Why People Believe 'People Don’t Change'

They can. But not without a system that supports the intention.

Year One

I ran a comprehensive 360 process with the CEO of a mid-sized firm in Asia. Not a questionnaire. In-depth interviews across the senior team. His people told me everything.

The feedback was clear: decisions made in a vacuum, minimal communication, a leadership style that left the team guessing rather than contributing. The firm was coming off a difficult year, and to his credit, the CEO responded. He heard the feedback. Changed his behavior. More transparency. More responsiveness. The team started to trust that this time would be different.

Year Two

We ran the process again. This time, deeper patterns emerged about the more senior, tenured members of the leadership team. People committed to change. They agreed to be transparent about their own development plans. Progress felt real.

Then the market turned in their favor. Performance pressure eased, and with it, the CEO’s motivation to stay open. The old patterns returned. Operating in a vacuum again. Communication dried up. Responsiveness disappeared.

The culture ended up worse than where we started in Year One. Not because the CEO was a bad leader. But because hope followed by reversion is more demoralizing than never trying at all. The team had seen what was possible. Then they watched it vanish.

Nobody said a word.

The Proposal They Didn’t Want

After two rounds of qualitative feedback, I couldn’t run the same process a third time. The team had nothing left to say that hadn’t already been said. Worse, after the reversion, they had realized that being totally honest wasn’t worth the risk. Why stick your neck out again if nothing changes? Why let people know you’re unhappy if there’s no benefit?

I proposed something different: a Leadership Growth Profile. A 360 diagnostic designed to identify which reactive leadership behaviors are most prevalent across the full team, benchmarked against a global database of 70,000 leadership surveys. Not another round of interviews. A tool built to show the organization what patterns of fast, stress-driven thinking are undermining its ability to achieve sustainable performance, continuous learning, and a workplace people actually want to be part of.

They balked.

“We already know what the problem is with each person. We don’t need a diagnostic.”

That single sentence told me everything. This was an organization where accountability was something people discussed, agreed was important, and then quietly avoided. The diagnostic wasn’t rejected because it was unnecessary. It was rejected because it would make the truth impossible to sidestep.

They didn’t want the truth. They wanted plausible deniability.

Commitment Is Not a Leadership Behavior Change Strategy

Here is what most organizations get wrong about leadership development: they treat behavior change as an individual willpower problem.

A leader gets feedback. They commit to changing. For a while, things improve. Then real life reasserts itself. Stress. Urgency. Or the opposite: a good quarter that removes the urgency to grow. The old patterns return because they were never replaced by a system. They were replaced by intention.

Intention without infrastructure is a New Year’s resolution. It works until it doesn’t.

The question is not whether a leader is willing to change. Most are, especially under pressure. The question is whether the organization has built anything that holds that change in place when the pressure lifts.

Behavior Change Architecture: Role Modeling, Rituals, and Rewards

After two decades of working with leadership teams across Asia-Pacific, I have found that sustainable behavior change requires three interlocking systems. I call it behavior change architecture. Without all three, reversion is not a risk. It is a certainty.

1. Role Modeling

Culture is not set by one person. It is set by every culture carrier the organization watches. If the CEO becomes more transparent but the rest of the senior team keeps operating the way they always have, the culture does not shift. People read the full leadership team, not just the person at the top.

2. Rituals

You manage what you measure. And in most organizations, leadership behavior is the one thing nobody measures in real time.

An annual engagement survey is a balance sheet. It is a snapshot of a moment in time. It tells you where you were, not where you are. It is not a tool that helps you track the ongoing performance of leadership at regular intervals. In startups, we talk about running experiments and failing fast. Why aren’t we doing the same with leadership development?

Rituals create that cadence. Biweekly pulse check-ins with a single, direct question: “Is this leader showing the behavior they committed to?”

The principle is simple: perception is reality. If the team perceives that a leader is changing, then we have progress. If they don’t, either the leader isn’t changing, or the change isn’t noticeable. Both are problems worth knowing about. Both require a different response. And both become impossible to ignore when visibility replaces silence.

3. Rewards

What behaviors get recognized, promoted, and rewarded? This is the question most organizations refuse to answer honestly.

If a leader delivers results through intimidation and still earns the promotion, the organization has told everyone what it actually values. If someone who avoids difficult conversations is celebrated as "easy to work with," the message is equally clear. The stated values say one thing. The reward system says another. People follow the rewards every time.

Rewards alignment means ensuring that stated values and actual reinforcement point in the same direction. Without it, you get organizational silence: leaders mistaking “no complaints” for “no problems.” The team has simply learned that speaking up changes nothing.

What This Looks Like in Practice

When I work with a leadership team, the engagement does not start with a workshop. It starts with a diagnostic. I need to understand which reactive behaviors are showing up across the team, what patterns of fast, defensive thinking are being modeled, and what those patterns are costing the business before I can design an intervention that will stick.

From there, each leader makes public commitments to specific responsive behaviors: transparent, growth-oriented, relational. Not vague aspirations. Observable actions their team can see and measure.

Then the rituals begin. Biweekly pulse check-ins. A scoreboard that tracks whether the team perceives real change. Coaching support for the leaders who are struggling. The system does the work that willpower cannot.

This is not about catching people out. It is about building the conditions where better leadership becomes the path of least resistance.

If this sounds familiar, let’s talk. Not about workshops. About building a system where behavior change actually sticks.

Book a conversation with Mac

Mac Ling is a Master Executive Coach and founder of Coaching Collective. He works with leadership teams across Asia-Pacific to build cultures where performance and care coexist. He is Teaching Faculty at HARTHILL and publishes The Collective Brief.