Let me say something nobody puts in the project charter.
The person most likely to derail your transformation isn’t the one who pushes back in the meeting. It’s not the skeptic. It’s not the one who asks too many questions.
It’s your best performer. And they’re not going to say a word.
To be clear, I’m not talking about the high performer who challenges assumptions in the open. Those people are often invaluable. I’m talking about a different archetype: the one whose influence comes from mastery, credibility, and years of knowing exactly how things work.
The myth we’re working with
We’ve built an entire mental model around where resistance lives. We picture it at the bottom of the performance curve. The people who were already struggling. The ones who needed more support before the change even started.
That model is comfortable, and it puts the problem somewhere manageable.
But it’s wrong.
The people I’m talking about aren’t the loud skeptics or even the obvious skeptics. They’re often the highly respected performers whose influence comes from years of credibility, expertise, and knowing how things get done. When a change threatens that mastery, resistance can show up in many different ways.
It could be that this high performer is frustrated they weren’t involved early enough. Sometimes they just see risks others are missing. Whatever the reason, their influence carries more weight than their title suggests, and leaders often don’trealize how much the rest of the organization is taking cues from them.
I’ve never seen it happen because they’re malicious. Most of the time, it’s human.
What high performers have that everyone else doesn’t
Here’s what we’re afraid to say out loud: resistance will also come from mastery, and not from uncertainty. People who have spent years becoming exceptional at something have more to recalibrate when the rules change. And the new system is trying to reset the winner’s board. In a previous article the real reason change fails? Nobody wants to feel incompetent; we covered the angle of psychological safety for everyone. In this article, we’re looking specifically at high-status performers protecting their position.
Think about what it takes to become the person everyone relies on. Years of learning the shortcuts, understanding the exceptions, building relationships, and developing instincts that aren’t written down anywhere. The undocumented tribal knowledge that makes you so valuable. The informal authority that comes from being the person everyone goes to when the system breaks.
Along the way, something else happens. You gain influence. You gain control over your work. You gain the confidence that comes from knowing how things fit together.
Then change arrives.
Suddenly, the rules shift. The expertise that once gave you certainty is less certain. The influence you’ve built is harder to exercise. The shortcuts disappear. And the control you’ve earned feels a little less secure.
Most high performers aren’t attached to the old system because they love the old system.
They’re attached to the credibility and power they’ve built along side.
They won’t rebel. They’ll redirect.
Your high performers usually aren’t the ones standing on the table arguing against the change. They don’t have to. By that point, they’ve already built something more valuable than a loud voice: trust. Instead, they become students of the rollout. They watch. They test. They compare what was promised to what happens once the work begins.
They notice the edge cases. And there are always edge cases.
Colleagues naturally turn to them when things get messy, because they’re often the first to separate what’s genuinely broken from what’s simply unfamiliar.
Soon, they become an informal source of truth. And they’re not resisting the change; it just so happens that trust tends to follow experience. And maybe not all leaders realize it, but people are watching them. They are watching to see whether they believe in the change, not really to hear what they have to say about it.
I’ve seen it; I’ve probably even been part of it once or twice. The Excel setup that was “too interconnected to migrate” was a masterpiece of the same logic. I told myself it was about quality. But the truth was, it was also about not starting from zero.
The leadership blind spot
Here’s where it gets uncomfortable for the people running the change.
We treat high performers like change allies by default. Change enablers. We involve them early. We give them visibility. We put them in the room where decisions get made, partly because we respect them, and partly because we assume that if they’re on board, they will build on the moment.
But “in the room” isn’t the same as “committed.” And visibility can become a platform for something that looks like engagement but is just surveillance. They’re watching to see if this is real. If it’s going to stick. If the people pushing it believe in it.
They’re not sold by decks. They’ve seen too many decks.
And to be fair, not every skeptical high performer is protecting their own relevance.
Some are seeing risks others haven’t spotted yet. Some have lived through enough transformations to recognize familiar warning signs. Some aren’t questioning the destination at all; they’re questioning whether the route makes sense.
That’s what makes them so difficult to read. The behavior can look identical. The motivation underneath can be completely different.
What they’re reading is whether the change is real.
Whether the organization will reinforce the new behaviors, whether leaders will model them consistently, and whether this initiative will still matter six months from now.
The tricky part is that two people can look identical during a transformation and be motivated by completely different things.
One may be protecting years of hard-earned expertise.
Another may be spotting risks nobody else sees.
A third may simply be tired after living through five previous “transformations” that quietly disappeared once the next priority arrived.
From the outside, the behavior looks the same.
That’s what makes these people so easy to misunderstand.
What you can do about it
First: find them early.
Waiting until they become skeptical is expensive. By then they’re usually reacting to gaps they saw three months ago.
If they’re involved while the change is still being shaped, many of the concerns that surface later can be addressed before they become friction.
They have influence no org chart can explain. The question isn’t whether they’ll use it. It’s whether you’ll harness their influence.
Second: pay attention to what the system rewards. High performers respond to systems, not speeches. Many high performers pay less attention to what is promised and more attention to what the system rewards. If the new way is genuinely better, make that visible. People trust evidence faster than enthusiasm.
Third: don’t mistake silence for alignment.
Silence can mean agreement. It can also mean uncertainty, skepticism, caution, fatigue, or simply a desire to see how things unfold. The only thing it rarely means is certainty.
And fourth, this one is big, don’t just train them on the new system. Give them a reason to care about it and help them feel included so they become champions of the new system.
Most high performers are looking for evidence that their experience still has value, they’re not looking for another badge to earn.
Ask them to solve a problem. Improve a workflow. Stress-test an assumption.
People are far more likely to support something they’ve helped shape than something they’ve simply been asked to adopt.
What if they are not resisting?
One thing I’ve learned over the years is that behavior and motivation don’t always match.
A high performer sitting silent through a rollout might be protecting years of hard-earned expertise. Or they might be spotting a risk nobody else has seen. They might be unconvinced. They might be exhausted. They might simply be waiting to see whether this change will still matter six months from now.
From the outside, all those behaviors can look remarkably similar.
That’s why the goal isn’t to “manage” influential people. It’s to understand them.
The best leaders I’ve worked with don’t spend their energy trying to win skeptics over. They do spend a lot of time getting curious about what those skeptics are seeing.
Sometimes the resistance is the signal.
The uncomfortable truth about high performers in change is that we’ve been measuring the wrong kind of risk. We spend so much time focusing on resistance that we forget to pay attention to influence.
The people shaping adoption are the ones that everyone else is watching, not the loudest people in the room.
The person most capable of making your change succeed is often the same person most capable of making it fail. And they’ll do both with excellent metrics and a very pleasant expression.
Watch the ones nobody’s watching.
Shift happens. And sometimes, it happens because of the people we assumed were already on board.
About The Shift Series
Shift Happens is a series exploring how organizations can turn disruption into direction. We write about the real, human side of work, where change, technology, behavior, and leadership collide in ways no framework fully captures.
Every article follows one of the five currents that shape modern work:
The Human Side of Transformation, the heartbeat beneath the strategy.
Change Management as the Missing Discipline, the discipline hiding in plain sight, quietly determining who succeeds.
Technology, Tools + Human Behavior, the space where logic meets instinct, and where most rollouts live or die.
Organizational Structure, Power & Governance, the lines, ladders, and tensions that decide how work truly flows.
Leadership Micro-Shifts, Governance & Operating Models, the small shifts that create disproportionate impact.
We combine lived experience with practical insight. The kind you can apply the same day, not someday.
Shift happens! But with the right mindset, it happens through you.
If your organization is navigating a shift in technology, structure, or culture and needs practical, human-centered support, reach out.
This is the work we love! And the work we do best.
