Written by Dr. Melik Peter Khoury
How Organizations Punish Transformation and Reward Stagnation
There鈥檚 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.
鈥淭his is happening too fast.鈥
鈥淧eople need time to adjust.鈥
鈥淲e鈥檙e losing good people because of all this disruption.鈥
And my personal favorite delivered with practiced sincerity by someone who hasn鈥檛 had a new idea in five years.
鈥淚鈥檓 just worried about everyone鈥檚 well-being.鈥
Let me be brutally clear about what鈥檚 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鈥檛 that the second group exists. The tragedy is that we鈥檝e built entire organizational cultures that treat their complaints as wisdom and the change makers as reckless.
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