Naysayers are a gift

Naysayers are a gift. They say out loud what a lot of other people are quietly thinking.

Early in my career I treated every naysayer as a problem to solve. If someone pushed back on a change, I set out to win them over, one conversation at a time, until they were an evangelist. It felt like the right instinct. It was actually a waste of a great deal of energy and time.

What I've learned across three decades of leading transformations is that resistance is information before it is an obstacle. A naysayer is telling you something true about how a change is landing. The work isn't to silence them or convert all of them. It's to read what they're giving you and decide who genuinely needs to be on board.

Not every naysayer needs to be converted

This is the misstep I made, and the one I watch other leaders make. You cannot bring every skeptic all the way to enthusiasm, and you don't need to. Trying to spend your credibility and your calendar on the wrong people.

There are three groups where a naysayer's opinion actually has to shift for the change to succeed. The people who serve on the project implementation team. The people who lead or manage the teams most affected by the change. And the people who influence others inside a key stakeholder group, whether or not they hold a formal title.

Everyone else matters, but they are not where your persuasion energy belongs. The question is how you tell the difference, and that comes down to doing your homework before the resistance shows up.

Stakeholder analysis helps prioritize people risks

You figure out whose beliefs need to move the same way an engineer figures out how a system fits together. You map it. A good stakeholder analysis early in a project is what lets you prioritize, and it sets up every involvement and communication decision that follows.

For leaders who have never mapped the relational side of their teams, this exercise can feel tedious. Its value shows up later, when you know exactly whose readiness to watch and why. A stakeholder analysis involves categorizing groups of people, assessing what each group currently understands and believes, identifying the understandings and beliefs those groups need for the change to be adopted, documenting who influences each group, and tracing how information actually flows to and between them.

That last part is what most plans miss. Information doesn't travel through the org chart. It travels through people others trust. Map that, and you've built the system architecture for human beings.

Stakeholder capacity is part of this picture too. How much change a group can absorb at once shapes how they respond (See: Change overload: how much change can your team actually handle?)

The emotions are data, not a final verdict

Here's the reframe that changes how you respond in the moment. The emotion behind a naysayer's comment is not a personal attack and it's not a sign the change is doomed. It's data. For the moment.

People move through a predictable emotional pattern during any significant change: fear, then anger, then sadness, before they arrive at acceptance. A naysayer voicing frustration in a team meeting is showing you where their group sits on that curve right now. That's useful. It tells you what people need before they can move forward, and it tells you sooner than any survey would.

Once you treat the emotion as information rather than a problem to shut down, your job gets simpler. You're not managing someone's feelings. You're reading a signal and deciding what to do with it. By responding rather than reacting to the emotional data, you're also reinforcing to others that they, too, are responsible for their emotions.

(For the full pattern and what each emotion signals about readiness, see: The big 4 emotions of the change curve).

Actions that turn a naysayer into a proof point

Two responses reliably shift an influential naysayer, and they work together.

The first is to listen and acknowledge the feedback. Fight the instinct to shut negativity down, especially early in a project. It takes courage to speak up in a room, and the person willing to do it is often the one with influence over their peers. Encourage the feedback so the perspective can actually be understood.

The second is to get them involved. Acknowledgment on its own can feel like being managed. An invitation to contribute proves you meant it.

Here's how that plays out. Early feedback often points back at a past failure:

"The last time we put a system like this in place, it created a ton of extra work for our team."

Acknowledge it honestly, without over-promising:

"I hear the frustration, and you're right, that last change was hard. This one won't be effortless either. But we're starting the prep work earlier, and part of that is getting your input now so we can anticipate what the team will need after go-live to make it easier to use."

Then open the door:

"We'd love to have you in the previews, and even testing the system, to help us figure out what those needs are. Would you be willing to put a few hours toward that?"

The acknowledgment lowers the temperature. The invitation shows it wasn't just talk.

When this happens in a team meeting, it does double work. It shifts the individual, and it shifts everyone watching. The negative comment becomes a live proof point that this change really will be handled differently. Handled well, the most vocal skeptic in the room becomes the reason the rest of the room starts to trust the effort.

Consistency between what you say and what you do is the trust signal underneath all of this: Walk the talk: trust signals that make or break change.

Be ready before the resistance arrives

None of this works if you're improvising. You can only respond to a naysayer strategically if you already know which stakeholders make the biggest difference to adoption, where they sit on the change curve, and who they influence.

That's the homework. Do the stakeholder analysis early, treat the pushback as data, and have your involvement ask ready before you walk into the room. The naysayer stops being a threat to the change and becomes one of the clearest reads you have on whether it's working.

For how this fits into a high-performing project team, see: How to build a change-savvy Workday project team.

Update note, July 2026: This post was originally published in November 2022. It has been reframed around the behavioral science at the core of the changecapable method, connecting resistance to the predictable emotional pattern people move through during change and to the stakeholder analysis that lets leaders prioritize whose readiness to build.

If you are leading a significant organizational transformation, the changecapable Leadership Program is a cohort for 25 leaders. It builds exactly the skill this post describes: reading resistance as data, knowing whose beliefs need to shift, and turning influential skeptics into proof that the change is real.

Learn more about the changecapable Leadership Program ➡️

Kris Jennings is an organizational change expert with 30 years of experience leading transformations for large organizations. She developed the changecapable method, a behavioral science approach to change that delivers higher adoption. She works with enterprise organizations navigating digital transformation, ERP implementations, and large-scale change.

Photo by engin akyurt on Unsplash