Do Employees Really Believe in Their Organization?

Why leadership credibility, organizational trust, and Learning Agility are essential to meaningful transformation.

Organizations devote considerable resources to defining their purpose, articulating their values, and communicating their strategies. Leadership teams spend hours discussing the future they want to build and the behaviors they expect from their people.

But there is a question that deserves far more attention:

Do employees actually believe in the organization they work for?

Not whether they understand the strategy. Not whether they can repeat the corporate values. Not even whether they report being engaged.

Do they believe that the organization’s leadership means what it says? Do they recognize its stated values in everyday decisions? Do they trust the people asking them to embrace change?

These questions are fundamental because organizational transformation depends on more than a compelling strategy. It requires people to reconsider familiar assumptions, develop new capabilities, and act differently, often under conditions of uncertainty.

And people are less likely to commit to that process when they question the credibility of those leading it.

Trust cannot be established through communication alone. It develops through the relationship between what leaders say, what they do, and how their actions are experienced by others.

But there is another dimension that deserves attention: Are leaders themselves capable of learning and changing?

This is where Learning Agility enters the conversation.

Organizational culture is what leaders do, not what they declare

Most organizations have no difficulty identifying the values they would like to represent: collaboration, innovation, integrity, respect, accountability.

The challenge is translating those values into consistent behavior.

An organization may encourage innovation while punishing unsuccessful experiments. It may celebrate collaboration while rewarding individual competition. It may promise transparency while avoiding difficult conversations.

Employees notice these contradictions, particularly when they occur at the highest levels of leadership.

Organizational psychologist Edgar Schein, in Organizational Culture and Leadership, explained that leaders communicate their real priorities through what they consistently pay attention to, measure, reward, and control.

In other words, organizational culture is transmitted through behavior, often more powerfully than through formal statements.

My professor at Columbia University, W. Warner Burke, used to make a particularly memorable observation:

“If the top of the house doesn’t change, nothing changes.”

That idea has stayed with me throughout my professional career.

Burke spent decades studying organizational change. In the influential Burke–Litwin model of organizational performance and change, developed with George Litwin, leadership, mission and strategy, and organizational culture are among the transformational factors that influence organizational performance.

The implication is significant.

Senior leaders cannot simply sponsor a cultural transformation. They must participate in it, beginning with their own behavior.

If an organization wants greater collaboration, its executive team must collaborate. If it wants greater openness, executives must demonstrate openness when the conversations become uncomfortable.

And if it wants a culture of continuous learning, its leaders must be prepared to acknowledge what they do not know.

Trust depends on more than good intentions

One of the most influential frameworks for understanding organizational trust comes from Roger Mayer, James Davis, and David Schoorman, whose research identifies three important dimensions of perceived trustworthiness: ability, benevolence, and integrity.

Ability concerns whether someone has the competence to deliver. Benevolence concerns whether that person is perceived as caring about the interests of others. Integrity concerns whether their actions reflect principles others consider acceptable.

These distinctions help explain why leaders with excellent intentions may nevertheless struggle to establish trust.

A leader may be highly competent but perceived as indifferent to employees. Another may genuinely care about people but repeatedly make decisions that contradict stated organizational values.

Trust also depends on perception.

Leaders may believe they are behaving consistently while employees experience their decisions quite differently.

Recognizing this gap requires more than communication skills. It requires the willingness to question one’s own interpretation of reality.

A leader cannot address a credibility gap that they are unwilling to recognize.

And recognizing that gap is fundamentally a learning challenge.

Learning Agility: The Willingness and Ability to Learn from Experience

Learning Agility has become increasingly relevant in leadership development because the challenges facing organizations rarely come with complete information or established solutions.

Leaders are expected to navigate unfamiliar markets, emerging technologies, shifting expectations, and organizational structures that may differ substantially from those in which they developed their expertise.

Experience remains valuable. But experience alone does not guarantee the ability to respond effectively to new situations.

A leader may have accumulated decades of experience while continuing to interpret new challenges through the same assumptions.

Learning Agility concerns the willingness and ability to learn from experience and apply that learning when confronting unfamiliar situations.

1. Warner Burke’s research, developed over several years at Teachers College, Columbia University, contributed to a behavioral approach to understanding this capability.

Rather than treating Learning Agility as a vague leadership quality or a fixed personality characteristic, Burke focused on behaviors that individuals demonstrate when learning from experience.

The Burke Learning Agility Assessment measures one overarching construct through nine behavioral dimensions:

• Flexibility: Remaining open to different perspectives and approaches.
• Speed: Acting with appropriate urgency when learning and responding to unfamiliar challenges.
• Experimenting: Trying new approaches and learning from their outcomes.
• Performance Risk Taking: Accepting challenging assignments that stretch existing capabilities.
• Interpersonal Risk Taking: Engaging in interactions that may involve discomfort or vulnerability.
• Collaborating: Learning through productive engagement with others.
• Information Gathering: Seeking relevant knowledge before forming conclusions.
• Feedback Seeking: Actively requesting information about one’s performance and behavior.
• Reflecting: Examining experiences to understand what can be learned and applied.

These nine dimensions are not separate personality types. Together, they describe the behavioral expression of Learning Agility.

They also offer an important perspective on leadership credibility.

Why Learning Agility matters for organizational trust

Learning Agility and organizational trust are distinct constructs. The Burke assessment does not measure trust, nor should Learning Agility be presented as a guaranteed predictor of it.

Nevertheless, examining their relationship offers a useful perspective on leadership behavior.

Consider four situations.

When leaders seek feedback, they challenge their own assumptions

Many executives believe they understand how their organizations perceive them.

But how often do they actively investigate whether that perception is accurate?

Feedback Seeking requires leaders to invite perspectives that may challenge their assumptions, including feedback from people who experience their decisions differently.

A leader who asks, “What am I missing?” opens a different conversation from one who asks, “Does everyone agree?”

The important distinction is not simply whether feedback is collected. It is whether leaders are prepared to learn from it.

When people see that their perspectives are taken seriously and can influence decisions, they have stronger reasons to believe that participation is meaningful.

When leaders take interpersonal risks, they make difficult conversations possible

Organizational change often requires conversations that people would prefer to avoid.

A leader may need to acknowledge an unsuccessful decision, confront a contradiction between stated values and actual behavior, or admit uncertainty about the future.

These situations involve interpersonal risk.

Amy Edmondson’s research on psychological safety and learning behavior demonstrated the importance of an environment in which team members feel safe taking interpersonal risks.

Her research on work teams found an association between psychological safety and learning behavior.

This creates an important connection with Learning Agility.

Leaders who are willing to engage in uncomfortable conversations may help establish conditions in which others are more willing to speak openly, ask questions, and acknowledge mistakes.

Interpersonal Risk Taking is not identical to psychological safety. One concerns individual learning behavior; the other concerns a shared belief within a team.

But they can reinforce one another.

When leaders reflect, experience becomes an opportunity for development

Organizations frequently conduct performance reviews and evaluate business results.

They are often less disciplined about examining the leadership behaviors that produced those results.

Reflecting involves looking critically at experience, identifying lessons, and considering how future behavior should change.

After a difficult restructuring, for example, a reflective leader might ask:

Did we underestimate employees’ concerns? Did our actions reinforce the values we claim to uphold? What did we learn about how our decisions are perceived? What should we do differently next time?

Without reflection, leaders may repeat familiar behaviors even when those behaviors have become ineffective.

Reflection does not guarantee better judgment. But it creates an opportunity to examine the assumptions on which judgment depends.

When leaders experiment and remain flexible, change becomes credible

Organizations frequently ask employees to innovate, adapt, and embrace new ways of working.

Yet their leaders may continue relying on familiar approaches, even when circumstances have changed.

Experimenting and Flexibility are especially relevant here.

Experimenting involves testing unfamiliar approaches and learning from the consequences. Flexibility involves remaining open to alternative perspectives and adapting when necessary.

Neither requires abandoning principles or changing direction with every new opinion.

Rather, they involve distinguishing between commitments that should remain stable and assumptions that deserve reconsideration.

A leader who changes an approach because new evidence warrants it is not necessarily demonstrating inconsistency.

That leader may be demonstrating an essential capacity for learning.

Credibility does not require leaders to have all the answers. It requires them to demonstrate sound judgment, including the judgment to recognize when they need to learn.

The paradox of organizational transformation

There is a paradox in many organizational change initiatives.

Senior executives ask employees to become more adaptable, collaborative, innovative, and open to new ideas.

Yet the transformation process itself may leave the behavior of the executive team largely untouched.

The organization launches workshops, communication campaigns, engagement initiatives, and programs encouraging employees to embrace change.

But the people with the greatest influence over organizational priorities, rewards, and decision-making may not have examined how their own behavior needs to evolve.

This is particularly problematic because employees observe the actions of senior leadership when deciding which behaviors are genuinely valued.

I have seen organizations begin cultural transformation with ambitious employee participation programs, extensive listening exercises, and sophisticated definitions of desired behaviors.

These initiatives can be valuable. But I have often questioned the sequence.

What happens when an organization invites hundreds of employees to help define a new culture before its senior leaders have made a genuine commitment to changing their own behavior?

Participation alone cannot resolve that contradiction.

The executive team does not need to become a perfect example of the desired culture before involving the wider organization.

But its members should be the first to acknowledge what they need to learn, what they may need to unlearn, and which behaviors they are personally committed to changing.

This is where Learning Agility can become an important component of leadership development.

From Learning Agility assessment to behavioral change

One of the most valuable contributions of Burke’s work is the emphasis on observable, developable behaviors.

Learning Agility is not simply a label assigned to individuals considered to have high leadership potential.

It is a capability that can be examined and intentionally developed.

The Burke Learning Agility Assessment evaluates 38 behaviors across its nine dimensions, providing individuals with a structured understanding of their learning-related strengths and development opportunities.

For executive coaches and leadership development professionals, this changes the nature of the development conversation.

Instead of advising a leader to “be more adaptable,” a coach can explore the specific behaviors that may be limiting the individual’s capacity to learn.

Does the leader seek feedback only from trusted colleagues? Do they avoid assignments that might expose weaknesses? Do they move quickly from one experience to another without reflecting? Do they gather information that challenges their existing assumptions?

These questions translate an abstract leadership aspiration into behaviors that can be observed, practiced, and revisited.

Importantly, the goal is not to maximize every behavior in every situation.

Effective development requires understanding context, recognizing strengths, and identifying where a different behavioral response may be valuable.

The assessment provides a starting point for that process. Development happens through deliberate practice, feedback, reflection, and experience.

Learning-agile leaders do not automatically create learning-agile organizations

There is another distinction worth making.

Developing individual Learning Agility is important, but it does not automatically produce an organizational culture that supports learning.

A leader may actively seek feedback while operating within a system that discourages dissent.

An employee may be willing to experiment while facing performance incentives that punish every unsuccessful attempt.

A team may recognize the importance of collaboration while being evaluated exclusively on individual results.

In these circumstances, individual learning behavior and organizational systems work against one another.

The challenge is therefore both individual and systemic.

Organizations need leaders who demonstrate Learning Agility. They also need management practices, incentives, decision-making processes, and cultural expectations that allow learning-related behaviors to flourish.

This is one reason Burke’s work on organizational change and his later work on Learning Agility complement one another so meaningfully.

The former helps us understand the interconnected factors influencing organizational performance and transformation.

The latter helps us examine behaviors through which individuals can learn and adapt.

Neither perspective is sufficient on its own.

Before asking employees to change, ask whether leaders are prepared to learn

Perhaps the most important question in organizational transformation is not whether employees understand the strategy.

It is whether they have good reasons to believe in the people leading it.

Do they see leaders practicing the behaviors they advocate? Do they believe their concerns will be heard? Do they observe decisions being reconsidered when new evidence emerges? Do they see mistakes becoming opportunities for learning rather than occasions for blame?

And perhaps most importantly:

Are the leaders asking others to change demonstrating that they are capable of changing themselves?

Learning Agility does not replace integrity, competence, benevolence, or the structural conditions required for trust.

But it offers a behavioral perspective on how leaders can become more responsive to experience, more open to feedback, and better equipped to navigate unfamiliar challenges.

In a world where organizations must continually adapt, that capability matters.

Because transformation is not simply about persuading people to embrace a different future.

It is also about demonstrating that those responsible for leading the organization are willing to learn what that future requires of them.

Before asking whether employees are ready for change, perhaps leaders should ask whether they are ready to learn.

Frequently Asked Questions

About Burke Assessments

Burke Assessments advances the research and practical application of Learning Agility through the work of W. Warner Burke and the Burke Learning Agility Assessment.

Our behavioral approach helps executive coaches, HR professionals, and organizations understand and develop the capabilities individuals need to learn from experience and navigate unfamiliar challenges.

Explore the Burke Learning Agility Assessment and our practitioner certification programs.