Once You Know What They Value, Then What?

This is part 2 of a 2-part series on change management. If you haven’t done so, please read the May 15 post: “People Aren’t Resistant to Change, They’re Resistant to Loss.”

Ron Heifetz, whose work on adaptive leadership shapes some of what we teach at Neptune Coaching, argues that the common factor behind most resistance to change isn't confusion or bad intent. It's loss. People resist when change asks them to give something up, and until you name what that is, you can't do much about it.

But diagnosing the loss is only half the work. The harder part is what you do next.

Resistance is often grief in disguise

When leaders understand what someone is protecting, the instinct is to reassure them. To explain that the change won't be as bad as they think, or that the benefits will outweigh what's lost. That instinct is understandable and usually counterproductive.

What people need first isn't reassurance. It's acknowledgment. A program director who has spent a decade building something doesn't need to be told their work will survive in a new form before they've had a chance to grieve what's actually ending. Skipping over that step doesn't accelerate the process. It drives the resistance underground, where it's harder to address.

Giving people room to name what they're losing, and to feel the weight of it, is not soft leadership. It's how you earn the right to ask them to move. Heifetz is direct about this: help people say goodbye before you ask them to go somewhere new. And ask what you can carry forward so they can recognize themselves and their history in what comes next.

Ask, don't tell

The other mistake leaders make after diagnosing resistance is thinking their job is to solve it for the person. To design a transition that protects their values on their behalf, without involving them. That approach almost always fails.

The people most likely to know how their values could be honored in the next phase of the work are the ones who hold those values. Which means the most useful thing you can do, after you've done your own diagnostic thinking, is to bring it into the open. Ask them directly: what would it look like for what you care about to be protected as we move through this? What matters enough to you that it needs to survive the transition?

You will learn things you couldn't have anticipated. Most leaders skip this step because it feels slower. It isn't. It's the difference between agreement that holds and agreement that collapses the moment the pressure increases. Ask before you build the plan, not after.

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