The Day I Stopped Talking and Started Listening

Michael R. Wood is a Business Process Improvement & IT Strategist Independent Consultant. He is creator of the business process-improvement methodology called HELIX and founder of The Natural Intelligence Group, a strategy, process improvement and technology consulting company. He is also a CPA, has served as an Adjunct Professor in Pepperdine's Management MBA program, an Associate Professor at California Lutheran University, and on the boards of numerous professional organizations. Mr. Wood is a sought after presenter of HELIX workshops and seminars in both the U.S. and Europe.

  Communications Management   Leadership  

I almost lost a project because I was too busy being right.

It was a mid-sized transformation initiative, the kind I’d managed a dozen times before. We were on schedule. The budget was clean. My status reports were green across the board. From the outside, everything looked fine.

But there was a senior stakeholder, let’s call her Maria, who kept raising the same concern in our check-ins. Something about the way the new system would change her team’s daily workflow. Every time she brought it up, I’d nod, explain the mitigation plan, point to the training schedule, and move on.

I had an answer. I was efficient. I was, I thought, in control.

What I wasn’t doing was listening.

Six weeks before go-live, Maria escalated to the executive sponsor. Her team was not ready. Morale was low. People were quietly threatening to work around the new system entirely. What followed was four weeks of crisis management, emergency workshops, and a go-live delay that I will never forget—not because of what it cost the project, but because of what it taught me.

Maria hadn’t been raising a logistical concern. She had been telling me that her people were scared. That the change felt sudden and imposed. Nobody had sat with them and acknowledged how much their working lives were about to shift. She needed to feel heard, really heard, not managed …

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