One Promise You Should Never Believe
The week before I was fired for the first and only time, I read an article on the Harvard Business Review blog (HBR.org) called “Promises You Should Never Make or Believe” by Rosabeth Moss Kantor. I’ve rarely had a more timely or insightful blog post come across my radar. The article talks about the “overly rosy” promises people and organizations make when they are trying to influence or entice people to do something. It points out one promise in particular:
“We want you to be a change agent and shake things up.”
This was the promise that my boss and the board made when they had hired me 14 months earlier. They said they wanted to transform the company from a services business to a technology company. I was offered my choice of roles and picked VP of Strategy & Innovation. I was the third highest paid person in the company and succession planned to take my boss’s job when she took over as the next CEO.
If someone ever recruits you with the line “We want you to be a change agent and shake things up” don’t be as naive like I was. As Kantor explains in her article:
Bosses and boards often espouse change as a desirable goal but less often embrace its implications — e.g., firing old hands, closing or selling historically-core assets, or challenging organizational assumptions. Officials generally like things stirred but not shaken (unlike James Bond’s martini). So if you are told that you’ve been hired or assigned to shake things up in the interests of change, don’t believe it — even if it’s clear that a turnaround is necessary.
This promise tastes dust the minute controversy surfaces. Controversy is embarrassing, time-consuming, and takes eyes off the situation needing change and onto the personality of the change agent.
I had several successful change agent roles in companies whose innovation efforts were stuck in a rut, which was why I thought I could do it here. But the cultures were very different. The other companies I had worked for were venture-backed tech companies. We all had stock options and aggressive goals. We all shared the same vision and were passionate about bringing our products to billions of people around the world. We were all geeks at heart and loved our work.
The company that hired me was much different. It was not a tech company but a services company in a boring niche. The company was family owned and not venture backed. Many senior employees had been there for more than a decade, working themselves up from entry level positions. The vast majority of my new colleagues had lived all their lives in that same metropolitan area — not something you see in Silicon Valley. This was not a company that was going to “move fast and break things” like Mark Zuckerberg does at Facebook.
I knew within weeks of starting that I did not belong there. This feeling became much stronger after going to drinks with the marketing team from my old company. Our clients had included many large tech companies including Apple and Google. We all loved tech and enjoyed discussing the pros and cons our clients’ strategies, the newest devices and industry trends.
When I tried to have conversations like that with my new colleagues, we got nowhere. Later I’d hear from my boss that people thought I was trying to show off by discussing tech trends and strategy. At all my startups that was what we talked about over lunch and drinks. At the new company people talked about their kids’ soccer games or sports. I didn’t fit in — they thought I was a know-it-all jerk and I thought they were out-of-touch losers.
“Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” — Peter Drucker
It’s hard enough to be a change agent when you do fit in. It’s impossible when you don’t. The organizational immune system thinks you’re a virus and wants to get rid of you. Things get mean and ugly. Work becomes about politics and power instead or products and innovation.
When my boss fired me, she said that I was moving too fast and making too many changes. She admitted that when hiring me, she had sold my objective as “transforming the company.” Now she clarified that she meant my approach should be more evolution than revolution.
I’ve declined many offers since that job— some of them extremely lucrative — because the board or CEO would try to sell me some version of “We want you to be a change agent and shake things up.” I’m always happy to have the conversation and would not mind getting back in the game again. But I’ve gotten much better about asking more probing questions, especially about culture, strategy and making people changes. These conversations always reveal enough for me to walk away, feeling bad for the poor sucker who’s naive enough to believe the promises.
Keep going…
Love,
Coco
