How Do You Influence a Team to Get Behind a Change When It Wasn't Their Idea?
Rethink Resistance: The Check Engine Light
About twelve years ago, a very large company decided to embark on a company wide transformation.
It consisted of several big initiatives with several teams. There was a directive from the very top: “keep them separate.” Each project would get its own name, its own identity, its own rollout.
A young change consultant on the project had a bad feeling about it in his gut. People were probably going to drown in information and get very confused. He voiced his opinion about what might happen and proposed that they tell one unified story and have one program instead.
Leadership said no. They were adamant.
So the rollouts began. And after every meeting, the anonymous feedback came in:
"It's insane that you're asking us to do all these things.”
“I don't know how this fits with that."
"It was catastrophically horrible the whole time," he told me.
Eventually the team walked it all back, pulled all the separate programs and initiatives into a one single story.
What stuck with him wasn't the mess of it all. It was this “why was the fix so obvious to him, but not to everyone else?”
That consultant was Travis Hahler. He's since led change inside 119 organizations, spent years leading transformation work with Google, and moved to Salesforce in 2023 to do it from the inside. His new book, Rethink Resistance, hit number one on eight new-release lists in its first week. Travis and I both live in the Midwest (he lived in downtown Minneapolis for years), so we spent the first few minutes of our call trading Twin Cities notes before we got serious about neuroscience.
The thing that stood out to me in our conversation was this one metaphor he used to describe our resistance to change: the check engine light. "The light isn't the problem, but something is causing a problem. And it's your opportunity to get curious."
Which brings us to this week's influence anyone playbook:
How do you influence a team to get behind a change when it wasn't their idea?
Let’s get into it.
⚡️ 60 SEC INFLUENCE
When someone is pushing against change, stop pushing harder
Think about the last time someone resisted your idea. Your boss. A client. Your kid at 7:45 a.m. when you're already late. Your team.
What did you do?
If you're like most of us, you pushed harder. Travis sees it everywhere: "Our first response and reaction is to almost mandate and to push harder against it. It's a fight."
But here's why that fight is unwinnable. This is status quo bias. Your brain's main job is to keep you alive, and it has a deep preference for what it already knows. Change costs energy, creates uncertainty, and always takes something away. So the brain hits the brakes. "Our brain just has this bias for keeping things as they are," Travis said.
Which means the resistance you're feeling isn't about you. "What's actually happening is not personal at all," he told me. "It's very biological."
So if your team is pushing back against a change initiative, it’s just their biology at work, nothing against you.
Travis boils resistance down to six barriers. Each one needs something different:
Routine → help them see how the change fits into their day
Learning → make the newness small, bite-sized, and give them time
Exclusion → bring them in, and show them who's already on board
Ambiguity → communicate often, and be honest about what you don't know
Anxiety → model the change yourself before you ask them to make it
Loss → name what they're giving up, and lead with empathy
When someone resists, their check engine light is on. And as a professional of influence, your job is to figure out which light is blinking.
Try this: The next time you encounter resistance to a change, resist your urge to push, instead ask this one question: "When I mentioned this (change), what did you hear?"
Then listen for the barrier. Travis has watched this question resume many stalled conversations and standstills, because "what is being heard is not always what's being said." Sometimes you'll learn they heard you perfectly and have a real concern you missed. Sometimes you'll learn they heard something completely different, like a flashback to the last change initiative that blew up in their face.
Either way, now you know what to address.
Or in the words Travis would put on a sticky note on your laptop: "Get curious, not combative."
As promised, influence in 60 seconds.
(Bonus: if you want to probe further, say “Tell more more” or “Give me an example”)
The Influence Anyone podcast:
Your CEO says, "We need this done in six months." You know it'll take eight. So you say what most smart people say: "That just doesn't feel like enough time."
According to Travis, you just lost. "Guess who wins the gut conversation every single day?" he asked me. "The CEO."
So what do you say instead? Travis walks through the exact move in the episode. It flips one of the most repeated rules in persuasion.
🔎 INFLUENCE DEEP DIVE
Have you experienced this"?
A decision gets made in a boardroom somewhere to execute a big transformation and then afterwards someone tells your team they need to get onboard.
I have. And I bet most of you have as well.
Travis says this is how most change works. "It's often decided by one group, received by another, and that can make people feel left out of the process."
And being left out is a dangerous place for a human brain. Because for most of our history, being outside the group meant your odds of surviving decreased. We depended on our tribe for protection and survival. "Our brain has a bias for being included," Travis said.
So when a change wasn't their idea, your team is resisting two things at once: the change itself, and the way it was presented.
Why "not my idea" makes it worse. Psychologists have a name for this. It's called reactance. In the 1960s, psychologist Jack Brehm found that when people feel their freedom being taken away, they push back to get it back. Sometimes they push back on things they'd have happily chosen if it was on their own accord.
Tell a team "we're doing this," and part of their brain hears "you don't get a say." The pushback that follows is often about control more than the change itself.
Now stack Travis's other barriers on top…
The change takes something away. (Remember, "every change equals some form of loss.") It asks them to learn something new. And the details are fuzzy, so their brains fill in the blanks with the worst case.
That's a lot of red lights at once. No wonder most change initiatives fail.
What the research says teams actually need. Here's the good news. People can get behind decisions they didn't make. They do it all the time.
Business researchers W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne studied this. They found that people are far more willing to commit to a decision, even one that goes against them, when the process feels fair. They called it fair process, and it comes down to three things:
Engagement. People got a real chance to weigh in.
Explanation. They understand why the decision was made.
Expectation clarity. They know what happens next and what's expected of them.
Notice what's missing from that list: coming up with the idea. The team just needs to feel like the change is happening with them.
Travis's playbook lines up with this almost exactly. Here are the five moves.
1. Hand them the "how." The decision may be made, but how it gets done usually isn't. That's where your team comes in. There's a reason people love the bookshelf they built themselves, even when it wobbles. We value what we help create (this is the Ikea effect.)
This is also where Travis's favorite question does its best work. When the pushback comes, ask: "When I mentioned this shift (change initiative), what did you hear?" He's seen teams hear something very different from what was said. A mention of change can send a finance team straight back to the last change that got them in trouble. "What they heard was this sounds like what happened before, and my mind immediately went to no."
Application:
Share the "what" and the "why"
Before you defend the decision, ask what they heard. Get curious about the resistance.
Include the team by using "how" as an open question.
2. Tell the whole story, loss included. When a change wasn't the team's idea, leaders often try to sell it. This is so great. Here's why this is exciting.
It backfires. "When we hear great, great, great, our brains hear something's missing," Travis said. "You're not telling me the whole story."
He pointed out the irony. "We hire really smart people," he said. Then we communicate with them like "everyone must be just a little bit dumb." Smart people have a finely tuned BS meter. This one-sided story sets it off.
And if there's more than one change in motion, tie them together. Remember the story at the top of this issue? Separate initiatives, no shared story, and feedback that read, "I don't know how this fits with that." Travis's fix was one story: "Here's what we're trying to accomplish, and here's how these different pieces play into that overarching story."
Application:
Name what the team is giving up before they have to name it for you (remember, any change IS loss.)
Explain the real reason for the decision, including the trade-offs.
Give every change one story it belongs to.
3. Make the next step clear, and communication lines open. Ambiguity is where the worst-case stories grow. Travis's fix is simple, and it's also the part leaders skip. "It requires frequency and transparency," he said. Frequency means set times people can count on. Transparency means "being honest about what you can, can't, and don't know at the moment."
This is also where the most common sentence in management fails. "Reach out if you have any questions." High achievers hear that and think, "I feel like I should be able to figure this out." So they don't ask. They get frustrated and they quietly check out.
Replace the open door with a standing time. "We're gonna check in every Tuesday. I want you to bring your questions, your concerns." Now a frustrating Friday has somewhere to go. "Just the simple act of knowing that there's a forum helps people to stop that spiral," Travis said.
Application:
Put a recurring check-in on the calendar for the length of the change.
Say out loud what you don't know yet, and when you expect to know it.
Tell the team what the hard part will feel like before they hit it.
4. Find your first movers. Most teams have people waiting for someone else to go first. "No one wants to show up early to the party and be the first guest," Travis said. So until someone moves, nobody moves.
Start small. Find the people most open to the change, get them moving, and let the rest of the team see it. When someone can say "your teammate is already doing this," it feels safer to follow.
And don’t forget to model it yourself. Travis's answer for easing anxiety: "Show people what it means to change. So we should model it, not expect them to just move."
Application:
Pick two or three early adopters and support them first.
Share what they're learning, stumbles included.
Go first yourself, where the team can see it.
5. Match the change to the team. Not every team change the same way. On a project in Japan, Travis's standard plan for passing news down through layers of managers got a quick no from regional leaders. In their culture, when the top says it, it's understood. The layers weren't needed.
Roles matter too. Finance and accounting teams tend to respond to policy and procedure. Sales teams respond to incentives. "If you don't have your incentives in place with the change that you're making, salespeople aren't going to make that change," Travis said.
Travis's shortcut is empathy. "The biggest thing anyone can harness in getting someone else to do something is to become someone else. Become the person that you're asking to change." Do that, and you'll figure out what they need before they have to ask.
Application:
Ask: how does this team usually recieve news, and who do they listen to?
Check that incentives, goals, and metrics point the same direction as the change.
Walk through the change as one of them. What would you fear? What would you need?
When it wasn't your idea either. Here's a twist a lot of leaders live with. Sometimes you're the one passing down a decision you didn't make. It came from the higher-ups, and so you're resisting too.
Travis's six barriers also work as a mirror. So if you feel resistance (trust me, you will) ask yourself: "What about this scares me? What am I afraid of?" That usually points to the loss you’re feeling. Keep wanting to ask others what they've heard? That's ambiguity. “What am I upset about?” will sometime reveal emotions about being left out of the decision. That’s exclusion.
Then bring it to your own leader. "I'm struggling because I just don't have enough information. Here are the questions that keep popping up." That gives them something to act on, and it gets you the answers your team is about to ask you for.
The real payoff. When Travis talks about his best work across 119 organizations, he talks about leaders who came back and said they felt closer to their teams on the other side of the change. They said they became better leaders because of how they handled it.
That's what's possible, even when the change wasn't anyone's idea in the first place.
A professional of influence treats resistance as information, and treats the team as part of the answer.
The light came on for a reason. So go find out why.
🔥 IN CASE YOU MISSED IT
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When I was younger, my friends and I would talk about movies, restaurants, cocktails, relive comedic skits, now? We talk about supplements and health products. One of my more recent purchases is a pair of reusable earplugs. It came in so handy at a Weird Al concert a few weeks ago.
I do love my loops Ⓞ
I have the Coral
Professionals of influence, I’ll see you next Sunday! 😉
Warmly,
Howie