Leading in a Culture of Change: What Most Leaders Get Wrong

Leading in a culture of change is not about having all the answers before the room settles. It is about making clear decisions with incomplete information, keeping teams oriented when the ground shifts, and knowing the difference between change that matters and change that is just noise. Most leaders struggle not because they lack vision, but because they mistake motion for direction.

The organisations that handle change well share a common trait: their leaders do not treat uncertainty as a temporary inconvenience. They build it into how they operate. That is a structural choice, not a personality trait.

Why Most Leaders Misread What Change Actually Requires

There is a version of change leadership that gets talked about constantly in business writing: the visionary who sees around corners, rallies the troops, and steers the ship through the storm. It is a compelling image. It is also largely fictional.

In practice, leading through change is far more mundane and far more demanding. It requires repetition over inspiration. It requires clarity over charisma. And it requires an honest read of where the business actually stands, not where leadership wants it to be.

I learned this early. My first week at Cybercom, there was a brainstorm for Guinness. The founder had to leave for a client meeting and handed me the whiteboard pen without ceremony. I had been in the building for five days. My internal reaction was something close to panic. But I took the pen. Not because I had a brilliant idea ready to go, but because the moment required someone to hold the room together. That is what change leadership looks like most of the time: not a grand strategic pivot, but a decision to stay in the room when it would be easier to step back.

The mistake most leaders make is conflating change management with change theatre. They announce transformations. They commission frameworks. They run workshops. And then they wonder why the culture did not shift. Culture shifts when behaviour shifts, and behaviour shifts when the signals from leadership are consistent over time, not when a new strategy deck lands in everyone’s inbox.

The Context Problem: Why Relative Performance Matters More Than Absolute Numbers

One of the most dangerous traps in any organisation going through change is the comfort of positive numbers in isolation. If your revenue grew 10% last year, that feels like progress. It might not be. If your market grew 20% in the same period, you lost ground. You just did not notice because you were looking at the wrong benchmark.

I have seen this play out in agency settings more times than I can count. A client would present their year-end results with satisfaction. Revenue up, margins stable, team headcount growing. And then you would pull the category data and find that their nearest competitor had doubled their market share in the same window. The absolute numbers looked fine. The relative position was deteriorating. That is a change leadership problem disguised as a performance story.

Understanding market penetration in context is one of the clearest diagnostics available to any marketing or commercial leader. It forces the question: are we growing, or are we just surviving while the market does the heavy lifting? That distinction matters enormously when you are deciding how aggressively to change course.

Organisations that build honest context into their performance reviews are far better equipped to lead change proactively. They see the signals earlier. They make decisions before the crisis forces their hand. The ones that do not tend to change reactively, under pressure, with less runway and fewer options.

If you are thinking through how change leadership connects to commercial strategy and go-to-market positioning, the broader frameworks are worth exploring. The Go-To-Market & Growth Strategy hub covers the structural thinking that underpins how organisations move from planning to execution, including how to frame change in a way that holds commercial logic.

What Agile Scaling Actually Looks Like Inside an Organisation

There is a lot of language in circulation about agility. Most of it is aspirational. The reality of scaling an organisation while maintaining the ability to change direction is considerably harder than the frameworks suggest.

When I was running iProspect, we grew the team from around 20 people to over 100. That kind of growth changes everything: the communication structures, the decision-making speed, the cultural coherence. What works at 20 people breaks at 50. What works at 50 breaks again at 100. The challenge is not just managing the growth. It is maintaining the clarity of purpose that made the organisation worth growing in the first place.

Forrester has tracked how organisations perform on agile scaling journeys, and the consistent finding is that most businesses underestimate the cultural dimension. They invest in process and technology but leave the human infrastructure, the norms, the decision rights, the communication rhythms, largely unchanged. Then they are surprised when the new processes do not embed.

Agility at scale requires three things that most organisations treat as optional: explicit decision rights (who can decide what without escalation), a tolerance for imperfect decisions made quickly over perfect decisions made slowly, and a feedback loop that is short enough to catch errors before they compound. Without those three, agile is just a word on a slide.

The Communication Layer Is Where Change Leadership Usually Breaks Down

In my experience, most change initiatives do not fail because the strategy was wrong. They fail because the communication was insufficient, inconsistent, or arrived too late. Teams do not resist change because they are inherently conservative. They resist it because they cannot see the logic, cannot trust the process, or cannot find their place in the new picture.

I have run enough turnarounds to know that the first thing you need to fix is almost never the thing that looks broken on the surface. When I have walked into loss-making businesses, the P&L problems are usually downstream of a culture problem, and the culture problem is usually downstream of a communication problem. Leaders who have stopped explaining their thinking. Decisions that arrive without context. Teams that have learned to wait rather than act because acting without clarity has burned them before.

The fix is not a town hall. It is not a culture survey. It is consistent, honest communication at every level of the organisation, repeated until it becomes the norm rather than the exception. That means leaders explaining not just what is changing but why, and not just once but continuously, until the reasoning is so embedded that the team can articulate it themselves.

One thing I have found consistently useful: the quality of a leader’s communication is often inversely proportional to how comfortable they are with uncertainty. Leaders who need to project certainty tend to over-communicate confidence and under-communicate context. That is exactly backwards. Teams can handle uncertainty. What they cannot handle is the sense that leadership is not being straight with them.

Change in Go-To-Market Strategy: When to Hold and When to Move

One of the most consequential decisions in any commercial organisation is knowing when a go-to-market strategy needs to change and when it needs more time to work. These are not the same question, and confusing them is expensive.

I have managed significant ad spend across a wide range of industries, and the pattern I see repeatedly is this: organisations abandon strategies too early when results are slow, and hold onto strategies too long when results are declining. Both errors share the same root cause: the absence of a pre-agreed framework for what good looks like and what the decision triggers are.

BCG’s work on go-to-market launch planning makes a point that applies well beyond the biopharma context it was written for: the organisations that execute best are the ones that have defined their success metrics and their decision points before launch, not during it. When the pressure is on and results are ambiguous, the temptation to reinterpret the data is enormous. A pre-agreed framework removes that temptation.

The same logic applies to pricing decisions during periods of market change. BCG’s research on long-tail pricing in B2B markets highlights how organisations often leave significant value on the table not because their strategy is wrong but because they change course before the strategy has had time to work through the full complexity of the market. Patience and rigour are not opposites of agility. They are preconditions for it.

The discipline of knowing when to hold is particularly important in marketing, where the pressure to show short-term results can push teams toward tactical changes that undermine long-term positioning. I judged the Effie Awards for several years, and one of the clearest patterns in the work that won was strategic consistency. The campaigns that delivered real commercial impact were rarely the ones that pivoted every quarter. They were the ones that found a clear position and held it long enough for it to compound.

Building a Team That Can Operate Through Uncertainty

The most valuable thing you can build in a period of sustained change is not a better strategy. It is a team that can operate effectively when the strategy is still being worked out. That is a different kind of capability, and it requires different things from leadership.

When I was building teams in agency environments, the people who performed best under pressure were rarely the ones with the most impressive credentials. They were the ones with high tolerance for ambiguity, strong commercial instincts, and the judgment to know when to escalate and when to make the call themselves. Those traits are partly dispositional, but they are also cultivated by the environment leadership creates.

If your team has learned that making a decision without full information is punishable, they will wait for full information. In a fast-moving environment, that means they will always be behind. The leader’s job is to create conditions where reasonable decisions made with incomplete information are expected and supported, and where the learning from those decisions feeds back into better decisions next time.

This is not about lowering standards. It is about being honest about the conditions under which people are operating. Demanding certainty from a team working in an uncertain environment does not produce certainty. It produces paralysis, or worse, the performance of certainty while the real uncertainty goes unacknowledged.

Tools that support growth and operational clarity can help teams stay grounded during periods of change. Having the right infrastructure in place, from analytics to experimentation, matters. Growth tools that support rapid testing and iteration are worth knowing, but they are only as useful as the culture that deploys them. Technology does not fix a communication problem.

What Culture of Change Actually Means in Practice

The phrase “culture of change” gets used loosely. It tends to mean different things to different people. In my experience, what it actually describes is an organisation where change is not treated as an emergency or an exception, but as the default operating condition. That is a meaningful distinction.

Organisations with a genuine culture of change share some observable characteristics. They review strategy regularly and without defensiveness. They treat competitive intelligence as a routine input, not an occasional exercise. They have short feedback loops and act on what those loops tell them. And their leaders model the behaviour they expect: they change their minds publicly when the evidence warrants it, and they do not treat consistency of position as a virtue in itself.

The healthcare sector is a useful case study in how industries that resist change eventually face it at scale. Forrester’s analysis of go-to-market struggles in healthcare devices and diagnostics illustrates how structural rigidity in commercial models creates compounding problems when market conditions shift. The organisations that adapt fastest are not the ones that saw the change coming earliest. They are the ones whose internal culture was already set up to respond.

That is the core of it. You cannot build the capacity to change in response to a crisis. You have to build it before the crisis, in the ordinary course of running the business. By the time the market forces your hand, you want the muscle memory already in place.

For those working through how change connects to growth planning and commercial execution, the Go-To-Market & Growth Strategy hub is a useful reference point. The articles there address how strategy, structure, and market positioning interact, which is exactly the terrain that change leadership has to handle.

The Quiet Signals That Tell You Change Is Working

Leaders often look for dramatic evidence that a change initiative is taking hold. A shift in the numbers. A change in team energy. A moment where the new way of working clicks into place. Those moments happen, but they are rarely the most reliable signal.

The quieter signals are more telling. When team members start making decisions that reflect the new priorities without being asked. When the questions in meetings shift from “what are we supposed to do?” to “here is what I think we should do.” When disagreement becomes more direct and less political. When people stop waiting for permission to act on things that are clearly within their remit.

These are the signs that the culture has actually shifted, not just the language around it. They take longer to appear than most leaders want to wait. But they are far more durable than any metric you can put on a dashboard.

The inverse is also true. The quiet signals that change is not working are equally informative: the same questions recurring in every meeting, the same decisions being escalated that should be made at the team level, the same people disengaging in the same ways. If you are paying attention, the culture tells you exactly where it stands. Most leaders just are not listening at the right frequency.

Leading in a culture of change is not a programme you run. It is a practice you maintain. It requires more consistency than creativity, more honesty than optimism, and more patience than most leadership narratives allow for. But done well, it is the single most durable competitive advantage any organisation can build.

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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