Change is rarely difficult because leaders fail to explain what they want to change. It becomes difficult when they assume they already understand why people are pushing back. When employees question a new strategy, hesitate over a reorganization or challenge a new way of working, the most common diagnosis is often the simplest one: they are resisting change.

Mary Lou Panzano, an award-winning corporate communications executive who spent 30+ years leading employee communications and change initiatives at companies including Bayer, Pfizer and Prudential, believes that diagnosis can be dangerously incomplete.

Her new book, “Cementing Change: Cracking the Code for Communications That Work”, published in 2026, is built around the idea that leaders need a more people-centered approach to making organizational change stick.

The management belief that puts the blame on employees

For Panzano, one of the most persistent and damaging management beliefs is that employees resist change.

The problem is not that employees never resist. Some inevitably will. The problem is what happens when leaders use “resistance” as an explanation rather than a question.

An employee who challenges a decision may be confused. They may mistrust management. They may fear losing something they value, disagree with the proposed approach or have identified a problem that senior leadership has overlooked.

In those situations, labeling the person “resistant” moves the problem from the organization to the individual.

Instead of asking What are we doing wrong?, leaders can start asking How do we change this employee’s attitude?

Panzano’s alternative is simple: “get curious before getting corrective”.

When someone pushes back, leaders should ask what they have failed to explain, what they have failed to hear, what the employee might feel they are losing and what would help them trust the direction the organization is taking.

The distinction matters. Listening to an objection does not mean accepting it. It means treating the objection as information before treating it as opposition.

What research says about resistance to change

Panzano’s argument is also consistent with a more nuanced approach emerging from organizational research.

A 2024 qualitative study by Alisha Rath and Lalatendu Kesari Jena, titled “I Don’t Want to Switch! Am I Trapped? An In-depth Qualitative Inquiry of Resistance to Change Leading to Competency Trap” examined the underlying factors behind resistance to organizational change.

Rather than treating resistance as a single phenomenon, the researchers used interviews, grounded-theory coding and network analysis to identify different themes, antecedents and consequences associated with it. Their findings highlighted factors including mistrust, motivation, training and innovation, while also emphasizing the role of leaders in managing resistance.

The study therefore points toward a more complicated picture: resistance can have different causes, and understanding those causes matters if organizations want to respond effectively.

That distinction is important for leaders because the same behavior (questioning a new initiative, for example) can have very different meanings depending on what is happening underneath it.

The employee may not be rejecting change itself. They may be reacting to uncertainty, a lack of information, inadequate training or a lack of trust.

When “resistance” revealed a leadership problem

Panzano has seen this distinction play out in her own career.

While leading communications for Bayer’s U.S. pharmaceuticals business, she was preparing to launch a new growth vision and strategy. The proposed vision was straightforward: “We will be the leading specialty pharmaceuticals company in the U.S.”

Before communicating it to employees, Panzano recommended testing the vision with the next level of leaders: people employees knew, trusted and looked to for direction.

The reaction was not what the executive team expected.

Leaders questioned what “leading” meant and what qualified as “specialty.” Some dismissed the vision as a “pipe dream”. But one question revealed a much deeper issue: Who did “we” actually mean?

The answers exposed a problem that had little to do with the wording of the vision itself.

Some leaders believed “we” meant themselves. Others interpreted it as the executive team. What emerged was that, years after an acquisition, parts of the leadership team still did not see themselves as one team or even as one business.

What initially looked like resistance to a new corporate vision was actually evidence of a deeper organizational problem: the leaders expected to communicate the change were not yet fully aligned themselves.

The rollout was paused. The leadership team worked on alignment, and several leaders became part of an advisory group that helped shape the communication strategy. When the vision was eventually launched, the meaning of “we” was deliberately made broader: it meant everyone.

The episode illustrates why Panzano believes pushback can be valuable. What appears to be an obstacle can sometimes reveal a problem that leaders need to solve before the change can succeed.

Change does not end with the announcement

Another mistake leaders make is treating communication as an event rather than a process.

From the executive perspective, a change may have been discussed for months before employees hear about it. By the time the announcement is made, leaders may already have considered the rationale, assessed the risks and decided what needs to happen next.

Employees are starting from a different point. They need to understand not only what is changing, but why it matters, what it means for them, what is known and unknown, and how they will be supported through the transition.

That means communication cannot stop with the announcement.

The objective is not to eliminate resistance. Panzano argues that this is unrealistic. Instead, leaders should create enough clarity, connection and trust for people to move through the change, even when they do not necessarily like it.

That also means being willing to hear uncomfortable feedback after the decision has already been made.

Why this matters for small and medium-sized businesses

The principle may be particularly relevant to SMEs, where the relationship between leaders and employees is often more direct.

In a large corporation, senior executives may be separated from the people experiencing a change by multiple layers of management. In a smaller company, an owner or CEO may know employees personally and interact with them every day.

That proximity can make listening easier, but it does not guarantee that leaders are actually listening.

Panzano’s experience outside the corporate world provides another example. As a board leader at a local Habitat for Humanity affiliate, she was involved when a CEO who had led the organization for 19 years announced her retirement.

Rather than immediately deciding whether to promote internally or recruit externally, the board involved a broader group of stakeholders in determining what it needed from its next CEO. The organization’s COO became interim CEO and was evaluated against specific objectives.

The process ultimately showed that she was capable not only of preserving what already worked, but of envisioning where the organization could go next.

For SME leaders, Panzano identifies a practical lesson: proximity should be used as an opportunity to listen, not simply as an opportunity to communicate decisions.

Employees often know things leaders do not. They see how processes work in practice, where customers encounter problems and how changes affect everyday operations.

The leader’s job is not to accept every suggestion. It is to create enough trust that people feel able to make those suggestions and then explain what happens as a result.

Four principles for making change stick

These ideas form the basis of Panzano’s broader approach to organizational transformation, which she calls the 4Cs Change Framework: Clarity, Connection, Caring and Courage. Her framework is the central practical model developed in Cementing Change.

  • Clarity means knowing what the organization is trying to achieve and maintaining that goal, while remaining willing to change the way it gets there as new information emerges.
  • Connection means engaging people in the process rather than treating change as a decision that travels only from the top down. Employees can identify problems, challenge assumptions and provide information that senior leaders may not have.
  • Caring recognizes that organizational change has consequences for the people experiencing it, not just for the organization’s strategy or financial performance.
  • Courage means being willing to hear difficult feedback and acknowledge uncertainty rather than pretending leaders have all the answers.

Panzano has also argued that this approach changes the meaning of executive presence itself. In an uncertain environment, she writes, employees are less concerned with whether a leader simply looks confident and more concerned with whether they can trust that leader to guide them through what comes next.

The question leaders should ask instead

Change will always produce disagreement. Some employees will genuinely oppose a decision, and leaders cannot (and should not) accommodate every objection.

But that is precisely why the word “resistance” can become a trap.

If leaders assume they already know what resistance means, they may stop looking for the information hidden inside it.

Panzano’s experience suggests a different approach: before trying to overcome resistance, understand it.

The next time employees push back against a major change, the most useful question may therefore not be How do we get them on board?

It may be: What is their reaction telling us?

That shift does not make change easier. But it can make leaders better at understanding the organizations they are trying to change and, ultimately, better at leading the people who have to make that change work.