Image credit: grinvalds
I have no spades.
No, I’m not talking about the card game, Spades. I’m talking about Personality Poker, the assessment/tool/awesomesauce that Stephen Shapiro created. It’s also one of the things we talked about when he was on my podcast.
Stephen's system runs on four suits, each mapped to a way of operating. Diamonds are the creative, scattered visionaries. Spades dig for data. Hearts run on people and gut. Clubs plan the work and execute it. My hand had: three diamonds, an ace of clubs, and a two of hearts, which assessed to insightful, visionary, creative, goal-oriented, and a little oversensitive. Not one card built for digging into data.
The Suit You're Missing Tells You Who You Need
Stephen's point wasn't really about the cards I had. It was about the suit I didn't. The one you're missing tells you more than the ones you're holding, because it tells you exactly who you need.
Then he said something I didn’t like: the person who annoys you the most is the person you need the most.
I told him, on the record (and half-jokingly), that I hate that advice. Not because it's wrong. Because it's annoying. I would just love to never interact with those people who annoy me and who work in completely different ways than me.
Of course, that wouldn’t be very “Yes, And” of me, would it?
The Problem With the People Who Annoy You
If you're leading people through change right now, you already know resistance shows up loud. Someone pushes back in the meeting. Someone emails you a list of concerns. It's uncomfortable, but it's visible, and visible is manageable. What actually kills a change initiative is the thing I talk about in almost every keynote I give: apathy. The quiet compliance. The people who stop offering ideas, stop pushing back, stop showing up as anything other than present. You can't manage what's gone silent.
The people who annoy you during a change effort, the ones asking the slow, skeptical, "have we thought about" questions, are very often the opposite of apathetic. They're engaged enough to still be arguing with you. The instinct most leaders have is to route around that friction, to build the rollout plan with the people who nod, who think like they think, who make the meeting feel easy. That instinct is exactly how you end up with a team that looks aligned and is actually just quiet.
The friction isn't the problem. The friction is often the last visible sign that someone still cares enough to push.
This is where Yield to What Is in the YES AND framework, actually earns its place instead of just being a nice idea. Yielding doesn't mean agreeing with the annoying colleague. It means accepting that the friction they're creating is real information about your plan, not an obstacle to it.
Same with Explore and Express Your Core. Part of knowing your core is knowing your own blind spot, which for me is apparently an entire suit of cards. You can't explore what you refuse to look at.
So here's the practice I'd actually put in front of you, if you're a leader trying to move your team up the Change Response Ladder instead of just hoping they land on excitement: Say “Yes, And!” to the person who annoys you.
Say “Yes, And!” to the Person Who Annoys You
Not “yes, they're right about everything.” Not “yes, but let me explain why we're still doing it my way.”
Yes, And.
Their reaction is real, and it's telling you something, and you're going to go find out what.
Think of the person on your team whose reaction to your last change initiative genuinely irritated you. Not the person who was hostile. The one who was just annoying. Slow. Nitpicky. Skeptical in a way that made the meeting drag.
Ask yourself what they were seeing that you weren't in the room to see.
Then go ask them directly. Not to convert them. Not to win the argument you've been having with them in your head. To find out. That's a very different conversation than the one most leaders are having with their most annoying team member, which is usually no conversation at all.
It's the same move I had to make with Stephen mid-interview. I said I hate that advice, and I meant it. But saying “Yes, and” to it instead of arguing my way out of it is exactly what turned an assessment I took for fun into something very powerful.
Stephen and I talked about a lot more than this in the full episode:
- Why the perfect change rollout plan doesn't exist and never has.
- How he took his own intellectual property, printed it as a book, and let his clients pick which three chapters they actually needed instead of guessing for them.
- How his own team is missing an entire suit and what he does about it.
It's a conversation that, honestly, changed how I think about a few things I say in my own keynote.
Listen to the full episode with Stephen Shapiro here.
If this is the kind of thing your organization is wrestling with right now, the gap between who's compliant and who's actually still with you, that's the exact territory of my keynote, "Say, Yes, And! to Change," and the framework I lay out in my book by the same name. I'm happy to talk about what that could look like for your team.