Change Management
The Tenured Manager With Eighteen Months to Retirement
The most underdiagnosed transformation risk is not active resistance. Active resistors are visible, manageable, and often useful — they surface the real objections that your change management plan needs to address anyway.
The risk that kills programmes slowly, invisibly, and almost without trace is strategic patience. It belongs to the tenured manager with enough institutional knowledge to look indispensable and enough time left to wait you out.
They will attend every workshop. They will contribute thoughtfully to every discussion. They will not argue with the direction. They will simply not change — and in an institution where their relationships, workarounds, and informal authority have been built over fifteen years, they do not need to.
How to Identify It Early
They are enthusiastic in workshops and invisible in implementation. Engagement is high, action is absent.
Their team mirrors their pace — not because the team resists, but because the team takes its signals from them.
When asked about progress, they reference process rather than outcomes. They are always preparing, never delivering.
They have a unique ability to identify why each proposed solution is premature — not wrong, just not quite ready yet.
Why Most Change Managers Miss It
Because they are measuring engagement, not behaviour. Engagement surveys capture sentiment. They do not capture whether the sentiment has produced a single changed action. A manager who scores nine out of ten on engagement and has changed nothing in six months is not an engaged change champion — they are a strategic wait-and-see.
The Structural Fix
- Measure behaviour, not attitude. Define what changed behaviour looks like specifically and track it.
- Shorten the feedback loop. Monthly check-ins are too slow to catch strategic patience. Fortnightly outcome reviews are not.
- Make their team's performance visible at the executive level early. Strategic patience thrives in the dark.
- Where possible, route the programme around them rather than through them. Give their high performers direct visibility and sponsorship.