Culture Change Doesn’t Fail at the Top or the Bottom...

I was about 3 years into my middle management leadership journey when I felt like I was fighting an uphill battle with my team culture.

The vision for shaping the team culture was there. I read the books that highlighted how to show up as a quality leader. But I felt crushed by so many thing that were outside of my control.

So when it came to me reshaping cultural values, I felt the weight of the organization getting heavier on my shoulders.

Like a lot of us, middle managers are asked to:

• Execute strategies they didn’t design

• Translate values they didn’t write

• Deliver outcomes without clear authority

• Absorb pressure from above and below

Then, when culture initiatives stall, guess who gets blamed?

If you are like me, you begin to see your many well-intentioned culture change efforts quietly fade into posters, slogans, and half-remembered initiatives.

After taking some time to reflect, and through trial and error, I want to offer a different way to think about culture change, one that finally puts the middle manager at the center, where the real work happens.

A Simple Model for Culture Change (And Why It Matters to You)

Think of culture change as an inverted funnel:

• Personal Commitment

• Staff / Organizational Commitment

• Organizational Pillars

• Tactics

Most organizations try to start at the bottom, rolling out tactics, metrics, and programs. Most leaders focus on a class or workshop to help address their team culture.

Yes, this things are necessary to track and train workplace culture values, but I believe they should not be the first action we need to take.

Here’s what each layer actually means for you as a middle manager.

1. Personal Commitment: Where Culture Really Begins

Culture change starts before policies, trainings, or KPIs.

It starts with how you show up.

When you think about you and your behavior, ask yourself:

• How do I respond when tension shows up on my team?

• Do people feel safe bringing concerns to me or do they manage around me?

• When pressure increases, do my values stay visible or quietly disappear?

Your team doesn’t experience the organization directly. They experience you. You are essentially the representation of the organizational values and culture. Because of your connection to the team, you have the greatest impact on their employee experience.

Is that too much pressure? Maybe. But what if we saw that challenge as an opportunity to make a great impact on others?

Before culture changes at scale, people watch whether their direct leader:

• Models accountability

• Listens without defensiveness

• Follows through

• Handles conflict with intention

If culture feels “off,” this is the most uncomfortable, but most powerful, place to look.

2. Staff / Organizational Commitment: Translating the Big Picture

Most organizations have mission statements. Many have values. Some even have DEI or culture commitments (even if they may have been eradicated over the last couple of years…)

But very few translate them into daily leadership expectations.

That translation work often falls to you. So instead of interpreting the statement by itself, have the statement modeled through you.

Through your role and actions, define:

• “This is how we run meetings.”

• “This is how we make decisions.”

• “This is how we give feedback.”

• “This is what’s not acceptable here.”

I’ve learned that middle managers clarify the culture. When teams struggle, we may see it as rebellion, but what if we reframed it as ambiguity?

When I pumped the breaks to breakdown any confusion, I started to see more engagement and connection from the team.

Clarity is one of the most underrated leadership skills in the middle that you can bring to the team.

3. Organizational Pillars: Aligning Without Authority

You may not control the organization’s mission, vision, or strategy. But you do influence how closely your team aligns with them.

This is where many middle managers quietly disengage:

“I didn’t write these values, so I’ll just focus on getting the work done.”

When we don’t take ownership here, culture erodes in that gap.

Let’s be intentional with how we question our culture and alignment. We can ask questions like:

• Where does our work align with our stated values?

• Where are we cutting corners, and why?

• What tradeoffs are we normalizing that we never talk about?

You don’t have to fix misalignment alone, but noticing it and naming it is leadership.

That gap analysis can help determine what your next step can be to keep the culture strong.

4. Tactics: Where Culture Becomes Visible

Now we get to the point where we measure our cultural goals.

As we’ve navigated the framework, and we understand the gaps within our culture, we can start asking ourselves the next set of questions:

• What gets measured?

• What gets rewarded?

• What gets ignored?

• What gets addressed quickly, and what lingers?

For middle managers, we know that culture lives in our meeting norms, decision-making processes, feedback loops, and how priorities shift under pressure.

These small leadership choices compound faster than you think. We can see how well we are doing through the regular touch points through out the day.

Going down this path will ensure we are consistent with our culture change for our teams.

A Question Worth Sitting With

Here’s the reflection I want to leave you with:

You know me, I believe that leadership is more of a perspective than a position. If we are to be culture changers leaders, we don’t need to be at the top of the organization to institute change.

But we do need to be intentional in the middle.

And that work, often unseen, often unacknowledged, is what makes everything else possible.

What do you think?

If you’re a middle manager navigating competing expectations, unclear priorities, and the quiet weight of holding teams together, this is exactly who the Leader’s Lens newsletter is for.

Quick fixes rarely work. We know leadership should never be performative.

But leadership should be filled with thoughtful, practical ways to lead well right where you are.

You are in a great position where you are. Let’s make an impact on our team culture together!

— Ray

PS. This resource is designed to give you the leadership posture and behavior needed to impact your organizational culture!