[Video] showing off my magic tricks

Why your team undermines change

Author

Nick Avaria
June 16, 2026

Note:

I'll leave the full details to the end of the email.

The number one enemy of any change is undermining behind closed doors.

A couple of team members get to talking on a call after the announcement:

  • "this won't last”

  • "remember the last initiative”

  • "just wait it out."

Nobody counters you openly, but they do agree to outlast you.

And three months later the new system is abandoned, and you're left concluding your team "doesn't like change."

Rather than assume your team doesn’t like change, there’s a significant potential that your rollout was missing a step.

When people go through change - any change - they move through the same four emotional stages:

denial, anger, bargaining, acceptance.

Let’s say you announce a new comprehensive time tracking initiative and the new process that comes with it, and every person in that room starts the same private journey through those four stages.

When they feel the resistance (the "this is stupid," the "we were fine before”) they don't recognise it as a stage. They think it's their own honest verdict on the change. And they act on it behind closed doors.

So let me break down what I do, and what I train the teams I work with to do…

Short version:

Show them the trick before you perform it.

Long version:

Before the change lands, you teach the whole team - frontline included, not just managers - the four stages themselves.

You say, plainly: when this rolls out, you are going to move through denial, anger, bargaining and acceptance… in roughly that order. Everyone does. This is what each one feels like from the inside.

Two things will more than likely happen next.

People hear the stages laid out and their immediate, almost universal reaction is: I'm more sophisticated than that. And in trying to prove it, they skip steps. They move themselves to acceptance faster, voluntarily, just to demonstrate they're not so predictable. You've used their ego in their own favour. It's like a magician showing you exactly how the trick works - once you've seen the mechanism, it can't work on you the same way.

Secondly: once the stages are named and shared, you've given people permission to locate themselves on the map.

So when the rollout comes, you can ask someone directly: where are you on the ladder right now? And they can answer honestly - "honestly, I'm somewhere around bargaining" - without it being a confession or an act of disloyalty.

The apprehension that would previously be gossiped behind closed doors now gets said to your face, where you can do something with it.

Any presence of undermining should die out, because you removed its reason to exist. People undermine in private when they have no legitimate channel for the doubt they're feeling. Give them the channel, and the back-channel empties out.

This costs close to $0.

One training, maybe an hour or so, before your next rollout.

One more thing worth saying:

If your last few initiatives died this way, don't read it as a verdict on your team.

They were never totally against the change.

They were going through the four stages alone, in the dark, with nobody naming what was happening.

That's fixable, it's probably the most fixable thing in your whole operation.

Any agency that has enrolled to take part in our upcoming cohort (starting June 23rd) will benefit from being able to build out these kinds of initiatives.

As well as access to:

  • Our 7-in-1 executive dashboard

  • Objectives, metrics, and KPIs for each employee

  • Client LTV System (onboarding, upsell & review systems)

  • AGI P&L format: benchmark profit & productivity against best-in-class agencies

  • Pricing Methodology: exact framework to price correctly & avoid undercharging

  • 30-min Dashboard Review Process: how I manage my agency in under 30 minutes a week

  • 100-day onboarding blueprint: my template to engineer retention from day 1

  • Price Increase Template: used to double prices with less than 3% client churn

The full breakdown + explainer video for the cohort is linked below if you’re interested in learning more, and potentially joining us on the 23rd.

Nick

P.S.

I expanded on this same topic (alongside a lot more) on the ‘You’re In Charge’ podcast, hosted by Glenn Pasch.