What to do when someone won't follow your lead

Hi {{first_name|there}},

I previously wrote about what to do when an experienced team member actively resists your leadership. But what about someone who isn't defiant exactly, just oddly disengaged, or someone perfectly pleasant to your face who stops delivering? The research tells us that there are at least three different patterns of this type of resistance, each needing a different response from you.

There is a deep and awkward silence in a meeting room when someone has just decided, quite deliberately, not to do what you asked.

The standard advice here is to assert your authority and set firmer boundaries. Sometimes you do need some of that, eventually. But the bigger risk, it turns out, is not being too soft. It is applying the same response to three problems that are not at all the same.

Before you think about the resistant team member, it's worth thinking about your own behaviour. Researchers who study how people cope with destructive leaders found that resisting your boss doesn't make someone a bad follower. Some of the most committed people in an organisation are the ones willing to push back when something is genuinely wrong (Almeida et al., 2021). So ask yourself plainly. Is the person reacting to something you are actually doing badly? Are you being unclear, or simply not listening? If the answer is yes, the responsibility starts with you, not them.

Assuming you can rule that out, the next question is what kind of resistance you're actually dealing with. The most useful answer I've come across is in a 2023 study in The Leadership Quarterly, where researchers interviewed 40 organisational leaders and then surveyed 1,229 more about how their team members resist them (van der Velde et al., 2023). The behaviours they found cluster into patterns that are critically important for how you should respond.

This is probably the situation you'll recognise most easily. It often shows up in someone older or more experienced than you, especially if they wanted your role or believed they deserved it. This kind of ‘status threat’ hits the person hardest when the comparison is immediate rather than distant (Reh et al., 2022). Nothing is more immediate than you being their boss in the role they wanted. It is not really about whether your decisions are good. It is about whether your presence makes someone's standing feel smaller, right now, in front of other people.

Two things help, beyond having a sensible conversation privately before anything plays out in public. First, give their expertise a real, current use, not a token title. Research on overqualified employees finds that when leaders don't visibly draw on what they know, status threat and undermining both increase (Liu et al., 2025).

Second, where you can, frame any changes you're making as a shared outcome rather than you replacing their old way of doing things. Interestingly, leaders who are themselves under status threat behave more constructively when rewards are structured around the team rather than the individual (Zhang et al., 2018), and the same logic runs in reverse: a shared sense of ownership lowers the sense that someone has to lose for you to be right.

Handled this way, the person who felt overlooked at the start can become one of your strongest allies within a few months. I have seen it happen.

This one is easy to misread as defiance, because it can look like someone doing what you ask, just late and with minimal effort. But the research on what is popularly called quiet quitting describes something different. It is a gradual withdrawal of effort and connection, not a fight (Dilchert et al., 2025). It is rarely about you specifically. More often it traces back to a promise the organisation didn't keep before you arrived: a promotion that didn't happen, recognition that never came, autonomy that was taken away, or a previous manager who simply stopped listening (Mahand et al., 2023).

Research on what is called the psychological contract draws a useful distinction between two kinds of solutions: directly fixing what broke, or helping someone see the wider picture differently when the original thing can't be undone (Bankins, 2015). Explicitly discussing the broken promise tends to do more than simply asking someone to re-engage. Beyond that, it is far more effective to provide the person with greater autonomy and recognition, than imposing closer supervision (Dilchert et al., 2025). Tightening the oversight on someone who has withdrawn will deepen their withdrawal rather than reverse it.

But don't expect one good conversation to fix it. Commitment after a broken promise tends to recover slowly and unevenly rather than all at once (Solinger et al., 2016). If you notice small improvements along the way, say so.

This is the one worth treating as escalation territory rather than a coaching opportunity. On a surface level the person can be calm and agreeable. But out of plain sight, work goes missing, information is not shared, and other people on the team start hearing a version of events that isn't flattering to you. Researchers who study what they call ‘knowledge sabotage’ found it is usually driven by a sense of grievance or payback, and that both the saboteur and the target almost always believe they are the one in the right (Serenko, 2019, 2020). That is exactly why a reasonable conversation, on its own, often doesn't work.

It's worth ruling out unfairness on your part first. Feeling treated with respect and given a fair hearing measurably reduces this kind of behaviour (Li et al., 2022), so a basic check on how you've actually treated this person isn't wasted effort. But fairness is unlikely to be enough on its own. Research on workplace deviance finds that the prospect of a real consequence, not just better treatment, independently reduces it (Zoghbi Manrique de Lara, 2006). And unlike the first two cases, this one tends to get worse under pressure rather than resolve itself (Schwepker et al., 2022), which is the practical reason to start documenting conversations and to involve HR or your own manager sooner rather than later.

I've written before about what that escalation path actually looks like in practice, and it isn't a sign that you've failed as a leader. It is the right response to a problem that was probably never about your leadership style in the first place.

The deeper point underneath all three of these comes from research comparing how different managers respond to resistance generally. Managers in poor relationships with their team tend to read almost all push-back as defiance to be put down. Managers in stronger relationships are more likely to notice when resistance is telling them something useful, and they get better outcomes as a result (Tepper et al., 2006). So the skill you need to build here probably isn't really about technique. It is about learning to pause long enough to work out what you're actually looking at before you decide how to respond to it.

Three people can all look like they aren't following your lead, for three completely different reasons, and the same response will probably be wrong for at least two of them. Work out which one you're dealing with before you act, not after.

This is also probably why none of this is really a coaching problem yet. Coaching, which I've written about before, assumes someone who is ready and willing to be helped. Your job in these situations comes before that. It is working out what is really happening before you decide how you need to respond.

All of my posts for new leaders are here.

If one of these situations sounds exactly like what's happening on your team right now, hit reply and tell me which one. I read every reply myself, and if it turns out to be the kind of situation that needs a proper conversation rather than a newsletter answer, that's exactly what 1 to 1 coaching is for. There are more details here.