A Broad Change

Broad change, like changing an organization’s culture is very hard to achieve because “culture” is vast and amorphous and, therefore, hard to teach or measure.  The more specific the goal and the more limited the number of goals at any one time, the higher the likelihood of success, especially if there’s powerful follow-through.

A change process that sets out to improve the performance of the business can, however, also change the organization’s culture. That happens when the organization’s decision makers are themselves models of the values, attitudes and behaviors that the organization has now identified as what it really wants.  That transformation occurs when people understand what’s expected of them and how they should behave because they’re working with and for people who tend to naturally do what’s now considered the right things in the right way. 

After years of participating in change efforts, I’ve come up with some rules and guidelines for a successful major change effort:

• Manage to success and avoid failure. No major change effort should be initiated unless it has a good chance of succeeding.
• The organization’s leaders must be models of the values, attitudes and behaviors that are now considered most desirable.
• Goals need to be based on improving the performance of the business and not on changing the organization’s culture.
• A change effort needs to be proportionate to the size of the problem and the extent of a crisis. An obvious crisis gives credibility to leaders’ calls for core change.
• Change efforts should be as small, as non-disruptive and as specific as possible.
• Plans for change must be as simple and focused as possible.
• All of management must be visibly on-board.
• Management should be upbeat about the outcome of change, while they are also forthright about the likely difficulties that will be involved.
• There must be a commitment to a three to five year follow-through.
• Measurements should be limited to outcomes that really matter.

An organization’s leaders need to be realistic as well as optimistic about how much and what kinds of changes are likely to be achieved.  Stable companies, which are normally driven primarily by rules, precedent and relationships, can certainly become performance-driven meritocracies in which output is far more important than seniority or connections, and their management can definitely learn to empower appropriately and everyone can learn to collaborate and be team players.  But large, mature stable companies don’t become entrepreneurial start-ups.  While elephants can learn to dance, they never become gazelles.