Written by Dr. Melik Peter Khoury
How Organizations Punish Transformation and Reward Stagnation
There’s a performance happening in organizations right now. Employees clutch their metaphorical pearls while managers furrow their brows in concern. The script is familiar and everyone knows their lines.
“This is happening too fast.”
“People need time to adjust.”
“We’re losing good people because of all this disruption.”
And my personal favorite delivered with practiced sincerity by someone who hasn’t had a new idea in five years.
“I’m just worried about everyone’s well-being.”
Let me be brutally clear about what’s actually happening. When organizations face existential challenges requiring fundamental transformation, two groups emerge with clockwork predictability. The first group rolls up their sleeves and gets to work rebuilding the engine while the plane is in flight. The second group stands in the aisle, complaining about turbulence and demanding the pilot land immediately so they can get off.
The tragedy isn’t that the second group exists. The tragedy is that we’ve built entire organizational cultures that treat their complaints as wisdom and the change makers as reckless.
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