Resistance Fighter

Once you've designed it, the toughest part of any change effort is clearing the next hurdle: the inevitable opposition. You may have put together a can't-miss program; you may have lined up top-level sponsorship. Those things don't matter.

History shows that managers and frontline workers alike will resist your best-laid plan. A few will openly fight it. Many more will ignore or try to sabotage your plan. If you don't have a strategy for winning people over, you can forget about your change program.

Mark Maletz knows this firsthand. In his role as an independent consultant affiliated with McKinsey & Co. in Boston, he has helped launch more than 75 large-scale change initiatives at such companies as Xerox, American Airlines, and computer giant Siemens Nixdorf. Maletz, 40, transformed himself into a full-fledged change agent while developing large-scale, artificial-intelligence expert systems. His toughest challenge: convincing highly skilled people to let him mine their expertise so he could put it on a computer. Overcoming their resistance was an almost insurmountable task.

"The technology side was by far the easy part," Maletz recalls. "The change side -- the human-dynamics side -- was the complex and compelling part." In an interview, Maletz outlined the dynamics of dealing with people who fight change.

It's almost a given that in the corporate world, most people, most of the time, will resist change. Why?

People know that historically, there's very little upside for them -- that change itself is rarely for the better. If you've been with a company for a few years, and you've seen these flavor-of-the-month change programs come and go, you quickly recognize a pattern: Management launches some kind of change effort to great fanfare. Managers talk up the benefits and explain why this program will be good for both the company and its employees. They make promises, but at the end of the day, they fail to deliver. Nothing really happens, and the whole effort seems like a waste of time. Well, it makes sense to resist things that are a pure waste of time.

That's one kind of resistance. But there's another scenario: A bunch of consultants analyze a corporate department consisting of 100 people, and they conclude that the company needs just 48 people to do the work. If you're in that department, one of two things will happen: Either you'll lose your job, or you'll stay -- and end up working even harder.

So there's typically a history within lots of organizations that says, "Change, in the past, has not been good." And there's no reason to believe that this time, it's going to be better."

So you can count on people being hostile.

You should expect some hostility, but it's rarely the in-your-face kind. Usually, resistance is passive-aggressive, meaning it's far more underground: People hear you out, saying nothing that's overtly negative, but they don't buy the change program. As soon as they're alone with their peers, they'll say something like, "This thing is going to pass, so let's just keep our heads down." And historically, they're often right. The impact of a lot of change never reaches too deep into the organization -- and when it does, it's usually bad.

Other people will say they're on board, but then they'll try to kill your effort. Not too long ago, I worked on a change program at a high-tech company, and one of the senior guys sat in meetings with the CEO and claimed to be totally on board. But then he'd go back to his organization and order people not to meet with the change team. He'd say things like, "Make sure that your calendar pushes meetings with these guys out as far as possible. And cancel each meeting at least once before it takes place."

How do you handle a guy who's trying to stab you in the back like that?

In that case, we found out about it and confronted him. He blew up and told us that the program was a complete waste of time and that he'd never give it any play. And he was terminated within a month. The message was, "You can come out and say, 'This is a complete waste of time,' and we'll engage you. But you can't agree that you're on board and then try to sabotage the effort."

Okay, you can expect to take some hits. What should you do then? Hit back?

Absolutely not. You don't even push people -- you pull them. You go out into the middle of the organization and the front lines, you find informal opinion leaders who have very broad networks, and you recruit them to be part of the change process.

We did this at Siemens Nixdorf. One of the people we went after was a very sharp, very young software developer. He had zero formal authority, but people throughout this 1,200-person software unit would come to him for technical help and advice. So if you get someone like him to ally with the change effort, you also get access to many more people within the organization.