The Org Chart Changes Faster Than the Culture

A leadership transition can happen quickly.

The announcement goes out. Reporting lines change. A new leader assumes responsibility for the team.

On paper, the transition is complete.

In reality, the old organization may still be operating.

People still have established relationships. They know who they trust, who they go to for advice, which expectations historically mattered, which initiatives eventually disappeared, and how work actually gets done when the formal process is not enough.

That is what makes entering an established organization so different from simply taking over a function.

The org chart can change overnight. The culture cannot.

THE FIRST SIGNS ARE USUALLY SMALL

Resistance is easy to identify when someone openly says no.

Most of the time, it is not that obvious.

It can sound like this:

Yes, I’ll take care of it.

Then it does not get done.

You follow up.

Sorry, I forgot. I’ve got it.

And it still does not get done.

Or a reasonable request for information goes unanswered.

A new expectation receives cynical commentary rather than constructive challenge.

A process is agreed to in the meeting but quietly ignored afterward.

None of those things, individually, proves resistance.

People forget. Priorities collide. Communication can be unclear. New leaders can misunderstand how an operation works. Employees may have legitimate reasons for challenging a change.

But there is a point at which isolated incidents begin forming a pattern.

And experienced leaders may recognize those patterns quickly.

Early recognition is not premature judgment.

The mistake is not noticing the red flags.

The mistake is assuming they will simply work themselves out.

When several signals begin appearing together—cynicism, persistent negativity, missed commitments, unanswered requests, or repeated agreement without execution—they deserve to be surfaced to the appropriate leadership team.

A leader who is new to the organization brings experience and pattern recognition. Other leaders bring organizational history and context.

Together, those perspectives can help determine whether the behavior is isolated, historical, structural, or the beginning of something more significant.

The point is not to rush to judgment.

It is to make sure meaningful warning signs are understood before they become normalized.

Red flags are not verdicts. They tell leadership where to look.

RED FLAGS ARE INFORMATION

Leadership experience matters.

Someone who has spent years leading teams, transformations, implementations, and difficult organizational transitions develops pattern recognition.

That does not make every first impression correct.

It does mean that what people say, what they do, and what they repeatedly fail to do should not be dismissed simply because a leader has only been in the organization for a short time.

Cynicism matters.

Persistent negativity matters.

Repeated missed commitments matter.

Requests that continually require multiple follow-ups matter.

And the recurring “yes, I will” followed by no execution matters.

Research gives leaders reason to take some of these signals seriously.

A meta-analysis by Dan Chiaburu and colleagues examined organizational cynicism across prior studies and found meaningful relationships between cynicism, employee attitudes, and performance. The analysis also found that cynicism is shaped not only by individual disposition but by employees’ experience of the organizational environment. [1]

Research by John Wanous, Arnon Reichers, and James Austin went further, finding evidence that cynicism about organizational change can be learned. Ineffective leadership practices, lack of participation, and prior organizational experience were associated with greater cynicism, while cynicism itself was negatively related to motivation to continue supporting change efforts. [2]

That does not mean every cynical comment signals a major organizational problem.

It means leaders should pay attention when multiple signals begin appearing together.

A leader should test what they are seeing.

Look for repetition.

Ask questions.

Understand context.

Communicate meaningful patterns to the broader leadership team.

And if the pattern continues, be prepared with an appropriate response.

That response may involve communication, coaching, clearer expectations, process changes, additional support, or performance management.

The right response depends on what the evidence reveals.

But doing nothing is also a response.

And when significant patterns are repeatedly explained away, the organization can unintentionally teach people that the new expectations are negotiable.

YOU INHERIT MORE THAN A TEAM

When leaders enter an established department, they inherit much more than people and processes.

They inherit history.

They inherit relationships.

They inherit expectations about what management will tolerate.

They inherit previous initiatives that succeeded, failed, or simply disappeared.

And they inherit an informal organization that probably does not appear anywhere on the organizational chart.

That informal organization matters.

Julie Battilana and Tiziana Casciaro studied 68 organizational-change initiatives and found that a change agent’s position within informal organizational networks influenced the initiation and adoption of change. [3]

The practical implication is significant:

Authority and influence are not the same thing.

A title establishes formal responsibility.

It does not automatically establish trust, credibility, or influence.

Those have to be built.

But the reverse is also true.

Someone without formal authority can possess considerable influence because of tenure, expertise, history, relationships, or the trust others place in them.

That influence can help a transformation.

It can also slow one.

A leader therefore needs to understand not only the reporting structure but the organization behind the organization.

Who do people listen to?

Where does information travel?

Who carries institutional knowledge?

Who shapes how decisions are interpreted after the meeting ends?

And where does informal influence reinforce the organization versus compete with it?

CYNICISM SHOULD GET YOUR ATTENTION

Some cynicism is earned.

Employees may have lived through initiative after initiative that was announced enthusiastically and abandoned months later.

They may have been asked for input that was never seriously considered.

They may have watched leadership tolerate behavior that contradicted the standards being promoted.

Over time, employees can learn:

We’ve seen this before.

This won’t last.

Leadership will eventually move on to something else.

That history matters.

A leader entering the organization should want to understand it.

Why are people skeptical?

What happened previously?

What promises were made?

What failed?

What am I missing?

Those are legitimate leadership questions.

But there is another side to the equation.

Cynicism can explain behavior without excusing it.

An organization’s history may explain why an employee is skeptical of another transformation.

It does not justify undermining the transformation, withholding cooperation, repeatedly failing to meet commitments, or creating an environment in which every new expectation is greeted with negativity.

Understanding the past should inform leadership.

It should not give the past permanent control over the future.

THE PREVIOUS LEADER MAY STILL BE PRESENT WITHOUT BEING PRESENT

Leadership transitions become particularly complicated when a former leader has deep relationships with the team.

That does not require anyone to be deliberately interfering.

Employees naturally maintain relationships.

They may continue asking a former leader questions.

They may trust that person’s judgment.

They may compare the new leader’s expectations with what existed before.

And the former leader may possess institutional knowledge the new leader genuinely needs.

There is nothing inherently wrong with that.

In fact, ignoring that knowledge would be foolish.

But research suggests that the influence of previous leaders can persist well beyond their formal leadership tenure.

Jeffrey Bednar and Jacob Brown examined what they call “organizational ghosts”—former leaders whose influence remains embedded in how current members understand the organization, its values, practices, and history. Their research describes how remembered and imagined encounters with former leaders can continue to shape current organizational members. [4]

The terminology is memorable.

The practical point is simpler:

A leader can leave the position without completely leaving the culture.

That does not make the former leader the problem.

It means leadership transitions are more complicated than changing reporting relationships.

Habits remain.

Relationships remain.

Stories remain.

Comparisons remain.

And assumptions about how the department is supposed to operate may remain long after formal authority has moved elsewhere.

KNOWLEDGE TRANSFER AND SHADOW LEADERSHIP ARE NOT THE SAME

This distinction matters.

A new leader asking a former manager:

What is the history with this customer?

Why was this process designed this way?

What happened the last time this was attempted?

Those are reasonable questions. They are examples of using institutional knowledge to understand the organization more quickly and make better-informed decisions.

That is knowledge transfer—not shadow leadership.

That is good leadership.

An employee maintaining a professional relationship with a former manager is also not inherently problematic.

The concern begins when an organization effectively develops two places where leadership occurs.

One formal.

One informal.

A decision gets made in one place and is effectively renegotiated somewhere else.

An expectation is established, but employees continue operating according to what previously applied.

Information moves around the person accountable for the function instead of through the operating structure.

Employees begin determining which interpretation of direction they will follow.

At that point, the issue is not whom people talk to.

The issue is whether the organization has one operating model or competing ones.

The answer is not to police relationships.

It is to remove ambiguity.

Who owns the decision?

Who is accountable for execution?

Where should disagreement be raised?

What happens once a decision has been made?

What does completion actually mean?

People can maintain relationships.

Organizations still need clarity about accountability.

WHEN CHANGE IS THE ASSIGNMENT

Sometimes a new leader arrives because transformation is already underway.

A new technology platform is being implemented.

Expectations are changing.

Work that historically lived in email, individual knowledge, or informal processes is moving into shared systems.

The organization wants greater visibility.

Better data.

Stronger measurement.

Clearer ownership.

More consistent processes.

Greater accountability.

Or a fundamentally different customer experience.

In those situations, change is not necessarily the new leader’s personal initiative.

Change may be the assignment.

Experienced employees still possess knowledge a new leader cannot possibly have on day one.

They understand customer history.

They know where systems fail in practice.

They know why exceptions exist.

They remember previous implementation failures.

They know what appears straightforward on a process map but becomes complicated when a real customer is involved.

That knowledge should be actively sought.

But seeking institutional knowledge does not require pretending warning signs are invisible until some arbitrary amount of time has passed.

Experienced leaders may recognize patterns within days or weeks.

The responsibility is to take those patterns seriously while continuing to test what is driving them.

And understanding the current state cannot become an obligation to preserve it.

Transformation eventually requires people to work differently.

New systems require adoption.

New measurements create visibility that may not have existed before.

Shared platforms reduce dependence on individual knowledge.

Clearer processes reduce ambiguity.

Greater accountability may feel uncomfortable precisely because it changes what the organization historically tolerated.

The leadership challenge is not choosing between respecting the past and implementing the future.

It is understanding enough of the past to build the future intelligently without allowing the past to veto it.

THE HARDEST RESISTANCE OFTEN SAYS YES

Open disagreement is easier to work with.

When someone says, “I don’t think this will work,” they have given the leader something concrete to examine.

You can ask why.

You can test the concern.

You can change course if the concern is valid.

Or you can make the decision and explain why.

That is much clearer than silent agreement followed by no execution.

Test the concern.

Look at the evidence.

Change your mind if the employee is right.

Or make the decision and explain why.

The harder situation is agreement without execution.

The employee understands the request.

The employee says yes.

The employee commits to doing it.

And repeatedly, they do not.

Leaders can spend enormous amounts of energy trying to determine what that behavior means.

Are they resisting?

Are they overwhelmed?

Are they cynical?

Do they disagree but refuse to say so?

Are they waiting to see whether the leader follows through?

Do they believe the initiative will eventually disappear?

Is someone else influencing them?

Sometimes leadership will know.

Often it will not.

Eventually, the motive becomes less important than the pattern.

You do not need to prove resistance in order to manage repeated nonperformance.

That protects both the employee and the leader.

The leader does not need to accuse someone of motives that cannot be proven.

The employee is not judged based on what the leader assumes they believe.

The conversation stays with observable facts:

What was expected?

Was the expectation clear?

Was the employee capable of doing it?

Was appropriate support available?

Was the commitment made?

Was the work completed?

Has the same pattern occurred before?

That is much more defensible than trying to manage attitude or personality.

WHEN EMPLOYEE RESISTANCE MEETS ORGANIZATIONAL SUPPORT

There is another dimension to transformation that leaders cannot ignore.

A manager may correctly identify resistance within a team and still struggle to address it if the organization around that manager is not aligned.

Research on middle managers as change agents argues that managers play an important role in helping employees make sense of change and reducing resistance. But that role depends on organizational support, communication, guidance, and the development of the manager’s ability to lead change. [5]

That creates two different questions.

The first is:

What is happening within the team?

The second is:

Is the organization aligned behind the leader who is expected to address it?

A manager cannot reasonably be held accountable for changing behavior while other parts of the organization unintentionally weaken, reinterpret, or fail to reinforce the same expectations.

That does not mean Human Resources, senior leadership, and the operational leader should automatically agree on every interpretation or every corrective action.

They should not.

HR should challenge assumptions when appropriate.

Senior leaders should ask whether expectations are reasonable.

The operating leader should be prepared to show the pattern rather than simply assert that resistance exists.

But challenge and lack of support are not the same thing.

The organization needs a shared understanding of the behaviors being observed, the expectations that have been established, and how those expectations will be reinforced.

Otherwise, employees can learn quickly that accountability depends on which part of the organization they are speaking with.

And once that happens, resistance is no longer simply a team issue.

It becomes an organizational alignment issue.

LEADERSHIP HAS TO CLOSE THE DISTANCE

Changing an entrenched culture does not require rejecting everything that came before.

Some practices still have value.

Some relationships carry critical institutional knowledge.

Some skepticism may be rooted in legitimate experience.

Some resistance may expose a flaw in the proposed change.

And some behaviors simply may no longer fit where the organization is going.

Leadership has to distinguish among them.

That means asking questions without becoming paralyzed by them.

Listening without surrendering accountability.

Respecting experience without allowing tenure or history to become veto power.

Recognizing early warning signs and communicating meaningful patterns to the leadership team rather than waiting for them to become crises.

And ensuring that the leader responsible for transformation has appropriate organizational support once the evidence shows the pattern is real.

Not everyone has to like every change.

Not everyone has to agree with every decision.

But once expectations are clear, commitments matter.

Observe behavior early. Diagnose motive slowly. Act on patterns decisively.

The org chart may change in a day.

The culture will take longer.

Leadership is what closes the distance between the two.

— Steven Waltz

Explore the Thinking Further

Executive Brief #007 — When Resistance Doesn't Look Like Resistance

A concise look at how leaders can recognize early warning signs, distinguish isolated mistakes from patterns, and know when change management needs to become accountability.

Read the Executive Brief →

Sources

[1] Chiaburu, D. S., Peng, A. C., Oh, I-S., Banks, G. C., & Lomeli, L. C. (2013). Antecedents and Consequences of Employee Organizational Cynicism: A Meta-Analysis.Journal of Vocational Behavior, 83(2), 181–197.

[2] Wanous, J. P., Reichers, A. E., & Austin, J. T. (2000). Cynicism About Organizational Change: Measurement, Antecedents, and Correlates.Group & Organization Management, 25(2), 132–153.

[3] Battilana, J., & Casciaro, T. (2012). Change Agents, Networks, and Institutions: A Contingency Theory of Organizational Change.Academy of Management Journal, 55(2), 381–398.

[4] Bednar, J. S., & Brown, J. A. (2024). Organizational Ghosts: How “Ghostly Encounters” Enable Former Leaders to Influence Current Organizational Members.Academy of Management Journal, 67(3), 737–766.

[5] Buick, F., Blackman, D., & Johnson, S. (2018). Enabling Middle Managers as Change Agents: Why Organisational Support Needs to Change.Australian Journal of Public Administration, 77(2), 222–235.

About the Author

Steven Waltz is a Customer Operations and Customer Experience executive focused on service transformation, operational excellence, global delivery, AI-enabled operations, and enterprise customer experience strategy.