Cultural change
by Miki SaxonRichard Fouts has a great post pointing out that communications, no matter how clear, isn’t enough to effect a change in corporate culture and detailing the importance of developing the correct processes. Good stuff and he’s bang on.
But even before a CEO considers the processes and the communications required for the change, she’d better consider her MAP and the MAP of not just her senior staff, but also all managers in the organization.
Fouts mentions the radical change in processes needed to effect the transformation that Jeff Immelt believes necessary at GE, but Immelt’s biggest challenge is changing GE’s collective MAP from one that was paranoid about missing the numbers to one that values innovation and celebrates failure (links to several stories here).
True cultural change requires still more. It’s one thing to put new processes in place and communicate them to your people and another to commit to building the trust that proves they’re real.
If developing the processes and communicating them to your people takes months, then convincing then that the changes are real requires years of sustained effort—in fact the effort never ends.
Significant cultural changes necessitate often-difficult changes in people’s MAP—changes not all will be comfortable with—and that means yet more change, as those who can’t change leave and new people join.
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