Organisation's Culture & Change Process

One of the differentiations between learning organization and traditional organizations is in their capacity to absorb change. Embracing Change is a hall-mark of a successful organization. Most of the CEOs/CXOs despite of their position in the organization still struggle around bringing in required amount & pace of change they want to bring in. Managing Change has been tricky always.

If Change is embedded with Business logic, stake holder's emotions & organizations real values, the equations become very effective. Not only this, the change process gets accelerated & impacts gets multiplied as well.

So what are those factors impacts change, the first thing which comes to our mind is Culture. Each organization will have a culture in place. It takes years to create & change culture.

Culture is nothing but a collective combination of attitude, behaviors and beliefs being displayed .As with individuals, organizations as well take couple of years to form these attitude, behaviors and beliefs. The unlearning process takes sometime before organization can start displaying new attitudes, behaviors and beliefs. It’s very important to build this into yours plans for the change to sustain. Ignoring same may result into a situation where change was visible till it was reinforced but was not sustained beyond that.

This is a paradox...leadership team and employees consciously build a culture and now we want to unlearn same and learn new rules impacting our new attitude, behaviors and beliefs but this is the reality. This happens with any conditioning...Organizations are also conditioned like individuals.

There are three cultural traps which resist change .Organizational leaders need to watch themselves not falling for these.

1. Don't try to solve today's problem with yesterday's learning & solutions always - It may not be possible sometimes. So unlearning, learning and application should be part of the culture as the same is unavoidable for growth. Growth is a change to your present as well. Can you get growth without embracing change?
2. Good may not be good forever - In another situation when organization is doing good, leadership team may sometime dislike to even think that they need to change. Inertia of present may go longer then it is desirable.
3. Not planning for change, may result in blocking new opportunity - Many times we resist change  because of the Fear of change or/and Ignorance about the possible opportunities which change will bring in. Everything which is conceived by our mind is not right as mind always operate from past experience .This is a strength but can be weakness sometimes for the organization 

Successful practices of past may become weaknesses of today. Many times problem is with the leadership style which as well may be a product of a successful past. Generally speaking, the older the organization, the tougher is the change. You may have seen yourself that many businesses in past have been closed because they were not able to keep pace with change .This comes at the cost of people's jobs apart from the economic loss.

So if your organization is changing for good, feel comfortable as you are on the right track.