If your strategy isn’t clear to everyone, they may appear to be resisting it but in fact they may just not know what it is or how they are supposed to support it. If that is what is going on, our Strategy services can help you formulate a crisp, understandable strategy with clear benefits and responsibilities.
Unfortunately, it is also a common event that people resist change even when it would benefit them. Dr. Douglas Brown’s book “Let It Simmer” explains several of the causes for such behavior and provides a roadmap for gaining acceptance for your improvement ideas – a method that does not depend on aggressive top-level support, which many authors insist on but seldom exists in reality.
Sometimes this is due to dysfunctional leadership and culture. In other cases, it is founded on bitter experience with expensive and disruptive “transformation efforts”. And sometimes the organization has created incentives that drive against the outcomes you’re trying to achieve.
No matter why this is happening, you’re going to have to live with (most of) the people who are there already and have expertise in the organization’s products, services, and processes your company has.
To make it work, you have to approach it from an entirely different direction that is not about the changes you want to make at all. It has to be about the outcomes that other leaders want to achieve that also meet your objectives (or, if you are the top leader, it’s about working within the envelope of the corporate culture until your success in bringing about change in the outcomes also results in a change in that culture). In essence, you’ll be going undercover, working along with the non-believers while seeking to influence the action in the direction you want to go.
To help you take advantage of this approach, we created the Undercover Change Agent Academy, a hybrid approach that includes both self-directed learning and personal coaching.