Trulie Nielsen, MOT, OTR/L, MBA

Early in my leadership career, I walked into a staff meeting with a plan. I understood the change we were making, I knew why we needed to make it, and I had thought through what implementation would require. I had my agenda, my talking points, and enough confidence in the decision that I expected the conversation to be fairly straightforward.

It was not.

I introduced the change, and it did not take long for the temperature in the room to shift. One person asked, "Why is that our job?" Someone else added a concern. That comment prompted another, which prompted another, and before long, the conversation had developed a momentum of its own. Concerns were building on concerns, people were responding to each other instead of to me, and I was learning in real time that a staff meeting can travel a remarkable distance from the agenda in a remarkably short amount of time.

I do not remember every comment from that meeting anymore, and I do not remember exactly how I brought the conversation back around. What I remember is what I learned from it. I had spent plenty of time preparing the change, but I had not spent enough time preparing the people.

There is a difference.

At that point in my career, I thought successful change communication was largely about clarity. If I could explain what we were doing, why we were doing it, and what everyone needed to do next, then I had done my part. Experience taught me that people are far more complicated than a well-organized agenda. You can have the right plan, the right rationale, and even the right decision and still walk into a room completely unprepared for how the people sitting in it are going to receive it.

That meeting became one of my earliest lessons in something I would understand differently years later: peacemaking begins long before conflict.

The Room Before the Room

Jesus said, "Blessed are the peacemakers" in Matthew 5:9. I think we sometimes read peacemaker and imagine someone who is particularly good at calming people down once conflict has already erupted. There is certainly value in that skill, but I have come to believe peacemaking is much more proactive than that.

A good leader does not simply know how to respond when the room gets hot. She learns to understand what is likely to make it hot in the first place. That requires knowing your people. Before introducing a significant change, I want to know who is likely to embrace it quickly, who will be skeptical, who will need more time, and who will ask the question everyone else is thinking. I want to know who needs the data and who needs to understand the impact on people. I also want to know whose opinion carries disproportionate weight, because every organization has an organizational chart, and then it has another chart that no one prints. That second chart shows influence.

Leadership and change-management literature gives us language for some of what leaders eventually begin to recognize through experience. Everett Rogers' Diffusion of Innovations theory, for example, describes differences in how readily people adopt something new, from innovators and early adopters through the early and late majority to those who are the last to adopt. The point is not to walk around labeling every employee. Human beings are far more complicated than categories. The value is in recognizing that people do not encounter change at the same speed, with the same questions, or through the same decision-making process. That means one perfectly crafted message delivered to everyone at the same time will not necessarily move everyone in the same direction.

Pull in the People Who Might Push Back

One of the biggest changes in the way I lead now is what I do with the person I suspect may resist a change. Earlier in a leadership career, there can be a temptation to avoid that person until the formal rollout. We know she is going to have questions, and we know she may have influence, so we prepare our answers and hope the strength of the presentation carries the room. I have learned that she is often one of the first people I need to talk to. Before the larger meeting, I would much rather sit down with her and say, "I'm working through this, and I want your perspective." I can explain the problem we are trying to solve, show her where my thinking is going, and then let her challenge it. What am I missing? What is going to make this difficult in actual practice? What are people going to push back on? What unintended consequence can she see from where she sits that I cannot see from where I sit?

That conversation is not a strategy for neutralizing a difficult employee. If that is the motive, people usually recognize it. It is an acknowledgment that the people closest to the work often possess information the person designing the change does not, and resistance can contain valuable data.

Sometimes the skeptic identifies a flaw in my plan. Sometimes she helps me realize that I have explained the "what" without adequately explaining the "why." Sometimes her concerns do not change the decision at all, but they help me understand what I need to address before I bring it to the larger group. And sometimes the person who could have become the loudest voice against a change becomes one of its most credible advocates because she was invited into the thinking early enough to help shape it.

That is not manipulation. That is participation, and it requires humility from the leader. Inviting someone into the process means being willing to discover that your original idea needs work. There is very little value in asking for someone's perspective if the only acceptable perspective is agreement.

Not Everyone Needs the Same Conversation

Knowing your people also means understanding that resistance does not always have the same source. One person may resist because she does not believe the evidence supports the decision. Another may understand the evidence perfectly well but cannot picture how the new process will work on Tuesday morning when three things go wrong at once. Another may understand both and still be worried about what the change means for the people she serves.

The analytical person may need the numbers. Show her the problem in the data, explain the evidence behind the decision, and tell her how you will measure whether the change works. The practical person may need the mechanics. Walk her through what will actually be different, where responsibilities will shift, and what happens when the process does not go according to plan. Someone else may need the human story. She may understand every graph you show her and still not be moved until she understands what the change means for a patient, a customer, a colleague, or the mission. That is not necessarily a failure to appreciate data. People make meaning differently, and leadership requires enough emotional intelligence to communicate the same truth through more than one doorway.

Then there are people who simply need time. They may be thoughtful processors who do not want to commit to something until they have considered the implications. Their questions can easily be mistaken for negativity when they may actually be evidence of careful thinking. A mature leader learns not to interpret every question as opposition.

Instead of immediately asking, "Why won't she get on board?" I have found a much more useful question is, "What does she need in order to get there?" The answer may be information. It may be context. It may be involvement or simply time. Occasionally, the answer will be that she simply does not agree, and leadership still requires us to move forward. Peacemaking does not mean unanimous agreement, and good leadership cannot require consensus before every decision. What it does require is enough curiosity to understand the difference between resistance that should be addressed, resistance that should be learned from, and resistance that simply has to be led through.

The Thermostat Starts Working Before the Meeting

There is an old leadership analogy that compares leaders to thermostats rather than thermometers. A thermometer reflects the temperature around it. When the room gets hotter, its reading goes up. A thermostat recognizes the temperature too, but it does something with that information. It determines what the environment needs and works to change it. I used to think about that analogy primarily in terms of composure. When a room becomes anxious, a leader should not simply become anxious with it. When someone becomes defensive, the leader should not automatically respond defensively. When frustration rises, she should have enough self-command to decide whether the situation actually needs more intensity or whether adding her own frustration will simply make an already difficult situation worse. I still believe that, but I think the analogy begins earlier than I once realized. A good thermostat does not wait until the room is unbearably hot before doing its job. It detects what is happening and responds before the environment becomes uncomfortable.

Leadership works much the same way. When I know change is coming, part of my responsibility is to think about the emotional and relational environment into which I am introducing it. Who needs a conversation before the conversation? Who needs more information? Who needs to challenge my thinking? Who could become a champion? Where is resistance likely to come from, and is that resistance something I need to overcome or information I need to hear? Those questions are not separate from peacemaking. They are part of it.

Sometimes peace is made long before the meeting begins.

Peacemaking Is Not Peacekeeping

This distinction matters because peacemaking is easily confused with keeping everyone comfortable. A peacekeeper may be tempted to avoid the difficult conversation, soften the message until it means very little, or abandon a necessary change because people do not like it. That may temporarily lower the temperature, but it is not necessarily peace. A peacemaker is willing to enter tension without becoming part of the tension. She can listen carefully without surrendering her responsibility to lead. She can change her plan when someone identifies something she missed, and she can hold the course when the plan is right but unpopular. She can allow people to disagree without treating disagreement as disrespect.

This is one reason the biblical language of peacemaking is so meaningful to me. Proverbs tells us that "a soft answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger." James instructs us to be "quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger." Neither instruction sounds particularly passive. Both require tremendous self-command. Being quick to hear means I may need to listen to the objection before preparing my rebuttal. Being slow to speak means I do not have to answer every challenge in the moment simply because it was placed in front of me. Being slow to anger means someone else's emotional state does not get to choose mine. That is where composure becomes more than a leadership technique. It becomes discipline.

Composure Is a Leadership Responsibility

Women have spent enough time being told that emotion makes us less capable leaders, so I have no interest in adding "never get emotional" to the list of impossible expectations. Emotion is information. Frustration can tell us that something matters. Anger can alert us to injustice. Anxiety can expose uncertainty. Empathy can help us understand what a change will cost someone else. The goal is not to become emotionless. The goal is to become emotionally disciplined enough that we can decide what to do with what we feel.

That distinction becomes especially important because a leader's emotional state rarely belongs only to the leader. People take cues from those with authority. If every unexpected problem produces visible panic from the leader, the team begins to experience problems as emergencies. If every challenge produces defensiveness, people learn to stop challenging. If frustration regularly becomes sarcasm, accusation, or a sharp response, those behaviors eventually become part of the culture.

Temperature spreads.

So does composure.

A leader who can remain curious when everyone else is assigning blame changes the conversation. A leader who can say, "Tell me what we know," before asking, "Who did this?" creates a different kind of environment. A leader who can acknowledge a legitimate concern without immediately abandoning the direction of the organization demonstrates that listening and leading are not opposites. This does not mean making every room calm. Sometimes leadership requires turning up the heat. Teams become complacent. Expectations need to be clarified. Accountability needs to increase. Difficult truths need to be spoken. A thermostat does not exist to keep a room permanently cool; it exists to regulate the environment toward what is needed. That is an important distinction. Composure is not softness. It is intentionality.

Proverbs 16:32 says that the person who is slow to anger is better than the mighty, and the one who rules his spirit is greater than one who takes a city. That is a remarkable description of strength. We tend to celebrate the leader who can command a room, an organization, a strategy, or a massive initiative. Scripture asks whether that leader can first command herself.

Making the Peace

That staff meeting early in my career did not teach me to fear resistance. It taught me to prepare for people with the same intentionality that I prepare a plan. Over time, I learned that some of the most important leadership work happens before the meeting ever begins. It happens when we identify the person whose questions will shape everyone else's thinking and invite her into the conversation early. It happens when we recognize that one employee needs the data while another needs to understand the human impact. It happens when we become curious about resistance instead of immediately trying to overcome it.

There will still be meetings that go sideways. There will be comments we did not anticipate, resistance we could not prevent, and moments when the temperature rises despite all the preparation in the world. That is when the other half of thermostat leadership becomes essential: the ability to remain composed enough to determine what the room needs instead of simply reflecting what the room gives us. This is where I believe the distinction between peacekeeping and peacemaking matters most. Peacekeeping can become an exercise in avoiding disruption. It can tempt us to soften necessary conversations, delay difficult decisions, or mistake agreement for health. Peacemaking asks more of us. It requires the courage to address what needs to be addressed and the wisdom to consider how we bring people with us.

When Jesus said, "Blessed are the peacemakers," I have come to appreciate the action contained in that word. Peace is not always something we walk into and preserve. Sometimes it is something we have to help create.

For leaders, that work begins with knowing the people entrusted to us. It means understanding not only what we need them to do, but how they process change, where their influence lies, what concerns they may be carrying, and what we might learn if we invite their resistance to the table instead of trying to silence it.

A thermometer can tell us when the room has gotten hot. A thermostat does something about it. The best leaders learn to do even more: they understand their environment well enough to recognize what may change the temperature before everyone else begins to feel the heat.

That is the work of a peacemaker—not simply keeping the peace, but making it.