You can feel the difference here. Most leaders stop too soon.
In We’re All In, I described one of the most instructive cultural turnaround stories I have come across: the New Aetna.
In the early 2000s, Aetna Healthcare was in serious trouble. It was losing roughly a million dollars a day. Its relationships with customers and physicians were steadily eroding. Its culture, long known internally as “Mother Aetna,” had become risk-averse, tolerant of mediocrity, and deeply resistant to change. When John Rowe became the company’s fourth CEO in five years in late 2000, employees steeled themselves for yet another exhausting transformation effort.
What Rowe did differently was a new approach. Rather than walking in with a new strategy and demanding a cultural shift to support it, he and his leadership team went out and listened. They visited employees at all levels. They sought out people who were well-connected, culturally sensitive, and widely respected. They asked questions and used what they heard. After a few months when Rowe spoke at a town hall meeting about restoring employee pride in the company, he received a spontaneous standing ovation.
That standing ovation told him everything. What it said to him was the majority of people in the company wanted to be part of something they could believe in. They were willing. They were ready. They just needed adaptive leadership dedicated to meet them there.
By the mid-2000s, Aetna’s operating income had swung from a $300 million loss to a $1.7 billion profit. Its stock price had risen nearly tenfold. The culture had not been replaced. It had been redirected, with the best of what it had always been there brought forward and the rest left behind.
That is what a Coalition of the Willing represents when the leadership gets it right. A significant majority of people aligned around a mission they believe in, moving together in the same direction.
What Level 4 Actually Looks Like
The Coalition of the Willing culture is the first level where the majority of the organization has genuinely bought in. Not a few isolated individuals carrying the flag while everyone else watches. A true majority, people who have aligned their personal goals and aspirations with the organization’s direction and who show up every day prepared to contribute to something larger than themselves.
The Azimuth is real here. The mission statement isn’t a relic. It establishes the who, what, and why of the organization in language people can connect to. Leaders ask forward-looking questions: Where are we going in the next six months? Do we have milestones established to get there? Real strategic planning takes place and is revisited periodically, even if it doesn’t happen on a precise annual cycle.
People in a Level 4 culture see themselves as having a career, not just a job. That distinction matters more than it might sound. A person with a job is focused on today’s tasks. A person with a career is invested in the organization’s trajectory, which means they think about how their work today connects to where the team is going tomorrow. That investment is the foundation of genuine commitment. More and more people are “All In.”
Where Level 4 Pulls Ahead of the Pack
Three things happen at Level 4 that you simply do not see at Levels 1 through 3, and each of them is significant.
The first is real mentorship. For the first time, senior leaders are systemically investing in the development of future leaders. Not episodically, not as a program that runs for a quarter and then fades, but as an ongoing practice built into how the organization operates. Young leaders are given expanded responsibility and someone above them who is paying attention to how they grow. Development is a leadership mandate. This investment changes what people believe is possible for themselves inside the organization. The career mentality takes hold.
The second is meaningful empowerment. Trust begins to function as a foundational principle at Level 4. Decision mechanisms are established and junior leaders are authorized to use them. Senior leadership is willing to underwrite honest mistakes, which is a significant shift from Levels 1 through 3 where mistakes are punished rather than treated as learning opportunities. When a leader knows that acting in good faith and falling short will result in a debrief rather than a demotion, they develop the confidence to lead rather than wait. They act within the intent.
The third is active listening with the intent to understand. Leaders in a Level 4 culture have learned to ask effective questions and use what they hear, just as John Rowe and his team did at Aetna Healthcare. There are feedback mechanisms in place at multiple levels. One-on-one conversations happen with real frequency and genuine focus. Leaders circle back to confirm understanding. The communication flows in both directions, which means the senior team has a much clearer picture of where the organization actually is versus where they think it is.
The Plateau That Traps Good Organizations
Here is the truth about Level 4, and it is the most important insight I can share with you about this stage of the journey. Most organizations that reach it stop climbing.
Not because they decide to stop. Not because they lose interest in building a great culture. They stop because Level 4 feels so much better than where they were that the urgency to keep going dissipates. The retention numbers improve. Engagement is up. Leaders are becoming better leaders. The strategic planning process is alive and well. By almost any measure they would have applied two or three years earlier, the leaders and teams are succeeding.
And they can be justifiably proud. Level 4 is a genuine achievement. I want to be clear about that.
But Level 4 still has gaps. The mission and values are understood but not universally lived. Empowerment is real but not yet instinctive. Mentorship happens but depends too heavily on individual relationships rather than being embedded in how the organization operates. Doing the right thing when no one is looking is common, but it is not yet the unquestioned standard.
The organizations that stay at Level 4 tend to be the ones where leadership declares victory a little too early. They look around at how far they’ve come and conclude that this is good enough. And good enough, in today’s competitive environment, has a way of slowly becoming not enough. There is a distinct gap between good and great, too.
The Distance Between Level 4 and Level 5
The gap between Level 4 and Level 5 is not as wide as the difference between Level 1 and Level 4, to be sure. And it is more subtle, which makes it harder to close deliberately.
What Level 5 culture requires that Level 4 has not yet fully built is complete alignment, the kind where commitment is not the exception but the expectation. Where people hold each other accountable without being asked to. Where the mission is not something the organization communicates but something the organization embodies, every day, at every level, whether anyone is watching. The most junior member of the team is committed to the greater good.
That final step is what we’ll explore next week when we examine The Level Five Culture of Commitment, what it looks like when an organization truly gets there, and what it asks of its leaders to build and sustain it.
For now, I want to ask you this:
If your organization is at Level 4, what is keeping you from making the final climb? And if you’re not yet at Level 4, what would it take to get your coalition built? Leave a comment below and let’s talk about it.
Enjoy the journey!
