Let me guess.

You’ve sat in the room for the big announcement. New values. New mission statement. Maybe even a new logo. Everyone clapped. Everyone meant it.

And six months later? Same meetings. Same passive-aggressive Slack messages. Same person still not pulling their weight. Same you, wondering what you actually paid that consultant for.

If that’s familiar, I want you to notice something important: you’re not bad at this. You’re not the problem. You were just handed the wrong tool for the job and so was almost everyone else trying to fix their culture right now.

Research from McKinsey has found that roughly a third of organizational change efforts fail to achieve their goals. And in our work with companies across Fortune 500s, professional sports organizations, private equity, and healthcare over the past 20+ years, Dawn and I have seen exactly why, over and over again, regardless of industry or size.

So in our latest episode of the Empower Podcast, we pulled back the curtain on it.

Here’s the part that might sting a little: most culture change fails for reasons that have nothing to do with effort, budget, or how badly you want it. It fails because of how it’s built. Which means the good news is just as real as the bad news — once you see the actual mechanism, you can build it differently. Starting now.

Here’s what we unpack:

The values trap. Most companies have value statements that sound incredible — integrity, excellence, people first — and mean something different to every single person on the leadership team. As Eric puts it in the episode, “without a clear vision, values are gutless.” We walk through the exact shift from aspirational values to behavioral values — the specific, observable practices that actually show up in how people behave under pressure, not just what’s painted on the wall.

The leader-go-first problem.  Picture this: you’re asking your team to change. You’re asking them to show up differently, communicate differently, take more ownership. Now picture the gap between that ask and what they actually see you do on a hard Tuesday. That gap is where culture change quietly dies. We talk about why leaders cannot outsource culture change; not because outside help doesn’t matter, but because no team will out-grow a leader who hasn’t grown first.

The new-leader blind spot. If you’ve ever brought in a new CEO, director, or department head and assumed they’d just absorb the existing culture; we explain why that assumption almost always backfires, and what to do instead.

The four stages no one warns you about.  Including the stage we call “the pit”; the exact point in every real transformation where it feels like nothing is working, where boards get impatient, and where most great leaders get pulled out of their role right before the breakthrough they were about to have.

Imagine for a second what it would feel like to walk into your next leadership meeting with a shared language your whole team already understands; where accountability means the same thing to everyone in the room, where your values aren’t a poster but a daily practice, and where you’re not patchworking together advice from twelve different podcasts and hoping something sticks.

That’s what this episode hands you. Not more inspiration. A map.

Listen to the episode #65 on Apple + leave a review with your favorite takeaway.

Talk soon,

Eric

P.S. If you’re a leader trying to scale past yourself and you’re tired of reinventing the wheel; reply to this email. Let’s talk about whether our leadership accelerator is the shortcut you’ve been looking for. No pressure, just a conversation.