How to Make Culture Change Stick
By Joe Newsum
You have done the hard creative work. You have built great commitments, whether core, operating, or activity commitments. Now comes the part where almost everyone fails: getting the whole organization to actually adopt them, until people own the commitments and the culture sustains itself. After doing this many times, I have learned it comes down to concentrating on one domain at a time and then doing three things relentlessly. You drive people to see the commitments, use them, and you reinforce them relentlessly. That is how culture change sticks.
The Framework
Concentrate on one domain. Then drive three things until the commitments take hold: people see them, people use them, and you reinforce them. Do that, one domain at a time, and people come to own the commitments and the culture sustains itself.
The stakes are brutal: roughly 70% of large-scale change programs fail to reach their goals. That number has held for decades, and it is not because organizations lack frameworks, launches, or effort. It is because the effort is spread thin and never driven to the depth where behavior actually changes. The framework on this page exists to beat that number. Source: McKinsey.
Most culture change fails because it is spread too thin, broad and shallow across everything at once, so nothing reaches the depth that real adoption requires. The framework here is the opposite: deep and narrow, then driven relentlessly until people genuinely make the commitments their own. Let me walk through all three parts.
Why Culture Change Is So Hard
Before the framework, it helps to be honest about what you are up against, because most people badly underestimate it. Culture change is a kind of mental guerrilla warfare. Every person you are trying to change arrives carrying thousands of cumulative years of inherited histories, behaviors, educations, and experiences. You are not writing on a blank page. You are trying to overwrite all of that, in hundreds or thousands of people at once, and the old ways do not surrender easily.
You do not win that fight with one big frontal assault. A splashy launch, a values poster, an all-hands, those wash off in weeks. You win it the way guerrilla campaigns are won: with focus, precision, and relentlessness. You concentrate your forces on one piece of ground, you stay on it far longer than feels comfortable, and you do not let up until it is genuinely yours. Then you take the next piece. The framework is exactly that discipline, made practical.
First, Concentrate: Pick One Domain
Before anything else, you decide where to focus. Trying to change the whole culture everywhere at once is the single most common reason culture change fails. Instead, you concentrate on one domain at a time, one area or activity where culture visibly lives, such as how the organization runs its meetings, and you drive the commitments there until the new way becomes self-sustaining. Then you move to the next domain and compound. I call this discipline Threshold Concentration, and it is the foundation everything else sits on.
Concentration is the decision that makes the rest possible. You cannot drive deep adoption everywhere at once, there is not enough leadership attention, communication, or energy to go around. By concentrating on one domain, you give the commitments the focus they need to cross a tipping point and hold on their own. Read the full method behind Threshold Concentration, including the science of why it works.
Then Drive Adoption: See Them, Use Them, Reinforce Them
Once you have concentrated on a domain, adoption comes down to three things, done relentlessly and together. People have to see the commitments and use them, and you have to reinforce them. These are not steps in a sequence, they happen at once and feed on each other. Do all three well enough, in one domain, and people stop complying and start owning the commitments. That is the goal: not behavior you have to keep pushing, but commitments people make their own.
1See them They become real
People believe the commitments are real only when they see them. They need to see them modeled by their leaders, who they watch more closely than anyone, and by their peers. They need to see them work, to watch them produce better meetings, better decisions, better outcomes, because proof is what turns compliance into belief. And they need to see people held to them, respectfully called back when they fall short, because a standard nobody enforces is not a standard. When people see the commitments lived, working, and upheld, they stop wondering whether this is genuine.
2Use them Until it is second nature
Then people have to actually use the commitments, in every situation where they apply, until it becomes second nature. Sometimes that means saying the shared language out loud, in a meeting, in feedback, in how a decision gets framed. Sometimes it means applying the commitment in how an email is written or how a one-on-one is run. Using the commitments is what moves them from words on a page into how people genuinely think and act. The more people use them, the more natural they become, until using them takes no effort at all.
3Reinforce them From every direction
Even when people see the commitments and use them, old habits pull them back. What keeps them going is reinforcement from every direction at once: recognition when people live the commitments, the feedback they get and the feedback they give to others, performance reviews and town halls that reflect the commitments, and the social pressure of a team that has bought in. Enough reinforcement, sustained long enough, and the commitments stop being effort and become simply how things are done.
Do those three, and people come to own the commitments. When people see the commitments, use them until they are second nature, and are reinforced from every direction, ownership follows. They hold each other to the commitments without being told, defend them, and pass them to new hires. That is the threshold: the culture now protects itself, and the change no longer needs you to push it. It sustains itself.
Pick a commitment you are trying to drive. Are people seeing it, modeled, working, and upheld? Are they using it until it is second nature? Are you reinforcing it from every direction? Wherever the answer is no is where the work is.
The Engine: The Levers That Drive Adoption
The three actions are what you are driving people to do. The levers are how you do it. There are six of them, and most serve more than one of the three actions, which is why you pull them all at once rather than one at a time. Their power comes from working together. This is where most of the real work lives, and where a lever has its own deep-dive page, the title links to it.
Make the commitments unmissable. Tell the story of why they matter, repeat the language relentlessly, and weave it into every channel until people cannot avoid hearing it. The full playbook, from launch story to the steady tsunami of small wins, lives on its own page.
Leaders visibly live the commitments, every day, in how they run meetings, give feedback, and make decisions. People do what leaders do, not what they say. If leaders do not model it, nothing sticks. Why leadership modeling is the make-or-break lever gets its own deep dive.
Capability
Teach people how to actually do it. Even when people believe in a commitment, they will fall back to old habits if they do not feel capable. Give them the tools, the practice, and the how, so living the commitment is achievable, not just aspirational.
Make the standard real by holding people to it, and make it peer-to-peer, where anyone can respectfully call anyone to the commitment, regardless of level. Accountability is what turns a nice idea into a genuine norm. The open accountability model has its own page.
Recognition
Celebrate the commitments being lived, loudly and often. Catch people doing it right and make it visible. Recognition reinforces the behavior and signals to everyone what the culture truly values.
Aligned incentives
Make sure the formal systems point the same way. Performance reviews, promotions, and rewards should all reflect the commitments. When what gets rewarded matches what you are asking for, adoption accelerates. When it does not, people follow the incentives, not the commitments.
The power is in pulling them together. Any one lever alone is weak. Communication without modeling is just talk. Modeling without accountability fades. Incentives without capability frustrate. Research on behavior change consistently finds that using the levers together, rather than one at a time, dramatically raises the odds the change lasts: McKinsey’s work on transformations shows organizations that deploy all the influence actions together are far more likely to succeed than those that use a few. Concentrate them all on one domain and you reach the threshold far faster. Source: McKinsey, The Four Building Blocks of Change.
What It Looks Like When It Works
Here is the framework running in a real engagement, one you will recognize if you have read the meeting culture page, because this is the implementation story behind it.
Case: A Fortune 500 Takes One Domain Past the Threshold
Concentration, all six levers, one bump, and a culture that now holds itself
The company had launched strong core commitments to its whole workforce, and faced exactly the question this page answers: how do you make them stick? We concentrated on one domain, meetings, because every employee lives in them, which makes it the fastest place for people to see the commitments working. Then we pulled every lever at once. Communication: town halls and a rollout that told the story of why, in the company’s own language. Modeling: the executive team adopted the meeting commitments first, visibly, before anyone else was asked to. Capability: every team got the training, the examples, and the practice reps. Accountability: anyone could ask “what is the goal of this meeting?” regardless of rank. Recognition celebrated the teams living it, and reviews reflected it.
The bump came mid-rollout, and it proved the framework rather than breaking it: adoption was uneven across functions, and the diagnosis was a single sagging lever, modeling, because some functional leaders drove the standard consistently and others let it slide. We calibrated the leaders, the lever came back up, and within months the meeting culture had crossed the threshold, best practice, self-sustaining, driving millions in time savings and, frankly, probably billions in better decisions. Then, with the first domain holding itself, the effort moved to the next: feedback. That is the compounding move, one domain at a time, each one permanent before the next begins.
| A real engagement, genericized © Stratechi 2026. All rights reserved. | STRATECHI.COM |
Putting It Together
The whole framework is simple to hold and hard to do. Concentrate on one domain. Drive people to see the commitments and use them, and reinforce them, pulling every lever at once: communication, modeling, capability, accountability, recognition, and aligned incentives. Get one domain to the point where people own the commitments and it sustains itself, then move to the next and compound. Do that, and culture change stops being the thing that fails and becomes the thing that builds, domain by domain, into a culture that holds on its own.
Every lever matters, but one of them decides the outcome. Read next: Leadership and Culture Change, why modeling from the top is the lever that makes or breaks all the others.
Work with Joe
Want to make your culture change actually stick?
Building great commitments is only half the work. The other half, the half almost everyone underestimates, is driving real adoption: getting people to see the commitments and use them, and reinforcing them until they stick. I help organizations and leaders concentrate on the domain that matters most and pull every lever, communication, modeling, capability, accountability, recognition, and incentives, to drive the change past the threshold where it becomes self-sustaining. Whether you are rolling out an enterprise transformation or changing how your own team works, this is where I spend my time.
If you want a culture change that holds on its own instead of fading the moment you stop pushing, let’s build it.
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Joe Newsum: McKinsey alum, former CEO, COO, CFO, and CMO, and creator of Culture by Commitment, working directly with Fortune 500 CEOs and executive teams to build cultures that hold.
Part of the Culture Guide
This is one piece of a complete, free guide to building a high performance culture. Start at the Culture Guide hub for the full system, or jump to the ideas most worth your time:
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Culture Strategy ›
The strategy: deriving the culture your business needs from your True North, your advantage, and the behaviors that win.
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Culture by Commitment ›
The method behind this page: how shared commitments, not values, actually build culture.
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What Is Organizational Culture ›
The big idea: it was never values, it was always language. Why most culture work fails.
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How Language Creates Culture ›
The mechanism: language shapes thinking, thinking shapes behavior, behavior becomes culture.
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The Four Types of Culture Commitments ›
The framework: the four kinds of commitments that build culture, and where meetings fit in.
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How to Make Culture Change Stick ›
The proof: concentrate, model, and reinforce until the new way holds on its own.
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Frequently Asked Questions
How do you make culture change stick?
You concentrate, then you drive adoption. First, focus on one domain at a time rather than trying to change everything at once, which is how the new language reaches the depth it needs to take hold. Then, within that domain, you drive three things: people see the commitments modeled, working, and upheld; they use the commitments until it is second nature; and you reinforce them from every direction. You do all three by pulling a set of levers, communication, modeling, capability, accountability, recognition, and aligned incentives, all at once. Do it well enough and people come to own the commitments.
What is the See Them, Use Them, Reinforce Them framework?
It is a framework for getting an organization to truly adopt its commitments. Once you have great commitments, the work comes down to three things: people see the commitments modeled, working, and upheld; they use the commitments until it is second nature; and you reinforce them from every direction. Do all three in one concentrated domain and people come to own the commitments, so the culture sustains itself.
Why concentrate on one domain at a time?
Because spreading the effort across everything at once is the single most common reason culture change fails. When energy is diffused, no behavior gets the focus and repetition it needs, and the old culture absorbs each small push before the next arrives. Concentrating on one domain lets the new language reach a tipping point where it becomes self-sustaining, after which you move to the next domain and compound the gains.
What are the levers of culture change?
The reinforcing forces that drive adoption: communication that makes the language unmissable, modeling by leaders who visibly live it, capability that teaches people how to actually do it, accountability where anyone can hold anyone to the standard, recognition that celebrates the language being lived, and aligned incentives so performance reviews, promotions, and rewards all point the same way. Pulling them together, not one at a time, is what makes change take hold.
How is this different from the McKinsey Influence Model?
The McKinsey Influence Model, tell me, show me, guide me, teach me, is the gold standard for behavior change and maps closely to several of these levers. What it does not include is focus. It tells you to pull all the levers but not where to concentrate them. This framework adds the missing discipline: concentrate the levers on one domain at a time and drive it past the threshold, rather than spreading them thin across everything.
How long does it take to make culture change stick?
Less time than most expect, when the effort is concentrated. Because you focus on one domain at a time and drive it to a tipping point rather than diffusing energy everywhere, a single domain can become self-sustaining in months rather than years. The full culture takes longer because you move domain by domain, but each one holds on its own once people see, use, and are reinforced for the commitments there.