Building Bridges on Familiar Ground
What if resistance is not the problem, but the clue? This sharp reflection reframes corporate pushback as protection of competence, safety, control, and relevance. Instead of forcing change, it argues for listening deeper, honoring existing expertise, and building transformation from familiar ground. Personal, practical, and punchy, it turns resistance into the starting point for real progress.
7/20/20263 min read
I work in a traditional, hardware-rooted corporate environment. As a natural scientist – a mathematician, to be precise – I lead the technical concept for the maintainability of safety-critical software, while also serving as the lead data steward for engineering data. When I say "traditional" and "hardware-rooted," I mean that the HR catalog doesn't even have a standard role name that fits my actual responsibilities. In an ecosystem like this, everything I work on is highly innovative, or at the very least, completely out of sync with the prevailing mindset and way of working.
Because of this, I face resistance every day. For a long time, my work felt like an endless fight for progress against the status quo. But I know that the only way to truly succeed is to help my colleagues transform their mindset – after all, it is statistically proven that 80% of employees shape and determine an organization's actual culture. I realized I have a hell of a lot of work to do, but pushing harder wasn't working.
So, I decided to reflect on this daily corporate friction through my coaching lens. I asked myself: How can I support their transformation? What are they actually experiencing? I believe most of my colleagues feel the immense pressure of today's changing landscape, the burden of uncertainty, and the undeniable need for evolution. But their default response is a very human one: a desire to turn back the clock to a time when things felt nice, predictable, and cozy. While that return to the past isn't a feasible option, understanding that impulse changed everything for me.
In the Co-Active coaching model, one of our fundamental cornerstones is that every person is naturally creative, resourceful, and whole – even in the middle of groundbreaking, unsettling change. When I look past the immediate pushback and reflect deeply, I see that people rarely fear change itself. What they actually fear is loss: the loss of competence, the loss of safety, the loss of control, or the loss of relevance.
Reframing resistance this way gives me a real place to start. It shifts my internal question from "Why are they blocking me?" to "What is the real fear beneath this resistance?" As an engineer without line authority, my impact comes from leading topics that arch across multiple product areas and cross-functional teams. My primary task isn't to force compliance; it is to ask this question and deeply listen for the answer. Most of the time, this inquiry won't happen explicitly in a meeting room, so my job is to find subtle, creative ways to uncover what truly matters to them.
If we picture transformation as a bridge stretching from the old way of working to the new, honoring our colleagues' existing expertise forms the solid ground on our starting shore. From that grounded space, I can help them see how the values rooted in their past experience aren't being discarded – they are being reframed, reused, and evolved. The new paradigms of software maintainability and data stewardship aren't here to replace their core expertise; they are here to upgrade and protect it for the future.
It is also my responsibility to make sure the steps we take together are manageable. If I show them a leap that is too wide or a future that feels too vast, panic sets in and people shut down completely. Transformation is never an aggressive push or a top-down mandate; it is a gentle, steady invitation to evolve together while respecting the foundation beneath our feet.
When you face resistance to a new path – whether at work or in your personal life – what would change if you stopped fighting the pushback, and instead assumed the other person was simply trying to protect something valuable?