Podcast: Does Your Corporate Culture Sabotage Meaningful Change?

You are a leader who exhibits strategic thinking. You also are able to take a systems perspective to managing change, seeing the whole versus getting too granular in your thinking and decision-making. You may also have developed a fine vision. You have what it takes to drive a meaningful organizational transformation within your organization.

All good, right?

Boom. Then reality hits. Your seemingly strong leadership characteristics slam up against a corporate culture that throws obstacles in your way. The organization is the roadblock to your ability to flourish.

Successful outcomes seem painfully unlikely in such a corporate environment.

In this episode of Behind the Curtain: Adventures in Continuous Improvement, podcast hosts Dr. Mohamed Saleh and John Dyer continue their exploration of 10 essential leadership characteristics for leading meaningful change, expanding on their previous discussion of leadership characteristic No. 6: being a strategic thinker with a systems perspective. More specifically they discuss how leaders who want to exhibit these characteristics can be stopped by an unsupportive corporate culture and how such corporate cultures sabotage sustainable organizational excellence.

How can corporate culture hinder potential? Saleh and Dyer delve into the downside of corporate short-term thinking and job-hopping as a deterrent to carrying out plans to fruition.

“I've been in that situation as a leader myself, where I put together a five-year plan, but then I get moved,” Saleh says. “I don't see my [plan] to fruition, but the new place I go to, I want to create my own footprint and my own identity.”

The continuous improvement experts also discuss the “fear factor” culture. It’s one that punishes risk and thus the risk-taker, even though risk is inherent in radical change. Transformational change can’t flourish in a culture where a change leader is worried about his reputation and career advancement opportunities.

“The top people need to create an environment, a culture that embraces change, that embraces risk taking, that makes it clear that it's okay to have failure,” Dyer says. “Plan, do, check, act, because that's how we learn, that's how we grow, that's how we get better.”

Dyer and Saleh also discuss a third category of poor company culture, which Dyer dubs “fluff versus reality.” In short, it’s a culture that bestows credit on people for something they never implemented and, in many cases, never intended to implement.

Dyer shared an example, detailing the power of a glitzy presentation given to the CEO. “Careers were made or ruined based on that presentation—not on how you implemented it, not on any results of it, none of that.”