#53: The People Factor - 3. Challengers, Non-Believers, and Resistors

Change of any kind brings forth challenges and resistance. Great leaders are aware of this, anticipate it, and plan for it. Sometimes, it takes great effort to overcome such resistance. Challengers can be changed with little effort, while resistors can drain the positive energy from an entire team.

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Learning how to effectively engage with the challengers and resistors is crucial to success for anyone in a leadership role.

Challengers

Every time any change, transformation, or growth initiative is introduced, we must expect it to be challenged. As leaders, we must be worried when something is accepted by everyone without any pushback.

Our ideas and proposals must be challenged so that we can see them from different perspectives. Critical feedback is essential to ensure that the final design, policy, process, service, or product has undergone adequate evaluation, modifications, and corrections before we launch.

The acceptance and adoption that gather for an initiative after it is challenged are good as these challengers will have greater confidence and invested interest. Champions also challenge initially to test the leader, concept/approach, and the program. But the challenge is an intent to evaluate and embrace.

Every leader will also face two other smaller groups of challengers, those who challenge with an intent to find issues—the non-believers and the resistors. Some work will be involved in managing this group, and the effort cannot be avoided, as ignoring it will generate bad press for your program.

Many leaders, while doing a good job handling most of the challengers, have difficulty handling the much more motivated, smaller group of non-believers and resistors.

Non-Believers?

This group primarily comprises people who find data, analytics, and digital change hard to accept. Their position is founded on disbelief from massive program failures and past experiences with data/analytics projects.

It is possible to win over the challengers into champions with several rounds of discussions, listening intently to the points raised, explaining your position, and seeking opportunities for creating shared goals/benefits.

Sometimes, this group of non-believers, through their very nature of challenging and pushing back, have provided helpful feedback and inputs that helped define/modify our data programs.

Resistors

This small group of people will not have the best interest in supporting you or your teams. Some of them will even actively work to oppose and bring down your efforts as much as every data leader wants to believe that given a reasonable explanation behind "why the company and leadership want to embark on the data initiatives," there will be resistance.?

The people who resist have a deep-rooted fear of retaining their jobs, expert status, or maintaining "their" view. You are looking at enormously inflated egos. The problem is that many of them are politically savvy and motivated, and it takes work to manage and fix the bad press generated by these resistors.

This group needs to be addressed, their efforts mitigated, and their influence on the program eliminated. How you do this depends on where they are in the organization and how much clout they wield. Unfortunately, there is no easy answer, and the approach for managing this group varies case by case.

Success Strategies

Identify the most vocal, visible, and influential players. Spend time and effort listening to their issues, offering potential alternate approaches, and exploring options together. If working together is possible, your efforts will succeed.

1. Enlist the support of your champions where you can

Sometimes, the easy way is to attach the needs of two stakeholders, a champion and a resistor. Since both are stakeholders, your advocate will explain the benefits and engagement options that will work, which are critical for their success. With data leadership, sometimes, others can describe your work better than you can to others who need help buying in. This doesn't make you weak, but you grow stronger as there are people who believe in it and are willing to support you. And it is easy for non-believers to embrace the new when one of their own (business S.M.E./champion) is rooting for it.

2. Do not take on more resistors than you can manage

It is critical to ensure you have only a few resistors simultaneously, especially in the early stages when the program is forming or focused on delivering those early wins.

For obvious reasons related to time and effort utilization, it is better than the previous engagements to focus on your champions or stakeholders who want to get things done and are on a neutral plane rather than starting from the point of disbelief. Prioritize results versus long-winded justification meetings.

3. Secure escalation and containment support from senior leaders

I generally do not advocate the escalation channel, as it opens more trouble than help. Some tools are better not used, but the knowledge that it is there if you need them helps you to face and overcome challenges.

Why do I advocate not calling for help, at least early on?

1. You may have one or two chances to reach out for escalation or help as you are expected to solve some of the baggage that comes with your role.
2. It shows that you have exhausted your choices. Otherwise, you risk coming across as unable to manage the political, diplomatic, or organizational aspects inherent to the expectations of your leadership role.
3. You need to grow creative thinking and problem-solving. As leaders, we must think through alternate options or spend the time and effort required to build bridges, even with people who are difficult to deal with or who may be rightly challenging our assumptions or approach, to grow as leaders.

While many suggest escalating these kinds of people issues if you want to grow more in terms of responsibility and challenges professionally, learning to handle difficult people and situations is vital.

It is good to keep your manager or the resistor's manager in the loop if needed, but let them know that you will seek their help and intervention as the final option.

Staying with difficulties that will eventually make you and your team fail is also not the right approach. I think it's important to use sound organizational judgment here.

4. Steer clear of energy vampires

These resistors claim that they do not have issues themselves but complain about every other stakeholder team member or peer and state that the problems they bring are others' problems. A ten-minute discussion would easily creep into an hour of the informal meeting, leaving you drained of vital creative energy. Avoid or deflect such resistors as there is no solution you can come up with to solve their problems. Chronic complainers are better ignored.

Appoint a team member with a higheE.Q.Q. and better people skills

This builds on one of the primary requirements of being a data leader. We will not know everything, and we may not be the best in our team at anything. I don't mean that just for technical, business, or process skills but also for soft skills.

I once had an "extreme resistor" who was also the lead stakeholder for a core business function. Even after my team and I tried hard over several months to get some alignment, every interaction would end badly.

Finally, I resolved the issue by making one of my leads the single point of contact for that resistor. This person managed the intake, work, delivery, and everything connected with the resistor and his group. It clicked. As a team, we couldn't be happier.

Personality preferences sometimes have no explanation. You can choose your team members with better E.Q. to handle your toughest resistors.

Dealing with resistors is time-consuming and requires patience and investment. Sometimes, despite your best efforts, your determined resistors will be resistors.?

What do you do then? Wait for the leverage to shift. Leverage shifts occur all the time in companies, and in severely caustic situations, the problem is resolved when that person or you leave the company. This also indicates that the company faces more significant problems around organization and people management.

In Closing

Your business, technical, or process knowledge and expertise are essential to delivering transformative programs and initiatives. However, that is only possible when leaders and their teams know how to engage better and manage the company's challengers, non-believers, and resistors.

Too many great teams have delivered mediocre results because they underestimated the influence of these groups on their work or the impact it could have on the level of support and adoption for their products and services.

An easy way would be to give up, exit, and look for other roles. But the harsh reality is that there is no guarantee you won't find resistance elsewhere. Instead, stay where you are, learn the hard lessons, and convert your challengers and non-believers into supporters and champions.

In some situations, you may be ahead of the organization regarding your ideas and your teams' work. Even after repeated efforts, when nothing moves, then step out. There are numerous opportunities to lead when the leader is committed to working and growing as an Intrapreneur.

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