They don’t like your idea: so bring them closer.

'Watering the rocks' was a new turn of phrase to me.

It’s an idea conveying madness: imagine watering rocks instead of plants, of investing in people who will never bear fruit, at the expense of watering those who will thrive with the attention and resources.

At face value, it seems obvious: try your best not to water the rocks.

But you’d be wrong. It’s not the best way to lead a project (or a school) to success. We need to water the rocks.

Leadership requires us to consider the rocks, the laggards, the people who seem determined to scupper anything that involves effort on their part. It means we have to act like radiators, even when they try to act as drains.

And we must avidly maintain optimism that everyone in our organisation is capable of producing good fruit. Another reason to keep watering the rocks.

So who are the rocks in your team?

Often the rocks are mistakenly viewed as the immovable "haters". Although their questions and comments are easily interpreted as resistance, they are the organisation's truth-tellers. And truth-tellers are a leader's most valuable feedback loop.

"Rocks can symbolise a stabilising foundation that keeps an organisation steady in times of crisis,” says INSEAD’s Michael Jarrett. He suggests that 'the rocks' in an organisation are often other leaders, experts and power roles, like your Board members. They symbolise stability.

But the problem lies in the sharp edges of the hard power that the rocks retain. Those sharp edges, and that hard power, can wreck a plan. Take them head on and you’ll get a bloody nose.

Instead, "watering the rocks" allows a leader to draw on and harness the power of the rocks rather than fight against it.

This is one of the principles we help people understand and then put into action in Leading from the Middle. It’s part of the second sprint, where we explore how a rich pre-mortem can predict where and how each participant’s project will fail.

And in large part, it’s down to deeply understanding the values held in those organisational rocks, those emblems of stability whose sharp edges will burst the balloon of innovation that our middle leaders bring to the table.

Most people let that pressure shape their ideas into a world of fuzzy compromise. Nobody wins.