OPPOSING FORCES

In your efforts to communicate a vision, you may encounter resistance from your audience. Such circumstances increase the difficulty of your task, but there are positive ways to work through them.

One of the most important things any communicator ever learns is to design a message for the intended audience. It's natural to wish that your audience would be supportive, but if it is not, there's no point in pretending that it is. You must prepare your message for the audience you have. When listeners are resistant, it is often because there is a competing priority. Consider the following example:

In response to a written survey a college's faculty members overwhelmingly said that they would be willing to give up their reserved parking places next to the building in order to be more egalitarian and less elitist. The idea was to give the best spaces to the students, in an effort to be student centered. When faculty members continued using these spaces, the college president was frustrated. Even when he gave up his own parking space, the faculty continued to resist. Finally, after conducting some additional informal surveys on the golf course and in the cafeteria, the president realized that taking away the parking spaces would be taking away the only visible symbol the faculty members had of their importance and value to the college.

A person who is leading a change must overcommunicate—that is, communicate patiently again and again, on different levels, using different media. It is difficult and time consuming to lead people out of their resistance. The vision is distant and indistinct. The resistance is here and now. Overcommunication is one of the answers. It takes a stalwart leader to demonstrate the continuing patience needed to deal with resistance, and it takes a dynamic leader to engender the enthusiasm needed to lead people into the new vision. At the same time that the leader is patiently overcommunicating, he or she must start building the concrete part of the vision that the resistant audience can finally claim as its own.

The college president put numbered spaces at the far end of the parking lot and put up signs forbidding anyone except the owner of a space from parking there before 9:00 A.M. He had the “reserved” label on the spaces near the building painted over, and he sent out a list of space assignments in the distant lot, based on seniority. The number one space (also the farthest from the building) was for the person who had been with the college the longest. Deans and directors got no additional consideration.

A dynamic leader is one who has a passion and talks about it frequently. In communicating a vision, this means not only talking about the intended result but also speaking passionately about the process of getting there. It may be a long time before some of the audience members get to the vision, but if they can buy into the process in the meantime, that will help move them along.

The college president and his executive staff came up with a mission statement about students being the top priority, the maintenance team put up banners with the mission statement on them, and the student government started a nomination program to honor people who had gone “above and beyond” The president didn't talk about the parking issue any more. He got the newspaper to run a big ad about the new mission, and the paper followed up with a feature article. People continued to joke about the parking, and some faculty members continued to come to work at 7:00 A.M. so they could get a space next to the building, but slowly the problem diminished. And as it did, the enthusiasm for and pride in the new mission and vision increased.

Resistance shows up in unexpected ways. It's important to remember that it usually represents a competing priority and to figure out a way to address that priority. It's critical to keep communicating in as many ways as possible and to be patient. Some people won't buy in until you've said your message over and over, and when they finally do buy in, as far as they're concerned, that's the first time you've said it. So keep talking, patiently and passionately.