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by masona
2261 days ago
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As a small part of a massive digital transformation project last year, it was clear to everyone involved that no amount of good organizational design could succeed without significant adjustments to organizational behavior and culture. We made all these logical plans but implementing them was about as effective as dipping them, bloodsoaked, into the piranha pit of legacy culture. > A better model for staying informed of developments as the organization scales is for groups to publish status updates as part of the regular cadence of their work. I mean, it sounds great. But politics just eats this stuff alive. And the more I felt empathy for the various factions, the more I realized that real, honest change takes unrelenting and sheer force of management will. Which is itself a kind of culture. |
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Having also experienced this firsthand, I've come to learn that:
- there are people in the world who have difficulty changing, despite best of intentions
- there are people who are narcissistic, psychopathic, or toxic in other ways
- there are people who are lazy and are just clawing and scratching to keep their paycheque because it's basically free money due to not adding commensurate value back to the organization
- there are people who are in over their heads and find it difficult to improve, no matter how much money you may provide for training budgets, you're basically paying their salary to be full-time students at that point, not employees, and they still fail to graduate from school
Take all of the above, let it rot in a stale culture for a decade, you can easily see why an organization might get into some difficulty. Change is hard and unfortunately sometimes involves layoffs if the organization is to thrive (note I said organization, not company, affects organizations of all types).
Change is hard because people are hard. People are hard because... many reasons. Not everyone can be a driven Steve Jobs to achieve success, damn the torpedoes and other people's feelings, especially if they're just the average joe.
The easy answer is to fire these people. I don't like it, but I don't have a better answer. It sucks. I went through it before, refused to fire anyone for years, believed in people's ability to change. The scar tissue has caused me to completely change my mindset moving forward. If you can't change, you need to be on a performance improvement plan, if you can't achieve it, you're out the door, but hopefully we work at an organization willing to give you some nice severance so that you don't immediately end up on the street.