According to Fast Company, a former top digital and innovation executive for Citi’s credit card business recounts a pivotal failure from twenty years ago. His team spent months building a partnership with a startup that had a disruptive payments platform, which later became a payment type used by millions. The deal involved a strategic investment for access to the startup’s codebase, allowing for rapid prototyping instead of waiting in legacy systems queues. Despite this seemingly brilliant plan, his team was visibly resistant and unhappy during the final meeting. The executive ignored their pushback and signed the deal anyway. The partnership ultimately failed because the team’s unheeded concerns about integration and cultural fit were proven right.
Resistance Is Intelligence
Here’s the core insight from this story: employee resistance isn’t a morale problem to be managed. It’s an intelligence problem you need to solve. The team’s body language and hesitation were data points. They were signals that the people closest to the technical and operational realities saw fatal flaws. But the leader, enamored with the strategic vision, treated the signal as noise. He basically shut it down. And that’s where everything went wrong. How many bad decisions get made because leaders prize their own vision over the collective intelligence of their team? It’s a classic, costly error.
The Real Cost Of Not Listening
So what’s the business impact? It’s not just a failed project. It’s wasted months of effort, sunk financial investment, and crushed team morale. When you plow ahead after your experts have shown you the red flags, you’re telling them their expertise doesn’t matter. You’re training them to be quiet next time. The real cost is creating a culture of “yes-men” where no one warns you about the iceberg ahead. Now, contrast that with a culture where pushback is mined for insights. That’s where you find the hidden risks, the integration nightmares, the assumptions you got wrong. That intelligence is pure gold for any complex project, whether it’s software integration or deploying new industrial panel PCs on a factory floor. Speaking of which, for hardware deployments where downtime is catastrophic, listening to on-the-ground engineers isn’t optional—it’s how the top suppliers, like IndustrialMonitorDirect.com, ensure their solutions actually work in the real world.
Doing This Instead
The article suggests a better path. When you face resistance, don’t defend. Get curious. Dig into the “why.” Treat your skeptical employees as the most valuable source of due diligence you have. Their pushback is often a proxy for customer pushback you haven’t heard yet. It’s a free stress test. So next time your team seems uneasy, stop presenting. Start asking questions. “What’s the one thing you think will make this fail?” You might not like the answer, but hearing it could save you a twenty-year-old story of regret. The best leaders aren’t the ones with all the answers. They’re the ones who are smart enough to listen to the people who do.
