Cultural Change

Cultural change of companies are happening everywhere. But are they doing well?

Literally, change needs to be valid when there is something different from the usual practice. So, some of the companies pick an easier way. That is kind of "symbolic change". Saying kind of marketing slogan, with colors, even office renovation/decoration, and the most important part will be some critical differences on some processes which are trivial but obviously floating somewhere.

To achieve this, sometimes will include some casualties, which termed as inevitable redundancies, under the label of restructuring. Everything sounds make sense. Do they?

Everybody knows buy-in is a necessity when going through the journey of change. But how do the top tier know those are real buy-in? Of course if your company is posting some key metrics on how to measure success, you are the lucky one. That makes sense on all the processes afterward. On the other way round, when no proper metrics is imposed, judgement will be a sales session of the advocates which is to be performed to the top tier. All the frictions from staff will be returned a label, sometimes with a guilt, who are "not willing to change". That is, you are hindering the change! Here, think twice, do they accept the change. They do! Because they have to (you know what I mean).

How about the top tier or the advocates? Do they want to change? No. Because they are changing others, all the time. In that sense, they did not change at all because they are changing others without changing themselves. Are they accepting the change? Technically, yes, because they draft the change. And they gave buy-in when making decision for the change. Metrics and governance will be another story, and it depends.

As a piece of grass, be careful, especially that 'label'. Think about it, you will accept the change anyway, why bother to take an extra label which will drag you down in your career.