“You have been at it for over 6 months now. Have you changed it yet?”

Let’s analyze the fabric of corporate culture by understanding the term ‘culture’. As defined by Merriam-Webster, culture is an “Integrated pattern of human knowledge, belief, and behaviour that is both a result of and integral to the human capacity for learning and transmitting knowledge to succeeding generations. Culture thus consists of language, ideas, beliefs, customs, taboos, codes, institutions, tools, techniques, works of art, rituals, ceremonies, and symbols.”

This sounds complex, as it should. Culture is learned over time by people sharing certain environmental similarities. These similarities could involve a common religion, place of residence, place of birth and/or place of work among other things. Strictly speaking about corporate culture, it is initially developed as a result of multiple individuals coming together bringing in their personal values, and then morphing them into something that is mutually adopted by the entire group. As corporations age and grow, their cultural values solidify and become more stable and as a result, new employees are expected to adopt these to succeed. This is not to say that the corporate culture stops evolving, but it becomes more and more resilient.

Let’s take an example of an organization that has been in business for over 50 years, with a number of lifers (or long-term employees). This organization will likely exhibit very strong cultural values shared by its employees, and any new employees are integrated into this culture through robust re-enforcements built into the formal and informal organizational practices such as performance management. Now add to this organization an executive change agent who wishes to move from a ‘management-controlled’ structure to a more autonomous work environment. Some may argue that this is a simple enough change; instead of manager’s assigning tasks to their employees, they will now be assigning high-level goals and leave it up to the employees to accomplish them in whatever way they see appropriate. Let’s give it 6 months for documentation, training and process changes, and we are good to go. Problem solved!

Unfortunately, the problem is not solved. In this organization, employees have taken orders from management for over 50 years and they are used to working in this manner. They may not have the skillset to distill the goals into executable steps, or more importantly, they may not want to do so. Similarly, managers have always ‘managed’ in the same way by assigning tasks and assessing performance based on employees’ ability to execute them. All of a sudden, the proposed change challenges their way of work. Manager may fear loss of control and may even question their prospects at this organization. What are they supposed to do? Is their job being taken away? Are they becoming redundant? All of these things are driven by the corporate culture inculcated in every employee of the organization, and they perceive anything outside of the accepted cultural norms as invalid. This is like asking you to believe that you can walk on water, contrary to the belief you have held all your life. Not to sound over dramatic, this is basically how human beings process a change to their cultural values.

In short, the change in question cannot be implemented by simply updating a few documents and changing the process; it requires a fundamental shift in the corporate culture with a very strong foundation. This takes a long time to accomplish; not days, not weeks, not months but years depending on the organization. Let that not deter you from the change; the idea is to instigate the change and ensure it continues to flourish over time with realistic expectations. However, the expectation to have a cultural change of this magnitude be accomplished within 6 or 12 months is fundamentally flawed as it blatantly ignores the human dynamics at play.