Jasmeet Kohli

Sunday 23 December 2018

Change Management - Identifying Difficult People

In many improvement projects, it has been found that improvements either fail to take place or are only partially successful due to the resistance / non-cooperation (active or passive) by the stakeholders involved. This negative impact may also get magnified if other people also start doing the same which can derail entire improvement initiative also.

Hence, successful execution of improvement projects requires dealing with such people through change management. But what this requires is to first identify the type of difficult persons & then dealing with them accordingly.


 We can categorize such people in following groups:
  • The "Know Everything" people: These people generally display arrogance & show that they know everything by offering opinions on every topics, including technical things outside their expertise & become loud & defensive when proven to be wrong.  
  • The "No Opinion" people: As the name suggests, these people generally play it very safely & offer no opinions. And even when being specifically asked, they answer i either vague language or in such a way that it becomes difficult to understand what they want to say. 
  • The Dominant People: These people have a bullying & intimidating nature. They wish to dominate the proceedings or discussions, are severely critical of other people opinions & decisions & are constantly demanding attention.
  • The "Always Yes" People: These people generally agree to everything which may also include making commitments  to important tasks. But problems arise when very often they fail to deliver or deliver only partially of what was required which may also have a negative cascading effect in the whole project. Due to this, these people also are not very reliable in follow-up tasks.
  • The "Always No" People: These people have a very rigid approach & are inflexible. Although they have a very good quality of playing by the rule-book but this approach often backfires also in crisis times or when some pro-activeness is required. They are also the ones to criticize & find negatives in whatever decisions are taken. 
  • The "Complaining" People: These people are always complaining about one thing or another to show why they are unable to do their tasks & want others to help them even if other tasks remain pending, howsoever important these tasks maybe. In a nutshell, nothing seems to be right with them at all the times. 


Change Management - Identifying Difficult People In many improvement projects, it has been found that improvements either fail to take p...