When a team resists a growth strategy, start by finding out what is behind the resistance—not by labeling people as unwilling. They may lack information, disagree with the plan, feel unprepared, have no capacity to take on new work, or see incentives that reward the old approach. Involve them in shaping the response, then make the strategy workable through clear roles, skills, resources, aligned leadership behavior and feedback.
First, diagnose what the resistance is telling you
Resistance is an observable response, not an explanation. A team may question a strategy in a meeting, delay adopting a new process, keep prioritizing existing customers, or struggle to meet a changed target. Those behaviors can have different causes, and each calls for a different response. Treating them all as stubbornness risks overlooking a genuine flaw in the plan or a practical barrier to carrying it out.
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Ask what people do not understand, believe, know how to do, have time to do, or see rewarded. Prosci identifies lack of information, anxiety about a changing environment and concerns about job security as possible sources of resistance. Other possibilities include conflicting priorities, insufficient tools or skills, unclear decision rights, and doubts about customer demand. The point is to investigate before deciding what intervention is needed.
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| Possible source | What to establish | Response to consider |
|---|---|---|
| Missing information | Which parts of the strategy, rationale or expected changes remain unclear? | Explain the evidence and trade-offs, invite questions, and provide a way to raise unanswered concerns. |
| Disagreement or credibility concerns | Which assumption, customer need or execution choice do people doubt? | Examine the concern against available evidence; revise the plan if the concern reveals a real weakness. |
| Capability gap | What new skills, tools, processes or role expectations will the work require? | Provide the needed development and resources before expecting consistent adoption. |
| Workload or resource constraint | What current work would have to stop, move or receive additional support? | Make explicit choices about priorities, capacity and resource allocation. |
| Misaligned incentives or leadership behavior | Do targets, compensation, recognition or managers’ own decisions reinforce the previous way of working? | Align the systems and visible leadership actions with the behavior the strategy needs. |
| Change anxiety or job-security concern | What do people fear will change about their work, team or prospects? | Address the concern honestly, distinguish known decisions from open questions, and maintain ongoing communication. |
These categories can overlap. A salesperson may understand why a new product matters yet reasonably doubt that they can sell it without training, customer evidence or a workable compensation arrangement. Ask for specific examples rather than relying only on general statements such as “people are against it.” Listening is useful only if leaders are prepared to act on what they learn or explain why a requested change is not feasible.
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Bring affected teams into the strategy conversation
People expected to execute a strategy often know details leaders cannot see from a planning room: customer objections, handoffs that routinely fail, or how a new process interacts with existing work. Involving them while the strategy is being shaped can expose these constraints before they become rollout failures. It also gives leaders a better basis for distinguishing a weak execution design from a team that simply needs more clarity or support.
Ron Ashkenas described Payoneer’s multi-month growth-strategy discovery process as engaging more than 200 employees. The process used data, workshops and limited experiments; the resulting strategy then informed budget and resource allocation. That is a company case, not proof that one participation method will work everywhere, but it illustrates a practical principle: involvement can be part of strategy development, not merely a communication step after decisions are made.
- Share the case and its limits. Explain the customer or market evidence behind the growth opportunity, what the organization hopes to achieve, and the trade-offs leaders have already identified. Separate established facts from assumptions that still need testing.
- Ask frontline teams to test the execution logic. Invite them to identify customer risks, process dependencies, skill needs and workload conflicts. Ask what would have to be true for the proposed approach to work in their roles.
- Make decision boundaries clear. Specify which parts of the strategy are fixed, which implementation choices teams can shape, and who will decide when suggestions conflict. Participation without clarity about influence can create frustration rather than buy-in.
- Close the loop. Report which suggestions changed the plan, which did not, and why. If leaders solicit feedback but never show what happened to it, further requests for input are less credible.
Participation does not mean every person must agree with every strategic choice, and it does not transfer accountability away from leaders. Its purpose is to improve the plan and uncover what execution will require. McKinsey’s change guidance also cautions leaders against assuming that their own reasons for supporting a change will motivate everyone else.
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Make the reason for growth matter to different people
A strategy needs a clear, credible explanation that connects the organizational goal to the work people are being asked to do. “We need to grow” is an outcome, not yet a reason for an employee to change a customer conversation, learn a product or adopt a new process. Explain why the opportunity matters to customers and the organization, and be specific about how the team’s contribution fits.
Where it is honest, connect the strategy to the working team and individual roles as well as the broader purpose. Different people may care about different consequences: serving customers better, building a stronger team, learning a capability, or contributing to an organizational goal. Do not promise personal benefits that the strategy cannot guarantee. A compelling story is not a substitute for evidence; it should make the evidence and the requested change intelligible.
Make room for difficult questions about risk, workload and job security. If an answer is not known, say so and identify how or when it will be resolved rather than presenting uncertainty as certainty. Prosci recommends Q&A, stakeholder engagement and ongoing feedback as part of responding to resistance. Leaders can use those channels to surface concerns early, not only to broadcast announcements.
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Translate strategic intent into changed working conditions
A strategy can be analytically sound and still fail in execution if people lack motivation, skills or resources. Ashkenas’s HBR example describes sales representatives asked to manage new products, customer relationships, processes and tracking while facing delayed compensation and inadequate readiness. Revenue declined after six months, and the company reconsidered its plan. This illustrates the risk of layering unfamiliar demands onto teams without preparation; it is not a general statistic about growth strategies or proof that any single factor caused the decline.
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Before expecting adoption, translate the strategy into the conditions of daily work. Identify the changes in skills, tools, roles, processes, capacity and incentives that the desired behavior actually requires. If the strategy asks a team to spend more time building new customer relationships, for example, clarify which existing work should receive less attention and how the team’s results will be assessed. A new demand without a corresponding decision about time and priorities is not an operational plan.
- Roles and decision rights: Name who owns each important activity and who can resolve exceptions. Ambiguous ownership can leave a new process stuck between teams.
- Skills and tools: Identify the capabilities and practical resources people need, then provide them in time to use them. Do not treat an unexplained performance gap as unwillingness when the required capability has not been built.
- Workload and funding: Compare the added work with current commitments. Decide what to stop, defer or resource differently, and connect those choices to budget allocation.
- Targets and incentives: Check whether compensation, performance measures or recognition still reward the old behavior. People receive a mixed message if leaders ask for a new priority while evaluating them only on the previous one.
- Leadership example: Managers’ choices should visibly support the strategy. McKinsey identifies role modeling and reinforcing mechanisms alongside a compelling story and capability building as elements of behavior change.
Review the full set of changes together. A team may be able to handle a new product, a different sales process or additional tracking individually, but the combined load can still exceed its capacity. Leaders should sequence changes or add support where needed rather than assuming that each new requirement is small because it appears separately in a plan.
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Test uncertain parts before expanding them
When an important assumption remains uncertain, a bounded experiment can generate evidence while limiting the cost of getting the details wrong. Define what the experiment is meant to learn, where it will run, what resources it needs and what result would prompt leaders to continue, change or stop. It should test a specific uncertainty—not serve as a symbolic pilot whose outcome cannot affect the decision.
In the Payoneer example, the company piloted localized customer-care vendors in one country before wider expansion. That example shows how a limited test can inform rollout decisions; it does not establish that every growth strategy should be piloted or that a successful local test will generalize automatically. Choose a test when the uncertainty can be tested meaningfully at limited scale, and check whether local conditions resemble those of the intended expansion.
Use experiments alongside, not instead of, direct feedback. People closest to the work can explain why a result occurred, what a measure missed and what needs to change before a wider rollout. If evidence contradicts the original assumption, revising the strategy is a management decision—not a concession to resistance.
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Track readiness and business outcomes together
Monitor whether teams can and are beginning to carry out the new work as well as whether the strategy is producing the intended business results. A business outcome alone may arrive too late to reveal an adoption problem, while an adoption measure alone cannot show that the strategy is creating value. Choose a small set of indicators that helps leaders decide what to investigate and what action to take.
- Readiness and adoption: Track whether affected roles have the skills, tools and clarity needed, and whether the intended processes are being used.
- Execution conditions: Watch for unresolved workload conflicts, resource gaps or decision bottlenecks that teams have raised.
- Business outcomes: Use measures tied to the specific growth strategy, such as the customer or commercial results its case depends on.
- Feedback and adjustment: Maintain a regular route for concerns and report what changed in response. McKinsey’s organizational-redesign survey associates progress indicators, risk mitigation and leader-authored narratives with stronger reported outcomes, but such associations do not guarantee success.
Set the measures before interpreting results, and be clear about who reviews them and what decisions they inform. If an indicator worsens, investigate whether the cause is the strategy, execution conditions, external circumstances or a combination. Avoid treating a single measure—or a few vocal reactions—as a complete account of what is happening.
Use published change statistics with care
Published percentages can offer context, but the available figures do not establish a universal rate at which growth strategies fail because teams resist them. McKinsey’s 2002 study of change programs at 40 organizations reported that 58 percent missed their targets and 42 percent achieved or exceeded expected returns. McKinsey also reported an association between change-management capability and realized returns. The study concerns change programs generally, not a current benchmark for growth-strategy resistance, and the association should not be read as randomized proof that a specific intervention caused an outcome.
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One free scan finds every outdated or missing driver and matches the right update for your exact hardware.Free scan · exact hardware matchA separate McKinsey Global Survey article on organizational redesign reported that 21 percent of respondents personally involved in a redesign said the effort was successful. Among respondents from completed redesigns, 52 percent in failed efforts cited active employee resistance, compared with 19 percent in successful efforts. Those are survey comparisons about organizational redesign, not growth-strategy rollouts; they do not show that resistance alone caused failure. They are a reason to take resistance seriously and investigate it, not a forecast for any one organization.
The evidence behind practical change guidance includes practitioner advice, company cases and survey findings. It does not establish one intervention that reliably eliminates resistance in every organization. Leaders should use the figures to resist simplistic claims, then make decisions from the evidence and feedback available in their own context.
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