What's the biggest gap in your organization right now?
You can do all the right work and still have nothing change.
I mean that seriously. I've worked with leaders who did the hard personal work, were honest about their blind spots, got better at giving and receiving feedback, worked on having hard conversations, and improved at actually listening to their teams.
And then they went back to a system built for a different way of operating.
Same performance review process. Same meeting structure. Same hiring criteria. Same incentives rewarding the same behaviors they were trying to move away from.
And (shocker!), within a few months, the old patterns came back because the poor structure of the business won.
Why company structure matters
This is the hard part of our coaching that most leaders really underestimate. Personal development is hard. Culture shifts are hard. When you put the work into those, it’s rewarding and contributes to better business outcomes. But you can’t just have personal and cultural growth with a structure that contradicts them. If your processes, systems, and policies are still built around the “old way,” that's what you’re running.
Think about your onboarding: Most companies spend two weeks telling new employees what the organization values and then they hand them a performance review template that measures something completely different. Or perhaps they drop new folks into a reporting structure that makes it impossible to act on any of the values. It’s important to remember that the system is always louder than the speech.
It’s the same idea with any major change initiatives. A Harvard Business Review study found 70% of large-scale organizational change efforts fail because the systems weren't rebuilt to support the new direction or new strategy of the company. People got the memo and were on board, but the org chart, the budget, and the incentives stayed the same.
Structure is more than your org chart
Business structure encompasses all the things behind-the-scenes like your hiring process and what you're actually selecting for, your performance reviews and what they reward, your meeting cadence and who gets to speak in the room. It even goes so far as your budget and what it truly funds. Yes, it does also include your org or accountability chart, but it goes deeper, too.
All of those components send a signal about what matters at the company and your employees read that signal fast and accurately. In fact, they probably read that faster than a slide deck on your core values!
So the real question is whether how you operate actually reflects what you say you value in practice. These aren’t aspirational values, it’s what you truly value through your actions on a day-to-day basis. Then the real work comes in when you’re willing to change the structure of your business to match.
This is exactly where change stops being a conversation and starts being a reality. And we can help with that!
We’re on your side,
Lauran Arledge
Founder, Bold Font
PS: I keep coming back to "Ordinary People" by John Legend this week. The whole song is about how change doesn't happen in one big moment. It's slow and unglamorous. It requires showing up the same way over and over before anything actually shifts. That's what this work feels like too: quiet and consistent. Will you give it a listen this week? (If you’ve missed any songs, you can check out our full playlist here.)
You can't change the system overnight… but you can change how you show up.
Bold Font cohorts are nine months of real, personal work. One hour a week, a small group of peers, and a dedicated coach. You'll get clarity on your values, sharpen how you communicate, build trust, and learn to lead in a way that's actually sustainable.
The leaders who change organizations don't do it by changing the org chart. They do it by knowing who they are, communicating with integrity, and building trust that holds under pressure.
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