Picture Marcus. He has worked the dock at a regional distribution center for eleven years. For most of that time, if he needed a Saturday off, he texted a coworker, they traded, and that was that.
Last month, that changed. Shift swaps now go through the scheduling app and need a supervisor’s approval. The announcement went out by email, got a mention at the start-of-shift huddle, and was taped up next to the time clock.
Three weeks later, Marcus is still trading shifts by text. So is half his crew.
His supervisor calls it resistance. Marcus would put it differently: “I’ve covered for this place for eleven years, and now I need permission to trade a Saturday?”
This is the gap most change plans don’t account for. An announcement is an event. Adoption is a habit. The email tells people what changed. Whether anything actually changes gets decided later, in dozens of small conversations between managers and the people they lead.
Because the people who made the decision and the people who have to live with it are in very different places.
Leadership may have spent months weighing options. Employees get the conclusion in a five-minute meeting, then go back to a workload that didn’t shrink to make room for it. They can understand the reason perfectly well and still be stuck on a simpler question: what does this mean for me, and what am I supposed to stop doing?
It doesn’t help that trust in leadership communication usually starts low. In a 2021 article, Gallup reported that only 13% of U.S. employees strongly agree their leadership communicates effectively with the rest of the organization. Gallup’s advice on change is to explain clearly what is changing and why, and to give employees a real voice. That’s the starting line. Managers carry it the rest of the way.
“Resistance” is a label we put on behavior. Underneath it is usually one of four different problems, and each one needs a different fix.
From a distance, all four look the same. The work doesn’t change, deadlines slip, and the questions keep coming. Up close, they’re completely different problems. Treat a skill gap like an attitude problem, or a real disagreement like confusion, and you make it worse.
The fastest way to find out which one you’re dealing with is to ask: “What’s making this hard to do in your actual work?” Then ask for a specific example.
Marcus is the fourth kind. He understands the new rule. He just doesn’t like what it says about him, and no policy reminder is going to fix that.
This is the hard part, and it’s where most changes quietly stall.
When someone pushes back, most managers do one of three things:
All three are understandable. None of them work.
Back to Marcus. His supervisor, Dana, could hand him another copy of the policy. Instead, she pulls him aside after shift:
“I get why this stings. You’ve been the guy who covers for everybody, and this feels like we stopped trusting you. That’s not why we did it. Last quarter we came up short on three shifts because trades fell through and nobody knew until the morning of. The app lets me see coverage before it’s a problem. The new process is staying. But if the approval step is slowing you down, tell me where, and I’ll take it to the ops manager this week. You’ll hear back from me by Friday.”
Look at what she did. She named the personal cost instead of pretending there wasn’t one. She gave the real reason, not a made-up benefit. She held the line. And she made a specific promise she can keep.
The follow-up matters as much as the conversation. If Friday comes and goes with no answer, Marcus learns that speaking up is pointless, and he stops. (We dig into that pattern in Why Communication Breaks Down at Work.)
Taking a concern seriously isn’t the same as reversing the decision. Good managers do both at once: they listen, and they keep the standard.
Sometimes the resistance is coming from above. This is the “I can’t do both” problem.
Take a regional insurance office that rolls out a shared dashboard so leaders can see every account in one place. The team is told to enter updates there. But two senior leaders keep asking for the old weekly spreadsheet, because that’s what they’re used to reading.
Now the team maintains both. When they complain, it sounds like resistance. To them, it’s double work.
No amount of coaching the team fixes this. Someone with authority has to decide which report counts, and the leaders asking for the spreadsheet have to follow that decision too. As long as the old way keeps getting rewarded, people will keep doing it.
When a change is stuck, HR and executives can pull the managers together and settle four questions:
Managers don’t need every answer on day one. They need a reliable way to get one. “I don’t know yet, and I’ll have an answer for you Friday” is a perfectly good response, as long as Friday actually happens.
Some changes mostly need a clear rule and a good conversation. Others ask people to do something they don’t know how to do yet. That’s the “I don’t know how to do it yet” problem, and it needs practice, not another memo.
Consider a construction company that moves its daily safety checklist from paper to tablets. The superintendent explains it at the morning meeting. By the end of the week, half the crew leads are still filling out paper, and the other half are skipping fields.
Another reminder won’t fix that. What works is the superintendent walking each crew lead through one real checklist on site, watching them do the next one, and coming back to the parts that keep tripping people up. One demonstration rarely sticks. Repeated practice tied to real work does. It’s the same reason one-time leadership training rarely sticks either.
Support comes first. But support doesn’t replace accountability. Once expectations are clear and the real obstacles are gone, continued refusal is a performance conversation, handled through your normal process.
Two things are true at once. People should never be punished for raising a concern. And raising a concern doesn’t excuse anyone from the job.
Watch the work, and listen to the people. They tell you different things.
Adoption is visible. Swaps go through the app, the dashboard is current, the checklists are complete. Buy-in is quieter. Someone can follow the new process to the letter and still think it’s a waste of time. That’s fine for a while. But if the new way never starts to feel easier or more useful than the old one, people drift back the moment attention moves elsewhere.
Early questions aren’t a sign of failure, either. The people actually trying the change are the ones who find the gaps the plan missed. What you’re watching for is the difference between someone hitting a real problem and someone who still isn’t doing it after you’ve cleared the way.
Pick one change that’s underway right now. Ask the managers responsible for it one question: “What’s keeping your team from doing this consistently?”
Write down what they say. Assign someone to answer each issue, with a date. Then tell your managers clearly what can change and what can’t.
Most changes don’t fail at the announcement. They fail in the hundred small conversations after it, when a manager has to hold the line and still listen. That’s a skill. Like any skill, it gets better with practice, not with one more meeting about it.
Marcus didn’t need another email. He needed a supervisor who could listen, hold the line, and follow through.
That’s what Growthstream is built for: leadership development delivered every month, reinforced with facilitated team discussions, so managers keep getting better at the conversations that make or break a change.
If you’re curious where your leaders are strong and where they’re getting stuck, take our free assessment, What’s Quietly Holding Your Team Back?, at growthstream.io. If you’d rather just talk it through, you can always schedule a demo.