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Key Takeaways
- Most resistance isn’t defiance — it’s a signal that risk hasn’t been fully translated.
- The right question can turn pushback into your most valuable insight.
The CFO slammed her laptop shut. “This is insane,” she said. “We’re three weeks into the NetSuite migration, and my team is entering every invoice twice. We’re working until midnight just to keep up.”
The CEO looked confused. Wasn’t this supposed to make things easier?
Every leader has experienced it: you announce a new system or process, and instead of enthusiasm, you get pushback. Teams hesitate. Managers stall. People complain.
On the surface, it looks like resistance. But more often, it’s something else entirely — untranslated risk.
For every Steve Jobs whose vision defies the doubts of internal teams, there are countless Galaxy Note 7s that crash and burn (quite literally).
When employees push back, it’s rarely stubbornness. It’s usually a signal — they see risks others don’t. But those risks often go unspoken or unrecognized because they aren’t translated into the language of leadership, investors or technical teams.
Without that translation, valuable insights are dismissed as negativity — and organizations suffer avoidable failures.
The hidden intelligence in “no”
Picture a company migrating from a heavily customized accounting platform to NetSuite.
On paper, the move is logical. For the CTO, it’s a modernization win. For the CFO, it promises better reporting. At the executive level, it’s a green light all around.
But on the ground? The accounts payable and receivable teams are now entering the same data into two systems. Their workload has doubled. The risk of error has spiked. And if something goes wrong, they’re the ones left holding the bag.
Their pushback isn’t resistance. It’s foresight. These teams are flagging legitimate risks, but because their concerns don’t show up in dashboards or executive KPIs, they’re ignored.
The pushback gets dismissed when it should have been decoded.
Turning resistance into perspective
When resistance shows up, strong leaders ask three simple questions:
-
Who’s responsible for this day-to-day?
Not the sponsor or the executive champion. Who will actually be hands-on with the system every day? That’s where most resistance comes from. -
Who benefits short-term — and who pays the price?
Executives may see immediate wins, but frontline teams often pay in late nights, duplicated work and stress. -
Who benefits long term — and who has the most to lose if it fails?
Ironically, those resisting may gain the most if it works. But in the short term, they shoulder the burden — and the risk.
This mindset shift reframes resistance as perspective. It’s not a wall — it’s a window.
Shadow IT is your best focus group
Every company has shadow IT: someone spinning up Dropbox accounts, managing key workflows in Airtable or running operations out of rogue spreadsheets.
IT hates it. Legal worries about compliance. The reflex is to shut it down.
But shadow IT isn’t defiance — it’s a signal. It says: “The tools you’ve given us aren’t working, so we built our own.”
It’s not a threat. It’s a user-generated requirements doc. Smart leaders don’t crush it — they investigate it. What’s being solved here that official systems didn’t address? Why was this workaround needed?
In many cases, shadow IT highlights what the organization should have built in the first place.
The language gap between tech and business
Part of the problem is linguistic.
- Tech leaders speak in risk: compliance, outages, integration failures.
- Business leaders speak in opportunity: speed, savings, growth.
Neither side is wrong, but without translation, everything gets lost in interpretation.
The CEO hears the CIO as overly negative. The CIO hears the CEO as reckless. Meanwhile, resistance festers.
Leadership’s job isn’t to take sides — it’s to translate.
Make technical risk legible to business stakeholders. Make business goals clear to technical teams. Alignment follows translation.
Translating risk into progress
To turn resistance into progress, reframe objections:
- “This won’t work” means there’s a risk we haven’t accounted for.
- “Shadow systems are a problem” means official tools aren’t meeting user needs.
- “The timeline is unrealistic” means we don’t yet understand the downstream costs.
Every objection is a message. Translation means hearing what’s underneath — and making it clear to everyone at the table.
What empathy unlocks
The 58-year-old VP of Sales had spent his career mastering relationships. When we announced a CRM migration, he resisted hard.
He complained about field layouts, pushed back on automation and refused to log data. At first, his objections seemed petty.
Finally, someone asked him, “What’s really at stake here?”
He admitted he was afraid that automation would erase everything that made him valuable — his memory of client birthdays, favorite restaurants, inside jokes.
He didn’t fear the tool. He feared becoming obsolete.
Once that surfaced, the solution became clear: position him as the “relationship architect.” He spent three months defining key touchpoints, personal triggers and best practices. Those insights became the backbone of the CRM.
He went from resistor to champion. Client retention rose by 23%.
What this means for entrepreneurs
If you’re leading a growing business, here’s the takeaway: resistance isn’t the problem. Untranslated risk is.
Next time your team pushes back, don’t bulldoze it. Don’t dismiss it. Pause and ask:
- What are they trying to protect?
- What risk are they seeing that I don’t?
- How can I make this legible to everyone involved?
Translation turns friction into foresight.
If you’re confident in your idea, come prepared with 80% of their objections already loaded in your mind. When someone says, “This will trigger the sprinklers,” ask them to walk it through. “Then what? What happens next?”
That curiosity reveals the real stakes — and often, the real solution.
The competitive advantage
At the heart of this is a leadership shift: stop trying to crush resistance. Start trying to decode it.
That requires real curiosity. You don’t need to be the most interesting person in the room — just the most interested.
When people feel heard — not just their objections, but the risks behind them — they trust you. And trust is what makes change stick.
The next time you face resistance, don’t see it as a wall. See it as untapped intelligence. Because the people resisting your idea today may be the ones who make it work tomorrow — if you’re willing to speak their language.
Key Takeaways
- Most resistance isn’t defiance — it’s a signal that risk hasn’t been fully translated.
- The right question can turn pushback into your most valuable insight.
The CFO slammed her laptop shut. “This is insane,” she said. “We’re three weeks into the NetSuite migration, and my team is entering every invoice twice. We’re working until midnight just to keep up.”
The CEO looked confused. Wasn’t this supposed to make things easier?
Every leader has experienced it: you announce a new system or process, and instead of enthusiasm, you get pushback. Teams hesitate. Managers stall. People complain.
