The bottom line is that in order to minimize your risk, you need to really familiarize yourself with the subtleties and idiosyncrasies of the culture, understand the power bases, recognize that a mandate from above may not automatically ensure a mandate from below, and not try to change the world in your first hundred days. Patience is often an essential virtue when it comes to cultural transformation at a large scale.
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Even though itâs crucial for a new leader to show that he or she fits into the culture and âgetsâ it, the paradox is that you donât want to settle in too comfortably if the culture needs modification. But of course, changing a culture is never as simple as ordering it to be so, especially if the organization is very proud of its traditions. And what organization isnât?
The issue of trying to transform a culture, especially a deeply embedded one from many years of the corporate equivalent of geological layering, extends well beyond your first hundred days. Sometimes it takes years. The critical point for the early days in a new role is to be highly sensitized to the issue, make an effective cultural assessment, and plant the seeds for the long-term change you are committed to achieving.
As Lou Gerstner says, âChanging the attitude and behavior of hundreds of thousands of people is very, very hard to accomplish. You canât simply give a couple of speeches or write a new credo for the company and declare that the new culture has taken hold. You canât mandate it, canât engineer it.
âWhat you can do is create the conditions for transformation. You can provide incentives. You can define the marketplace realities and goals. But at some point you have to trust. In fact, in the end, management doesnât change culture. Management invites the workforce itself to change the culture.
Creating the conditions for a cultural transformation takes all the tools at your disposal. You canât, for example, command an internally focused culture to magically metamorphose into one that canonizes its customers. You have to nudge, suggest, cajole, and ultimately convince people that the new environment youâre proposing really is the best one for the business and, perhaps more important, for themselves. That takes time - and a good sense of timing.
Some leaders look back on their first hundred days and say, âIf I could do it again, I wouldnât hesitate so long to make those key people changes or that strategic move.â Others were glad they exercised restraint. In most cases the timing are dependent on the situation.
Just remember that too much change can break the culture - or more likely destroy the change-maker. You have to pace yourself and continually assess the tolerance of the organization.