Monday's Opening Thought: April 11, 2022

This week’s opening thought: organizational culture change takes years. Not two or three years, mind you. Organizational culture shifts take five-plus years to implement, adjust, maintain and sustain. In a 2021 survey of workplace culture consultants, the folx who are hired to provide advice on changing an organization's culture shared that they generally estimate that the chances of success are low. How low? Typically one in three or four attempts takes root. Studies have shown that the single most crucial element in determining success in changing an organization’s culture is its leader's interest, support, and even passion. Not just the CEO or Executive Director but the interest, support, and passion for change of the senior leadership team or C-suite. But the leader? That person is the core driver of organizational change. And because organizational culture change takes such a long time, it is often longer than the tenure of a leader and much longer than the attention span of the organization or the organization’s willingness to sit with and process the discomfort of its oppressive states and processes.

So why do organizations think they can hire one person, often a person from an underserved community and a person of color fighting against the oppressions of intersectionality, to change an organization’s culture single-handedly with an unrealistic timeline for completion? And with little to no support or backing from leadership or the primary leader of the organization?

Whether intentional or unconscious, this is a recipe for failure and harm.

Leaders: hiring one person and placing the enormous weight of changing your entire organization for you on their shoulders while you passively "participate" in said change is not leadership. That’s setting someone up for failure – and giving yourself a scapegoat and excuse for why your organizational culture doesn’t have the opportunity to change.

If you’re a CEO, President, or Executive Director, it is your job to stand up and call in your senior leadership team and company leaders to help you center organizational change as something that matters.  And you can’t be ready to bail when it gets uncomfortable, or the realities of the negative impacts of your workplace culture on your staff come to light. You have to be willing to take responsibility for the current culture and atone for the harm your workplace has caused and may still be causing. You also have to be responsible for standing with the folx (plural, not one person) you’ve hired to help move your organization forward, not standing next to them long enough to throw them under the bus when things get complicated or uncomfortable.

Step up and quit hiring one person and expecting them to somehow make rainbows and unicorns happen for your organization with minimal involvement or support from you and your leadership team.