Changing the Company: Between Sincere Intentions and On-the-Ground Reality

How can we bring about change? I meet many business leaders who feel at a loss when faced with the challenge of driving change within their organizations. Despite a truly commendable intention to support and help people grow, change often struggles to take hold. So what is holding it back?

Two Opposing Approaches

At heart, two approaches are clashing here. In the top-down approach, decision-making is centralized. This is the traditional approach to management, the “Command & Control” approach. In practice, it results in a management style that is more or less flexible, ranging from strict hierarchical authority to a management style blended with coaching and attempts to take team input into account, but decision-making remains centralized. Often, this leads to the classic double bind: “Be agile.”

In contrast, the bottom-up approach lets ideas bubble up organically. Management only makes decisions as a last resort because it trusts the people it has hired to make good decisions together. The manager is first and foremost a facilitator, nurturing the system rather than seeking to control it (the Management 3.0 approach, theorized by Jurgen Appelo). This perfectly illustrates Steve Jobs’ famous quote (whom I knew very well): “It doesn’t make sense to hire smart people and tell them what to do; we hire smart people so they can tell us what to do.” Put another way, if a manager finds that they cannot trust their team, it means they made a mistake in the hiring process. That puts the responsibility where it belongs!

Many business leaders understand that they would benefit from letting go, but the conditions for doing so are not in place (we’ll come back to this). They hire a coach and find, after a few months, that the change isn’t happening as quickly as they would have liked. At that very moment, the organization tightens its grip and makes a sudden shift toward “military-style” management, with generally disastrous results. Let’s be clear: this never works. The “bad cop” hired for the occasion ends up having the opposite effect of what was intended: a listless organization, paralyzed by fear, and, before long, situations of harassment.

Measuring Progress (and Beware of Unintended Consequences)

The first step in avoiding this pitfall is to measure progress. Fostering growth is a long-term process, which sometimes even involves letting teams make their own mistakes. This is how they come to understand the need for change and find solutions they truly embrace. But for company leaders, this means gritting their teeth for many long months.

It is therefore essential to demonstrate progress, which means putting metrics in place. This topic would warrant a dedicated article, but it cannot be discussed without mentioning the trap of Goodhart’s law: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure,” the “cobra effect” being a perfect example of this. In the software industry, this law is all too often illustrated by team velocity, which some organizations use to compare teams (which makes absolutely no sense), when it should be nothing more than a tool for internal team management.

The people already in place

While the top-down approach, in my experience, has no chance of working, the bottom-up approach is nonetheless difficult to implement. The latter is based on the assumption that the manager-facilitator can place their trust in the people already in place, because the company has been able to select and attract the right people. In other words, you need the right people, people who are competent, self-reliant, and trustworthy.

However, someone may have been the right person to lay the technical foundations of a product in the early days of a startup but may not be the leader needed to guide its growth later on. Whether out of loyalty or because other paths to excellence within the company have yet to be invented, it’s all too easy to promote these “long-time” employees and set them up for failure in management positions that, deep down, they probably never really wanted. Such a change therefore requires facing the situation head-on and taking action if necessary.

Conclusion

We cannot stress this enough: change takes time, whether it involves individuals, teams, or organizations. The support of a coach can help, provided that the progress being made is highlighted. On the other hand, these attempts to let go will run out of steam sooner or later if the company doesn’t take action on recruitment and, more broadly, on its culture. At the risk of sounding trite (and pardon the comparison), you can’t make a racehorse out of a donkey…