Kate McKinnon has spent her career inside organizations where culture doesn’t get the luxury of being theoretical. These are environments where speed is constant, pressure is visible, and performance is measured in real time. When results matter this much, culture can either become a stabilizing force or the first casualty.
Most recently, Kate led people strategy at PlayFly Sports, a business built on competition, growth, and high visibility. Today, she works as a Fractional Chief People Officer, stepping into organizations that are scaling quickly or navigating change and realizing that something feels off. The work is getting done, but the workplace feels tired.
When I asked Kate how leaders can keep culture from becoming collateral damage in high-performance environments, she didn’t offer a clever framework or a packaged solution. Instead, she went straight to something most leaders underestimate because it requires discipline over time.
“You have a culture,” she said. “So it’s identifying what it is today and where you want it to be in the future.”
That sounds obvious. But many organizations act as if culture is either automatic or something that can be addressed later, once the pressure eases. Kate’s perspective is that culture is always forming. If leaders aren’t intentional, it will simply take the shape of whatever forces dominate the business, and in fast-moving environments, those forces are often urgency, reactivity, and burnout.
When Pressure Rises, Leadership Posture Matters Most
Kate kept coming back to the same word: intentionality. Not as a value statement, but as a daily leadership behavior. In high-pressure moments, leaders are often tempted to move faster, make quicker decisions, and eliminate anything that feels like friction. But Kate has seen how easily that instinct backfires. “In times of stress and pressure,” she said, leaders need “a calm head,” not rushed decisions and not reactive leadership.
When leaders lead with calm, teams can think clearly and respond intelligently. When leaders lead with panic, teams follow suit. Work becomes chaotic, communication gets sloppy, and people retreat into survival mode.
Kate also emphasized something leaders often forget when pressure builds: teams need outlets. Stress doesn’t disappear when it’s ignored. It accumulates. When leaders intentionally create space for people to process pressure, ask questions, or name what’s hard, culture holds. When leaders don’t, the cost shows up later as disengagement, mistakes, and turnover.
Naming Fatigue Is the First Act of Leadership
When organizations come to Kate feeling worn down, they often describe the same symptoms: burnout, disengagement, and hybrid tension. It’s a sense that people are running on fumes.
Kate’s starting point is acknowledgment. It’s about “recognizing that people are tired,” she told me, and not just because of work. People are tired because of everything. The world doesn’t pause at the office door, and employees bring all of it with them.
That fatigue compounds whatever is happening at work. Leaders who ignore it create distance, whether they intend to or not. When people feel unseen, the work itself becomes heavier.
Kate often starts with structured listening, including stop, start, and continue conversations. What should we stop doing? What should we start doing? What’s working that we shouldn’t lose? Those questions turn vague exhaustion into usable insight. They also interrupt the default tendency to stay in production mode.
Kate was blunt about what happens when leaders pretend nothing is wrong. “It doesn’t do anybody any favors,” she said. “Because the reality is it’s happening, and it’s happening in every industry.” Naming reality strengthens trust. People don’t expect leaders to fix everything, but they do expect honesty.
Why Awards Follow Culture, Not the Other Way Around
I asked Kate about PlayFly earning recognition as a most loved workplace and best employer in sports, curious about what made those accolades real rather than performative. Her answer: “It was the employees that wanted to do it.” These awards are driven by employee surveys and participation. They can’t be bought. While there’s backend work involved, the heart of the process is engagement.
When employees knew the company was going for recognition, they were excited to share their experiences. It wasn’t a campaign imposed from the top. Instead, it reflected a culture that people felt proud of.
Kate made a point that many leaders often overlook. “It’s not one person that creates the culture,” she said. “It’s not a department. It’s the whole organization.” Culture doesn’t live in HR. It lives in how managers show up, how teams treat one another, and how decisions get made under pressure. When recognition is authentic, it’s usually because employees recognize themselves in the culture being celebrated.
The Generational Divide Isn’t a Problem to Solve, It’s a Reality to Design For
With five generations in the workforce, misunderstanding is inevitable. Kate laughed when I asked her to summarize the biggest gaps. One common narrative she sees is that new grads are lazy, disengaged, uncoachable, and overly focused on work-life balance. Kate sees that as a misread. The engagement style is different, and that difference is often mistaken for disinterest.
At the same time, younger workers look at older generations and see lives built almost entirely around work. They don’t want that tradeoff. They’re more willing to question long hours and outdated norms, and that pushback creates friction.
Instead of framing this friction as a values clash to be won, she frames it as a reality to be managed. “We all need each other,” she said. “This isn’t going to go away.” That mindset shifts everything. Leaders who believe generational tension is temporary try to wait it out. Leaders who accept it as permanent build systems that help people meet in the middle, adjusting expectations on both sides and recognizing that different generations bring different strengths the organization needs.
The AI-Native Workforce Is Already Reshaping Work
We talked about the idea that by 2027, new graduates may be the first cohort to have grown up with generative AI as a normal learning tool. Kate’s response was optimistic. “I think it’s amazing,” she said. These students have navigated COVID, grown up with social media, and now use AI to work faster and more efficiently so they can focus on higher-level thinking. She didn’t hedge on what this means for organizations. “You either adapt and learn from this new generation or you will be left behind. There’s no real middle ground.”
Kate also addressed a fear many HR leaders quietly carry. HR isn’t going away, but HR professionals who refuse to integrate AI into their work might. Ultimately, AI can free up time for deeper human work if leaders are willing to learn it rather than resist it.
Making Work More Human Starts With Workload
“Make work more human” is a phrase that gets used often and implemented rarely. Kate grounded it in something concrete: workload. People are doing more with less. Sometimes they’re doing two or three jobs. Leaders at senior levels can forget how heavy that feels on the ground. When workload is ignored, teams can feel dehumanized.
Kate believes workplaces will become antiquated if they don’t consider the whole person, especially as younger generations reject unsustainable expectations. If performance depends on chronic overwork, the cost will eventually surface in disengagement, mistakes, and attrition.
Human-centered is all about realistic expectations paired with the tools and resources people need to succeed.
Why Middle Managers Are the Cultural Linchpin
One of the most persistent cultural breakdowns Kate sees is the promotion of strong individual contributors into leadership roles without development. “They’re two completely different skill sets,” she said. Yet organizations repeat this mistake constantly. Someone excels at their job, gets promoted, struggles, and is labeled a poor leader rather than an underdeveloped one.
In her consulting work, Kate sees the greatest need in middle management. These leaders are responsible for translating strategy into reality, yet they’re often undertrained and overwhelmed.
The gaps are consistent: giving and receiving feedback, delegation, inspiring teams, empowering others, and shifting identity from doing the work to enabling it. When organizations invest here, culture strengthens quickly. When they don’t, even strong values erode at the middle layer.
Learning Is Changing, Not Disappearing
We discussed learning and development in an era where answers are instant, and attention is scarce. Kate sees momentum not in long, expensive trainings but in real-time, accessible learning that meets people where they are.
Microlearning isn’t new, but it’s becoming essential. Employees want learning that they can use immediately. At the same time, Kate doesn’t believe in-person learning is obsolete. Different people learn in different ways, and conferences still build relationships that matter long after the sessions end. She also emphasized accessibility, particularly for neurodiverse employees. More learning pathways mean more equitable development.
Reframing DEIB Without Losing the Point
DEIB work has faced fatigue, backlash, and budget cuts. Kate sees organizations taking different paths, from cutting programs to doubling down to reframing language while keeping the work intact. What frustrates her is what gets lost in the debate. “Everybody benefits from it,” she said. Differences of thought and experience make organizations stronger.
She mentioned hearing the term “fairness” used in place of DEIB, a framing she doesn’t reject. The core goal remains the same: giving people a fair shot.
Kate focuses first on belonging. Diversity is relatively easy to change through recruiting, but belonging is more challenging. Without it, diverse hires tend not to stay.
When budgets are tight, she points to employee-led resource groups as a powerful, low-cost way to build connection. These groups, when inclusive and intentional, create support systems that benefit both people and performance.
What Sports Can Teach the Rest of Us About Performance
Sports organizations operate in an environment of extreme competition and intense drive. “There’s an unhinged amount of competition,” Kate said. That intensity fuels performance but also demands careful cultural stewardship.
What surprised me most was how she described the people: team-oriented, fun, relentlessly supportive. “They won’t let each other lose.”
High performance manifests through trust, shared accountability, and systems that allow people to compete with themselves while supporting the team. Kate has seen similar dynamics work outside sports through continuous feedback platforms, regular one-on-ones, and real-time engagement tools that connect performance, development, and succession planning.
Bridging the Gap Between College and Career Requires Grace
Kate is currently writing a book about the transition from college to career, and her perspective is grounded in empathy. “It’s really hard,” she said. The transition is fear-based and uncertain, and many required skills, like networking, job searching, and building relationships that open doors, aren’t taught. These are learnable skills, but many people are expected to figure them out alone.
Kate believes both new grads and hiring managers need grace. Candidates won’t always say the perfect thing. It happens to everyone. The same applies to veterans, athletes, and individuals transitioning into new careers. These populations bring strong transferable skills, but they need support navigating unfamiliar systems.
The Next Decade of Culture Leadership
When I asked Kate what the next decade will demand from cultural leaders, she pointed to the complex challenges, such as generational overlap, caregiving pressures, political tension, and global instability. All of it shows up at work because people are human.
At the core, she believes leaders will need to stay focused on how people feel and respond to change. The work-from-home debate is just one example of the tradeoffs ahead. Leaders will have to decide whether they’re willing to lose talent to preserve legacy norms.
Culture leadership won’t be about perfect answers, but about thoughtful tradeoffs, clear communication, and designing workplaces that can hold complexity without defaulting to control.
A Final Word on Grace
As we wrapped up, Kate shared one simple thought: “Everybody needs to give each other some grace,” she said. “There’s a lot going on out there. And a little kindness would go a long way.”
Brandon Laws is a workplace culture and leadership enthusiast, host of the Transform Your Workplace podcast, and VP of Marketing and Product at Xenium HR.