Engaging the Power of Community
Part III of “How Real Leaders Drive Real Change”
In the first two newsletters of this series, we explored courage as a leadership operating system and the deliberate use of productive distress to drive real change. Both are necessary.
Neither is sufficient on its own.
Because the urgent reality facing today’s companies is that the boundaries between businesses and their communities have dissolved.
Your employees, your customers, and your competitors now see inside your organization in real time — through social media, anonymous forums, leaked documents, and public data.
🚪Decisions that once stayed behind closed doors are now visible and often debated publicly.
💡Community opinions on the direction of your products, services and operations can either ignite your business or destroy it.
🧱 And organizations that still operate behind corporate walls are at a growing competitive disadvantage.
The Power of Community in Two Case Studies
A company I previously worked at made a change to an algorithm that its product used to display opportunities to its communities. We thought the change would give our community more options to view. The change drove hundreds more opportunities to certain people in our community. The problem? Those people felt like they were now getting spammed with opportunities that they didn’t have the time to assess. And others saw their opportunities dwindle. What did they do? They took to social media – Reddit, Quora, and X. The complaints hit an uproar while we were working to untangle the new algorithm and put it back the way it was!
That’s an example of a relatively small action taken by a company that a community drove to end..
Here’s a larger, more interesting example.
It’s a story about Cracker Barrel, an American restaurant chain founded in 1969. In 2023, it began taking a series of steps to revitalize its image and attract a new, younger customer base.
In August 2025, it simplified its logo, removing the image of a man dubbed “Uncle Herschel” and his barrel, and designing a simplified shape resembling a barrel.
Now, for the Cracker Barrel brand executives, this was the farthest thing from a controversial step that they imagined. The design trends had been moving to more minimalistic designs for years and the goal was in fact to attract a younger customer base.
And yet, immediately after the logo change, a few people commented online that the logo was generic and soulless. That in and of itself is not surprising.
There will always be public complaints to any change a company makes in today’s social-media filled environment.
But then a politically right leaning social media account changed the narrative and started branding the change as an attack by the “woke” left and an abandonment of the Cracker Barrel heritage. (Ironically, the logo of Uncle Herschel by the barrel wasn’t the original logo. It was added in a 1977 rebrand.)
Within 24 hours, the narrative went viral and within one week, Cracker Barrel apologized publicly and rolled back its nearly $700 million rebrand investment.
While it’s tempting to laugh at the intensity of reactions to something as seemingly trivial as a logo change:
“I’ll never stop foot in one again.”
“A restaurant chain I patronize has changed their logo and I have never been more angry in my life”
it likely wasn’t funny to the Cracker Barrel executives who saw its stock drop 7% as a result of the controversy.
Cracker Barrel Didn’t Lose a Logo — It Lost the Narrative
When the community backlash is happening, you’ve already lost.
At that point, you’re no longer leading — you’re reacting. You’re explaining instead of shaping. You’re negotiating with narratives that were created without you and that now define you.
That’s exactly what happened to Cracker Barrel.
The company didn’t fail because it redesigned a logo. It failed because it treated the decision as an internal branding exercise rather than a community-facing change. By the time the outrage machine spun up, there was no reservoir of trust to draw from—
no customers saying, “I don’t love this, but I trust them.” No employees explaining the intent behind the change
no industry allies contextualizing the move
no community ready to stand with them when nameless complainers weaponized the moment for political gain.
The company rolled out a finished decision and hoped the community would accept it. When they didn’t, leadership panicked—and reversed course publicly. The result was a visible erosion of credibility and confidence.
A Law Firm That Made the Same Mistake
Rachel Cohen’s firm [see the first post in this series for background] followed the same pattern, just in a far more consequential context.
The firm may believe that they talked to their associates, they discussed the issue with other firms, they engaged with industry associations capable of supporting a coordinated response. They may believe that they did this. But what they did wasn’t community engagement. It was, at best, a series of transactional discussions that started too late and under time pressure.
Rachel’s open letter didn’t create the crisis. It exposed one that leadership had failed to manage proactively.
Community Is Not a PR Strategy—It’s a Leadership Discipline
The throughline between Cracker Barrel and Rachel’s firm is not branding or politics. It’s timing.
Engaging community after a decision is not engagement—it’s damage control.
Real engagement happens upstream, long before support is required and decisions are made – back when trust can still be built.
Rachel, on the other hand, spent years investing in relationships with different communities in her ecosystem — inside her firm, across the industry, outside the legal world, and within organizing communities.
When she needed support in a controversial moment, she wasn’t starting from zero. She already knew who would listen, who would help, and who would stand beside her.
Are You a Real Leader Trying to Drive Real Change?
Excellent leadership requires
💪 courage
🧑🤝🧑 real community engagement
And you cannot improvise community in a crisis.
Instead, do these 5 things
Invest in building community relationships long before you need it Employees, customers, partners, regulators, peers — talk to them before decisions are final. Especially when values are involved.
Invite dissent before it becomes backlash Create forums where people can raise concerns directly to your teams without fear. If they can’t do it internally, they’ll do it publicly.
Treat community insight as strategy, not as a PR task Communities surface risks and second-order effects faster than leadership teams alone ever can.
Don’t use fiscal ROIs to measure the return on community Payoffs from the power of an engaged community don’t appear overnight.
Say this over and over again: trust is built in calm moments and spent in crises If you haven’t built trust, you will have nothing to draw on when things get hard.
Courage + Productive Distress + Community = Transformative Leadership
But put together, they create the conditions for real leadership — leadership that can withstand pressure, respond to crises with clarity, and mobilize people to build something stronger than what existed before.
