How Do You Lead People Who Don’t Think the Way You Do?
Do you want to listen to this article? Click here to access our AI-generated audio version!
How do you lead people who do not think the way you do?
Leadership is a challenge, especially when you are not always aligned with your colleagues and employees. Our MDI Ambassador Zeca Ruiz proves that even resistance in your team can be a good thing. You want to know why and how to deal with this? Read this blog article to find out more!
First mistake: Don’t confuse alignment with unanimity
I want to start with a simple, and perhaps uncomfortable, provocation for many leaders. If everyone on your team thinks like you, something is not right.
For a long time, I believed that good leadership meant achieving quick alignment, minimal friction, and decisions flowing with little or no resistance. Today, I think exactly the opposite. Teams that are overly aligned, in the sense of agreement, tend to be fragile, predictable, and dangerous in the long run. One of the most common leadership traps is confusing alignment with unanimity.
Why You Seek Agreement
When we seek to make people think like us, it is usually not a strategic choice. It is about comfort. Agreement gives us a false sense of control, reduces our anxiety, and makes us feel validated. The problem is that it also removes the questioning that could prevent mistakes, poorly calibrated decisions, and strategic blind spots.
The truth is, you do not want people to think like you. You want them to challenge you. When they press the right buttons, the ones that test whether you truly believe in the direction you are proposing, they strengthen the decision, refine the path, and turn a personal idea into a collective commitment.
Strong contributors do not accept everything. They question, create tension, ask for clarity, and force the leader out of autopilot. And strong leaders can hold that space with presence, inner security, and genuine openness, without becoming defensive, without confusing discomfort with threat, and without silencing differences to preserve authority.
This is exactly where a fundamental distinction comes in, one that deeply changed the way I lead and develop leaders. You do not need people to agree with the path. You need them to be committed to the shared destination. The role of leadership is not to create copies of yourself, but to sustain a direction that is clear enough to allow diversity of thought without losing coherence.
This Requires an Important Mindset Shift.
Questioning is not disloyalty. Thinking differently is not a lack of engagement. On the contrary, it is often a sign of responsibility, ownership, and genuine commitment to the outcome. In practice, what truly matters is ensuring that you and your team want the same outcomes, even if you take different routes to get there. That only happens when the leader stops trying to convince and starts translating the vision into the language, pace, and motivators of each team member.
People do not engage with your vision. They engage when they can see the vision through their own motivators and their own language. Now, moving into the practical side, here are a few DOs and DON’Ts that make a real difference in everyday leadership.
DOs
- Align on the why before discussing the how.
- Explicitly invite dissent in important decisions.
- Publicly recognize those who challenge you with respect and constructive intent.
DON’Ts
- Do not confuse questioning with a lack of commitment.
- Do not demand alignment of form when alignment of intention is what truly matters.
- Do not label people who think differently as difficult.
How to Create Real Commitment
In addition, I like to work with a simple set of questions that help reveal motivators and create real commitment.
- What makes you genuinely care about this project?
- What would need to happen for you to commit even more?
- What are you seeing here that I might not be seeing?
- What would you regret not saying now if things went wrong later?
These questions do something powerful. They move a person from executor to co-creator. And when someone feels like a co-creator, the level of commitment changes completely.
Emotional Maturity All the Way
At the end of the day, leading people who do not think like you is less about management and more about emotional maturity. It is about holding tension without needing to win. It is about sustaining a direction that is clear enough for different voices to contribute without diluting meaning.
Perhaps the most noble role of leadership is not to create loyal followers, but to create spaces where different people can commit to something greater than themselves.
So, Here is the Final Reflection.
Who on your team truly challenges you today?
And when that happens, do you respond with defensiveness or with curiosity?
Zeca Ruiz
Leadership Trainer and Consultant
Zeca Ruiz is a Leadership Trainer, Facilitator and Consultant in Human and Organizational Development. He works in leadership development across Latin America and Europe, with experience in cultural transformation processes, team dynamics and the integration of systemic methodologies into corporate practice. He is a specialist in complex thinking, a generative coach and an integrative therapist, working at the intersection between human behavior, learning and the evolution of systems. He leads trainings, talks and development programs that combine depth, clarity and practical application to prepare people and organizations for high complexity environments.