They don’t fail because the strategy was wrong, or the rollout was sloppy, or middle management didn’t buy in. They fail because the thing that actually needs to change is the person announcing the initiative. And that person almost never is the subject of it.
So instead, we get programs. New values painted on the wall of the break room. A consultant. An offsite. A survey with a respectable response rate that gets presented to the board and filed.
Two years after I started leading differently, my firm ran an anonymous employee satisfaction survey. Trust in leadership was up 53%. Feeling heard was up 40%. Process efficiency was up 54%. We hadn’t reorganized. We hadn’t rolled out a program. Nothing that any business school would identify as a change initiative had taken place.
What had taken place was that I had become a different person to work for.
Years before that shift, this is what it felt like to work for me:
“Anything regarding mistakes... it felt possibly catastrophic and career-ending.”
I didn’t see this for a long time. I saw drive. I saw urgency. I saw a team that delivered. I told myself the intensity was the cost of the results, and the people who couldn’t handle it weren’t built for the work. The revolving door of employees was, in my framing at the time, a filter.
It was not a filter. It was a verdict.
The shift didn’t come from a program. It came from a difficult conversation that I couldn’t unhear, followed by years of paying attention to things I had previously dismissed as soft: tone, pause, presence, the difference between reacting and responding. I started noticing what my arrival in a room did to the room. I started letting silences sit. I stopped treating every problem as an emergency that required immediate action to solve.
None of this is unique to my firm. The mechanism is general. The reason most cultural change initiatives fail is that they ask the organization to change while leaving the leader exactly as they were. The organization correctly reads this as theater and goes back to managing the leader, which is what it was doing in the first place.
There is no version of this where the work gets outsourced. There is no framework that does it for you. Survey results, testimonials and metrics weren’t going to change the actual problem. The project was internal, it was quiet, it took years, and was not always flattering.
If you’re a leader who senses something is misaligned inside the organization you’ve built, the question to sit with is not what program to launch. It’s whether you’re willing to be the thing that changes.
— Judd