Common Mistake:Assuming resistance occurs because employees lack information.

Common Challenge:
When adoption slows, organizations often respond by increasing communication. More emails are sent, more presentations are delivered, and more messaging is repeated in different formats.

The assumption is clear: if people understand the change, they will adopt it.

In practice, this assumption rarely holds.

Resistance is not always informational. In many cases, it is driven by deeper factors:

• Emotional: Concern about loss of control, competence, or stability

• Political: Perceived impact on influence, role, or decision authority

• Practical: Uncertainty about how the change affects daily work

When leaders treat all resistance as informational, they risk addressing symptoms rather than causes.

This leads to a familiar pattern:

• Communication increases

• Adoption does not

• Frustration grows

Effective change leadership requires diagnosis before response.

Leaders must ask:

• What is driving the resistance?

• Where is it concentrated?

• What is the perceived risk from the employee perspective?

Only then can interventions be targeted and effective.

In many cases, what is needed is not more communication—but more clarity, reinforcement, or direct engagement.

What type of resistance are you seeing—and are you responding to the symptom or the underlying cause? Distinguishing between the two is a critical inflection point in many LaMarsh engagements.