Forget culture change for everyone. Performance starts with the few who lead the many.

By Kevin Keohane, Managing Partner, Brandpie US:

In a business landscape under pressure to transform fast, the biggest barrier is trying to move all of the parts at once. To resolve internal tensions and unlock performance, focus on your high-impact catalysts and let their momentum pull the rest forward.

It’s a well-known fact that transformation is a rarely smooth process—and culture change is no exception. The internal journey toward alignment, agility, and performance is riddled with friction. Leaders are often told they need total buy-in across every level of the organization. But what if that pressure for comprehensive change is part of what’s holding transformation back?

Not every part of a business moves at the same pace. And in organizations already navigating the monumental tension between legacy systems and future ambitions, the idea of a full-system cultural reboot is often unrealistic and unnecessary.

What if the key to real transformation isn’t total alignment but strategic selectivity, concentrating on where momentum already exists?

The problem with “comprehensive” change

Organizational change management literature is filled with calls for alignment across all levels—executives, middle managers, and front-line employees. It’s a compelling idea in theory, but in practice, it often leads to generic efforts that lack focus, urgency, or measurable traction.

One of the most persistent blockers to this kind of change is the “frozen middle”—a term coined to describe middle management who, despite being crucial to implementation, often resist change. Why? Because they are overloaded, risk-averse, and frequently excluded from the why behind the transformation.

A McKinsey analysis recently confirmed that change initiatives stall in the middle at the intersection of strategy, process, and people.

Kylie Sayer’s research into change management found that middle managers actively resist transformation efforts like Business Process Re-engineering when they perceive them as a threat to their power or routine. This resistance isn’t malicious—it’s survival. And it’s why pushing change “from the top” or “across the board” often results in passive compliance rather than meaningful adoption.

The result? Culture programs that are too slow, too expensive, and too easily derailed.

The alternative: start where it matters most

What if, instead of targeting everyone, we were more intentional and selective?

Specifically, the 10–15% of people whose roles, mindsets, and visibility have outsized influence on how things get done—and what gets valued—in your organization. These are the senior leaders who set the behavioral tone, sales team stars who carry your brand promise to clients, frontline operators who model key behaviors, and program managers who translate strategy into results. These are also the people whose actions speak louder than slogans.

When a global manufacturing company faced pressure to modernize operations, it didn’t attempt a sweeping, company-wide reset. Instead, it zoomed in on frontline supervisors and safety leaders—those with day-to-day influence over culture on the ground. Through behavior-based coaching, peer accountability, and targeted recognition, they shifted mindsets around ownership and operational discipline, resulting in a 30% reduction in recordable incidents. The transformation took hold not because everyone changed all at once, but because the right people changed first.

Similarly, a leading technology firm chose to spark culture change not through lofty values campaigns, but through performance. By identifying high-performing units and investing in their leadership autonomy and development, they created localized blueprints of success that others across the business aspired to emulate. As one senior leader put it, “We focused on where the heat already was—and poured gasoline on it.” Their approach didn’t require broad mandates. It allowed performance to pull the culture forward—naturally, credibly, and fast.

A playbook to power performance through culture

1. Identify your cultural catalysts Use data to find the 10–15% of people who influence how work gets done. Look at leadership impact, employee network analysis, sales team performance, operational data, customer satisfaction scores. Who people listen to matters more than who sits on the org chart.
2. Empower the few, loudly Give them support, freedom, and responsibility. Pilot new behaviors, tools, or ways of working with them. Provide visibility and senior backing. Let them co-create what “better” looks like and recognize their wins publicly.
3. Amplify their success Make the early adopters the story. Turn their results into internal case studies. Use storytelling and internal comms to shift what’s “normal.” As social norms shift, more people follow—not because they’re told to, but because they want to be part of what’s working.
4. Scale what’s working Only after proof, not before. Once you’ve built critical mass, you can scale through playbooks, peer-to-peer coaching, and targeted onboarding. Change that is real, visible, and successful sells itself.

Anticipating (and answering) the critics

“What about inclusion? Doesn’t this create a two-tier culture?” It could—but it doesn’t have to. The key is transparency in how high-impact teams are selected, and clarity that everyone will benefit from improved outcomes.

“Isn’t this risky? What if the initiative fails?” The real risk lies in continuing to burn time, money, and energy on culture programs that try to do everything—and accomplish nothing. Selective transformation lowers risk by concentrating resources and demonstrating proof before scaling.

“How do we sustain it?” Sustainability comes from social proof, not policy. When people see that different behaviors drive real performance, they adapt. Build systems of feedback, recognition, and coaching to keep the fire burning.

The Data Is Clear: High-Performance Culture Is Contagious

Gallup’s research shows that when managers are actively engaged, teams are 59% more likely to be engaged themselves. And McKinsey has found that in organizations with strong cultures, 81% of employees feel more aligned with organizational purpose, versus 23% in weak culture environments.

Yet only 23% of employees strongly agree that they can apply their organization’s values to their work every day (Gallup, 2023). This disconnect is a symptom of overly generic culture programs that fail to connect with actual roles and realities.

The answer isn’t broader alignment. It’s targeted credibility.

Lead loud, start small, scale fast

The tension between what needs to change and what’s ready to change isn’t a problem—it’s the pathway. Comprehensive culture programs often stall because they ignore this tension. But by starting where performance already burns bright, leaders can turn internal belief into external results, fast.

Just as any major business transformation demands both bold direction and tactical patience, cultural transformation succeeds when it embraces the unevenness of progress. Identify your catalysts. Back them visibly. Let their impact spark belief in others.

Because in business—and in culture—critical mass changes everything.

Written by: Editor