Change Ready Means Dissent Ready

It was just one person!   I once sat on the Board of Directors of a regional non-profit.  We were having a meeting to decide something — I don’t remember what — and took an initial voice vote to level set.  The result: all yeas — except for one person.  Just one.  Call him Bert.  Bert voted nay. 

We paused.  When Bert alone raised his hand with a nay, our Board President didn’t just announce “the yeas have it” and wrap things up.  No. He asked us to pause.  So we turned to Bert and Bert proceeded to explain his reasoning. Calmly.  Logically. One by one we asked questions.  Not to affirm how right we were but to understand where he was coming from. Heads began to nod and before long we “got” what Bert was saying and voted unanimously in the other direction.

Dissent matters. I learned a LOT from that meeting.  I saw how dissent mattered.  How a whole room “listened up.”  How Bert chose not to “go along to get along.”  He laid out his thinking citing facts.  Precedents. Risks we hadn’t considered.  The Board was equally courageous — starting with our President who didn’t dismiss Bert with a “majority rules” action but instead invited us to pause and to listen. To one person’s different idea.  At the end we did a 180 — not because we caved or were cajoled but because we stopped long enough to see that Bert’s thinking made sense to us.     

Do you resist dissent? Is your first reaction to resist dissent because you take it as resistance?  You’re human if you do — but it isn’t useful for a change leader.  For myself, I know what effort it takes to recognize my own resistance:  I have to work — I mean WORK — at being curious and open and staying in the interrogative so I can hear what the other person’s point is before I jump in with why I think they’re wrong, why something won’t work, why it’s too early or too late or too costly or too hard or whatever.  Those yes-buts shut down everything that’s creative and thoughtful — and thought-provoking.  That’s not the kind of leader I want to be. 

Leaders can be steamrollers!  I’ve seen leaders behave like steamrollers, running over opinions they don’t like in a meeting, causing ideas — and people — to wilt in their wake.  What a message that sends to the deep thinkers in the room, the introverts, the innovators — anyone whose alternative ideas or perspectives may not quite align with everyone else’s but whose insights are valuable and need to be heard (after all, we hired them!).  If I ask my colleagues “what do you think” and then shut them down when they tell me — I’m being a steamroller. Maybe worse.

Dissent is a form of engagement. Change invariably causes dissent.  When you and your leadership team say “we want to engage stakeholders in this change process,” know you will encounter dissent.  The question is, will the way you manage dissent enable people to be heard?  Or will you force dissent underground where it can thrive like weeds and choke your change effort through things like work-arounds, cynicism, eroded trust, reduced productivity — all of which are expressions of resistance.

What dissent isn’t. Let’s be clear — dissent isn’t defiance or push-back just for the sake contrariness. There IS such a thing as negative leadership and it can come from anyone anywhere in the organization.  That isn’t what I’m talking about.  What I am talking about here is fact-based, thoughtful, respectful discourse.  Conversation that introduces alternative — even new –— thinking.  Interactions that allow as how there isn’t just “one way” forward.  If forward is even the best way.  Dissent is the antidote to groupthink.  And no leader should want groupthink!

What should you do? Start by asking questions. Make room for dissent.  Don’t shut it down. For example, you might ask:  

• What about this (change, solution, approach, etc.) don’t you think will work?
• What other input do you think we need to move forward?
• What risks are we missing?
• What do you base your opinion on?
• What would you do differently?
• How would you measure success?
• How would you communicate the change to your teams?
• What are you seeing/hearing in your day-to-day that does/doesn’t square with the direction we’re taking? 
• What do you think your team would say?  Why?
• What do you think our customers will say?

Dissent destabilizes. Dissent by its nature can cause discomfort. Doubt.  It can subvert what’s been presumed to be so.  Effective change leaders understand this and enable their teams to handle the dissonance.  They create a safe space where people can bring value to the table — not argument for the sake of argument. They set ground rules together.  They ask for data — fact-based insights and perspectives. They let team members/stakeholders know they truly want to know what others think even — especially — if it isn’t what they think.    

Are you dissent-ready? How to be dissent-ready?  Invite it!  Simple?  Hardly!  Inviting dissent means you have to listen.  You may even have to change your mind.  Savor this attributed to playwright George Bernard Shaw: “… those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.”

You don’t want “yes people!” Dissent is an antidote to groupthink. Performance suffers when people are afraid to say what they think.  Dissent is a culture muscle and like any muscle you’ve got to work it!  It will strengthen decision-making and inspire innovation.  Expressing differences of opinion, concerns, and alternative ideas is an organizational capability. It is a competitive advantage.  Steamrollers miss that.  Effective change leaders don’t.   

 Nina Kern is principal of InterrogativesWork, LLC, a change advisory service dedicated to helping clients and consultants plan and implement organizational change. She has supported a wide variety of organizational change efforts — from digital transformations and functional re-alignments to the stand-up of enterprise risk management programs, PMOs, performance improvement initiatives, org-wide policy and culture change, and more. She has an MS in Organization Development, an MA in Communications, graduated from both the Johns Hopkins Fellows in Change Management Program and Georgetown University’s McDonough School’s Change Management Advanced Practitioner Program (CMAP), and is ProSci trained.  More of Nina’s writings on organizational change can be found on GovLoop,Change Management Review, and Government Executive.

Photo Credit: Atlantic Ambience, Pexels