Before You Blame the Resistance

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Leaders do not usually enjoy resistance. We announce the direction, explain what needs to happen, and believe the decision is sound. Then somebody questions it, delays it, challenges it, refuses to enthusiastically support it, or keeps pointing out problems we thought had already been settled.

Our instinct is understandable: Why won’t these people get on board?

Sometimes that is exactly the right question. People really can resist necessary change because they are afraid, comfortable, self-protective, territorial, proud, stubborn, politically motivated, or simply unwilling to do what responsible leadership requires of them. Scripture gives us no reason to romanticize resistance. Korah’s rebellion against Moses was not courageous “speaking truth to power.” It was rebellion against legitimate authority (Numbers 16). Sometimes the problem really is the resistor.

But there is another possibility. Sometimes the resistance is telling us something, and sometimes what it is telling us is about us.

Research on organizational change has increasingly challenged the convenient assumption that resistance is a problem located entirely inside the person resisting. Jeffrey Ford et al. described the prevailing view as a “one-sided story” that places the problem “over there” in those receiving the change. Their corrective was significant: leaders and change agents can themselves contribute to resistance through their actions and inactions, and resistance can sometimes become a resource for improving change.¹

That possibility deserves the attention of every serious leader because one of the easiest mistakes in leadership is to diagnose the behavior beneath us without examining the leadership above it.

Resistance Is Evidence

In September 2026, Markéta Svobodová published research in Leadership examining resistance across the hierarchy of a large international manufacturing organization facing the need to make its core business more sustainable. Rather than treating resistance merely as a follower defect, the research examined it relationally—within tensions involving control and resistance, power and identity, and leader and follower.²

That distinction matters far beyond sustainability.

If I assume resistance means only that someone does not want to follow, my task is relatively simple: identify the resistor and overcome the resistance. But what if people are reacting not merely to where leadership wants to go, but to how leadership is leading them there? What if the stated priority and demonstrated priority do not match? What if leaders call something strategic but repeatedly fail to resource it, or tell people that a change matters greatly while behaving as though it matters only when convenient?

What if expectations contradict one another, promises have repeatedly been made and forgotten, or people have raised legitimate concerns only to discover that leadership really wanted agreement rather than information?

Then resistance becomes more difficult to interpret. It may still be wrong, but it may also be informative.

Resistance is evidence. Wisdom requires discovering what it is evidence of.

Rehoboam Had a Resistance Problem

When Rehoboam inherited the kingdom from Solomon, he inherited a resistance problem. The people came to him saying, “Your father put a heavy yoke on us. But now, lighten the harsh labor and the heavy yoke he imposed, and we will serve you” (1 Kings 12:4 BSB).

Notice what they did not say: We refuse to serve you.

They essentially said, There is a problem in the way we have been led. Address it, and we will follow.

Rehoboam initially did something wise. He sought counsel. The older men who had served Solomon told him, “If you will be a servant to these people today and serve them, and if you respond by speaking kind words to them, they will be your servants forever” (1 Kings 12:7 BSB).

Listen. Serve. Respond well.

Instead, Rehoboam abandoned their counsel for the advice of the young men who had grown up with him. Their recommendation was essentially to meet resistance with greater force, so Rehoboam told the people, “My father disciplined you with whips, but I will discipline you with scorpions” (1 Kings 12:11 BSB).

He answered resistance by increasing control—and lost most of the kingdom.

The theological story is larger, of course. God was sovereignly accomplishing His judgment upon Solomon’s house. There are no maverick molecules. But divine sovereignty did not make Rehoboam’s foolishness wise or eliminate his responsibility for how he led.

The people brought him information about their experience under leadership. He treated it primarily as opposition to leadership.

That distinction cost him dearly.

The Convenient Story

There is a particularly attractive story available to leaders whenever people resist us: The direction is good. My leadership is sound. The problem is them.

It is attractive because it leaves the leader almost entirely outside the diagnosis.

Ford et al. challenged precisely that tendency. Their argument was not that resistance is always justified. It was that leaders themselves participate in the relationship that produces it. Their actions—and significantly, their inactions—can contribute to the resistance they later condemn.¹

That word inactions matters because leadership failure is not limited to doing destructive things. A leader may never scream at an employee, humiliate a staff member, deceive a board, or deliberately sabotage an initiative and still contribute substantially to organizational dysfunction. He may fail to listen, explain, follow through, resolve contradictions, provide necessary resources, communicate why something matters, build relationships, encourage people, or create conditions in which they can safely tell him what he does not want to hear.

He may simply fail to do what good leadership requires.

This is leadership by omission, and Scripture takes omission seriously. In Ezekiel 34, God’s indictment of Israel’s shepherds is striking because He does not condemn them merely for terrible things they did. He also names the good things they failed to do: “You have not strengthened the weak, healed the sick, bound up the injured, brought back the strays, or searched for the lost” (Ezekiel 34:4 BSB). Only then does He add, “Instead, you have ruled them with violence and cruelty.”

The shepherds were responsible for both what they did and what they failed to do. Scripture does not permit leaders to define faithfulness merely by the atrocities they avoided.

The absence of bad leadership is not the presence of good leadership.

Sometimes what a leader identifies as resistance is the organization responding to what the leader has failed to lead.

People May Be Resisting More Than the Change

One of the clearest conclusions from decades of change research is that people’s reactions to organizational change have more than one source. Shaul Oreg et al. reviewed 60 years of quantitative research involving 79 studies of employee reactions to organizational change. Their framework included not only characteristics of the people experiencing change, but the internal organizational context, the process by which the change occurred, the perceived benefit or harm of the change, and the nature of the change itself.³

Sometimes the person is part of the problem. Sometimes the change is part of the problem. Sometimes the process or organizational environment is part of the problem.

And sometimes several are true at once.

Imagine a department leader repeatedly questioning whether her team has enough staff to accomplish a major new initiative. Senior leadership believes strongly in the initiative and gradually begins interpreting her questions as negativity. She raises the concern again, the response becomes less receptive, and eventually she gets the message and stops asking.

Six months later the initiative falls behind because the department never had sufficient capacity to accomplish what had been assigned.

Someone in senior leadership asks, Why didn’t anybody tell us?

They did.

The leader just classified the information as resistance.

If a dashboard warning light comes on in your car, you do not solve the problem by putting electrical tape over the light. The light may be annoying. It may even be malfunctioning. But a wise person investigates before deciding that the warning itself is the problem.

Resistance deserves at least that much attention.

The People Resisting You May Still Believe the Mission

We naturally assume that the person opposing leadership is opposing the mission, but those are not necessarily the same thing.

Imagine an organization repeatedly telling its people, This matters. This is who we are. This is where we are going. We need your commitment. People believe it. They reorganize their work around it, sacrifice for it, defend it, and begin to connect part of their professional identity with the direction leadership has announced.

Then leadership fails to act consistently with its own declaration.

Now the people most committed to what leadership said may become among the most frustrated with what leadership does. Their resistance may not mean that they abandoned the mission. It may mean that they think leadership did.

Some of the strongest resistance to leadership can come from people who remain deeply committed to the mission leadership itself announced.

That does not automatically make their behavior right, but it radically changes the diagnosis. The employee who keeps saying, “This isn’t what we said we were going to do,” may be obstructive—or he may be preserving organizational memory. The person questioning a decision may be protecting turf—or she may see a contradiction leadership has stopped seeing. The skeptical employee may simply have heard the same promise five times before.

So the leader has another question to ask: Are they resisting the mission—or are they resisting what they believe we have done to the mission?

Resistance Has a History

Leaders tend to encounter resistance in the present. Followers often experience it through the past.

A new initiative may feel new to the leader announcing it while sounding remarkably familiar to the people who endured the previous six initiatives. A promise that sounds sincere today may land inside an organizational memory filled with promises that were made enthusiastically and quietly abandoned.

Research by Arnon Reichers et al. on cynicism about organizational change found that contributors included a history of change programs that were not consistently successful and inadequate information about change. The consequences were not trivial: cynicism was associated with lower commitment, satisfaction, and motivation.⁴

A leader may think, Why are they so cynical? We just announced this.

The employees may be thinking, Exactly. You just announced another one.

What appears to be resistance to today’s initiative may partly be accumulated disappointment from yesterday’s leadership. Trust remembers. People remember. Organizations remember. And leadership debt compounds.

Today’s resistance may be the accumulated interest on yesterday’s leadership debt.

A leader cannot repeatedly teach people that his declarations are temporary and then resent them for learning the lesson.

Moses Was Willing to Look in the Mirror

Resistance and criticism do not always arrive from subordinates. Sometimes somebody simply sees what the leader cannot.

Moses was leading Israel when Jethro watched him spend an entire day judging disputes among the people. Jethro did not praise Moses’ work ethic. “What you are doing is not good,” he told him (Exodus 18:17 BSB), before warning, “You and these people with you will surely wear yourselves out, because the task is too heavy for you. You cannot handle it alone” (v. 18).

Jethro was not challenging Moses’ calling. He was identifying a weakness in the way Moses was carrying it out.

Moses could have defended himself. Do you have any idea what I have been through? God called me, not you. You weren’t at the burning bush.

Instead, “Moses listened to his father-in-law and did everything he said” (v. 24).

That is leadership knowability in action. Moses was secure enough in his responsibility to receive information about how he was exercising it. As Proverbs 12:15 says, “The way of a fool is right in his own eyes, but a wise man listens to counsel” (BSB).

A wise leader does not assume every criticism is correct. He simply refuses to assume it must be wrong because it is criticism.

Resistance May Be Involuntary Feedback

Not all feedback arrives in a neat sentence. Some people are very good at saying, “I support the objective, but I think there is a contradiction in the implementation that we need to examine.”

Most human beings are not that tidy.

Sometimes feedback arrives as hesitation, frustration, reduced enthusiasm, repeated questions, sarcasm, workarounds, withdrawal, foot-dragging, argument, or even anger. Those behaviors still require evaluation, and some may require correction. But poor delivery does not make the underlying information useless.

Resistance may be involuntary feedback.

The person may not completely understand what he is reacting to. He may communicate it badly, attach motives to the leader that are unfair, or even be morally responsible for the way he expresses it. But the leader who stops at the behavior may miss the information underneath it. “He who listens to life-giving reproof will dwell among the wise” (Proverbs 15:31 BSB).

One of our most useful principles applies here: Explanation is not exoneration.

Understanding why someone is resistant does not mean excusing sinful, destructive, disrespectful, or irresponsible behavior. But the principle works in the other direction too:

A follower’s wrongful resistance does not exonerate insufficient leadership.

Both people can have responsibility at the same time. That is not compromise. That is reality.

What Is Mine to Carry?

Leadership is faithful stewardship applied to people. That means my first responsibility is not to protect myself from every accusation. It is to faithfully steward whatever God has actually placed in my hands.

Galatians 6 gives us a remarkably useful framework because Scripture refuses to let responsibility become either completely individualistic or completely collective. We are called to “carry one another’s burdens,” and only a few verses later, “each one should carry his own load” (Galatians 6:2, 5 BSB).

Those are not contradictions. They describe differentiated responsibility.

There are things I may help carry with you, and there are things only you can carry. So when someone resists me, I do not have to choose between Everything is my fault and Everything is their fault. I can ask, What belongs to them? And then I must be willing to ask, What belongs to me?

The resistant follower may need humility, and the leader may need humility too. The follower may need to submit to a legitimate decision while the leader acknowledges that he communicated it poorly. The employee may need to stop undermining the change while the executive stops announcing priorities he does not consistently support. The staff member may need to control his attitude while the leader repairs damaged trust.

Both loads still exist.

Faithful stewardship requires each person to carry the one that is his.

A Better Resistance Diagnostic

Before labeling someone “resistant,” examine at least five possible sources.

Start with the person. Is fear involved? Pride? Self-interest? Comfort? Loss of status? Personality? Territorialism? Unwillingness to accept legitimate authority?

Then examine the change. Is what we are asking actually wise? Is the objective clear? Are there unintended consequences? Have the people closest to the work identified something senior leadership has missed?

Look at the process. Was the change explained? Was input genuinely invited? Were expectations clarified? Are adequate resources available? Is the implementation coherent?

Examine the relationship. Do these people trust us? Have we kept our word? What previous interactions are shaping the way they interpret what we are saying now?

Finally, examine the leadership. Are we behaving as though this matters? Have we been consistent? Are our decisions aligned with our declarations? Have we faithfully led the very thing we are asking everybody else to faithfully follow?

Those five categories—person, change, process, relationship, leadership—do not compete with one another. Several can be true at the same time because we are not trying merely to find the culprit. We are trying to understand reality well enough to steward it faithfully.

A foolish leader asks whether resistance should be defeated. A wise leader first asks whether it should be defeated, understood—or both.

The Leader Can Make It Worse

Here is where the research becomes uncomfortable.

When people push back, leaders naturally feel an impulse to push harder. Paul Endrejat et al. studied communication between change agents and people being asked to change. Across three studies, they found that autonomy-restrictive communication—communication that reduces the recipient’s sense of meaningful choice and participation—undermined readiness for change. Even more telling, when change agents encountered resistance in actual interactions, they tended to use more autonomy-restrictive communication rather than more autonomy-supportive communication.⁵

Earlier work examining these interactions found something similarly revealing: autonomy-restrictive leader behavior elicited resistance-oriented responses, which in turn elicited more autonomy-restrictive behavior from the change agent.⁶

Consider the cycle. The leader encounters resistance, so he increases control. The increased control produces more resistance, and the increased resistance convinces him that greater control was necessary.

The leader has now helped create the evidence he will use to justify doing more of what helped create the problem.

That is a vicious cycle—and another reason resistance should be investigated before it is simply overpowered.

Be Careful When the Resistance Disappears

Eventually, however, people may stop resisting.

That is not necessarily good news.

Elizabeth Morrison and Frances Milliken described organizational silence as a collective phenomenon in which employees withhold information about potential organizational problems. Their work explored organizational conditions capable of producing precisely the kind of silence that deprives leadership of information it needs.⁷

Consider what can happen. Someone sees a problem and speaks. Nothing changes, so he speaks more strongly. Leadership begins calling him negative. He pushes again, leadership applies pressure, and eventually he learns.

He becomes quiet.

The resistance disappears.

The inexperienced leader may interpret the silence as victory: Finally. Everybody is on board.

Maybe.

Or maybe everybody has simply stopped telling you what they know.

Albert Hirschman’s classic framework of exit, voice, and loyalty adds another sobering possibility. When people perceive decline, one response is voice—attempting to improve the situation. Another is exit.⁸

An organization can therefore experience something resembling this progression:

Concern → Voice → Resistance → Futility → Silence → Exit

Not every person follows that sequence, of course, but the possibility should make leaders considerably less eager to equate quiet with health.

The person arguing with you has not necessarily given up on you. The person who no longer says anything may have.

A leader should not automatically celebrate the disappearance of resistance. He may have won compliance while losing access to reality.

And once that happens, another leadership problem develops.

Knowability begins to collapse.

Resistance and Leadership Knowability

Leadership knowability is the degree to which a leader has created the relational conditions in which people can safely, honestly, and usefully help him know reality.

Every leader has blind spots, possesses incomplete information, and sees the organization from a particular position. Leaders therefore depend upon other people to tell them what they cannot see for themselves.

But leaders also influence whether people will do that.

If questioning the leader is interpreted as resistance, disagreement as disloyalty, bad news produces anger, or raising a problem causes the messenger to become the problem, people adapt.

They manage what the leader is allowed to know.

Now connect that with what the resistance research has shown. Resistance produces pressure. Pressure reduces candor. Reduced candor reduces leadership knowability. Reduced knowability produces poorer information. Poorer information increases the leader’s sense that he must take control, and greater control produces even less candor.

Drive → relational cost → reduced candor → reduced leadership knowability → distorted information → increased control → even less candor.

At some point, the leader can become extraordinarily certain while becoming progressively less informed.

That is a dangerous combination.

Rehoboam responded to resistance with greater control. Moses responded to correction with greater understanding.

Both remained responsible to lead.

Only one became better informed about the reality he was leading.

Do Not Waste the Resistance

None of this requires leaders to surrender authority. Leadership still makes decisions, sets direction, corrects people, and sometimes has to say, “I have heard the objections. We are moving forward.”

There are times when the leader is right and the resistant person is simply wrong. Korah reminds us of that. There are also moments when resistance must be confronted because it has become divisive, destructive, dishonest, or insubordinate.

But even then, a wise leader asks one more question before throwing the resistance away:

Is there anything here I need to learn?

Perhaps 95 percent of the complaint is wrong and 5 percent exposes something leadership needs to see.

Take the five percent.

Perhaps the delivery is awful but the observation is accurate.

Take the observation.

Perhaps the employee’s conclusion is wrong but the information that led him there exposes a communication failure.

Take the information.

Perhaps the resistance reveals nothing wrong with the decision but quite a bit wrong with the process.

Take the lesson.

You do not have to agree with somebody to learn from him, and you do not have to excuse resistance in order to examine what produced it.

The easiest leadership question is, Why won’t they follow?

Sometimes that question needs to be asked.

But faithful leadership requires another one: What might their reluctance to follow be telling me about how I am leading?

That question does not surrender authority.

It exercises stewardship.

Perhaps the investigation reveals that the direction is sound, the process was responsible, trust is intact, leadership has acted faithfully, and the person simply refuses to follow.

Then deal faithfully with the resistance.

But perhaps the investigation reveals something else. Perhaps communication was unclear, expectations conflict, leadership failed to follow through, or trust has been spent faster than it has been replenished. Perhaps people have seen promises abandoned. Perhaps they are protecting something leadership itself taught them to value. Perhaps they know something we do not.

Perhaps they are wrong.

Perhaps we are wrong.

And sometimes both may be wrong in different ways.

That is why resistance is not merely something to overcome.

Resistance is information to investigate—revealing what belongs to the follower, what may belong to the leader, and what faithful stewardship requires of both.

The leader committed to stewardship does not fear that investigation. He welcomes whatever truth it reveals because his responsibility is not merely to get people to move. His responsibility is to faithfully lead the people God has entrusted to him toward what is true, wise, and good.

Sometimes that means correcting the person who is resisting.

Sometimes it means correcting ourselves.

And sometimes the resistance is what helps us discover which one needs to happen.

The Resistance Diagnostic System

Resistance should trigger investigation before conclusion. When meaningful resistance appears, examine five sources before deciding what the resistance means or what should be done about it.

1. Person

Ask what may belong to the individual resisting. Is fear involved? Pride? Self-interest? Comfort? Personality? Loss of status? Territorialism? Political motivation? Unwillingness to accept legitimate authority?

Do not assume the person is innocent simply because leadership may have contributed to the problem.

2. Change

Examine what people are actually being asked to support. Is the objective wise and clear? Are there unintended consequences? Does the change solve the problem leadership thinks it solves? Do people closer to the work possess information leadership does not?

Do not assume a decision is sound merely because leadership made it.

3. Process

Examine how the decision or change is being implemented. Was it adequately explained? Was input genuinely invited—or was agreement expected under the name of input? Are expectations clear? Are sufficient resources available? Are competing priorities creating contradictions?

A good destination can be undermined by a poor process.

4. Relationship

Examine the relational history surrounding the resistance. Is trust healthy? Has leadership kept its word? Have concerns been heard previously? Have people learned that candor is welcomed—or punished? Is today’s reaction being shaped by yesterday’s experience?

Resistance rarely arrives without a history.

5. Leadership

Finally, put leadership itself under examination. Are our actions aligned with our declarations? Have we communicated clearly? Have we followed through? Have we provided what people need to succeed? Have we built enough relational trust for people to tell us what we do not want to hear? Have we omitted something good leadership required of us?

This is where stewardship requires the leader to ask the hardest question:

What part of this belongs to me?

The Decision

After examining all five sources, determine what faithful stewardship requires.

Some resistance must be corrected.

Some resistance must be understood.

Some resistance reveals something leadership must change.

Some resistance requires both correction and change.

The objective is not to assign all responsibility upward or downward. It is to see reality clearly enough to assign responsibility truthfully.

Resistance is evidence. Investigate before you interpret. Steward what the investigation reveals.

Five Coaching Questions

Think of the person or group currently resisting you most strongly. What have you already decided their resistance means—and what evidence supports that conclusion?
Using the five-part Resistance Diagnostic—Person, Change, Process, Relationship, Leadership—where might responsibility actually reside? Which category have you been least willing to examine?
What information might be hidden underneath the resistance, even if the person’s attitude, delivery, or behavior is wrong? What is the 5 percent you need to take seriously even if the other 95 percent is wrong?
Have people around you become more candid over time or less candid? If resistance has recently disappeared, what evidence tells you that you gained genuine alignment rather than silence?
What belongs to you? Regardless of what the other person needs to change, what specific action, omission, relationship, communication, or leadership behavior is yours to steward differently now?

Endnotes

Jeffrey D. Ford, Laurie W. Ford, and Angelo D’Amelio, “Resistance to Change: The Rest of the Story,” Academy of Management Review 33, no. 2 (2008): 362–377. DOI: 10.5465/amr.2008.31193235.
Markéta Svobodová, “Responses to Insufficient Sustainability Leadership: Dialectics of Resistance,” Leadership, first published September 4, 2026.
Shaul Oreg, Maria Vakola, and Achilles Armenakis, “Change Recipients’ Reactions to Organizational Change: A 60-Year Review of Quantitative Studies,” Journal of Applied Behavioral Science 47, no. 4 (2011): 461–524.
Arnon E. Reichers, John P. Wanous, and James T. Austin, “Understanding and Managing Cynicism about Organizational Change,” Academy of Management Executive 11, no. 1 (1997): 48–59.
Paul C. Endrejat, Florian E. Klonek, Lena C. Müller-Frommeyer, and Simone Kauffeld, “Turning Change Resistance into Readiness: How Change Agents’ Communication Shapes Recipient Reactions,” European Management Journal 39, no. 5 (2021): 595–604. DOI: 10.1016/j.emj.2020.11.004.
Florian E. Klonek, Nale Lehmann-Willenbrock, and Simone Kauffeld, “Dynamics of Resistance to Change: A Sequential Analysis of Change Agents in Action,” Journal of Change Management 14, no. 3 (2014): 334–360. DOI: 10.1080/14697017.2014.896392.
Elizabeth W. Morrison and Frances J. Milliken, “Organizational Silence: A Barrier to Change and Development in a Pluralistic World,” Academy of Management Review 25, no. 4 (2000): 706–725.
Albert O. Hirschman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970).

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