Navigate The Nay Sayers
What the Playbooks Don’t Tell You
Hey, fellow Leader 🚀,
I am Artur, and welcome to my weekly newsletter. I am focusing on topics like Project Management, Innovation, Leadership, and a bit of Entrepreneurship. I am always open to suggestions for new topics. Feel free to reach out to me and share my newsletter if it helps you in any way.
Projects, by their very essence, are temporary in nature, but their impacts can last for years.
Working actively on implementing transformative changes in corporations of all sizes, we start to learn and become aware of all types of resistance to our projects.
All project playbooks say we need strong governance, and it is very much true. However, there is so much more that playbooks are not telling us.
This article will give different examples of managing people’s perceptions and roles in the event of adversity brought by a project or a wave of change going through the organization.
It will also shed light on other risks that are sometimes not immediately seen during project execution.
Skillsets mismatch
When we set up a new team to handle a project, we are always mindful of casting errors.
It is very, very tricky to have recruitment be 100% on target when we need to set up a team of five people. It’s even trickier when we need to set up a new team of 10, 20, or 30.
On top of this, the company needs to adapt to a new reality. For some functions, it makes sense to reassign people who already work at the company to different roles based on the changes that are coming.
The issue starts to rise when people realise they are being assigned to roles that don’t match their skillsets.
In some cases, these changes happen outside your scope, and you might not have a say in those appointments.
It is not those people’s fault that they are being reassigned. Sometimes the decision is well-intentioned: it is better to re-assign existing staff than to fire the squad and hire new people.
Because the competence is not there, some can be very vocal in their opposition to the project or its goals.
The challenge here is those people will likely hide the true reasons for their posture. It is not easy to say out loud that your skillset is not aligned with the new role.
Especially to Management, where sharing a feedback like this might be perceived as incompetence. Instead, they raise concerns around the project’s pain points and weaknesses to rethink or even sabotage the strategy.
This is where Leadership experience plays a big role, because the signs are in the nuances of the arguments and how people expose the challenges.
When this happens, I like to show the opportunities the new reality will bring and how their work will be valued. I emphasize the advantages of having these new skillsets in the job market.
Of course, the reception of these arguments varies, but it is my go-to tactic. If this is not enough, I prefer to have individualized feedback in a more casual conversation to understand their fears and figure out tailored solutions for their concerns.
Being Difficult For The Sake Of Being Difficult
This is somewhat related to the previous point. However, because this is a complex subject, the real reason might vary.
Having a posture of constant combativeness and heavy resistance to execution strongly indicates the real reason is not the project itself, but something else. Be mindful, these situations happen even in projects and teams with a strong governance. A single opposing person outside the project team can cause damage.
That’s why it’s important to get to the root cause of the behavior, even if we need to dig deep.
I once had a case (let’s call him Marcelo) who had an issue with his management about his pay. Marcelo was a fierce opponent of everything we tried to put in place, even though he was outside the project structure.
I discovered the root cause almost by accident while talking with other managers. The truth was, Marcelo was clearly underpaid for his experience and responsibility.
Of course, we could say Marcelo should be more pragmatic and address this with HR or put his CV out there. However, for people with outdated skillsets, this is easier said than done.
In Marcelo’s case, it was not the first time he was re-assigned, but his salary was never updated to match his performance.
It was a tricky situation since he was not under my direct supervision, and I didn’t want to step on his leader’s toes. In a way, fixing this became one of my project tasks. Doing so I would turn him into an ally, or at least someone easier to handle.
Almost always, when there is a strong opposing voice against a project that is clearly beneficial, the root cause is located outside the initial arguments.
Protect The Stars
Experienced leaders make mistakes. New leaders even more.
When someone is appointed to a Leadership position, they sometimes lack the reality check of how things are actually managed. Having ideas is great, but sometimes reality bites, and some leaders might not recover.
Once I managed a project that changed some internal processes. One of the impacted teams had a recently promoted Team Leader (let’s call him João - ah ah try to pronounce this name out loud). João wanted to show value, and he tried really hard to make things happen. But when João started to fail, he had become a project risk.
On one occasion, “João” was struggling to keep up with the pace of the project. My project was approaching delivery, and his team was supposed to pick up the operational part.
I had already requested from Management the budget to recruit more people to handle the upcoming workload.
The new people were being onboarded, but João made an unfortunate decision to manage turnover by assigning newly recruited staff to old tasks instead of assigning exclusively to the new process. The consequence was clear. The moment the project went live, people were overwhelmed, drowning, clearly understaffed.
Because the project had high visibility, João needed to find justifications for why things weren’t working. He needed to put the blame somewhere, instead of himself.
In the midst of the confusion, there was a newly recruited Engineer (let’s call him Carlos) who was handling things very nicely. Well above expectations. Rapidly, it became noticeable that the new Team Leader felt threatened by this “Star” recruitment.
Suddenly, Carlos was being cut off from meetings and reassigned to tasks outside the product. João was spreading news that Carlos was taking too much initiative and “should only do what he was told”.
I needed to prepare a very careful and subtle campaign in defense of the Star Engineer.
In management meetings, I praised how Carlos was onboarded. I even played a card of asking the Department Manager (João’s boss) how they managed to find such a good professional.
By spreading good feedback in the corridors with key decision-makers, it became impossible for João to “burn” his own Star Engineer. I protected a key element who helped the entire initiative succeed, even against the sabotage of his own Team Leader.
Adversity To Change Is Complex
As you can see, Nay Sayers can come from anywhere. It is a situation that the handling must be tailored to the specific context.
Experience is key and sometimes we need to be the “invisible hand” to push things in the right direction.
Rarely do we have a solution that fits all, but it is important that we at least try. That is how we build the experience to handle these situations in the first place.
Some questions to ask yourself while handling Nay Sayers:
Is the resistance coming from technical or personal reasons?
Is the person threatened by the changes or just overwhelmed?
Is someone saying a lot of “corporate talk” or have practical reasons?
Are the arguments valid or are insecurities in disguise?
That’s it. If you find this post useful, please share it with your friends or colleagues who might be interested in this topic. If you would like to see a different angle, suggest it in the comments or send me a message.
Cheers,
Artur