Change resistance is information: your leaders are usually mishearing it.

Every team has a Nancy.

You bring a new idea to the table and Nancy says no. You bring a revised version and Nancy says no. You bring the version everyone else has already agreed to, and Nancy has questions. Lots of them. What does it cost? Who decided this? What happened last time? Why now?

Most leaders I work with have a word for Nancy, and it is not a kind one. Negative. Resistant. Not on board. Once that label sticks, every question she asks gets heard as an objection, and every objection gets managed instead of answered.

That is the mistake. Not Nancy's. The leader's.

Resistance is not the opposite of engagement. Very often it is engagement, showing up in a form we find inconvenient. The "no" is information. The problem is that most leaders hear the "no" and stop listening right there.

Same symptom, three different causes

When someone pushes back on change, the behaviour looks the same from the outside: the questions, the sighing, the folded arms in the meeting. But the cause underneath is usually one of three very different things. Each one needs a different response.

1. Nancy needs different information.

Some people trust ideas once they see the facts: the cost, the data, what happened last year. Others trust the big picture first: the strategy, the possibilities, where this is going. In Myers-Briggs language, that is the difference between a preference for Sensing and a preference for Intuition.

When a big-picture leader brings a vision to a facts-first colleague, the colleague responds with a stream of questions. They are not trying to kill the idea. They are trying to make it real enough to trust. But to the big-picture leader, those questions sound like nitpicking. It works the other way too: bring a detailed plan to a big-picture thinker and "how does this connect to the strategy?" can land like a dismissal.

This kind of "no" really means "not yet. Show me."

2. Nancy has been here before.

Some resistance has nothing to do with this change and everything to do with the last five. The reorganization that was announced and quietly abandoned. The new system that doubled the workload for a year. The initiative that arrived with great fanfare and left no trace.

People who have lived through that are not being difficult. They are being rational. They are protecting themselves from a pattern they have learned to expect. This "no" really means "I don't believe this time is different."

3. Nancy is having a bad day.

And sometimes it really is just Monday. The grumbling is about the parking, the colleague who talks too loudly, the email that arrived at 6 a.m. It will pass. Treating it as a strategic threat to your change initiative wastes your energy and tells Nancy you are watching her more closely than her work warrants.

How to tell which one you are facing

You cannot diagnose resistance from across the room. You have to ask, and you have to ask in a way that invites an honest answer rather than a defensive one.

Start with open prompts that peel back a layer:

• "Tell me more."
• "Help me understand what's not sitting right."

Then listen for the pattern. If you hear "I don't see the logic," "Where's the research?" or "I don't understand how this works," you are probably dealing with an information gap. Good news: that is the easiest one to close.

If you are not sure, borrow a question from Appreciative Inquiry: "Tell me about a time a change like this actually worked here."

That one question sorts people quickly. Some will describe a success, and now you have something concrete to build on. Others will say "this always happens," "this never works," or "I'm tired of all this." That is not an information gap. That is change fatigue, and no amount of data will fix it. What fixes it is honesty about what will be different this time, and follow-through that proves it.

And if what you hear is a grievance about something that has nothing to do with the change at all, let it be a bad day. Listen, acknowledge it, and check in tomorrow.

I have been the leader who got this wrong. I was introducing a new process to my team, and one person pushed back at every turn. Question after question. I filed them under "resistant" and started managing around them.

I was selling the big picture: where we were going, why it mattered. They needed facts. How it would work, what it would cost, what evidence we had that it would be better. Once I brought the data, the questions stopped sounding like objections and started sounding like due diligence. That person became one of the strongest advocates for the change on the team.

They were never against it. They just needed it to be real before they could trust it.

Respond in the right order

Once you know the source, resist the urge to jump straight to persuasion. Work through it in order:

1. Seek to understand. You have done this if you can say back, in their words, what is actually bothering them.
2. Give information, if the gap is information.
3. Coach, if they can solve it themselves with the right question.
4. Advise or support, if they need your experience or your help.
5. Be directive, only when everything above has genuinely been tried.

Most leaders run that list backwards. They start at five, get pushback, and slide down to one only after the relationship has taken the damage.

It also helps to be honest about where your energy goes. Picture your change as a bus. Some people are singing at the front. Some are grumbling in the back. A very small number are slashing the tires. The grumblers in the back are not your biggest problem. They are often your best source of information about what will break. Spend your effort in proportion to the actual risk, not the volume.

The conversation behind the resistance

Here is the uncomfortable part. Labelling someone as "resistant" is often a way to avoid a conversation. It lets us skip the harder work of asking what they know, what they have seen, and what they need, because we have already decided what they are.

The Nancys on your team are not obstacles to your change. They are telling you where it is weak. The leaders who get change to stick are the ones willing to ask what the "no" is made of, and patient enough to hear the answer.

Same symptom. Different cause. Different conversation.