Reflections on Management

Change is complex and difficult, no matter the context. Although sometimes they may be overly simplistic, change management tools are plentiful and can help someone kick-start the process of making change happen. Culture change, however, is doubly hard. The simple approach has been to impose ‘strong’ cultures. But several episodes of the main Talking About Organizations Podcast have shown the several downsides of trying the strong culture approach, including resentment and rebellion. Is there another way?

The short answer is ‘yes,’ but that is indeed a short answer. The fact is culture change is not something that is often done in an instant. Thus, our desire for certainty and simplicity often leads us down the path of treating culture change instrumentally — like a series of knobs to turn or levers to pull. Such ideas conflict with my own experience, where culture change only succeeds through persistence and the use of different metaphors. In this episode, I present the metaphor of Van de Ven and Poole’s (1995) teleological motor of change and explain why it is a more accurate representation of how culture change actually occurs in practice. It is indeed not a method for the impatient, but it certainly helps avoid unnecessarily frustration and cynicism if used properly.

Some organizations encourage or rely upon volunteers to supplement its mission or activities. Occasionally, the organization finds that the voluntary efforts are so essential to its purpose that it decides to create a new permanent position to perform it, effectively in-sourcing the role. On the good side, this demonstrates a tacit acknowledgement that the volunteer work is important and appreciated. But it is not always easy or smooth, and could actually create problems where they did not exist. In this episode, I explore two examples from my experiences, with both resulting in changed relationships among the organization, the permanent hire, and the other volunteers. One turned out well, the other experienced a rockier start. What should managers do to make such transitions work more smoothly?

When one embarks on a career as a professional or a scholar, it is commonly spurred by a desire to make a significant contribution to society, through personal service (such as medicine or law) or helping solve a vexing problem. We want to ‘make a difference,’ ‘give back,’ and ‘do something about X or Y.’ But somewhere along the way, perhaps beginning with one’s dissertation or one’s socialization into the field, we narrow the questions down to what is deemed feasible or empirically testable. And that socialization process channels our work from then on, dissuading us from getting back to answering the big questions that brought us to the field in the first place. How can restore the sense of wonder from our beginnings and get after the big questions again?

This is a troublesome question for some, as ordinary academic pressures push us scholars to the culture of narrow questions, staying within our chosen field and communicating primary with those who are like-minded. I take a completely different view — happily pursuing topics that I have little to no prior experience in, so long as there’s a tether back to something about organizations. That’s because of my BIG question … my primary quest that drove me to enter a doctoral program at such a late age. What is that BIG question? Listen and find out!

Branding and brand equity is a competitive sport. No matter what type of organization, public or private, maintaining high brand equity is seen as important. Brand equity is defined in David Aaker’s book Managing Brand Equity as having five components – brand loyalty, name awareness, perceived quality, brand associations in addition to perceived quality, other proprietary brand assets such as patents, trademarks, etc. Getting those components to show high value — meaning that customers and stakeholders think very highly of the brand — is big for an organization’s competitiveness, maybe even its survival. Low brand equity, while not always fatal, is a definite problem. So when an organization is able to turn things around and make its brand suddenly interesting, prominent, even viral — people take notice. But it is hard to replicate.

I use the recent example of the so-called ‘storm surge’ celebrations held by the National Hockey League’s Carolina Hurricanes 2018-2019 season to highlight an example of how a team mired in long-term mediocrity suddenly upped its profile. It’s an interesting story of turning an organization’s reputation around, but what does the literature tell us about how this might have occurred and whether or not such an apparent success can be replicated in some way by other organizations.

Last season, I talked about how narrative, as a construct, can represent either the full story of an organization or an intervention into it. But unfortunately, the organization’s own narrative is not the only version of the story. In a competitive world, other actors use counternarratives against the organization – alternative stories that are often adversarial, intended to harm the organization’s reputation or tarnish its images. Popular communication literature plays this image up… a lot. But is it accurate? Are all counternarrative adversarial, or used only by our enemies?

Counternarratives are narratives that exist primarily to “refute other narratives” harbored by organizations, societies, nations, or any other collective group. They often emerge as “stories … which offer resistance, either implicitly or explicitly, to dominant cultural narratives.” But while counternarratives are often viewed or discussed as adversarial entities, they can take many forms as I demonstrate in the analysis of a prominent military case study — the initial phases of establishing the U.S. Africa Command by the U.S. Department of Defense, 2006-2009. Some counternarratives were purely antagonistic, but other emerged from friendlier sources. The contrasts among the counternarratives at play should make us rethink the breadth of competitive stories used to challenge the mission, purpose, or identity of organizations.

There is more than one way to accomplish a goal -- indeed, Katz and Kahn gave this concept a name – equifinality. But some organizations find themselves routinely switching change strategies, especially those that turn over leadership routinely. They enter thinking there is a ‘right’ or ‘better’ way to do this, but does such a thing really exist?

In this episode, I apply a book chapter by Robert Chin and Kenneth Benne to show that all strategies have strengths and vulnerabilities. The moral of the 'Story of the Four Commanders' is to mitigate the vulnerabilities.

Whenever a job opportunity opens at a distant location, a factor that may be taken into consideration is the climate. Not just the organizational climate on the job, but the climate outside. Maybe it isn't so much of a concern for the potential employee, but it sure can be for the family -- like when the opportunity is in Minnesota or Alaska but the spouse hails from Louisiana or Arizona, there could be misery at home! But liking or disliking the prevailing weather is just part of the story. What about prevalence of bad weather events or other natural disaster? How much of the job is outside and how much is inside? And just because one works in an office setting doesn't mean the environment is not a factor.

My experience in organizations where members are forced to move routinely, is that climate factors can weigh very heavily and locations can be separated into 'preferred' and, well, 'not preferred.' To what extent does this knowledge weigh on the minds of those at preferred or non-preferred locations? Or in making moves with career implications?

When we discuss change and change management, the emphasis tends to be placed on ‘starting’ something or ‘creating’ something. But in my experience, the creation of something often must accompany the ‘destruction’ of something else – like the breaking of a bad habit. Also, ‘terminating’ a change effort is rarely discussed, as though it were unimportant – ‘Oh, don’t worry about how this ends, let’s just get started’. But stopping something is an important part of change, is it not? And is it just like starting something?

This tendency to ignore the need for stopping -- whether it means breaking a bad habit or interrupting an organization's process--does a disservice to organizations and their change agents. It increases the chances of change fatigue because the effects of change efforts simply accumulate. In other words, we're adding more work without enough reward. But stopping something can leave a trail of destruction in its wake -- the second order effects of stopping can be great. In this episode, I use theories of de-institutionalization to offer ideas and approaches to effect change by stopping something.

If you are like me, you don't like to hear profanity, and find it difficult hearing conversations where curse words are flowing from people's mouths like water. Cursing, swearing, cussing, whatever it is called -- it has a long history, and for some people it is a natural part of their language while others reserve it for very rare and specific occasions. I have noted over the course of my work life that the purpose, frequency, and intensity of cursing has evolved. On the one hand, the organizations in which I served cleaned up their language over time because of the need to be inclusive and reduce hostile work climates. On the other, popular media and other venues almost seem to need cursing to stay provocative or cutting-edge.

Is there a right or wrong in all this? Does cursing have a real purpose? Has it evolved over time? I address these questions with the help of some literature on cursing and my own experiences listening to how profanity is used among different levels or types of organization. It is a complex topic because there are multiple purposes for cursing, each reflecting different norms and have different effects on others.

While some may view the current state of political division in many parts of the world as new and disturbing, it merely follows a trend that has spanned decades. That doesn’t make it OK, it merely suggests that the deepening divide between those on the “left” and “right” will grow. Organizations risk becoming intellectually homogeneous, and there are studies showing that discrimination on the basis of political ideology is trending up. If so, it could have a significant impact on an organization’s ability to maintain diversity of views and perspectives to remain innovative and competitive.

One must first ask whether it really is a problem, and then what can one do? For me, the challenge is that neutrality — which can be described in many ways as I show in this episode — must serve a purpose and provide a benefit over taking one political side or the other. In a world that does not consider neutrality to be an honorable stance to take, this is difficult. But we must start somewhere…