Reporting progress against stakeholder resistance is a narrow needle to thread: overstate it and you look careless if objections resurface; frame the resistant stakeholders too harshly and you damage a relationship you still need. "Chip away at" sits in the useful middle ground between those two failure modes.
The overclaiming failure
The first way this goes wrong is declaring victory too early. If resistance has genuinely softened but hasn't disappeared, saying it's fully gone sets up an awkward correction later if objections resurface — and they often do, especially with early, partial progress.
Overclaims (avoid): "The pilots have eliminated the managers' resistance."
That sentence claims a complete, finished outcome. If even one manager raises the same objection again next week, the claim looks careless in hindsight — not because the progress wasn't real, but because it was described as more final than it actually was.
The accusatory failure
The second way this goes wrong pulls in the opposite direction: framing the resistant stakeholders themselves as the problem, in language that reads as personal or adversarial.
Accusatory (avoid): "The pilots undermined the managers."
Even if the intent here was just to describe the pilots' effect on resistance, "undermined" implies something closer to deliberate sabotage than "changed some minds gradually." Read by the managers themselves, or forwarded to them, this framing can turn people you're trying to bring on board into people who now feel attacked — which tends to harden resistance rather than reduce it further.
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Start learning for free →The diplomatic middle ground
Between overclaiming and accusation is a modest, honest, still-in-progress description — exactly what "chip away at" is built for.
Diplomatic (better): "The pilots are starting to chip away at some of the resistance, but we still need more proof points."
This version does several things at once. "Starting to" signals early-stage, not finished. "Some of the resistance" is honest that it's partial, not complete. "Chip away at" avoids any implication of intent or sabotage toward the stakeholders themselves. And "we still need more proof points" tells the reader what comes next, rather than implying the work is done.
Why this framing holds up better over time
The value of this middle-ground phrasing isn't just diplomacy for its own sake — it's more accurate, and accuracy is what protects your credibility if the situation develops further in either direction. If resistance keeps softening, "starting to chip away at" ages well; it undersold nothing, and continued progress simply confirms the trend. If resistance resurfaces, the same sentence still holds up, because it never claimed the resistance was fully gone in the first place.
That durability — holding up whether things keep improving or partially reverse — is the real reason "chip away at" is the right register for early-stage progress against resistance, rather than a triumphant or an adversarial framing of the same facts.
Practice scenarios
Practice using chip away at in situations like:
- reporting early progress against stakeholder resistance without declaring victory
- avoiding language that frames resistant stakeholders as adversaries
- phrasing partial, early-stage progress so it holds up either way it develops
- signaling what still needs to happen instead of implying the work is done
Useful practice phrases:
- "We're starting to chip away at some of the resistance."
- "We still need more proof points before we'd call this resolved."
- "Let's not say eliminated — this is still in progress."
- "That framing sounds adversarial — can we soften it?"
Modest and honest ages better than triumphant or adversarial.
Say what's starting to happen, and what still needs to.
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