Your Culture Is Reinforcing Something. Is It Reinforcing the Change?

Organizations communicate what they want people to do in countless ways.

They announce new strategies. Introduce new processes. Train employees on new systems. Define new leadership expectations. Ask teams to collaborate differently, make decisions differently, or serve customers differently.

Then employees return to work.

And there, they encounter another set of messages.

They see which behaviors managers recognize. They notice what leaders ask about. They learn which metrics determine success, which shortcuts are tolerated, and which accomplishments receive attention. They watch colleagues succeed, and they pay attention to what those colleagues did to get there.

Those signals may never appear in a communication plan.

Yet they can be far more powerful than the messages that do.

This is one of the most important realities of organizational change: every organization is already reinforcing behavior. The question is whether it is reinforcing the behavior the change requires.

When the answer is yes, new ways of working gain strength.

When the answer is no, employees are placed in an impossible position. They are asked to embrace the future while continuing to operate in an environment designed for the past.

Employees Believe the System

Imagine an organization asking leaders to become more collaborative.

The message is clear. Leadership workshops reinforce the expectation. Executives speak about breaking down silos and working across functions.

But performance measures continue rewarding individual business-unit results almost exclusively. Leaders who protect their own resources outperform those who share them. Decisions continue being made within functional boundaries, and employees see little evidence that collaboration influences how success is evaluated.

What will people believe?

Probably not the presentation.

They will believe the system.

This is not cynicism. It is rational behavior. Employees learn what an organization truly values by observing the consequences attached to different choices.

The same dynamic appears in nearly every type of change. An organization introduces a new process but celebrates employees who find ways around it to deliver faster. Leaders ask managers to coach more frequently but continue filling their calendars so completely that coaching becomes nearly impossible. A company promotes innovation while treating unsuccessful experiments as failures. Employees are encouraged to use a new system, yet leaders continue requesting information through the spreadsheets the system was designed to replace.

In each case, the formal message points toward the future while the organizational environment quietly points backward.

Eventually, the environment wins.

Old Behaviors Rarely Disappear on Their Own

One reason sustaining change is difficult is that existing behaviors usually developed for a reason.

They fit the previous environment.

Processes, measures, incentives, relationships, and routines grew around them. Employees learned how to succeed within that system, often becoming remarkably skilled at doing so.

Then the organization changes direction.

The desired behavior changes immediately on paper. The environment surrounding that behavior often changes much more slowly.

This creates a period in which employees may genuinely want to adopt the new way but discover that the old way remains easier, faster, safer, or more rewarding.

That is a dangerous moment for adoption.

If leaders interpret the return of old behaviors simply as resistance, they may miss the more important question: What is the organization still doing that makes the old behavior make sense?

Sometimes the answer is a formal reward or performance measure. More often, it is subtler.

A manager praises speed while the new process initially requires more time. A leader repeatedly makes exceptions for high performers. Teams are told to collaborate, but deadlines make independent action more practical. Employees are encouraged to raise concerns, then watch what happens to the first person who does.

Culture is built through moments like these.

So is resistance.

Reinforcement Is Bigger Than Recognition

When people hear the word reinforcement, they often think of recognition.

Recognition certainly matters. A manager acknowledging an employee who is practicing a new behavior can send a powerful signal about what the organization values.

But reinforcement is much broader.

It is everything in the environment that makes a behavior more or less likely to continue.

It includes what leaders model, what managers discuss, what the organization measures, what performance systems reward, what processes make easy, what policies require, and what teams begin expecting from one another.

This is why reinforcement cannot wait until the end of a change initiative.

By the time employees are expected to behave differently, they are already encountering signals that either support or compete with that expectation.

The strongest change strategies anticipate those signals.

They ask not only, “How will we teach people the new way?” but also, “What will happen when they try to use it?”

Will their manager support them?

Will the process allow it?

Will the measures recognize it?

Will senior leaders model it?

Will colleagues see it as the new standard or as an optional experiment?

Those questions move reinforcement from a final project activity to something much more important: part of the design of the change itself.

What Leaders Tolerate Is Also Reinforcement

Positive reinforcement receives a great deal of attention during change, but leaders also communicate through what they allow.

Suppose an organization has introduced a new process and most employees are making the effort to adopt it. A small number continue using the old approach because it is familiar. Their managers know this but choose not to address it.

Other employees notice.

The lesson may not be what leadership intended.

Instead of hearing, “This is how we work now,” employees begin hearing, “This is how we would prefer you to work, but ultimately it is optional.”

That ambiguity can erode adoption remarkably quickly.

Accountability does not need to mean punishment. Often it begins with curiosity. Is the employee struggling because the new process is unclear? Is there a capability gap? Is the system creating an unnecessary barrier? Does the person understand the expectation?

Good leaders distinguish between someone who cannot yet perform the new behavior and someone who simply chooses not to.

But eventually, expectations must mean something.

If the organization continually rewards, accommodates, or ignores the old behavior, it should not be surprised when the old behavior survives.

Culture Is Where Change Either Sticks or Slips

We often speak about culture as though it were something abstract.

During change, it becomes remarkably concrete.

Culture is the collection of signals that tells people, “This is what matters here.”

Those signals appear in meetings, performance conversations, leadership decisions, informal recognition, metrics, promotions, resource choices, and everyday interactions. Individually, they may seem small. Collectively, they shape behavior far more effectively than another announcement ever could.

This is also why sustainable change eventually stops feeling like change management.

The new behavior becomes embedded in ordinary organizational life.

Managers reinforce it because it is part of good performance. Leaders model it because it reflects how the organization operates. New employees learn it without knowing there was ever another way. Systems and processes support it naturally.

The organization no longer needs extraordinary effort to sustain the change because the environment itself has become the reinforcement.

That is when change begins becoming culture.

And it raises an important question for every leader overseeing transformation:

If employees ignored everything you said about the change and simply watched what your organization rewarded, measured, modeled, and tolerated, what would they believe you really wanted them to do?

LaMarsh Perspective

Reinforcement is not something that begins after implementation. It should be designed as part of the change from the beginning. Employees make sense of organizational priorities through the signals surrounding them: leadership behavior, manager expectations, performance measures, recognition, consequences, processes, and everyday experiences. Sustainable adoption becomes possible when those signals align with the desired state rather than continuing to support the current state. Successful change does not ask people to fight the organization in order to behave differently. It reshapes the environment so the new behavior can become the natural way of working.

Leadership Reflection

Consider one behavior your organization is currently asking people to change.

Now look beyond the communication and training surrounding it.

What happens when employees actually demonstrate the new behavior? What do their managers reinforce? What do leaders model? What gets measured and recognized? Which old behaviors are still being rewarded, intentionally or unintentionally?

And perhaps the most revealing question:

Is your organization making the new way easier to sustain, or is it still making the old way easier to choose?