A client of mine, a Senior Manager in a national corporate role, often comes away from meetings with the sense that some participants are almost deliberately undermining the outcome.
You know the feeling – someone keeps raising objections, poking holes, bringing up edge cases. It feels personal. It feels like sabotage.
Here’s the problem: when you operate from that feeling, you get defensive. You push harder. The conflict escalates. And nothing moves forward.
So here’s a tactical reframe: Assume better intent than you feel.
Not because people are always noble. Not because their actions aren’t genuinely a problem. But because your feelings about their intent is likely to be wrong at least in some material aspect, and this assumption makes your response less effective.
Here’s why:
Intent is context-dependent, temporally relative, and agent-specific. Which is a fancy way of saying: they’re solving a problem that matters to them, in their frame of reference, right now.
The person raising all those objections? They might be protecting their team from embarrassment of past failures. Or seeking to feel important, ‘proving their value’ by finding risks. Or genuinely trying to prevent a disaster they can see and you can’t.
“Assume better intent” does not imply they’re doing it by accident. Or that they are seeking to act beyond their own personal benefit. It just means that we ought to assume they’re trying to solve a problem that’s real and important to them, from their perspective, about something they want to prevent or generate.
The tactic:
If you want to change their actions, you need to change how they think about the underlying problem they care about.
Not argue against their objections. Not defend your position harder. Find out what problem they’re actually trying to solve, and either address it or reframe it.
This is influence work. The kind that dissolves resistance instead of fuelling it. The kind that builds alignment instead of demanding it.
If you want to develop this capability systematically – the kind of leadership influence that navigates conflict and moves people – the Influence Accelerator is where we build these skills.