Hi {{first_name}} ,

Often, when I or a supervisor - or even the CPO - first suggested changes in a room with stakeholders, sometimes even before the presentation had even begun, the participants started arguing about whether anything should be changed at all, or they brought up issues that weren’t working well in their collaboration with the procurement organization anyway.

Why is that?

In this episode, we’ll explore different perspectives. Enjoy.

Many procurement leaders expect resistance to begin once a proposal has been heard, compared, and judged on its merits. In practice, a more useful organisational reading may be that resistance often starts earlier, when stakeholders anticipate loss of control, added coordination burden, exposure to disruption, or a narrowing of their own decision space. Recent work on change and cross-functional leadership points in that direction: in more complex organisations, change is increasingly filtered through fatigue, trust, competing priorities, and how the proposal lands in adjacent functions, not only through its technical quality. (McKinsey, 2025) (Harvard Business Review, 2026) (Harvard Business Review, 2024)

This matters because procurement is now being asked to influence more consequential terrain than before. Across recent procurement research, the function’s role continues to widen beyond cost control into resilience, supplier collaboration, technology, and broader value creation. (McKinsey, 2025) At the same time, Deloitte’s 2025 Global CPO Survey found that siloed ways of working remained the most-cited barrier to procurement value delivery, identified by 57% of respondents. (Deloitte, 2025) One implication for ambitious procurement leaders is that stronger procurement initiatives often collide with more stakeholders, more ownership concerns, and more informal resistance before the formal discussion has fully begun. (Deloitte, 2025) (Harvard Business Review, 2024)

A helpful distinction here is between disagreement with the proposal and resistance to what the proposal may change.

Those are not the same thing. A sourcing redesign, earlier procurement involvement, tighter supplier discipline, or a more rigorous business case may look analytically sound on paper. But in practice, adjacent functions often experience the proposal first through its consequences for them: extra review loops, slower autonomy, supplier change risk, more visible assumptions, or reduced room for informal decisions.

Based on the source picture, a more practical reading may be that good procurement work often meets resistance before it meets facts because organisations do not absorb change in a purely analytical sequence. McKinsey’s recent work on reinvention and change argues that employees are experiencing far more planned change than before, and that the challenge for leaders is no longer simple compliance with new procedures but navigating more layered forms of mobilisation and transformation. (McKinsey, 2025b) Harvard Business Review’s recent treatment of change resistance makes a similar point in a more behavioural register: resistance is often better read as information about what people fear, protect, or do not yet trust than as evidence that they are irrational. (Harvard Business Review, 2026)

For procurement leaders, this often becomes visible in familiar moments. Finance may hear “we need earlier involvement” as a request for more process. Operations may hear it as added friction under time pressure. Engineering may hear it as a challenge to technical ownership. Project leadership may hear it as a threat to schedule flexibility. By the time the formal meeting takes place, the proposal may already be carrying meanings that procurement did not intend.

That is one reason some strong procurement leaders stall. They improve the analysis, the numbers, and the sourcing logic, but underestimate the interpretive layer around the proposal. In many organisations, what tends to matter at senior level is not only whether procurement is right, but whether the surrounding stakeholders can support the move without feeling politically exposed, operationally burdened, or publicly corrected.

Harvard Business Review’s work on leading across silos is relevant here because it frames cross-functional effectiveness less as argument quality alone and more as the ability to understand adjacent priorities and constraints. (Harvard Business Review, 2024) The stronger implication for procurement is that resistance often needs to be worked on before the proposal enters the room, not merely answered inside the room.

It may therefore be more useful to view resistance as an early diagnostic. Sometimes it signals weak proposal design. Just as often, it signals that the proposal has not yet been translated into a form that others can safely support.

They distinguish between analytical weakness and adoption risk. A proposal can be commercially strong and still organisationally fragile.

They ask earlier what others may feel they are losing. In practice, that often reveals more than another internal slide.

They reduce the reasons for resistance before the formal discussion. That may mean clarifying trade-offs, limiting process burden, sequencing the move differently, or building one trusted validating voice first.

They treat resistance as data. Harvard Business Review’s recent guidance is useful here: resistance can reveal where the change is poorly understood, poorly timed, or colliding with legitimate concerns that need to be surfaced rather than dismissed. (Harvard Business Review, 2026)

They aim for supportable proposals, not only correct proposals.

Good procurement change often meets resistance early because organisations react first to what may shift around them, not only to what is true on paper.

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Deloitte. (2025, August 19). Procurement at the Tipping Point: Deloitte’s 2025 Chief Procurement Officer Survey Reveals the Pressure and Promise of Technology Disruption. Retrieved from https://www.deloitte.com/us/en/about/press-room/2025-chief-procurement-officer-survey.html

Harvard Business Review. (2024, January 11). How to Lead Across a Siloed Organization. Retrieved from https://hbr.org/2024/01/how-to-lead-across-a-siloed-organization

Harvard Business Review. (2026, April 20). Leaders, Treat Resistance to Change as Valuable Data. Retrieved from https://hbr.org/2026/04/leaders-treat-resistance-to-change-as-valuable-data

McKinsey & Company. (2025, February 25). Procurement 2025: Reimagining the Function for Success. Retrieved from https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/operations/our-insights/procurement-2025-reimagining-the-function-for-success

McKinsey & Company. (2025, November 19). Change Is Changing: How to Meet the Challenge of Radical Reinvention. Retrieved from https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/people-and-organizational-performance/our-insights/change-is-changing-how-to-meet-the-challenge-of-radical-reinvention

Thank you for reading,

Pascal Hecker | Editor-In-Chief, CPO Path.