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.
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Enjoy the journey!
