Is Your Culture Ready for Disruption?

If I say “this is a time of great change,” no one is going to argue with me. Even if you leave out the crazy political stuff that’s happening right now, the AI juggernaut is already disruptive enough for most people. It’s changing (and improving) so fast, that it’s almost impossible to imagine how it will impact our work experience even just a year from now. Most of us are experimenting with it, but if you’re like me, you might be feeling like you can’t keep up.

Not keeping up is a problem. I think there is great potential here, but only if we can move fast, be agile, and adjust continuously in a changing environment. And it’s not just a “personal” issue. In most cases, it’s not just “you” that is not keeping up—it’s your culture.

Our newest research is digging into the change readiness of workplace cultures. If you’ve followed our research to date, you know that we have identified 8 primary culture patterns related to the 8 culture markers we measure in our assessment—agility, collaboration, growth, inclusion, innovation, solutions, technologies and transparency. Knowing what your patterns are is critical to designing a culture that drives your success and retains top talent.

Among those markers, Agility and Innovation are both obviously related to change, so that’s one area to examine if you want to assess your change readiness, but we realized there’s more to it than that. Spread across those eight culture markers are 36 individual building blocks that we think have a huge impact on how well your culture manages change. All of these building blocks address two opposing aspects of change readiness: agency and control.

Agency refers to the ability of individual employees to take action, make decisions, and solve problems. In a culture of high agency, when your people see an opportunity, they take it. When they see a problem, they solve it. In a culture of low agency, people wait for permission, assume someone else will handle it, or pass the buck. Cultures with low agency will struggle with change, because action will be continuously delayed.

Control is the other side of the coin—it’s about how tightly the top of the organization controls things, and from a change perspective, you’d rather have light control than heavy control. In a culture of light control the senior level stays out of the way if possible, knowledge and expertise is valued, and authority is delegated responsibly and frequently. In a culture of heavy control, the senior level gets into the weeds, approval and title are valued, and authority stays with higher titles. Cultures with heavy control will struggle with change, because the top becomes a bottleneck.

Those 36 building blocks are broken into six categories:

· Difficult conversations (dealing with conflict, giving negative feedback)

· Organizational clarity (silos, strategy, policies)

· Employee support (resources, needs-focus, ownership)

· Shared responsibility (accountability, risk-taking, user focus)

· Empowered decisions (distribution of power, decision-making, role of senior level)

· Creative autonomy (creativity, trust, flexibility)

In our dataset, those six are listed in score order from lowest to highest. In other words, difficult conversations is least present in cultures, on average, and creative autonomy is most present.

But when it comes to managing major disruption (like business model changes, digital transformation, or just about anything based in AI), there are two in particular that I think are important: difficult conversations and empowered decisions.

Difficult conversation revolves around you handle conflict, and of all the 64 building blocks in our data set, the two blocks with the highest correlation are “managing conflict” and “embracing change.” It’s hard to do change well if you can’t do conflict well. I see people avoiding conflict and working for months solving the WRONG problem because no one spoke up when they saw the mistake. I see departments that never have the conversation about who’s in charge, and eventually it blows up and grinds the change to a halt at its most important juncture.

Empowered decisions is ultimately about decentralization, letting the people closest to the problem actually solve the problem to as great an extent as possible, and customizing rather than standardizing. It’s hard to do change well if the top is getting in the weeds and creating bottlenecks. I see the top deciding—and then undeciding as soon as they get a complaint from an influential person about the direction of the change. I see them hold back resources for customization, making the change more difficult for the people on the ground.

I’m working on a quick change readiness assessment that will give you a snapshot of where you stand on these two areas (and the other four), or you could consider running a full culture assessment (which will provide you all the details related to these six change-related areas as well). I suggest gathering data, because I believe you need to move quickly on this, and I find that data can really mobilize people around change.

And if you really want a jump-start, go ahead and take (or send your people to take) my Managing Conflict with Confidence online course.