Tony Chatman on Why a CEO’s Greatest Resistance Often Comes from Success

In 2018, Harvard Business School professors Michael Porter and Nitin Nohria published the results of a study in Harvard Business Review that tracked how 27 chief executives spent their working hours. The CEOs averaged 37 meetings a week, meetings consumed 72 percent of their time, and roughly 36 percent of their time went to reacting to issues as they unfolded.

For Tony Chatman, those numbers pointed to reactive leadership, and that was before the pandemic and before artificial intelligence. Since then, the faster pace of change has made that pattern significantly worse. What concerns him is not the increased pace, but how leaders respond as the pace increases.

“When the world speeds up, they speed up,” Chatman says. “They do the same things, just faster.”

Chatman, an organizational consultant, leadership advisor, keynote speaker and author of The Force Multiplier: How to Lead Teams Where Everyone Wins, has built his recent work around individual and organizational resistance, the often hidden force that keeps people and organizations from acting on changes they know are necessary. At the executive level, he has found that some of the most stubborn resistance comes not from failure but from success.

Speed Pushes Leaders Back Toward What Already Worked 

More meetings, more information and quicker decisions can look like a reasonable response to a faster market, but Chatman notes that faster decisions are not necessarily better ones. Under pressure, people lean on familiar approaches, past experience and the systems that served them before. Those people and systems are under strain too, yet a CEO is often more inclined to trust them without question because they have delivered results.

Chatman sees a structural version of the same problem. Many organizations were built to be stable. “Stability is the antithesis of agility or being able to evolve,” he says.

His conclusion is that companies built to last now need to be built to evolve. “That’s a total change in mindset and a change in function,” he says.

Where Executive Blind Spots Come From 

That shift is harder than it sounds, in part because of where resistance at the top tends to come from. Resistance is usually associated with bad experiences: something goes poorly, and people become reluctant to try it again. Chatman sees a different pattern among executives.

“Truthfully, I think for leaders and executives, the greatest resistance comes from success,” he says.

Most CEOs reached their roles by developing strategies, tactics and ways of thinking that produced results. Over time, those approaches become so familiar that leaders stop examining them. When the old approach stops working, the instinct is often to fault their teams rather than the approach itself, asking, in effect, “what’s wrong with these people?” In that sense, success creates blind spots, and resistance hides inside them.

The second source of blind spots is information. As executives rise, they have less contact with frontline employees, and the people they do hear from often become more selective about what they share. Chatman points to a 2003 study by Frances Milliken, Elizabeth Morrison and Patricia Hewlin, in which 85 percent of the employees interviewed said they had felt unable to raise an issue with a supervisor even though they considered it important.

“This is why I believe leaders need people around them who are willing and able to challenge their thinking, not just affirm their decisions,” Chatman says.

He has seen what those blind spots can cost. In most of his advisory work, Chatman says, the top leader is not stuck so much as dealing with something that is already on fire. In one engagement, an employee survey surfaced problems with serious business and potential legal consequences. Working with the CEO and the chief human resources officer, Chatman found that one executive’s behavior had gone unaddressed because that executive was a high performer, while another operated with few limits because of the CEO’s favor. He helped the CEO see how what he tolerated had spread through the organization, then addressed the issues individually and through training he designed for the company. Over the next three years, complaints dropped significantly, attrition declined year over year, and the company was later named a best place to work by two major publications.

Looking for the Issue Behind the Issue 

The survey results were the visible problem. The tolerated behavior behind them was the real one, and that distinction sits at the center of Chatman’s work. “My first question is always, ‘Is this the real issue, or is it a symptom of something deeper?'” he says.

Organizational symptoms are easy to see and measure: missed milestones, turnover and initiatives that keep getting rescoped. Root causes rarely are, Chatman says, because they sit beneath the surface of some other action and only come to light through diagnosis. His 7 Resistance Points™ Assessment is designed to locate where that friction sits.

At the individual level, resistance is harder to spot because it rarely sounds like fear. It sounds like prudence: “We need more data.” “The timing isn’t right.” The logic is usually sound, which makes it hard to challenge, so Chatman asks what the hesitation is protecting. Usually it is one of five things: safety, identity, capacity, social standing or control.

Chatman points to an executive who knows they should delegate but keeps stepping into decisions that belong to the team. The executive may not trust the team, may have an identity tied to being the person with the answers, or may have learned that delegating means the work gets done in ways they would not choose. Each is a different problem with a different solution. “Forcing them to delegate without addressing the resistance is an exercise in futility,” he says.

Not every objection is resistance to overcome, Chatman adds. “Sometimes people are identifying a legitimate problem with the strategy itself,” he says.

Leading Differently Without Adding More 

Chatman is cautious about handing busy executives another task. “If I tell a CEO who’s already working 70+ hours a week that they need to schedule another meeting, create another report, or introduce another process, they’re going to walk me right out the door,” he says.

Instead, he focuses on changing what happens inside the work leaders already do. He has sat in executive and board meetings where the CEO or board chair visibly grimaced as a decision was announced, hoping no one would raise questions or objections. “Don’t assume silence means agreement,” he says. “A leader’s job is not to wish resistance away. It is to uncover it and address it, or as I sometimes say, hunt it down.”

Leaders can change the questions they ask in existing meetings, moving beyond whether a project is on schedule to why it is behind and what a worker three levels below them is experiencing. They can also watch for what Chatman calls resistance signals:

• Decisions that keep being revisited
• People who agree in meetings but do not follow through
• Managers delegating work they should be doing themselves

Those signals tend to repeat. Resistance, he says, “will keep running the same plays over and over as long as they keep working,” so a pattern that shows up once is worth watching for again.

For a CEO who recognizes these tendencies, Chatman suggests choosing one area where results are falling short and testing the explanation that has been accepted for it. What is the leader assuming, or being told, is causing the problem? What evidence supports that assumption? Are there other possibilities? And is the leader contributing to the situation, intentionally or unintentionally?

Then he recommends finding someone who sees the situation differently and asking what is being missed. “And when they tell you, resist the urge to explain, defend, or correct their perspective,” he says. “Just listen.”

The aim is not for CEOs to slow down, which Chatman acknowledges is unrealistic. It is to keep asking the question that success makes easiest to skip: “Are the systems, information sources and even beliefs that I’m relying on really built for the moment we’re in?” For a company trying to move from built to last to built to evolve, that question starts at the top.

More information about Chatman’s work on resistance and organizational change is available at tonychatman.com.

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