12 March 2026
Why middle managers stall change programmes
Executives like the story of the blocker in the middle. It is tidy. It is also usually wrong. After sitting with Australian supervisors through The Change Field Method, the stall looks more like an accounting problem wearing a human face.
A middle manager is paid to keep yesterday’s machine running while someone else announces tomorrow’s machine. When both scorecards remain live, the rational move is delay. Delay looks like resistance. It is often compliance with the louder incentive.
In a food-processing cohort last year, a shift manager kept “forgetting” to trial a new labelling scan. The scan added forty seconds. Her bonus still rewarded cases per hour on the old definition. Nobody had rewritten the bonus. The programme office had rewritten the poster.
What to look for before you brief communications
Ask what still gets measured on Fridays. Ask who still signs overtime. Ask which unofficial clerk actually issues the roster. Those three answers explain more stall than a culture survey.
We teach this in week 6 as “resistance as data”. The job is not to convert the manager with a video. The job is to put the colliding metric on the sponsor’s desk in a sentence they cannot smile past.
A mild warning
If your sponsors will not touch incentives, do not buy a teaching cohort and hope the middle will volunteer to be scored twice. Decline, or run Sponsor Alignment Intensive until the scorecard is a single story. Business consulting for change management that skips this step is just nicer stationery.