Module 3:
Bring people along

The first shift is to stop seeing pushback as failure. "Resistance to change is natural," says VJ, who led Shell's tax transformation. It's strongest among long-tenured experts who have done the work the same way for years, and it's growing as AI moves tasks from people to machines.

The trick is to manage it with those same people, not around them. VJ's approach was to minimise the disruption and move talent out of low-value compliance work and into higher-value advisory roles. That reframe matters, because a lot of resistance is really fear: people worry that sharing what they know, or letting a system take over a task, makes them less important. Show them the change makes them more valuable, not less, and the resistance loses its fuel.

Brigitte Baumgartner, who guides multinationals through transformation, adds a discipline: don't label people. "My job is identifying how people think, not putting a label on the risky user," she says. She stays neutral and works to understand why someone resists, because "the more I understand that kind of people, the more success the solution will have." And a hard truth for anyone counting on a sign-off: a CFO can approve a tool, "but you cannot force people to use it."

When it comes to winning people over, Jesús Ricart, Head of Indirect Tax at Al Tayer, reaches back to Roman law: auctoritas versus potestas. Potestas is the power to make people comply. Auctoritas is the ability to influence them without it. He chooses auctoritas every time.

In practice, that means selling the benefit, not the order. "It's automated in the system; it's better for you. You save time, the information is more accurate, no manual errors," he explains. Not "this has to be done because the tax team says so." The message is always what's in it for them.

That doesn't mean going soft. Kristof Cuppens calls the balance "caring directness": you stay honest and clear, with the intent to help. As he warns, a weak no reads as a yes. Influence isn't avoiding the hard conversation. It's having it well.

Resistance spikes when change arrives without warning. Diana Hansen, Sr. Director Global Tax at Trident Seafood, made sure it never did: "It wasn't a surprise was like the main thing. I repeatedly told them this was coming." By the time the new way went live, no one could say they hadn't heard.

She also leaned on a champion. Her biggest advocate was the colleague whose manual workload the new system erased, who became its most natural promoter. That's the pattern the PwC research behind our Q2 course found too: "People follow success, not ideas." Find the person the change genuinely helps, make their win visible, and momentum builds on its own. As for the holdouts, Diana is relaxed: the resisters will get "a rude awakening the first time their work papers get pulled for an audit."

• Expect resistance, and don't take it personally.
• Influence over authority: show people what's in it for them.
• Find the champion the change helps most, and let their win do the talking.