Organizations often look for change in the wrong place. They search for new strategies, external expertise, or structural redesigns, while overlooking a crucial source of transformation already present inside the organization: employees who are willing to act on social and environmental issues from within. For many managers and leaders, this raises a simple question: if so much change potential is already there, how can it be better recognized and supported?

This matters because many of the challenges organizations now face—climate pressure, inequality, inclusion, and wider expectations around responsibility—cannot be solved by a small group at the top alone. They require people across the organization who notice problems early, care enough to act, and have the confidence to push ideas forward even when those ideas are not yet part of the official agenda. In other words, meaningful change often begins with insiders who treat responsibility as part of everyday organizational life rather than as a separate project.

Change does not need a title

One of the most persistent misconceptions in organizations is that meaningful impact requires a formal mandate. In practice, however, some of the most important change efforts are initiated by people whose job titles have little to do with sustainability, diversity, or social impact. A paralegal, a product manager, a marketer, a chemist, or an innovation manager may all notice opportunities for change and begin working on them long before anyone recognizes them as change agents.

What makes these insiders important is not simply that they care. It is that they connect values to action. They see how a social or environmental issue relates to the organization’s everyday work, and they are willing to act across boundaries to move it forward. Their identities, experiences, and motivations may differ, but the common thread is a willingness to turn concern into organizational action.

This is where many organizations underestimate themselves. If change is assumed to belong only to a specialist unit, then much of the organization’s potential remains untapped, so a useful step for any manager is to scan for people who are already connecting social or environmental concerns to everyday work. The capacity for change lives in many roles, many departments, and many forms of expertise.

How change becomes possible

Of course, individual commitment is not enough. People who try to drive change from within need conditions that allow their efforts to take shape. That means time, access, allies, credibility, and a leadership environment that does not treat social or environmental initiatives as distractions from real business.

The work of insider social change agents is often messy and incremental, so it helps when managers value small experiments and learning rather than only fully formed programs. These can then grow through connections: between people inside the organization, and between insiders and external actors who can provide expertise, legitimacy, or momentum. Change efforts frequently involve frustration, uncertainty, and emotional strain, especially when they touch deeply held values or challenge established routines.

This is why leadership matters so much: as a manager or leader, you shape the conditions under which insider efforts can either grow or stall. You can broaden participation normalize learning from failure, and connect promising initiatives to the resources they need. Most importantly, you can stop treating impact work as peripheral and start aligning it with how the organization actually operates.

Why small wins matter

The temptation in organizations is often to wait for the big move: the large strategy shift, the comprehensive policy, the fully scaled initiative. But meaningful transformation usually starts smaller than that. It begins when a local idea works, when a network forms, when a team learns something useful, or when one initiative creates the confidence for the next. These small wins matter because they lower the activation energy for larger change.

Organizations do not transform only by importing change from outside; they also transform when they notice and support the people already inside who are willing to move things forward. For managers and leaders, this starts with asking a different question: instead of “Who should we appoint to lead change?”, begin with “Who is already acting, and how can we back them?” That can mean giving insider initiatives time and visibility, connecting people across departments, and signalling that social and environmental efforts are part of everyday business rather than side projects. When managers do this consistently, they stop overlooking the change potential already in their organization and start turning it into visible results.

Author: Katrin Heucher - k.s.heucher@rug.nl

To continue reading:
Alt, E., Heucher, K., & Soderstrom, S. (2026). No job title required: Anyone can be a catalyst for change. IMD / I by IMD, July–August 2026.

Heucher, K., Alt, E., Soderstrom, S., Scully, M., & Glavas, A. (2024). Catalyzing action on social and environmental challenges: An integrative review of insider social change agents. Academy of Management Annals, 18(1), 295–347.

Kingsbury, K. (n.d.). Catalyzing change within organizations. Academy of Management Insights. https://journals.aom.org/doi/10.5465/annals.2022.0205.summary