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When a team resists a growth strategy, do not begin by demanding enthusiasm. Find out what the resistance is telling you: people may not understand the case for change, may disagree with its assumptions, lack the skills or resources to act, face conflicting incentives, or see risks leaders have missed. Involve the people expected to execute the strategy, resolve practical blockers, and test uncertain parts before scaling them. A strategy becomes workable when the rationale, day-to-day expectations, support, incentives, and leadership behavior point in the same direction.

Diagnose the resistance before trying to overcome it

“Resistance” describes a response, not its cause. A missed deadline, low participation, continued use of an old process, or criticism in a meeting can each have different explanations. Treating all of them as stubbornness can hide problems in the plan and make the response less effective.

Start by asking what people do not understand, believe, know how to do, have time to do, or see rewarded. These questions separate several common causes that call for different responses. A person who lacks information may need a clear explanation and a chance to ask questions. Someone who doubts the growth opportunity may need to examine the customer or market evidence. Someone who agrees with the goal but lacks a new skill needs practice and support, not another speech about commitment.

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  • Information: Do employees understand what is changing, why now, and what is expected of them?
  • Credibility: Do they believe the customer need, growth opportunity, and assumptions behind the strategy?
  • Capability: Can they perform the new tasks with the knowledge and tools currently available?
  • Capacity: Is there enough time, staffing, budget, and management attention to do the new work alongside existing work?
  • Consequences: Do performance measures, compensation, promotion criteria, and informal recognition support the new behavior—or reward the old one?
  • Risk and security: Are people anxious about changing conditions, their roles, or job security?

Prosci identifies lack of information, anxiety about changing environments, and concerns about job security among possible sources of resistance. Those explanations are not interchangeable: an information gap can be addressed with explanation and dialogue, while concerns about security require honest answers about what is known and what remains undecided. Do not promise outcomes leadership cannot guarantee.

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Listen for evidence that the strategy itself needs revision. Frontline teams may have customer knowledge, operational experience, or workload visibility that was missing from the planning process. Their objections may identify a weak assumption or an implementation risk. Distinguish an objection to the growth goal from an objection to the current route, timing, resourcing, or incentive design. The response should fit what people actually say and do.

Make the case with evidence people can examine

Explain the growth opportunity in terms of the customers and work the strategy is meant to affect. Share the evidence behind the choice, the alternatives considered, the trade-offs, and the assumptions that remain uncertain. Invite questions rather than treating the announcement as the end of discussion. If the rationale is credible, employees should be able to describe it in their own words and understand how their work connects to it.

A compelling story is more than a memorable slogan. McKinsey’s change guidance emphasizes a compelling story alongside role modeling, reinforcing mechanisms, and capability building. For a growth strategy, that means connecting the intended change to real customer needs and explaining what it means for the organization, the working team, and individuals. Leaders should not assume that what motivates them will motivate everyone else. Explain the case honestly for different audiences without implying that every employee will have the same personal reason to support the plan.

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Be specific about what is changing and what is not. If a new customer segment requires different sales conversations, say so. If a new process changes how teams hand off work, show the handoff. If leaders are still evaluating a decision, label it as undecided and give a way to revisit it. Vague assurances invite speculation; false certainty damages credibility when conditions change.

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Numbers about change programs can help frame the challenge, but they are not forecasts for a particular company. McKinsey’s 2002 study of change programs at 40 organizations reported that 58 percent missed their targets, while 42 percent achieved or exceeded expected returns. The authors also reported a strong association between organizations’ change-management scores and the expected value captured from initiatives. That finding is an association, not proof from a randomized test that a particular intervention caused success. It is a reason to take implementation seriously, not a probability that any one growth strategy will fail.

Bring the people who will execute the strategy into its development

Participation is useful before and during rollout, not only after teams object. People closest to customers and operations can reveal friction that a planning group may not see. Give them a meaningful role: examine the evidence, identify risks, propose workable process changes, and help decide what a pilot should test. Consultation is not meaningful if the decision is already fixed and feedback cannot affect any part of execution.

In a 2024 Harvard Business Review article, Ron Ashkenas described Payoneer’s multi-month growth-strategy discovery process, which engaged more than 200 employees through data, workshops, and limited experiments. The strategy then informed budget and resource allocation. The useful lesson is not that every company needs the same number of participants or timeline; it is that strategy development can draw on a broad set of perspectives before commitments are locked in.

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  1. Share the starting evidence. Give affected teams the customer, market, and operating information leaders used to form the growth thesis. Explain where the evidence is strong and where assumptions remain.
  2. Ask for execution risks. Have teams identify what could prevent the strategy from working in their roles, including dependencies on other groups, systems, suppliers, or decisions.
  3. Separate fixed choices from open choices. Be clear about the strategic direction leaders have decided and the implementation details teams can still shape.
  4. Close the feedback loop. Tell participants what changed because of their input, what did not change, and why. Silence after consultation suggests that participation was ceremonial.
  5. Use the findings in planning. Connect resource allocation, timing, and rollout sequencing to the constraints and opportunities employees surfaced.

This process does not mean every employee gets a veto over strategy. Leaders remain accountable for choices and trade-offs. It does mean that those choices should be informed by the knowledge of the people responsible for carrying them out, and that implementation details should not be treated as immovable when evidence changes.

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Translate strategic intent into changed work

A growth strategy is not operational until people know what to do differently. Convert broad aims into role-specific expectations: which customers to prioritize, what activities to add or stop, which decisions employees can make, how work moves between teams, and what success looks like in the near term. If two teams interpret the same strategic phrase differently, clarify the handoff and decision rights before expecting consistent execution.

Then check whether the conditions make those expectations achievable. A strategy may require new products, different customer relationships, new processes, more tracking, and changed compensation. Introducing all of these at once can overwhelm people, particularly when they lack readiness or must still meet existing targets. Ashkenas described a sales organization in which representatives faced multiple unfamiliar demands and delayed compensation; revenue declined after six months, and the company reconsidered its plan. This is a case illustration, not evidence that the same sequence causes revenue declines generally. It does show why leaders should assess the combined burden of changes rather than evaluating each new demand in isolation.

  • Roles and decision rights: Identify who owns each part of the new work, who approves exceptions, and where a team should take a dependency or conflict.
  • Skills: Specify the skills required by role and provide training, coaching, or supervised practice before judging employees against new expectations.
  • Tools and processes: Make sure systems, information, and workflows support the desired behavior. Remove obsolete steps where possible instead of stacking new work on top of old work indefinitely.
  • Workload and resources: Estimate the time required, identify what work can pause or stop, and allocate staffing and budget to the strategy’s actual demands.
  • Incentives and measures: Review whether targets, commissions, performance reviews, and recognition reward the new priorities. Employees cannot consistently prioritize growth behavior if the system penalizes them for doing so.
  • Leadership behavior: Leaders should use the new process themselves, make decisions consistent with stated priorities, and address exceptions openly. A strategy loses credibility when executives endorse it publicly but continue to reward the old approach.

These are related but distinct requirements. Training cannot fix a compensation plan that makes the desired behavior financially costly. A revised incentive cannot compensate for missing tools or an impossible workload. Diagnose the full set of conditions before deciding that a communication campaign is the solution.

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Test uncertain parts before scaling them

When the strategy depends on assumptions that have not yet been proven, use a bounded experiment where it is practical to do so. Define the question, the scope, the time period, the decision owner, and the evidence that would support expanding, changing, or stopping the test. A pilot should reduce uncertainty; it should not be presented as proof that the entire strategy will work everywhere.

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Ashkenas’s account of Payoneer describes piloting localized customer-care vendors in one country before expanding more widely. That example illustrates how a limited test can surface execution information before broader rollout. The right scope for another organization depends on its customers, risk, and operations; the case does not establish a universal pilot design.

  1. Choose a meaningful uncertainty. Select a question whose answer could change how the strategy is executed, such as whether a new service model meets a local customer need.
  2. Bound the test. Specify the team, market, process, or period involved, and protect customers and employees from avoidable disruption.
  3. Set measures in advance. Track a relevant business result and whether the intended work was actually adopted. Record important conditions that could explain the result.
  4. Review with participants. Ask employees what worked, what created friction, and what assumptions failed. Pair their feedback with operational evidence.
  5. Make a decision. Expand, revise, repeat, or stop the test based on what it shows. Communicate the decision and what the organization learned.

Not every strategy component can be piloted safely or meaningfully. Where a test is unsuitable, leaders can still use staged implementation, readiness checks, and frequent feedback to detect problems early. Avoid changing too many variables at once if the goal is to learn which part is helping or hindering execution.

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Measure adoption and business outcomes together

Revenue or growth alone may show whether an outcome is changing, but it often cannot explain why. Pair a small set of business measures with indicators that reveal whether teams can and do perform the new work. Choose measures that connect directly to the strategy rather than building a large dashboard that no one uses to make decisions.

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  • Readiness and capability: Can affected employees explain the rationale, identify their role, and access required training or tools?
  • Adoption: Are the intended activities happening—for example, are teams using the new process or reaching the customers the strategy prioritizes?
  • Execution health: Are handoffs, workload, quality, or customer experience showing problems that need attention?
  • Business outcomes: Are the customer, revenue, retention, or other outcomes relevant to the chosen growth thesis moving in the intended direction?

Set a review cadence and name who can act on the results. If adoption is low, investigate whether the barrier is understanding, capability, capacity, incentives, or disagreement before deciding what to change. If adoption is strong but the expected business outcome does not follow, revisit the underlying strategy assumptions rather than simply asking employees to try harder.

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McKinsey’s survey of organizational redesigns found that 21 percent of respondents personally involved in a redesign said the effort was successful. In the same survey results, 52 percent of respondents from completed failed redesigns cited active employee resistance, compared with 19 percent of respondents from successful redesigns. These are survey comparisons about organizational redesign, not growth-strategy rollouts; they do not show that resistance alone caused failure. McKinsey also associated stronger reported redesign outcomes with risk mitigation, progress indicators, and leader-authored narratives. Those practices can help leaders see and communicate progress, but survey associations do not guarantee success.

When resistance persists, use a response matched to the cause

Resistance may continue after leaders explain the strategy and provide support. That does not automatically mean the team is unwilling, and it does not automatically mean the strategy is wrong. Revisit the diagnosis with concrete evidence: what behavior has not changed, what employees say is preventing it, what resources are missing, and whether the strategy’s assumptions still hold.

  • If people cannot explain the rationale, improve the explanation and create a reliable place for questions. Ask them to describe the case in their own words rather than measuring success by attendance at an announcement.
  • If they disagree with the case, review the evidence and assumptions together. Decide whether the disagreement reveals a genuine flaw, a different interpretation, or a trade-off leadership must own.
  • If they lack capability, provide role-specific development and practice, then give employees a reasonable opportunity to apply it.
  • If capacity is the constraint, adjust sequencing, staffing, scope, or existing work. Repeating the priority without changing the workload does not create more hours.
  • If incentives conflict, change the relevant measures or rewards and explain when the new system takes effect.
  • If the evidence shows a flawed plan, revise it and explain what the team’s input or test demonstrated. Changing course in response to evidence is not the same as abandoning a sound goal.

Make progress visible without turning measurement into surveillance or punishment. Employees need to be able to raise risks and admit when an experiment is not working. If every negative signal is treated as disloyalty, leaders will lose access to the information needed to correct the rollout.

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What leaders should avoid

  • Do not label disagreement as disloyalty. It can suppress useful information about customers, workload, or execution risks.
  • Do not rely on repeated announcements. Communication matters, but it cannot substitute for skills, tools, capacity, clear roles, aligned incentives, or credible decisions.
  • Do not treat consultation as a vote after the decision is final. State where teams can influence the rollout and show how their input was handled.
  • Do not promise that change is risk-free. Explain known impacts, unresolved questions, and how employees can get an answer.
  • Do not use broad failure statistics as a prediction. Findings from redesign surveys or older studies of varied change programs do not establish how often growth strategies fail because of employee resistance.

There is no single intervention established here as the best response in every organization. The practical standard is whether leaders are learning why adoption is difficult and changing the conditions that employees need in order to execute the strategy.

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