Eliminating Resistance with Roy van Griensven

Jesse Hopps: Before you led this approach to commercial excellence and transformational growth, what were the more common approaches you saw in Fortune 500 companies when it came to change management? What is the dominant standard playbook?

Roy van Griensven: What you see in many companies over at least the last two decades is that big companies realize they might have a problem. They are not living up to their full potential, which they hear from the markets, the shareholders, the analysts. Or they have an actual problem, because they are declining, not growing, stalling.

The common approach is: okay, we need to adjust our strategy. Let us hire a big consulting firm, because they have done this before with other companies and they can tell us what we need to do. Typically that lands beautifully on paper, with at least a nine-figure value potential attached, and then it is: okay guys, you just need to run a transformation program across multiple streams. In most cases the company then hires one of the consultants in as the program leader, to tell the people in the company what needs to be done.

Traditionally it is the same approach. We look at our processes, we look at our tools, we fix our data, we train people how to do it, we do a bit of a reorganization. That keeps the company busy for two to three years, until the point where you have actually spent a huge amount of money. Initially people are excited, because something is happening and they can be part of it. Over time they realize nothing materially is changing.

In the headquarters there is a huge idea of how we are changing the company. The moment you step out of the headquarters office, people say: I have seen all the webcasts, I have seen all the live streams, I have seen the town halls, but my day-to-day job is not changing at all. I do not understand how it is helping me. And by the way, nobody has asked me for the last eighteen months what I think or how I can contribute.

Jesse Hopps: I call that transformation theater. A lot of activity, everyone is very polite, they are nodding along, agreeing with the need for the transformation on the surface level, but they are selectively adopting, or passively resistant. They are not outright rebelling and saying this is a dumb idea, you do not have the process right, you do not get my job. They sort of agree and say yes, of course, we will give that a try. But the behavior does not stick, and the earnings do not lift the way the case said they would.

There is all kinds of data. McKinsey, BCG, they all say the same: seventy to ninety percent of these transformations fail to deliver on expectations. So either we are really bad at setting goals, or the fundamental playbook is the problem. Everybody cannot be executing this badly.

Roy van Griensven: I do not even think the things put on paper by the big consulting firms are bad. The potential is there. There are always these elements: these processes are not okay, the organization structure is not as efficient as possible, objectives are not aligned. It is correct.

The point is in how you execute it. As humans we are not that good at just being told what needs to be done. If someone comes in and tells you that you did a bad job, your first reaction is resistance. You are defensive. That can show immediately, or it can be passive: let these guys talk.

And the problem is that in most cases it is not about people having done a bad job. In a lot of cases where companies need a transformation, the environment has changed, and that means something else is required than before.

Roy van Griensven: That is what typically fails in the consulting approach. They come in and tell you how to do the job without giving credibility to the people, without saying: you have done a fantastic job so far, we just need something else going forward.

Secondly, the accountability of the people telling you that something else is needed is typically not there. You have a senior partner coming in who might have seen a lot of companies but has not been responsible for doing the job. I have seen very senior leaders say: theoretically, content-wise, you might be correct, but it is not as easy as how you put it on a shiny piece of paper.

And the problem becomes even bigger when you go into execution, because then the juniors come in, and they have zero credibility. They have never done the job. If you want to talk to a supply chain guy, a lady in operations, in sales, and you are talking to someone who is telling you how to do your job that has never done that job before, that is a huge credibility gap.

What I have seen happen is that people then start giving the reasons why the consultant does not understand it, which leads into resistance. They might actually want to change. They might be fully behind the fact that the opportunity is there. But the way it is executed triggers human resistance.

Jesse Hopps: The predominant change-management framework came out of Prosci, and it is called ADKAR: awareness, desire, knowledge, ability, reinforcement. Everyone in the Fortune 500 has heard of it or been through a training session on it. On paper it makes sense. Do they know why we need to change, what is the burning platform. Desire, can we talk about what is in it for them, using incentives and implicit punishments. Knowledge, the classroom training. Ability, tools and software. Reinforcement, KPIs and governance. To me that whole paradigm is about managing change, or managing resistance to change.

Roy van Griensven: The whole makes sense. It is correct. There is nothing wrong with it. What I see is that there is one crucial element that is typically failing or under-present, and that is the desire.

The way big companies handle it is: we need to explain the why, what is the burning platform, what does the company need to change. Then companies explain why it is good for the people. But that is where it starts, and it is explained from the company's perspective, not from the individual's.

One very simple example: very few companies would actually say this gives you an opportunity to develop and grow, which gives you a ten times bigger opportunity to find a job at any company. No company says that, because they want to retain their talent.

But then if you move into the desire, hardly any company I have seen or heard of genuinely asks people what they think. What do you think needs to happen to get our company to the point where it needs to be?

Jesse Hopps: I have to push on this, because people running a PMO will say we consult, we inform, we do stakeholder interviews. What is the difference between consulting and informing and truly getting people's ideas on the table? Is it that they do not act on them?

Roy van Griensven: Two things. The interviews typically happen in a way where we say: this is what we are going to do, what is your feedback, do you have any problem, do you have any ideas. So the idea, the approach, everything has already been decided.

And then, am I going to speak up that I have a different opinion, while the entire company and the board and all the leaders have already signed up for this plan? That is not genuinely asking for people's opinion.

Jesse Hopps: Not very psychologically safe to disagree with the momentum of the rest of the company.

Roy van Griensven: Absolutely the case. But then it is about whether you genuinely start by asking people what they think. And secondly, and this is a very tough thing to do: what now if someone comes back with an idea that is very different from what the company had in mind, based on what the consultants told you that you had to do? What do you then do? Change the approach?

You ask them for the input, but then you are in a dead-end street. That is again where you lose the credibility, because people feel: I have been asked to give input, but nothing happens with it anyway.

Roy van Griensven: It becomes: we need to tick the boxes. That is what typically also happens with the stakeholder mapping in change management. It is used to identify the people who resist, and that means they resist a plan that they were not able to provide input to.

And then the approach in change management is: how do we change their minds so that they are on board with the plan that we already had? That is strange, right? They have good ideas, you are asking them for their ideas, but the moment they have a different idea, you do not adopt it. You say no, no, no, you are wrong by default.

Jesse Hopps: So everyone is wrong by default. Convincing them, manipulating them, coercing them.

Jesse Hopps: Walk me through the difference between extrinsic and intrinsic motivation as it relates to generating desire that lasts. When we started working together you told me: I do not care what we design, the fundamental design principle is intrinsic motivation. That changed my whole trajectory.

Roy van Griensven: The challenge with extrinsic motivation is that it is short-term, always. You incentivize, and people think: let me get on board with this because it helps me realize the next step in my career. Or I am just afraid to speak up. Or we have a hierarchical culture and therefore we follow whatever it is.

In the end there are cultural differences, but in principle it is the same for everyone. People are more motivated to do anything if they feel it is something they are passionate about, something they are on board with. In Japan, people start moving not when you touch the head but when you touch the heart. The content does not matter so much; what matters much more is whether they feel comfortable with it.

In any other culture it shows in different ways, but it is the same: people get moving the moment they feel I buy into this, I genuinely believe this is the right thing to do. If you look at any transformation, there is a multitude of speed you can get if you do not have to chase people to do it. You do not have to tell them what to do. They will come up with ideas.

The biggest factor in the difference is the sustainability of it. Extrinsic motivation is never sustainable. It might work for three months, twelve months, twenty-four months. And what do you do after? What happens when a new leader comes in with a new set of ideas?

Intrinsic motivation is much more something that lasts, because you do not need to keep encouraging it. But that is a difficult part for organizations. You need to have much more of a servant behavior. How do you serve people? How do you help enable people to do the right thing? The only thing you do as a company is say: this is where we need to go, that is where we need to be. Employees do not get to decide what type of a company we are. But how you get there, that is where the more intrinsic motivation there is, the higher the chance you actually get things to change sustainably.

Jesse Hopps: I am a parent. I have two daughters, and I tried carrots and I tried sticks. What I learned is that the minute you are not there to reinforce or govern, they do what they are going to do. So the real key is that we want them to make good decisions for themselves when we are not around. I have learned to give them choices: do you want broccoli or asparagus, spinach or brussels sprouts. You can choose any one of these, but you have to pick one.

When we started working together the second time, you mentioned this intrinsic motivation piece and I was puzzled by it. I went deep on the behavioral science, and it was really clear. Self-determination theory has been widely validated for a very long time. Three psychological needs. What blew me away was how top-down transformation approaches seem to violate all three.

Autonomy: do people feel they are actually in charge of the choice of how this gets done, not just consulted and informed but meaningfully involved in the design. Competence: do they feel they can develop the skills and mastery required, something challenging but not out of reach, and not below their level of expertise. Relatedness: does this really apply to my everyday work? People often cannot see how their day-to-day job changes. And if the people around them, their boss or their peers or someone with a lot of followership, are not going along with it, they are probably not going to be motivated either.

Roy van Griensven: The content itself, the playbooks and the approach, is not bad. The way you execute on it, that is where the difference is.

If you want to change your go-to-market model, you can have a consulting firm figure that out, put it on slides, and then run all kinds of sessions to explain this is what we are going to do. Guys, how are you going to make this work? Get them involved and then monitor whether we are progressing.

Or you could say: we believe these are the three or four topics that are most relevant to our company to achieve our goal. How do you feel that changing our go-to-market model could contribute to that? And by the way, for inspiration, here are some examples of how other companies have done this. It does not mean it is going to work for us. How do you relate that to your daily job?

You might even use the same content, the same playbook, the same framework, but the way you expose people to it is very different. Am I telling you, or am I inspiring you with this could be something, but maybe you have better ideas? In my experience you typically get the same outcome that the consultants said was needed. The difference is it is their idea. They came up with it.

Roy van Griensven: The value potential defined by a benchmark or a consulting firm: just adopt it. It makes sense, it is logical. I agree with the strategy, this is possible, that is where we need to go. Now how we get there, that is where we need to have a discussion.

In a lot of companies there is one plan that different regions and different business units all have to follow. If you have a consulting firm coming in, they always have one plan: we start with this topic, then we deploy to the rest.

By nature that is what creates resistance, because a business unit leader says: my business model is not exactly the same as the other one, the maturity in my organization is different, the context is different. In a lot of companies the perception is that these people are always resistant because they always talk about how different they are. You know what? Acknowledge that. Acknowledge that there is a clear difference.

If you tell them we are going to bombard you with these eight programs and train you in one setup, one process, one tool, one data model for the entire company: resistance immediately. The moment you say this is the menu card of things that, if we all do them extremely well, will get us to our maximum value, but in order to make progress we need to talk about what matters most to you. Which of these twenty capabilities in commercial matter most to you right now? And the interesting thing is that different business units then start working on different topics, and that is okay.

Jesse Hopps: Is this your structured autonomy in action? And you are doing this with whom, the general managers?

Roy van Griensven: Heads of the business units. You are accountable at the end of the quarter and at the end of the year for the results of your business unit, so you determine.

Jesse Hopps: And where do these capability gaps come from? Are they in the strategy, saying to get from here to there we have to close these gaps?

Roy van Griensven: That is where I sometimes use the phrase: it is academically correct but in a lot of cases practically irrelevant. Academically it is correct that we have capability gaps in twenty different areas. But it does not mean all twenty are equally practically relevant today for each individual business unit or region.

The moment you give them the option to say these five topics not for now, these three matter most, then you immediately hit the point of intrinsic motivation.

Jesse Hopps: You are taking a servant leader's approach. You are not pushing what you think are the top three, you are asking what would move the needle, and then supporting them on closing the gap.

Roy van Griensven: How can I help you work on the two or three most important things that matter most to you in order to get as close as possible to your targets?

Roy van Griensven: Nine out of ten, if not ten out of ten companies always focus on the endpoint. How do we get to the north star, how do we get to the full value potential. They make a beautiful plan with lots of ambitions, not a strategy to solve the problems. And then the PMO question is: how far are we, when are we hitting that number?

The problem is we are focusing far too much on a lagging indicator. The moment you take that away and start managing on leading indicators, you start addressing that the ideas people have and the work they are doing is creating change. Take CRM adoption. How do you show that we are actually changing? Focus on early indicators: the value of our pipeline in the first stage of the opportunity pipeline is increasing, we are changing the conversion rate from stage one to two by ten percent. We are progressing.

The outside perspective, investors and markets, they are not looking at whether you hit the number in your five-year strategy. The stock price goes up the moment people see what you put in the strategy starting to happen.

Jesse Hopps: Visible momentum. This reminds me of The Gap and the Gain, by Dan Sullivan. That was a big unlock for me personally. I am an idealist, always measuring forward, measuring what I have left to achieve, never arriving. That book is about measuring backward and looking at how much progress you have made. But how do you convince a board of directors to measure progress instead of end results when they are on the hook for the end results?

Roy van Griensven: Two things. First, go back to the employees. Instead of focusing every quarterly review on how big the gap still is, you say: the work you have done in the past quarter has moved us this much. That is recognition. That is reinforcing intrinsic motivation. We are on the right path, we are making progress, what we are doing is working, let us continue. That is the biggest part, because that is where you need to get your people. The change does not happen through a board. It happens through the people itself.

For the board, in most cases they use the lagging indicator because they need to say something in the quarterly market dialogues with investors. And in a lot of cases numbers are fabricated, because we need to get to a hundred and twenty right now, so let us pull some orders forward. What investors want to see is progress. It is an open dialogue with the board to say: we can keep focusing on the lagging indicator, but then you will only be able to look back and say we did not hit it again, do a better job next quarter. If you look at the leading indicators, how much have we progressed, is this enough, where do we need to steer. It drives a very different dialogue. Having said that, you need the link between your leading indicators and the lagging one to be tight, and the correlation to be there.

Jesse Hopps: I have a question about a leading indicator most boards would not consider one. When we were designing this, there was an idea of mindset KPIs, or adaptive capacity as an organization. I was not sure you were going to buy it, or the board, or anybody. Adaptive capacity is an individual's or an organization's ability to metabolize and adapt to change. We are in a more volatile time now, with AI and geopolitics, than we were with the internet. Is that a soft, fuzzy HR metric, or does measuring adaptive capacity at scale correlate to EBITDA impact?

Roy van Griensven: Two angles. Having a dialogue to say our adaptive capacity translates into X EBITDA improvement: never going to happen. The positioning is that this is a crucial enabler to get you to that potential, combined with a lot of other work.

If you put it as a metric and say we are measuring that and therefore there is an X amount of EBITDA, no CEO or CFO will say yes, I fully recognize that. But the moment you have a qualitative dialogue, let me provoke a little: at least nine out of ten companies, the board would say we are a bit stuck as a company. Stuck is the symptom of not having the adaptive capacity.

So the moment you have a dialogue with any board member and say: do you think that if we get a little less stuck, if we are able to move beyond the problems we see faster, that gets us a higher likelihood of reaching our target? I guarantee a hundred out of a hundred board members would say yes.

Jesse Hopps: So the question is how do you get unstuck. Adaptive capacity is part of the solution, but it is not framed as we need to make our people adaptable. It is we need to get unstuck, and we need to get our earnings unstuck from flat or declining.

Jesse Hopps: How did you sell this internally? We found that McKinsey study on unlocking engagement and innovative behavior. Around seventy-seven percent of people do not feel very resilient and adaptable. But when adaptability and resilience were combined with organizational support and psychological safety, there was a roughly sixfold unlock in engagement and innovation. How did you convince stakeholders that mindset and preparing people for change was worth investing in, rather than a fluffy HR thing you do with leftover budget?

Roy van Griensven: First of all, because it is the way to actually get people on board. The way I have used it is that it is predominantly something the company needs to provide as an enabler. If you ask individual employees, they will never refer to the point that they individually get stuck somewhere. It is always because this function did not help me, someone else is not doing their job, or it is external factors, China and so on.

Everyone can get unstuck, and that starts by the person saying: given everything that is happening, what can I still do today to make a step forward? But it does not work to tell people you just need to get unstuck. So the typical way for me to open the door is to say: we recognize that maybe as a company we have not done the best job of enabling you to do what you need to do. So let us talk about it.

Jesse Hopps: You take ownership of it. It is not you are to blame, it is we are to blame.

Roy van Griensven: And then combine that with providing a safe environment where people feel it is okay to openly share their ideas without immediate ramification. So you build a peer environment, not immediately the manager on top where it needs to be spot on.

Jesse Hopps: Is this like a town hall, or different?

Roy van Griensven: A town hall is a one-way street of information.

Jesse Hopps: It is: ask any questions, if you dare resist what we are telling you. That is not very psychologically safe. You get the odd person who pipes up, and that is career suicide.

Roy van Griensven: It is.

Jesse Hopps: And that is the negative guy, they are not on board. But to me that is the person with the most passion, who cares about the company, and who sees the train wreck of this thing not being realistic and practical.

Roy van Griensven: Absolutely.

Jesse Hopps: So instead of viewing these people as detractors, you are suggesting leveraging them, listening to them more.

Roy van Griensven: You give people guidance and direction of where the company needs to go. Look, this is what other companies have typically done. That is the inspiration. We are not saying this is what we need to do, it is just to inspire your thoughts about what is potentially possible.

The reflect phase needs to be a safe environment, peer level, even if there is a hierarchical difference among the people joining. You need to bring everyone to that same level of peer dialogue. All ideas are good ideas.

Jesse Hopps: That sounds great, but how do you actually get thirty, forty, a hundred people to open up and be vulnerable about maybe we are not managing the pipeline well, maybe we do not have a process? How do you get them to admit shortcomings publicly? That does not sound easy.

Roy van Griensven: There is a huge element of servant leadership. The moment you go into these sessions you say: we are here to help you with whatever is critically most important, we are not going to tell you, you can pick whatever topic you like, and no one is forcing you to pick a topic if you do not believe it is there. And it needs to be genuine. You cannot fake your way through this. Fake it until you make it does not work in this case.

That safe environment does not arrive in one go. People need to see consistency in how people around them behave. They need to see that we have actually solved one or two of their problems first. Now they are asking for my advice. They are doing that again. I told them something and I see it is not coming back to me.

Jesse Hopps: Talk is cheap. You have got to demonstrate consistency. You cannot do this in a one-time occasion.

Roy van Griensven: And people talk to each other, so they need to hear that what you are saying is true through other people's experiences. The moment they come with a different idea, you have to actually support them with it and not cut them off and say this is different from what I had in mind.

Jesse Hopps: So you are engineering the conditions for adaptation to occur naturally, as opposed to trying to force change on people. How do you bridge from reflect to apply?

Roy van Griensven: We keep reinforcing that you do not need to pick any project. We are here to give you an opportunity, in a ninety-day phase, to get help from credible experienced coaches who can help you solve your day-to-day challenges. But if you say there is nothing there that I need, then no one is forcing you.

There is a little guidance from the inspire and reflect stages about the topics that matter to our company, but we let people pivot to the topic that matters most in their own job.

Jesse Hopps: What level are these people?

Roy van Griensven: It ranges from senior leaders to mid-level to front office. All levels, all different roles.

Jesse Hopps: Let us say there are non-negotiable top-down things, we are all going to SAP, we are all implementing Salesforce. It does not sound like you are pushing those projects on people.

Roy van Griensven: Let me take a CRM implementation. We can tell people we are going to implement the CRM, this is the process, clean up the data, do the training. Or it is a bottom-up approach to achieving the same thing. Because for no company is the objective to implement CRM. The objective is to improve my pipeline, get more opportunities, get the conversion rate up.

So we let people figure out what the biggest challenge is in order to reach that goal, and automatically some come to the point that our pipeline is not filled enough, we do not have enough opportunities. Okay, now what do we need to get there?

We never push for the system, because I would much rather have a team that goes from not managing a pipeline of opportunities to being able to prioritize the right ones and know where to spend time, and do that on paper. Because typically, after they do that for a while, they start asking whether we could do this in a tool.

Jesse Hopps: There is going to be a better way than this.

Roy van Griensven: And again, it is intrinsic motivation. Sure, we have got a system for that. But they are asking for it.

Jesse Hopps: Why does the pro way fail, compared with letting them use paper and having them ask to configure the enterprise tool when they are ready for it?

Roy van Griensven: I have seen quite a few CRM implementations. Typically it is the wrong people designing the way it works. It is not the people doing the job who need to use it, it is people observing and monitoring the people who need to use it.

And it goes back to intrinsic motivation: people feeling that for me there is a need to do this in a more efficient way. Go back to the board. Does any of the board members care about the adoption rate of the system, when they can also trade that for a ten percent increase in our conversion rate, hence faster time to money, or ten percent more opportunities? Everyone understands that eventually you cannot keep doing this on paper. But getting to that point, the adoption is much easier when people say I am getting fed up keeping this on paper, can we put it in the system.

Jesse Hopps: How does their attitude to the little nuisances change, the data quality, the configuration, the UX, when it is their idea versus pushed on them?

Roy van Griensven: If you come with predefined terminology, stages, design, UX, it triggers a human reaction: let us find what I do not agree with, let us criticize something, why will it not work. I look for the differences versus my own idea. The moment you let people define how they think it should be done, and then you say okay, that makes perfect sense, but instead of calling this potential can we call it prospect: sure, I do not care, as long as it works the way I have in mind. Very different adoption. But you need to allow for that to happen.

Jesse Hopps: That seems crazy to me. If field teams are deciding how to configure their systems locally, does that not breed chaos? Does senior leadership not lose control?

Roy van Griensven: In the end, my experience is that the board does not care about the standard. They care about the outcome. The reason they start using terminology like standardization and harmonization, design first and then roll out, is that they are trying to hold on to something controllable.

And I can tell you, in any company, eighty percent of the people know what to do. They know how it needs to look. They will design it the way it has to be done. But there is a huge factor of fear of not being in control, fear of chaos. That is a job for people in my role: guide people in the right direction. You do not tell them what to do, you let them discover, but you guide them.

If someone wants to do something completely wrong, how do you let them see that it might not be the best idea, or use peers to convince them? If eight out of ten have the right idea, can the eight not convince the other two, rather than someone else telling all ten what to do?

Jesse Hopps: Leadership changes. I hear a lot in the Consortium: another transformation, another person blowing into town. They cannot even absorb the first transformation before the next one is coming at them. How do you create staying power? Can the organization sustain this if you move on?

Roy van Griensven: I would wish to say it is completely person-independent, and it can be for a certain part, because as long as you are able to show progress, as long as you have people working on the right things, the reinforcement by the individual becomes less important. Even if someone else comes in, they look at it and ask: is this my biggest problem to solve? Probably not, if they see progress.

That being said, it requires leadership behavior. The questions keep coming up. If you have a bad quarter: is there anything else? No, we need to stay the course and keep going, because we see the progress. Persistence, sometimes a bit of patience. There is a role for leadership in that.

Jesse Hopps: Could you help another organization implement the same behavioral system? Is it universal, and is it affordable?

Roy van Griensven: Having been in different industries and different companies, I one hundred percent believe it is universal, and it does not matter the company or the industry. Having said that, it is situationally dependent on what is needed and how to apply it. In some contexts you need a bit more convincing, sometimes it is more the middle management, sometimes you are at the start of a transformation and sometimes in the middle of a failure. The context matters for how to turn it around, but the logic is very universal.

On the investment, it is quite simple. For any company, I dare to guarantee you can cut down consulting costs by seventy to eighty percent by taking a different approach and asking how we can leverage our own people differently. You might still need one of the big consulting firms to help set a piece of the strategy. But how you then execute it, you can do at a fraction of the cost, because what you mainly need is operator-coaches who can guide with credibility. The credibility of the people is massively important. People who have been there, held the bag in the industry. They get it. They guide people. They do not have an interest in selling more hours.

Jesse Hopps: So not career consultants or guys like me. The people who were general managers, heads of sales, who have done the job at a high level in the industry. They get it, they understand why it is hard, and they do not sugarcoat why the plan is going to be difficult to implement.

Jesse Hopps: The predominant response I hear when expectations are not delivered on is one of two things: our people resisted the change, or they could not execute. What do you say to a leader who tells the board that? How would a board feel about you as a leader if you said that to them?

Roy van Griensven: If I would say that, in all honesty, I would fire myself.

Because in the end, it does not mean it is easy. There are things you need to do. But I fundamentally disagree and do not buy into the fact that people do not want to change. It is just the way you get people involved, how you get them motivated. There is always the exception, maybe someone with active resistance, someone with something else going on, someone who just wants to sit out the last three years of their career. Those are the exceptions.

The majority has no problem with change. The problem is how that change is brought to them, instead of how they are involved in it. And that is what a leader needs to take on.

You need to say: I have a fundamental belief and an idea of how we can get people involved and get change to actually happen. And if the board does not believe that is the way it should be done, then stand for what you believe in and say maybe I am not the right person. If you want to do it the traditional way, the way we have failed for twenty years, then that is fine, but that is not me. Take ownership and say: I am not giving you a guarantee that all of the objectives will happen, there are so many factors. But for influencing the chances to be as high as possible, this is the way we believe it needs to happen. Then stand for that. And also be mentally okay if people say no, we want to do it the classical way, and be ready to say then probably it is not me.

Jesse Hopps: People do not really resist change. They resist the feeling that someone is trying to change them. It threatens their ego, their identity, the sense that who they have been until now is not good enough any more. And that is not the case. A lot of the time the environment changed. That was the key insight.

Roy van Griensven: Two things. One, you are spot on: the environment has changed, it is not you. Not your fault.

Secondly, the moment that as a leader you take the first step in changing, that is pivotal. Saying: we are not going to do the same thing you have seen before. When I arrived, people said, this is the fourth person who comes in, I have heard that before, sure, sure it is not going to be different.

So saying, one: it is not you, it is the environment that changed. And secondly: by the way, the first change I will do is by changing what we are going to do and how we approach this. That already generates accountability, so people say okay, this is going to be different. Let us see. Let us give it a shot, maybe.

Jesse Hopps: There is a book on change management that makes exactly that point: if you want real change, change your approach as a leader to doing change first. It starts with us.