By the time most leaders bring something to their teams, they’ve been living with it for a while.
They’ve turned the idea over in their heads. Stress-tested it. Considered the objections, worked through the uncertainty, and arrived at something that feels ready — or at least something that has merit. Then they walk into a room and present it — as a decision, or close to one — and they’re surprised when people don’t immediately engage.
The confusion is understandable. To the leader, this feels like the logical next step. To the team, it feels like being dropped into the middle of a movie with no context.
You can’t ask people to run a marathon cold in the dead of winter and expect a personal best.
The response you will often get in this scenario isn’t resistance. It’s not disengagement. It’s not a sign that people don’t care. It’s a simple problem of narrative distance. The leader is at chapter ten. The team is just opening the book.
And when urgency gets layered on top of that gap — when people are expected not just to catch up but to catch up fast — what you get is compliance at best. People say what seems expected, agree to what feels inevitable, and save their actual thinking for the conversation they’ll have after the meeting, behind the leader’s back.
I see this pattern everywhere.
A leader has been wrestling with a structural change for six weeks. They’ve processed it, grieved what needs to change, and landed on a direction they believe in. They present it to the team, thinking they’re asking for feedback and engaging the team. Instead, they get silence, cautious questions, or pushback that feels disproportionate — and confusing to the leader who thinks they’re doing it “right.”
What looks like resistance is often just people, in real time, doing what the leader already did privately. Working through it. Testing it. Trying to figure out where they fit in the new picture.
The solution isn’t to slow down indefinitely. It’s to bring people into the story earlier.
Not necessarily for the decision itself — some decisions belong to the leader. But for the thinking behind it. The problem it’s solving. The tension it’s responding to. When people understand the why before they hear the what, the gap closes. They’re not starting from scratch when you get to the room — they’re already somewhere in the middle of the story with you.
There’s a concept in improv that applies here. The rule is “yes, and” — whatever gets introduced, you build on it. You don’t shut it down. You don’t reverse course. You add to it, even if it sounds illogical or incongruent.
That kind of momentum is possible in leadership, too, but it requires setup. People need enough of the story to be able to add to it. If they don’t have context, they can’t contribute. And if they can’t contribute, you lose the best thinking in the room.
The goal isn’t just to inform people. It’s to give them enough of the story that they can become part of telling it.
That’s when you stop getting polite nods and start getting real engagement. That’s when the gap closes. And that’s when the work that comes out of the room is genuinely better than what any one person brought into it.
Photo by Clay Banks on Unsplash
