Leadership and Organisational Change: What Moves the Needle

Leadership and organisational change succeed or fail on one thing: whether the people leading the change understand the business well enough to know what actually needs to change, and are willing to make the hard calls before the situation forces their hand. Most don’t. Most wait too long, change too little, and then wonder why the organisation didn’t follow.

I’ve led change from the inside, under pressure, with real financial consequences attached. What separates the programmes that work from the ones that produce a slide deck and a lot of internal anxiety is almost always the same: clarity of diagnosis, speed of execution, and a leader who’s willing to be uncomfortable before everyone else is.

Why Most Organisational Change Programmes Don’t Work

The failure rate for large-scale organisational change is well-documented and consistently sobering. The reasons are rarely mysterious. Organisations commission change programmes when things are already difficult, then run them in a way that prioritises internal comfort over actual transformation. Workshops get scheduled. Consultants get hired. A vision gets articulated. And then, six months later, the org chart looks slightly different but the underlying problems are exactly where they were.

I’ve seen this from both sides. As an agency leader, I’ve been brought in to fix businesses that had already spent money on change that didn’t change anything. The consultants had done their work. The frameworks were in place. But nobody had made the call that actually needed making, which was usually about people, about accountability, or about a business model that no longer worked.

The organisations that get change right tend to share a few characteristics. They diagnose before they prescribe. They move faster than feels comfortable. And the person leading the change is genuinely prepared to be unpopular for a period of time in service of a better outcome. That last one is rarer than it should be.

If you’re thinking about how leadership and organisational change connect to your broader commercial strategy, the Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy hub covers the wider context, including how to structure teams and functions around growth rather than around legacy habit.

What a Real Diagnosis Looks Like

When I joined Cybercom, the business had serious problems. It was losing money. The cost base was wrong. Some of the team structures made no commercial sense. And there was a culture of avoiding the difficult conversation in favour of keeping things comfortable. Before I could change anything, I needed to understand exactly what was broken and why.

A real diagnosis isn’t a survey or a series of listening sessions, although both can be useful. It’s a forensic look at where the money goes, where the value is created, what the delivery margins actually look like by client and by service line, and which people are genuinely driving performance versus which ones are consuming resource without producing it. It’s uncomfortable work. Most leaders don’t do it thoroughly enough because the findings force decisions they’d rather not make.

In my case, the diagnosis was clear within the first few weeks. There were whole departments that weren’t covering their costs. There were pricing models that had never been designed to make money. There were senior people who were well-liked but not commercially effective. Once you know those things with certainty, you have an obligation to act on them. The question is how quickly and in what order.

BCG’s work on go-to-market strategy makes a related point about the importance of understanding your commercial position before committing to a direction. Their analysis of financial services go-to-market strategy highlights how organisations often design their structures and approaches around assumptions that no longer reflect market reality. The same is true inside organisations undergoing change. You have to interrogate the assumptions before you can build anything durable on top of them.

The Sequencing Problem: What to Change First

One of the most common mistakes in organisational change is getting the sequence wrong. Leaders often want to start with culture because it feels less confrontational than structure. They run values workshops and engagement programmes while the structural problems that are creating the cultural issues remain untouched. Culture doesn’t change in a workshop. It changes when the incentives change, when the accountability changes, and when the people who modelled the old behaviour are no longer in the room.

My view, based on what I’ve seen work and what I’ve seen fail, is that you have to deal with structure and people first. Not because culture doesn’t matter, but because you can’t build a healthy culture on top of a broken structure. Fix the architecture first. Get the right people into the right roles. Remove the people who are actively blocking progress, even if they’re popular. Then the cultural work has something to attach to.

At Cybercom, we cut staff, cut whole departments, and restructured teams, all while simultaneously pitching for new business and managing existing clients. That’s not a comfortable position to be in. But the alternative, which was to manage the change more slowly and carefully to avoid disruption, would have meant the business ran out of road before the transformation was complete. Speed matters. Not recklessness, but genuine urgency.

The sequencing also applies to commercial decisions. Changing pricing models, improving delivery margins, and restructuring how work gets done all interact with each other. If you change pricing without fixing delivery, you win better revenue but still lose money on execution. If you fix delivery without addressing pricing, you get more efficient at producing work that was never priced to make a profit. These things have to move together, which requires someone who can hold the whole picture at once.

The People Decisions Leaders Avoid

The hardest part of leading organisational change is almost always the people decisions. Not the redundancies, although those are difficult enough. The harder calls are the ones about people who are technically doing their jobs but are fundamentally misaligned with where the business needs to go. Senior people who’ve been there a long time. People who are well-liked but not effective. People who are effective in the wrong direction.

I’ve made every version of this mistake. I’ve held onto people too long because they were good at certain things, even when it was clear they weren’t going to be part of the solution. I’ve promoted people into roles they weren’t ready for because the alternative was a gap I didn’t know how to fill quickly. And I’ve seen leaders protect their inner circle through a change programme and then wonder why the rest of the organisation didn’t believe the change was real.

The people who resist change most visibly are rarely the ones you most need to keep. That’s a generalisation, but it holds more often than not. The people who are genuinely good and genuinely aligned will engage with the discomfort of change, ask hard questions, and in the end get behind it. The ones who can’t or won’t are usually telling you something important about their relationship to the status quo.

Hiring strong senior people during a turnaround is as important as cutting the drag. When we restructured at Cybercom, bringing in people who were better than what we had in certain roles was as significant a lever as anything else we did. It raised the standard, it changed the internal conversation, and it sent a clear signal about what the business was becoming rather than what it had been.

Communication During Change: What Works and What Doesn’t

Most leaders over-communicate process and under-communicate reality during organisational change. They send updates about the change programme, share timelines, run town halls. What they don’t do is tell people honestly what’s happening, why, and what the implications are. Silence doesn’t protect people. It creates the conditions for rumour, anxiety, and disengagement, which are far more damaging to productivity than the truth.

The principle I’ve tried to operate by is this: tell people what you know, when you know it, and be honest about what you don’t know yet. That sounds obvious. In practice, it means being willing to say things like “we’re restructuring this team and not everyone will have a role in the new structure, and we’ll have more clarity in two weeks.” Most leaders find that level of transparency uncomfortable. But people can handle difficult information. What they can’t handle is uncertainty that goes on for months while the leadership pretends everything is fine.

There’s also a difference between communicating the change and communicating the rationale. People will accept difficult decisions more readily if they understand the logic behind them. Not everyone will agree, but understanding is different from agreement. When I’ve had to make cuts that affected people I respected, the conversations that went best were the ones where I was direct about the commercial reality, not the ones where I softened it into something unrecognisable.

Growth strategy thinking, particularly around go-to-market execution, shares this principle. The organisations that execute well are the ones where people understand not just what they’re doing but why it matters commercially. You can read more on that in the growth strategy section of The Marketing Juice.

Installing Capability, Not Just Removing Cost

One of the most persistent misconceptions about organisational change, particularly in turnaround situations, is that it’s primarily about cost reduction. Cut enough cost and the business becomes viable. That’s true up to a point. But cost reduction without capability building just produces a smaller version of the same broken business.

The turnaround at Cybercom involved cutting staff and whole departments, yes. But it also involved improving process, changing pricing, improving delivery margins, and bringing in new business simultaneously. The swing from significant loss to significant profit, a movement of around £1.5 million, came from doing all of those things together, not from any single lever. The cost cuts created breathing room. The capability building created a business that could actually grow.

This is where a lot of change programmes fall short. They’re designed to reduce cost or improve efficiency, but they’re not designed to build the capability the organisation needs to perform differently in the market. BCG’s research on product launch strategy makes a related point about the importance of building go-to-market capability rather than just optimising existing processes. The principle applies equally to internal transformation.

Capability building during change looks like: hiring people who are better than the organisation is used to, investing in process and tools that allow the team to work at a higher level, and being clear about what standards of performance are now expected. It also means being willing to let people grow into new expectations rather than immediately replacing everyone who isn’t there yet. The balance between patience and urgency is one of the harder judgements in leadership.

When the Leader Is the Problem

This is the conversation that almost never happens in articles about organisational change, so I’ll have it here. Sometimes the reason the change programme isn’t working is the person leading it. Not because they’re incompetent, but because they’re too attached to the version of the business that created the problem, or because their instinct is to protect relationships rather than make decisions, or because they fundamentally don’t believe the situation is as serious as it is.

I’ve been in situations where I had to confront this in myself. There were decisions I delayed because I was uncomfortable with the personal cost of making them. There were people I protected longer than I should have because I valued the relationship. Recognising when your own instincts are working against the outcome you’re responsible for is one of the harder skills in leadership, and it’s one that doesn’t get discussed enough because it requires a level of candour that most people find difficult in public.

The external pressure test is useful here. If you had to explain every decision you’ve made in the last three months to your board, your investors, or your most commercially demanding client, would you be comfortable with the explanation? Not comfortable in the sense that the decisions were easy, but comfortable in the sense that they were the right calls given what you knew. If the answer is no, that’s worth sitting with.

What Sustainable Change Actually Requires

Sustainable organisational change requires three things that are harder to produce than most change frameworks acknowledge. First, a leader who genuinely understands the business at a commercial level, not just at a strategic or cultural level. Second, a pace of change that is faster than comfortable but not so fast that execution collapses. Third, a clear connection between the internal changes being made and the external outcomes the business is trying to achieve.

That third point is the one most often missing. Change programmes are frequently designed and communicated as internal exercises: we’re restructuring, we’re changing our culture, we’re improving our processes. The question that should drive every decision is: how does this make us better at serving our market and growing our business? When the answer to that question is unclear, the change is likely to be cosmetic.

Semrush’s coverage of market penetration strategy is a useful reminder that internal capability only matters in the context of external ambition. Organisations that go through significant change and come out the other side in a stronger position are almost always ones where the internal transformation was explicitly connected to a commercial goal, not just an operational one.

The other thing sustainable change requires is patience after the hard work is done. There’s a temptation, once the restructuring is complete and the new team is in place, to expect immediate results. But organisations take time to settle into new ways of working. The new structure needs time to function. The new people need time to build relationships and credibility. The leader’s job at that point shifts from making hard calls to holding the line and letting the changes bed in.

Growth strategy and organisational change are more connected than they’re usually treated. The way you structure and lead your organisation either enables or constrains your ability to execute in the market. For more on how these connect, the Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy hub covers the commercial side of this in depth.

About the Author

Keith Lacy is a marketing strategist and former agency CEO with 20+ years of experience across agency leadership, performance marketing, and commercial strategy. He writes The Marketing Juice to cut through the noise and share what works.

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