Eliminating Resistance with Roy van Griensven

Roy van Griensven, Head of Commercial Excellence at a €7B specialty chemicals company, on why top-down transformations fail — and what actually works.

Consulting-led change relies on mandates and extrinsic motivation. It produces passive resistance. Roy's alternative is servant leadership: structured autonomy, psychological safety, bottom-up engagement.

People don't resist change — they resist being changed by others. Leaders who own transformation failures instead of blaming resistance get adaptive capacity as the outcome.