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Impatient cultural change

Many organizations in Korea have recently begun to change their corporate cultures from top-down to horizontal, from organization-oriented to individual-oriented, from an emphasis on quantity of work to an emphasis on quality of work. However, many of the employees that I encounter during my work as an organizational consultant repeatedly tell me how exhausting all of these change efforts have been. Furthermore, they often don’t even expect very much from these efforts in terms of outcomes. Almost of them emphasize that a culture that has taken along time to build cannot change within a day.

If this is true and the attempt to change culture does nothing but tire out employees, why do organizations try to change their corporate cultures? Their probable intent is to achieve a better market performance or to obtain a higher satisfaction score from customers. Every effort to reach these goals is, of course, worthwhile. However, any effort to change human beings or organizations should acknowledge that the effectiveness of change has limits. If this is not taken into consideration, the new culture will become as much of a monster as the old culture was, and will make people and their organization just as powerless. In order to avoid this, change agents of organizational culture should not forget to take the following things into account when revamping their corporate cultures.

1. An obsession with perfection is a dangerous path. For example, when organizations desire to build a performance-oriented culture, they have the best of intentions. When building a culture, however, focusing on one value always comes at the expense of another competing value, so the pursuit of perfection usually has adverse effects. Becoming perfectly performance-oriented means that the value of employees as human beings is depreciated, bringing about a decline in employee engagement and commitment. An overconcentration on productivity (and efficiency, planning, and goal-setting) will also exhaust employees and lessen their senses of self-worth and empowerment. This will end up contributing negatively to long-term achievement. Additionally, this type of excessive attention to performance usually creates a phenomenon wherein organizational members either try to avoid responsibilities or push themselves so much that their pursuit of personal performance and recognition threatens to destroy organizational unity.

1. An obsession with strategy implementation makes that very implementation less flexible. This causes damage to the culture. When organizations focus too much on new products and new marketing approaches, this comes at the risk of ignoring people. In the long-term, people should drive the products, not the other way around. If employees, instead of products or marketing approaches, become the targets of evaluations, the culture will overlook the importance of people’s involvement and ownership. Furthermore, employees will begin to focus only on how they are evaluated and so will become merely followers and executors of whatever strategy is given to them, as opposed to being innovators. This vicious cycle will make employees less flexible than they are when they have authority and initiative, and their ability to adapt to a changing environment will decrease. As a result, employees will lose the agility and sense of empowerment necessary when penetrating into a new market. When being evaluated, people have a tendency to repeat the same behaviors as long as they are successful, which leads to an immunity to change. In this regard, it is essential for organizations to remember to value their people, as this is what creates the value of products and services.

Nevertheless, leaders are often too impatient to follow these guidelines because they think that their leadership is strong enough to change the culture quickly. That is why we should not forget that the pursuit of perfect leadership can sometimes hurtl eadership. The thought that leaders should be leaders, leaders should be almighty, leaders should have all of the keys to performance can be damaging: a blind pursuit of perfect leadership can create an uncomfortable dynamic betweena leader and their followers. Leadership without followers is meaningless.Group dynamics are always the foundation of group performance, especially for long-term success., Leaders erroneously think that their personal courage and determination will allow them to shine; however, strategy implementation will fail with disengaged followers.

These are just some reasons why culture change efforts should not be too rushed. Employees need leaders who put people before performance. Short-term, glorious victories do not always translate into true success. Culture change may look attractive to the leaders of organizations and push them to pursue fast transformations. However, fast transformations are apt to create fractured organizations, because it takes a long time to truly change a culture while keeping employees engaged and valued. In order to go far, walk slowly, especially for cultural change.