Most culture change initiatives are actually designed well. The strategy is usually right, the values are genuine, the communications plan exists, and yet somewhere between the announcement and the expected cultural shift, things quietly slide. The real problem is that many of these initiatives are led poorly.
More often, the problem isn’t the people resisting the change, tt’s the people leading it.
Culture is defined less by what gets said in a town hall and more by what gets done under pressure like in a restructure, in a difficult decision, or in the moment when someone raises a concern and the leader either makes it safe or makes it costly. People notice when the people at the top behave in ways that contradict the values they’re asking everyone else to adopt. When people draw conclusions from these behaviours, managing resistance to culture change becomes exponentially harder. That’s because the resistance HR is being asked to manage is often a rational response to what employees have already observed.
Michael Werle, Managing Director of HR Consulting Australia and a member of the Mentorloop Industry Advisory Council, works with Australian organisations on exactly these challenges: from founder-led businesses where culture is everything, to complex operations where it’s quietly eroding. “Leaders clearly need to be able to model and be exemplars for the behaviour and culture that they’re setting,” he says. What happens when they don’t is usually left for HR to figure out.
Why does culture change fail?
Culture change most commonly fails when leaders are unable or unwilling to model the behaviours they’re asking others to adopt. Values without consistent leadership behaviour are aspiration, not culture. And that gap is most visible in the moments of highest pressure: restructures, difficult decisions, and times of organisational uncertainty.
The Problem With Values on a Wall
Values statements don’t change cultures but most organisations treat them as if they do.
The gap between what an organisation says it values and how its leaders actually behave is one of the most consistent, and most avoidable, sources of cultural resistance. When a restructure contradicts a stated commitment to fairness, when feedback is championed publicly and punished privately, when decisions align with convenience rather than stated principles, leadership credibility erodes and psychological safety follows. People learn that speaking up about inefficiencies, misalignment, poor decisions, or leadership behaviour that contradicts stated values carries real risk and they stop doing it.
That’s not on your people. That’s a systems and leadership problem that requires HR to name it clearly, even when it’s uncomfortable.
The organisations that navigate culture change well are the ones that treat values as operational requirements. As Michael puts it, “Saying one thing and then doing something completely different in a restructure is just going to blow up what you’re trying to do around culture.” Culture gets truly tested at the pressure points and that’s exactly where leaders need to be most deliberate about how they show up.
For a deeper look at what a well-constructed high-performance culture looks like when the foundations are right, check out The HR Leader’s Guide to Building a Sustainable High-Performance Culture.
Turning Values Into Behaviour: What It Actually Takes
Most organisations have values but not many have the documented behaviours that show what those values look like in practice. Culture change either takes root or stalls in that space between the aspiration to action.
When Michael Werle’s team HR Consulting Australia works with a new organisation, one of their first steps is a culture audit focused specifically on this gap. Are the values and their associated language embedded into policies, performance conversations, goal setting, and recognition programs? Or do they live only in the communications materials like the website, the onboarding deck, and the poster in the kitchen no one really pays attention to?
Where that bridge doesn’t exist, the next step is a values and behaviours workshop with the executive team. The process starts with a Barrett values assessment to surface what leaders actually share, then moves into collaborative exercises (e.g. above/below-the-line, start/stop/continue, team effectiveness) that get the group to define the specific, visible behaviours associated with each value. The executives write these themselves and that ownership is necessary. When leaders build the framework, they’re far more likely to model it. When they receive it from HR or an external consultant, they’re more likely to treat it as someone else’s project.
One practical downstream benefit: when behaviours are clearly defined, employee recognition becomes a genuine cultural lever. You can recognise people specifically for demonstrating a defined behaviour that everyone knows is the expected standard instead of superficial recognition for things like tenure, visibility, or just being easy to manage. That specificity is what separates a recognition program that relies on popularity and one that reinforces culture.
When values are properly embedded, recognition becomes the mechanism that makes them visible. Michael Werle shares how one of his clients brought this to life with a simple, low-cost program built around their four core values.
Not All Resistance Is Sabotage, and Getting This Wrong Is Expensive
One of the most common mistakes in managing resistance to culture change is treating all resistant behaviour as the same problem. It’s not, and the intervention that works for one category can actively backfire in another.
Michael’s framework breaks resistance into three meaningfully different types:
- Anxious and uncertain: These are the people who are resistant because change threatens something they value like job security, status, influence, or familiarity. They’ve often seen previous initiatives fail or simply haven’t been consulted on why this one is happening. The response needed here is clarity and genuine involvement, not pressure.
- Disagrees, but influenceable: These people have real concerns about the direction being taken who could be brought around with evidence, consultation, or a modified approach. It’s important to note that this is healthy professional dissent. Organisations that suppress it will make worse decisions and those that engage it often find constructive and useful feedback worth incorporating.
- Actively undermining: This is the group of people who are deliberately working against the change: spreading damaging narratives, withholding information, publicly agreeing while privately working to derail progress. This is real sabotage, and it requires a meaningfully different response.
Not all resistance to culture change looks the same. Responding to them all in the same way is one of the most common and costly mistakes HR leaders make. Michael Werle breaks down how to tell the difference.
Michael reminds People & Culture practitioners that “Healthy cultures allow some disagreement. Not everybody needs to agree with every initiative. Constructively challenging things is appropriate and can certainly improve decision making.”
What HR professionals need to actively work on is recognising the line between healthy dissent and active sabotage. Questioning a decision respectfully, raising risks, offering alternatives, and challenging assumptions are the behaviours of someone who cares about the outcome. But undermining a leader behind closed doors, spreading rumours, encouraging others not to participate, and deliberately withholding information are completely different in kind, not just in degree.
Getting it wrong in either direction carries a huge cost. Treating healthy dissent as sabotage destroys trust with your most engaged people who are willing to tell you hard things. On the other hand, treating sabotage as dissent signals to everyone watching that there are no meaningful consequences for working against change. Both signal travel fast.
How Should HR Respond When Resistance to Culture Change Emerges?
If there’s one consistent pattern in how culture change fails at the execution level, it’s this: leaders spot a problem, feel uncomfortable acting on it, and wait, hoping it resolves itself. (It rarely does)
For employees who are anxious or uncertain, early involvement and honest communication can shift their position before it hardens. For employees demonstrating more deliberate resistance, a structured conversation is more effective than either confrontation or avoidance: observe the specific behaviour, name the impact, set clear expectations, offer appropriate support. That sequence keeps the conversation anchored in behaviour rather than character, which makes it both easier to have and more likely to land.
That structure: observing the behaviour, naming the impact, setting clear expectations, and offering support; is also the foundation of a broader accountability culture, one where these conversations happen regularly rather than only when things have gone wrong. Building that culture is a different challenge, but it starts with the same habits.
“Having those courageous conversations early, and not allowing resistance to linger,” is how Michael frames the obligation:
- Note what you’re observing
- Name the impact
- Set the expectation
- Provide the support.
For genuine sabotage, the stakes are higher because the organisation is watching how you respond, not just the individual involved. That means acting promptly and visibly enough that the broader team registers it without turning it into a public spectacle. Document what you’ve observed, have a direct conversation that names the specific behaviour and its impact, and be explicit that continued undermining behaviour will result in formal disciplinary action. How you handle it signals what the real culture is. Leave it unaddressed, and the norm shifts. The people who were on the fence will draw their own conclusions based on the organisation’s response.
| Resistance Type | What it looks like | What's driving it | How to respond |
|---|---|---|---|
| Anxious & uncertain | Withdrawal, reluctance to engage, lots of "what if" questions, concerns raised privately but not openly | Fear of job loss, status, or disruption to familiar ways of working; may have seen previous change initiatives fail | Involve early, explain the why clearly, give them a concrete role in the change. Reassure rather than pressure. |
| Disagrees, but influenceable | Raises objections openly, pushes back in meetings, questions the approach or direction. Often the most informed sceptics in the room. | Genuine concerns about strategy, timeline, or impact; not opposition for its own sake | Take concerns seriously, consult rather than inform, be open to modifying the approach where valid. This voice often improves outcomes. |
| Actively undermining | Spreads negative narratives, withholds information, publicly agrees while privately working against the change | May feel bypassed or threatened, but at this point the cause matters less than the behaviour. | Act promptly: document the behaviour, name the specific impact in a direct conversation, and be explicit that continued undermining will result in formal disciplinary action |
Where Mentoring Fits Into This
Culture change is fundamentally a relational problem and that’s what makes mentoring one of the most practical (and most underused) tools available to HR leaders navigating it.
In the 70-20-10 learning model, the 20%, learning through others, is exactly where values get demonstrated rather than described. Mentors show what it looks like to give difficult feedback well, to challenge a decision respectfully, to navigate uncertainty without abandoning what matters. Those behaviours compound across an organisation when the conditions are right.
For HR leaders working within constrained L&D budgets, which Michael notes is almost always the case, mentoring delivers this kind of relational, behaviour-modelling learning at a cost formal programs rarely match. This works best when it’s embedded into the culture itself, not bolted on as an afterthought program.
Michael Werle is the Managing Director of HR Consulting Australia and a member of the Mentorloop Industry Advisory Council. With over 25 years of experience across listed companies, government, and small-to-medium businesses, Michael specialises in values-based HR practice, culture change, and workplace compliance.
Frequently Asked Questions About Managing Resistance to Culture Change
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What is the most common reason culture change fails?
Culture change most commonly fails because leaders don't model the behaviours they're asking others to adopt. Values statements create aspiration, but culture is defined by how leaders actually behave, particularly in high-pressure moments like restructures, difficult decisions, and periods of uncertainty. When leadership behaviour contradicts stated values, trust erodes quickly and resistance follows.
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What is the difference between resistance and sabotage in the workplace?
Resistance can range from anxiety and uncertainty through to respectful disagreement and constructive dissent. Sabotage is specific: it involves deliberately undermining a change initiative by spreading damaging narratives, withholding information, or working against the change while publicly appearing to support it. The distinction matters because each requires a meaningfully different response from HR.
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How do you manage resistance to culture change?
Start by identifying what kind of resistance you're actually dealing with. Employees who are anxious or uncertain need clarity, involvement, and a genuine reason to trust the process. Employees with substantive concerns deserve consultation and honest engagement. For active sabotage, act early: document the behaviour, have a direct conversation that names the specific impact, and be explicit that continued undermining will result in formal disciplinary action. Inaction signals that the behaviour is acceptable — and that message spreads faster than any intervention will.
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How do you embed values into everyday workplace behaviour?
Start with a gap analysis: are your values embedded into policies, performance conversations, goal setting, and recognition — or only in communications materials? Where they're not operationalised, a values and behaviours workshop with your executive team is the practical starting point. The key is ownership: leaders who define the specific behaviours are far more likely to model them consistently than those who receive them from someone else.
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What is a values and behaviours workshop?
A values and behaviours workshop is a structured process, typically run with an executive or senior leadership group, to define what an organisation's values look like in specific, observable practice. It usually involves a personal values assessment, collaborative exercises like above/below-the-line and start/stop/continue, and a process of defining the visible behaviours that sit under each value. The goal isn't documentation. It's leadership ownership.
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How does psychological safety connect to culture change?
When leaders fail to model the culture they're asking others to adopt, psychological safety breaks down. People learn that speaking up about misalignment, poor decisions, or leadership behaviour that contradicts values carries real risk. That chilling effect undermines the open, honest culture most organisations are trying to build, and contributes directly to the psychosocial compliance obligations HR leaders are now navigating under new workplace health and safety regulations.
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