What to Say When a Colleague Says ''That's Not How We Do It Here

A client brings you a workplace defeat. They proposed something at work, a cleaner process, a faster workflow, and a senior colleague shut it down with one sentence: “That’s not how we do it here.” Your client wants to talk about how to win that argument next time, which data to bring, which slide to lead with. The work is to show them they were never in an argument about merit. The clinical move is to stop them from selling the idea and start them investigating what the old way protects.

What the phrase is actually doing

The sentence reads like a verdict on the proposal. It is a boundary being drawn. The colleague is not saying the idea is bad. They are saying your client is an outsider who has not earned a vote on how things are done. The phrase asserts the group’s identity and frames the new idea as a threat to it, in one move, which is why it lands so hard and why your client cannot answer it. Every fact they marshal in defense of the idea confirms the colleague’s real point: this person does not get it.

That confusion is the thing to surface first. Your client walked out of the room believing they lost on logic. They lost on belonging. Until they can see the difference, every fix they invent will be a better argument, and a better argument is the wrong tool.

What the resistance is protecting

Most clients who bring this in assume the colleague is being difficult or threatened or political. Some of that may be true. The more useful frame is that the colleague is doing a job for the group, guarding the established order against the cost of change.

People prefer the familiar over the better. An established process, even a slow one, feels safe. A new one carries the cost of learning it, the social risk of championing it if it fails, and a quieter cost that matters more than your client realizes. The person who built the old way has expertise sunk into it. A new method threatens to make that expertise worthless.

Give your client the spreadsheet example. It does the work faster than any abstraction. A team has tracked its finances on the same elaborate spreadsheet for ten years. A newcomer suggests dedicated accounting software. The veteran who built that spreadsheet does not hear a tooling upgrade. They hear that the thing they have expertly managed for a decade is now obsolete, and so are they. The resistance is not to the software. It is to the erasure.

There is a system layer too, and naming it helps your client stop taking the rejection personally. Most organizations reward managers for steady, predictable output and punish them for failed experiments far more than they reward successful ones. Whatever the company says about innovation, the incentives favor stability. The colleague who shut your client down is acting as an agent of those incentives. They are performing a function. Your client wandered into it.

The shift to coach

Here is the reframe to give your client. Stop trying to win. The moment they try to win, the frame is already “me against you,” and that is the frame they lose in every time. The move is to change the question from “my new idea versus your old way” to “us against a shared problem.” That requires putting the proposal down and getting curious about the world of the person resisting.

Their first job is not to persuade. It is to understand what the old way preserves. What value, what skill, what stability is bound up in it. Coach your client to translate “that’s not how we do it here” into the sentence underneath it: “There is a reason we do it this way, and you have not shown me you understand or respect it.”

From there the strategy is to make the colleague feel understood before proposing anything. Your client acknowledges the legitimacy of the past, joins the colleague on their side of the table, and looks at the problem with them rather than at them. Defensiveness drops only after the colleague sees that your client values their experience. That is the precondition for the colleague to consider a new path at all.

The lines that fit the new position

Give your client these as illustrations of the move from defending to investigating. They are shapes to recognize and adapt, in their own words, to the colleague in front of them. Each one validates the person or the existing process before it asks anything.

The opener that lowers the stakes: “You’re right, this is a big departure. Help me understand the history of the current process. I want to make sure I’m not missing something important it was designed to do.” This agrees first, then casts your client as a student instead of a disruptor.

The line that hands the colleague authorship: “That’s a fair point. The current system has obviously served the team well for a long time. What’s the most important thing it protects that we need to make sure we don’t lose?” It credits the old way and asks the colleague to define the criteria any new solution has to meet, which makes them a partner rather than a gatekeeper.

The line that introduces a shared pressure: “I hear that. It sounds like there’s a lot of institutional knowledge tied up in that process. My only concern is the new client demand. How well is the current process set up to handle that?” Your client fills in the real external pressure. This turns the conversation toward a problem they both face.

The line that de-risks the whole thing: “I completely get the hesitation. What would be the harm in trying this on one small project for two weeks, just to see what we learn?” The all-or-nothing threat becomes a small experiment that offers learning where failure used to be the only downside.

What to listen for in the next session

Ask your client which line they used and what came back. The data lives in the colleague’s response. Whether the idea got adopted tells you far less.

Watch for your client reporting that they tried the curious approach as a wrapper for the same pitch. The question about the old process was a wind-up, the pivot to their idea came thirty seconds later, and the colleague felt it. That is the old script reasserting itself inside the new words. The investigating has to be real, or the colleague reads the maneuver and the boundary goes up higher.

Listen for whether the colleague said anything about what the old way protects. If they named a real value, your client now has something to build on. If the colleague stayed guarded even after a genuine opening, that is useful too. It tells you the resistance is doing a larger job than this one proposal.

When the real work is somewhere else

Sometimes the client who keeps colliding with “that’s not how we do it here” is not running into ordinary institutional friction. They walk into every workplace and within weeks they are the outsider with the better idea that no one will hear. If the pattern follows them from job to job, the colleague’s sentence is a mirror, and the work is about the position your client keeps choosing rather than the line they need for the meeting.

Other clients are in a genuinely closed system. The incentives are so locked against change that no amount of joining will move it, and the honest formulation is whether your client should keep spending themselves on it or take their competence somewhere that can use it. That is a different conversation than how to phrase the next proposal. It is worth having directly, before another year goes into a room that was never going to open.