Your people aren’t difficult.

This article is a joint effort from Kristine Posthumus of The Squiggle Collective and Davina Jones of LCC.

If you’ve stepped into a new management role recently, or you’re preparing to start a new role in the New Year, you may encounter this: someone in the middle layer of your team who just won’t get on board. Who asks too many questions. Who seems jaded. Who others label as “difficult”.

In our work with organisations across sectors and contexts, we’ve both seen a recurring pattern: a constant churn of senior leadership and the deep impact it has on corporate knowledge, culture, and how people experience work.

Us humans are very good at glorifying successful people. Especially those who rise to the lofty heights of senior executive roles. We’ve built entire industries around leadership theory, and much has been written about its importance, its attributes, and its practice and ascribed those in the most senior structural hierarchy as “leaders”.

But leadership is a behaviour as well as a position.

Humans start leading the minute we start breathing. No human is born alone – we are part of a system that is connected to others from birth to death. And within our system is the capacity to lead ourselves and others.

What’s really challenging is that we humans have organised our inherently system-based world into a structure of hierarchies and assigned differing value to each of the levels.

Nowhere more so than at work.

The view that leaders are at the top leading and everyone else is doing the lesser work of managing and doing, is, quite frankly, ridiculous.

Because where does this leave all the people that are not that handful of senior executives? The ones leading themselves and their teams to deliver day in and day out. The ones holding the practical and the lofty together. These same people are the ones there when a new executive is dropped in every few years, eager to make their mark with a bold new plan.

Sometimes senior executives fall into the trap of behaving as if they are the smartest person in the room simply because they’re the most senior. It’s our mission to shift that compulsion.

What if the standard approach for all senior leaders was to approach their role with the humility to know that intelligence comes in many forms, and that each person within the room - beyond their title, role level or length of tenure - has something to offer even if you can’t see yet.

What would that look like? Probably like steadily working to unveil the collective intelligence of your middle management level through collaborative and cooperative leadership. Leading with curiosity and humility instead of a get on board or get out mentality.

Because in the organisations we work with, many people don’t get out - even if the leader wants them out.

They stay. They might get moved sideways, parked on projects, or quietly avoided. The challenging conversations that might surface what’s really going on - what drives their behaviour, what sits underneath their views, what are they really concerned about - don’t happen as often as they should.

In teams with a long-standing managerial base (people who have both high tenure and deep lived experience) there’s almost always someone in that group who’s seen by default as “difficult”. Before they even open their mouth people have stopped listening.

And we’re not saying there aren’t people who are challenging to deal with. There is.

But more often than not, a perceived “difficultness” or resistance comes from a place of deep care. Deep care for their work, the people they work with, and the organisation they’ve committed a large chunk of their life to.

It’s these people that often have the desire to ask the hard questions; to air the dirty laundry so they can tangibly see the commitment to transparency, trust and meaningful progress. As managers of on-ground workers it’s the very least they need to rally their teams.

To the newly minted executive with a bold plan, it doesn’t look like that at all. It can look like obstruction, like negativity, like a problem that needs to be solved.

Rather than defaulting to “they’re deliberately trying to piss me off”, “they’re just against me”, “they’ll never get my vision”, or whatever other story is convenient, here’s an alternative framing to consider:

What is happening for this person to make their ‘difficult’ behaviour the best option they have right now?

All behaviour has a positive intention - regardless of whether you’re cognisant of it. And if you’re experiencing someone’s behaviour as difficult it likely highlights a disconnect between their intentions and your perception.

Our suggestion is that you are likely both after the same thing – that being what’s best for the business and its people.

And so the invitation is to lead with that in mind.

To wonder: What fear or frustration might be driving this?

To consider: What would it take for them to feel safe enough to speak freely — and to be heard? Safe enough to sit with me through all that’s difficult and come out the other side with a better understanding of each other and how we might move forward together.

There’s something important here about how we value, or fail to value, the people who hold institutional memory. The ones who remember the last restructure, and the one before that, the initiatives that didn’t work out how we thought they would, the lessons that were never quite learned. The ones who understand the texture of this place and what it’s made of. The ones who know more of the systems and processes - their flaws and how to improve them - than we could dream of. The ones who know the questions we should be asking, but never do.

We underestimate the cost of losing that.

Every new executive wants to make a difference, of course. To leave a legacy. But most times the biggest impact isn’t in the new plan or the new structure. It’s in taking the time to understand what came before, to genuinely listen to the people who’ve lived through it, and to build on that foundation with humility.

So as you make your legacy, be mindful - organisations don’t change or succeed through the brilliance of a single executive. They change through the persistence, wisdom, and care of the people who keep showing up, even when the doors keep spinning.