Corporate culture is a system of attitudes and beliefs that shape behavior. Your corporation or organization has its own cultural beliefs about change, about how it should be viewed and responded to. Many times these beliefs operate just outside of awareness, but they are palpable and observable through other people’s behaviors and patterns of interaction. Is change an enemy, to be fended off or invited only into the tiniest parts of the organization? For example, are large issues referred to a committee for further study? Does the committee’s work result in new forms or paper-based change only? Is change seen as a necessary evil which requires a response in order to "get things back to normal"? Or, is it a welcome challenge and an opportunity to renew everything and everyone?
You can also find hints about your corporate change culture by looking at how it deals with employees during the change process. Are decisions about change made at the highest levels and issued as edicts to employees? Are employees viewed as opponents to change, who must be coerced or co-opted before change occurs? Or, are employees treated as partners in anticipating, inviting, and managing change? You won't find answers to these questions in a personnel handbook or description of the organization. If you do, chances are that such descriptions define the organization’s values better than its practices.
If organizations hunkered down in their own little corners of the world and focused on nothing but mission and product or service offering, no single theory for handling change would be more suitable than another. However, few, if any, businesses could afford to operate in that kind of isolation. And, the more your business requires an open door policy with the world, the more the viewpoints related to transformational change are suited to your operation. When you deal not only with a small, stable specialty clientele, but with interstate and international markets and with local, state or federal departments, you are constantly bombarded with change from the outside. This is especially true in sales, which is in itself an open door to the world. Your department cannot afford to resist change.
Being there first with the most guarantees nothing. If your organization is open to change—not just paper recognition, but changes that organize work around outcomes and include everyone who affects those outcomes—you don’t need to "fight City Hall" and worry about changing your corporate culture. But, if your organization operates as it does because "that’s the way we’ve always done things," your work as a manager is cut out for you. Change will be imposed on your organization from the outside world and you will have to deal with your employees’ responses to these changes, as well as the organization’s resistance to reformulating itself.
Changing the corporation from within is difficult, even when the organization is deeply committed to change. When the organization fears change, the first task is to make people aware that there are different ways to think about and respond to change. Organizations that don’t learn this lesson will soon exist in old phone books, and nowhere else.
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Excerpted from Sandler’s Strategic Sales Management training program, Module 2 Reference Guide, © 1998 Sandler Systems, Inc. All rights reserved.
