Every Monday, I bring you one mentor: a thinker, a teacher, a voice that has shaped how I lead, coach, and live. Not as a lecture, but as an invitation. A few minutes to start your week thinking a little differently about who you are and how you show up.
The last few weeks we’ve explored how we speak, how we influence, and how we defer to power. This week, we turn to something that sits underneath all of it: what happens when we simply value different things.
“Daniela, I don’t want to change.”
This cut sharply across the warm introduction I’d been building for the past ten minutes to one of the best 360 tools I know, The Leadership Circle. It was the first time someone said this to me with conviction, out loud.
Fred led a team of highly skilled engineers at a Swiss biotech company. Two of his niche specialists had already left. HR feared more would follow, and they couldn’t afford the cost of losing more talent.
The easy read: Fred was stubborn, fixed mindset, unwilling to listen and consider the impact he had on his team.
He was more than that, and the difference is what made the work possible. Fred was defending an established way of working, a fixed picture of how things should be, that no longer fit the reality around him. Let’s bring back our mentor Geert Hofstede, who helped me get a deeper look.
▍ The cultural dimensions underneath the conflict
Hofstede spent his career mapping the invisible rulers by which different cultures measure the world. One of them is long-term versus short-term orientation: whether attention points toward the future, or toward the present and the past.
The long-term pole values future rewards: perseverance, thrift, and adapting to changing circumstances. The short-term pole values the present and the past: pride in established ways, respect for tradition, and the sense that how things have always been done is how they should stay.
In our case, the biotech company was clearly long-term oriented, similar as Switzerland. Fred’s team was too: future-facing engineers, ready to adapt their methods and evolve. Fred was the exception. He leaned towards the short-term end, proud of the old ways of working, attached to how things had always been done. His “I don’t want to change” was that attachment speaking.
That single mismatch explained the friction that had already cost two engineers. His team experienced his defence of the old methods as blocking the future they were reaching for. Fred experienced their push to evolve as disrespect for what had always worked. Same team, same goal, two different rulers for what “success” meant.
A note worth making, because it matters here: Hofstede’s scores describe cultures, not individuals. A country can lean strongly long-term while a person within it leans short-term. Fred was exactly that, a short-term-oriented individual inside a long-term-oriented culture and team.
▍ The second ruler: a fixed world versus an open one
The other dimension at play was uncertainty avoidance, which isn’t risk avoidance but how threatened we feel by ambiguous or unknown situations.
Fred leaned strongly towards uncertainty avoidance, clinging to a safe, known, fixed view of how things should be, one that no longer fit. High uncertainty avoidance could look like a valued principle from the inside. From the outside, to a team ready to move, it looked like a wall.
Put the two together and you have the knot. A short-term orientation that prized the old ways, reinforced by a low tolerance for the ambiguity that any real change brings.
▍ Where a few cultures actually sit
It helps to see how differently cultures line up depending on which value you measure. The countries reshuffle completely from one dimension to the next, which is the point. Switzerland, marked in gold in the graph below, is comfortable enough with ambiguity to sit mid-pack on uncertainty avoidance, yet firmly future-oriented on the long-term scale. That was the water Fred’s company and team swam in, and the current he was swimming against.
These are national tendencies, not a verdict on any individual. Fred lived inside the Swiss long-term norm while personally leaning the other way, which is why the tension was so sharp.
▍ How we untied the knot
Here is the part worth being truthful about, because the tidy version would help no one. There was no clever reframe in a single room. Before I could do any work on the relationship between Fred and his team, I had to work with Fred alone. It took eight sessions to move the needle. To help him consider, and then practise, a longer-term orientation. To look at uncertainty, variety, and change more openly, and to start building a middle ground with his team rather than a wall against it.
That is slow, patient work. It is also the real work. Fred did shift, genuinely, but only because he started (slowly) to look honestly at how his own view had stopped fitting the world he led in.
Three shifts make this repeatable for any leader.
Name the ruler, not just the position. Where there is resistance, ask yourself what could be the ruler. Often it is a time orientation (fixed or fluid) or a tolerance for ambiguity that differs from everyone else’s in the room, and that gap is a natural tendency that usually goes unnamed.
Catch the tension and use it to learn and shift. “I don’t want to change” is information. Sometimes it protects something real, sometimes it stems from an unconscious fear of uncertainty. The work is about bringing to light what lies beneath, and face it honestly, it is about flexing styles towards the middle to find common ground.
Watch your own default. Your own style feels like plain common sense, which is exactly why other points of view are invisible to you. Fred could not see that his “how things should be” was one view among several until someone helped him hold it up to the light.
▍ The two rulers, side by side
For reference, here is what each pole of the two dimensions tends to value.
Hofstede found that these values are remarkably stable. They pass from parents to children and change little across a lifetime, which is exactly why moving Fred took eight sessions and not one conversation. You rarely argue anyone out of their orientation. But you can help someone see it, question it, and choose to stretch and flex, especially when their own view has stopped fitting where they are.
Who you are matters. And so does being willing to ask, honestly, whether who you are still fits where you are.
▍ Share with us
How did you deal with situations where you were in direct opposition with how the other(s) dealt with uncertainty and change?
And an honest question: are you (really) willing to change?
See you next Monday,
Daniela
Quantum-Leader.com | Connect. Lead. Grow.
The Monday Mentor is a weekly reflection on the thinkers who shape how we lead. Names and details have been changed to protect client confidentiality.
