Sabotaging Change

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Whenever one is trying to initiate change there will be resistance. Some resistance will be rather benign. Other resistance will be conscious or subconscious sabotage. Suppose you have announced to your co-workers that you are going to try to lose twenty-five pounds of excess weight. Everybody in the office knows you are especially fond of jelly filled rolls. You can usually resist all other donuts and rolls, but jelly-filled are particularly irresistible. It is an office tradition for one of the staff members to stop at the local bakery and to pick up a dozen donuts and rolls. Nobody else in the office is fond of jelly-filled rolls. Yet, every Friday, there are two jelly filled rolls in the box when the staff gathers for a morning break. Quite without thought the purchaser of the pastries is sabotaging your weight lose goal.

I am the kind of person who likes to talk through an idea before beginning to take steps toward initiating a change. In one congregation I served I would often go to the secretary’s office to engage her in such conversations. She was a member of the congregation and a very capable secretary. She would politely listen to me spin out my idea. Often she would ask some excellent questions about it. I did wonder, a few times, when I would introduce an idea at a session meeting, why there were already some who seemed to know about the idea in advance. One day a member of the congregation stopped by the office for a chat. He said, “The other night when you brought up your idea for the stewardship campaign to the session, I sat there and realized I had heard about that a few weeks ago. Do you realize your secretary tells her husband about your conversations, and he talks about them at the golf course in the Nineteenth Hole?” Intentional or not, I was being sabotaged.

The next time the secretary was in the office, I went in to talk with her. We had the usual chit-chat about families and pets and such. Then I said to her, “I am disturbed to learn your share our conversations about ideas I am working on with your husband and he then shares them in the Nineteenth Hole when the men’s league plays. I feel you are sabotaging me, before the idea is full blown and I am ready to take it to the session. It needs to stop, or we’ll not be able to work together anymore.” Needless to say, that did not go over very well. When I left her office, she immediately wrote a letter of resignation. She stated as the reason that “I had yelled at her.” The letter was sent to every member of the session. Maybe I could have handled it differently.

John C. Norcross, PhD, writes in response to the question, “What should I do if someone is sabotaging my efforts to change?” Dr. Norcross suggests, Based on research and experience, we know that it helps to address the potential saboteurs from the get-go. That’s addressing, not confronting, mind you. (https://www.sharecare.com/health/wellness-healthy-living/what-do-sabotaging-efforts-change) That is all well and good if one anticipates not just the possibility but the probability of sabotage and deals with it proactively as Dr. Norcross suggests.

In later years, while still preferring to talk through ideas, I learned to go to whoever I was going to discuss an idea, and began the conversation saying, “I have an idea running around in my head. I would like your feedback on it, but this has to be limited to just the two of us.” In most cases, that seemed to work.