Your Team Isn’t Resisting Change. They Just Don’t Know What You’re Solving.
A high-level leader walks into yet another meeting about upcoming change efforts. She looks around and sees her colleagues staring at their phones, their computers, anything but each other. The energy has flatlined. Everyone is tired. For her, this looks like resistance. But is it?
Maybe she decides to double down: create more meetings, more communication, and more effort spent making the case. But nothing shifts.
That’s because she has misdiagnosed the problem. Her people aren’t resistant, they’re confused.
When organizations shift direction, restructure priorities, or launch new initiatives, the impact begins to shape how people communicate, how decisions are made, and how teams coordinate their work.
What Happens When Alignment Is Assumed Instead of Defined
According to Gartner, only 32% of global leaders succeed in helping employees adopt change in a healthy way.
Periods of change exact pressure on daily work processes. Adjustments to new workflows, practices, and resources make collaboration more difficult while teams are still trying to deliver results.
As pressure builds, people gravitate toward what feels most urgent, which scatters their attention across competing priorities. Without clear ownership, teams stay busy but drift out of alignment.
One Question That Brings Clarity in Periods of Change
Elsa Powel Strong, SVP, Solution Strategy at Ariel, often works with leaders whose teams feel the strain of competing priorities. In these situations, she introduces a simple two-part question that helps the group refocus.
“What is the problem we are trying to solve right now, and what are the problems we can solve later?”
The first part of the question invites the group to identify one shared priority. Teams make progress when decisions are sequenced thoughtfully and the right people are involved at the right time. A clear focus on the current problem helps concentrate the team’s attention.
The second part of the question creates space for additional concerns. Team members see that their issues are acknowledged and will be addressed in due course. This structure allows the conversation to stay focused while maintaining trust within the group.
Together, these two questions help teams stay focused while ensuring that people feel heard.
Focus Turns Agreement into Alignment
Getting everyone focused on the same problem today is the starting point. Alignment is something a team must keep building, through the next conversation, the next decision, the next priority that comes off the waiting list.
When several problems compete for attention at once, discussions expand in many directions. Each participant advocates for what feels most important, and the strategy becomes harder to guide.
A clear focus on the immediate problem helps the team concentrate its efforts. Once the group has addressed that priority, attention can shift to the next item on the list. This steady rhythm allows teams to move forward together.
What This Looks Like in Practice
The next time a conversation feels tense or starts going in circles, resist the urge to push harder or schedule another meeting. Instead, ask the question: what is the one problem we are solving right now, and what can we put aside for later?
It won’t resolve every tension in the room. However, it will almost always show you whether the tension is about direction or simply about clarity.
Change will always create friction. The question is whether leaders stop long enough to ask what that friction is telling them. Most of the time it isn’t a team that’s pushing back, it’s a team that’s waiting for someone to tell them where to focus. That’s not a hard problem to solve, it just requires the right question asked at the right moment.
Watch the full video here.
