How Do I Align My Team Around Strategy?

A CEO once described one of his teams to me as “resistant to change.” I asked what he had done to involve them in shaping it. He looked at me as if the question missed the point. He had sent an all-staff email announcing the change and attached a deadline, then was surprised when the change did not take, and staff were upset.

That sequence is so common we have stopped noticing how strange it is. We hand people a finished decision, ask them to feel ownership of it, and then read their hesitation as resistance. Buy-in has never worked that way. You cannot announce your way to ownership.

Resistance is usually a response, not a personality

One of the oldest findings in organizational research is also one of the most ignored. In 1948, Lester Coch and John French ran a study at a textile plant where some groups had a change imposed on them and others were involved in planning it. The groups who helped shape the change adapted faster and pushed back far less. The resistance was not coming from the people, it was coming from how the change arrived.

That reframe matters, because “they are resistant” quietly blames the wrong thing. Most of the time, what looks like resistance is a reasonable human response to having something done to you with no hand in it. Change people did not help design feels like change that is happening to them, and people defend themselves against things that happen to them.

Why you can't pay your way there either

The usual fallback, when people will not get on board, is to reach for an incentive. Tie it to a bonus, or attach it to a target. I understand the appeal, and I think it backfires more often than it helps.

There is good evidence for the worry. A meta-analysis of 128 experiments by Edward Deci and colleagues found that tangible, expected rewards tend to undermine people’s intrinsic motivation for the very thing being rewarded. In plain terms, paying people to care can quietly teach them to stop caring once the payment stops. You can buy compliance for as long as the money lasts. Ownership, however, is a different substance, and it is not for sale.

What actually builds it

Genuine buy-in comes from the thing that sounds too obvious to be a strategy: people own what they help build. Decades of motivation research, much of it from Deci and Richard Ryan’s work on self-determination, point the same way. People internalize goals as their own when they have some autonomy in shaping how those goals get met, rather than being handed a finished script to perform.

In practice that means bringing people into the design while it is still genuinely open, before the real decisions are already made. There is a version of “involvement” that is pure theatre, where leaders have decided and then run a consultation to manufacture the feeling of input. People see through it immediately, and it does more damage than not asking at all. Real involvement means some of their fingerprints actually end up on the outcome.

It also helps to be honest that this is slower at the start. McKinsey’s research on transformations found that companies which invested in genuinely shifting employee mindsets were about four times more likely to call their change efforts successful. That investment costs time up front. What it buys you is a change that keeps moving after you stop pushing, which is the only kind worth having.

The harder, better path

This is why I keep saying that a plan is not the same as a change. In why strategic plans fail I argued that strategy dies in the gap between the document and people’s daily behaviour. Buy-in is one of the main things that decides whether that gap ever closes, because behaviour people own survives, and behaviour they merely tolerate does not.

It is also what makes implementation hold rather than slide backward, which I get into in strategy implementation that actually sticks. If you are sitting with a change that keeps stalling against what looks like resistance, that is usually a buy-in problem wearing a discipline costume, and it is exactly the kind of thing my services are built to work on.

So the next time a change is not taking, it is worth resisting the urge to ask how to make people comply. The more useful question is the one most rollouts skip entirely: at what point did the people doing the work actually get to shape it?