10/08/2026
Nearly 72% of culture-change initiatives produce no meaningful improvement in trust, engagement, or retention after a year.
Companies pour real time and money into these efforts. Then they hand managers a set of talking points and a couple of training sessions, and wonder why nothing sticks.
Elenna Mosoff, director of Experiential Design, names the reason:
"When something is solely driven by a top-down initiative without manager buy-in or engagement, people don't feel included or valued for the wisdom and expertise they bring from the vantage point of their lived experience and role function."
Managers are the crux of any culture change. They account for more than 70% of why employees are engaged, productive, and on mission. They translate culture for their teams every day. Yet the standard playbook treats them as message-passers, responsible for staying on-script with HR-approved language.
The problem: a manager can take a team only as far as they've gone themselves.
Talking points don't change that. Coach training does.
Here's what shifts when a manager goes through it:
They stop leading from deficit. Most managers see themselves as a pile of gaps to fill with more frameworks and scripts. Coach training builds on a different belief, that people are already creative, resourceful, and whole. They stop bolting on what's missing and start drawing on what's there.
They get curious instead of directive. Rather than steering a conversation toward a predetermined answer, they open it up. People think out loud, push back, and arrive somewhere together.
They shift from being to becoming. As Elenna puts it, they "stop playing whatever they believe is the 'role' of manager, and become the person they are who happens to be managing as part of their role."
Culture lives in those moments. How a manager gives feedback, delegates, sits with tension instead of rushing past it. Not in quarterly all-staff meetings.
As Elenna shared, "People want to grow. People want to be seen. People want to be encouraged... And if they can do that at work, even better."
When enough managers lead this way, culture stops being something rolled out from the top. It becomes something shared and lived.
