Dear Change Leader,
The meeting had been going well — until it wasn’t.
Elena, the VP of Client Success, had just finished presenting her team’s quarterly numbers when David, the COO, cut in: “I don’t understand why we keep resources allocated to that program. The data doesn’t support it.”
The temperature in the room shifted immediately. Elena’s jaw tightened. “That program,” she said, her voice clipped, “is what’s keeping two of our largest clients from walking out the door.”
What followed was less a conversation and more a standoff. Two smart, experienced leaders — each holding a real piece of the picture — talking past each other entirely.
It’s a scene I’ve witnessed in one form or another more times than I can count. And if you’ve sat around a senior leadership table, you’ve probably seen it too. Maybe you’ve been Elena or David. There’s probably a good chance you’ve been to both of them at different times.
When challenge feels like attack
Here’s what happens in moments like that one: a question gets asked — sometimes bluntly, sometimes poorly timed — and the person on the receiving end hears it not as curiosity but as criticism. The instinct is to defend. And the moment we shift into defense, we stop communicating and start competing.
This is particularly common in organizations navigating significant change, where uncertainty is high, and everyone is already operating near the edge of their bandwidth. When people feel stretched thin, there’s less buffer between a hard question and a hard reaction.
But here’s what I’ve noticed: the problem usually isn’t the question itself. It’s the response it triggers.
When Elena heard her colleague’s challenge, she had real information to share — client relationships, contractual context, risks that weren’t visible in the data alone. But what came out first was the emotional charge, not the substance. And once the room felt the charge, the conversation stopped being about the program and started being about the people.
A different kind of response
When I asked Elena to try again — this time approaching David’s question with curiosity rather than defense — something shifted.
“Help me understand what’s driving your concern,” she said. “I may be sitting on some context that changes the picture.”
And then, instead of defending the program, she described it: the client conversations she’d had, the assumptions she was working from, the information she had that wasn’t captured in the quarterly slide. Not a defense. An account.
I then turned to David and asked him to do the same — to set aside the challenge and simply share what he was seeing and why it concerned him. His response surprised the room. His issue wasn’t actually the program itself. It was that resource allocation decisions were being made without full visibility across teams — and that left him feeling exposed when the board asked questions he couldn’t answer.
Two leaders, each carrying something real. Neither had been wrong, exactly. They just hadn’t been talking about the same problem.
Two minutes later, they were solving it together.
Three practices worth building
- Lead with a question, not a conclusion. When you feel challenged, resist the pull to explain or defend immediately. Start instead with genuine curiosity: “What’s prompting that question?” or “Help me understand what you’re seeing.” This slows the moment down and signals that you’re interested in understanding, not just being understood.
This week: Identify one recurring tension in your team where you typically go straight to defending your position. Practice opening with a question instead.
- Describe your reasoning, not your conclusion. When it’s your turn to respond, share what’s informing your view: the data you have, the experiences you’re drawing from, the assumptions underneath your thinking. A response that starts with “Here’s what I’m seeing and why I see it that way…” invites collaboration. A response that starts with “You’re wrong” — however diplomatically phrased — shuts it down.
This week: In your next team meeting, make one contribution that explicitly names your assumptions: “I’m assuming X is true, which is why I think Y.”
- Acknowledge what the other person is carrying. Hard questions often come from a real concern. Even when the delivery is rough, there’s usually something legitimate underneath it. Naming that — “I think you’re pointing at something important here” — can transform a standoff into a conversation.
This week: The next time a team member challenges you, find one thing in their concern that you can genuinely affirm before you respond.
The bigger shift
When Elena and David finally understood what the other was actually carrying, the tension didn’t just ease — it converted. They left the conversation with a better solution than either would have reached alone.
That’s what becomes possible when leaders stop performing certainty and start sharing their thinking. Change is hard enough. The conversations you have inside your organization shouldn’t make it harder.
Until next time,
P.S. If your leadership team is finding it hard to have the honest, productive conversations that change demands, I’d welcome the chance to think through what’s getting in the way — and what might help. Simply reply to this email.
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EFFECTIVE CHANGE RESULTS FROM INTENTIONAL LEADERSHIP
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