It was mid-morning on a late-fall Monday in New York City, a block away from Columbus Circle, at the Steelcase HQ, when a large group of executives started filing into a presentation room. These were not Steelcase executives. We were in town (from Germany) with a client from a German DAX 30 company with roughly 120,000 employees, global supply chain, and a 100-year history in business. The reason for our meeting - to conduct a few ‘social organization’ experiments, and Steelcase graciously allowed us to use their space.

The executives in attendance were 95% male, between the ages of 46 and 64, coming from a wide range of functions (ranging from production to marketing to HR), all directly under the C-suite. 32 executives in total. These executives were unaware we were conducting this experiment and most of the staff at the organization didn’t know either - only one primary contact person was clued into the experiment.

To create the right setting for a ‘social organization’ experiment you need a hypothesis and a control group.

Our hypothesis: For executives at this organization, success is defined by the three T’s: title, tenure and top-down authority in any situation or place. Our belief was that this ‘definition of success’ was stifling creativity, long-term innovation, and fast decision making.

Our experimental group was in New York, and our control group was in Germany at the headquarters. In both locations we developed the same experiment.

Why did we believe this to be the case?

In embedded and external concept sprints with roughly 200 of the company's executives we had observed, the overwhelming majority exhibited behaviors that tracked back to the three T’s. For example, comments in group concept sprints such as “I would know that this won’t work because I’ve been here for 15 years and this has never worked at our organization” were the norm rather than the exception. The executives were also trapped by their titles and ‘top-down authority’ when working throughout the sprints. Although it was stressed that all group members remain equal during the sprints, most teams began assigning roles to individual members of the team that were nearly identical to their actual roles within the organization. As an example, the marketer crowned himself CMO of the group and began to ‘veto’ ideas and solutions that didn’t work without the proper marketing spend. The goal of blue-sky thinking during the sprints was often in jeopardy by group members using a fabricated ‘top-down authority’ towards other members of their own group.

The many occurrences of these anti-innovation behaviors led us to believe that the ability for the company to innovate didn’t rest with the organization's resources or employees abilities, but in executive culture, specifically around their success. The organization would need to redefine success for these executives to ensure that these ‘success factors’ would not 1) stifle future innovation and 2) infect mid and lower management, which would repeat the negative success definition in perpetuity.

Let the experiment begin

We believe that when you take people outside of their comfort zone, away from their proverbial ‘hearth and home’, they will adapt. Therefore we wanted to test the executives in a lean-back environment if they would defer to the same way of thinking as in the embedded and external concept sprints. The 32 executives were invited to a special two-day trip to New York as part of our larger innovation journey. All of our sessions were per the client objectives, ‘to experience innovation in one of the leading innovation hubs in the world’. However, one session was a set up deliberately created for our experiment hidden as a regular session in our agenda.

Once everyone was settled in the presentation room at Steelcase, our presenter started by introducing himself: “Hi, I’m Al and I still love water skiing even though wakeboarding is more ‘hip’ today.”* He followed up this comment by then asking that all the executives introduce themselves as follows: “name and a fun fact about yourself.” The presenter provided a few examples to ensure the executives understood the format such as “My name is Bob and my chocolate Labrador is named, Chocolate.” This language was specifically chosen to avoid any misunderstandings.

The presenter started the exercise by motioning first to the executive sitting in the first row to the far left. The executive began, “I’m Klaus Obermeyer, I’m the Head of Production at the production facility in Northern Germany and have been with the company for 17 years.” The next executive stated “I’m Juergen Schrempp, I’m the Head of Supply Chain for Europe, and I’ve been with the company for 19 years!” The second executive's voice peaked at “19 years” as he deadeyed the first executive, as if to make it clear he has bested the first executive with his ‘measly’ 17-year tenure. The remaining 30 executives in the room then proceeded to deviate from the instructed introduction format. Every single one of them failed to do the exercise as instructed - even better than my team imagined.

What does this tell us about this group of people:

They won't follow simple directives if it means they’ll miss a chance to flex their ‘I’m important’ muscles. Humbleness is not an attribute of their culture.
By providing their titles, with no request to do so they wanted everyone to know that their role in the company was valuable.
They are competitive even when there is no reason to be - a room full of their peers with only one outsider.
By ignoring the request to state a personal fun fact, and instead stating their tenure, they were only focused on their professional ‘power’ and not their personal side, which might be more vulnerable.

From our perspective, as the perpetrators of this ‘social organization’ experiment, we had struck gold with these results. But it wasn’t the good feeling striking gold is usually associated with considering that these findings would not be welcomed results when presented to the group that unknowingly took part in this experiment. These initial results, albeit early, brought to the surface that many of the challenges the company and it’s employees face stem from their executive’s definition of success. Would these same executives be ready to make real-lasting change once they fully realized the harm it was doing to the success of the company?

Note: the control group performed identical to the experimental group.

The reveal… of sorts.

We invited both the experimental and control groups back to a formal presentation on culture change with some of our favorite ‘culture’ case studies (Patagonia, Netflix, Airbnb, etc.). We didn’t disclose the experiment to the groups, but we discussed how the culture at Netflix, for example, mirrors a performance sports team where tenure means very little. Taking that sports example, if you join Bayern Munich as the former star player of Real Madrid, it’s likely that you’ll be one of the most important players on Bayern Munich even though you might have just joined the club a few weeks prior. I asked the group, “what if a data science whiz from Amazon came to work for your company? Wouldn’t he be more valuable than you?” The room erupted in negative comments. “That’s absurd!” “Ridiculous.” “Never in a million years.” The comments filled the room giving way to “Our hierarchy would eat him alive” and the room erupted in laughter.

This told me that in addition to the definition of success that these executives ascribe to being out of place for the times we live in, it’s being actively celebrated (adding insult to injury). As we wrapped up our session I asked the group a final question that immediately sobered the mood in the room and prompted reflection. “If your customer met you - the individual you - and had to spend a day with you, do you think he/she would be more likely to buy your product after that day, or less?” The majority thought the customer would be less likely to purchase the product. This sudden realization brought an unwelcome change to the groups otherwise unflappable idea of their own self-importance at the company. It was in that final moment of our session that many began to comprehend that to be better leaders, they would need to change. For those in the room a few years away from retirement, change is unlikely - there just isn’t the motivation when you’ve reached your peak. However, among the younger executives in the group - their success and tenure may be predicated on their ability to adapt and change.

We advocate for definitions of success such as “my employees feel purposeful and therefore I’m successful,” or “I’ve delivered inventive ideas to help grow our business and do more for the world and therefore I’m successful.” Younger managers are already steeped in these types of definitions of success that focus on wellbeing, meaning, and team. We’re big fans of Brene Brown’s definition of success - “generosity, curiosity, civility.” Success is no longer tied to 'work at', but 'work with'. We’ve found that the ‘work at’ model of thinking focuses on many selfish ‘me’ needs, versus the ‘work with’ model which focuses on others needs. It's vital that young managers are insulated from the traditional success definers so that they can set a new example for what it means to be successful on a larger stage.

During the same time span as our ‘social organization’ experiment we put the executives in the room with executives from other companies to act as social stimulus motivators within their peer group. Essentially, to help them reflect on their behavior by hearing from others that are in similar positions elsewhere. Scott Guthrie the EVP, of Cloud and Enterprise at Microsoft was one of these executives that we were fortunate to have for a couple hours. The executives lauded Scott’s success in leading Microsoft’s cloud effort, and asked how he did it. His response - redefining success. In Scott’s own words "I ran a 1 billion dollar business and then I’m put on a 1 million dollar business, um, WTF… and then I realized, you're on this piece of business because you're a proven performer to grow it to 1 billion.” Microsoft’s cloud dept pulls in roughly 11 billion today. Scott shifted his definition of success away from managing a large team (title and authority), to developing a new product, calling it “a change in personal and cultural KPI’s.” His advice to the executives in the room, "just experiment to solve cultural issues.”

So how do we redefine success?

Taking managers that have prayed on the mantle of the three T’s for decades to shift their understanding of success is a challenge. The multistep process we have used to spur executives to do so and actively address this redefinition can’t happen individually, but as a group. Without sharing all of our proprietary process (that’s why we spend days with you to achieve this), here are the necessary steps:

Reflect on self motivations, customer needs, and the value of the individual role.
Re-evaluate success options. Sometimes there’s a lack of imagination or creativity, which supports the old success definitions in staying entrenched
Ask yourself what successes fit with me, my team, my department, my company and with our community of external stakeholders and customers
Try out new success definitions in the real world via experiments project by project.
Develop a new definition of success and call out when projects or actions prompted someone to revert to the old definition of success.

It’s important to note that this was one ‘social organization’ experiment of many with this particular client. When conducting these types of experiments it’s important to dive in as deep as possible and test on-going in many work and extracurricular situations. Touching very briefly on another experiment which also provided supporting evidence for our results around redefining success, we looked into the state of ‘happiness’ and it’s meaning to employees and executives. In a series of situational surveys we found most often that employee happiness meant “having a win,” whereas the executives saw happiness as “laziness,” an attainable end-state signaling that you have nothing to do. The more information you have at your fingertips about your executives and people, the better you can assess their definition of success and put actionable measures in place.

When clients like this one face the daunting task of transforming their business, investing in innovation and implementing ‘ways of working’ used for instance by startups, a version of this question always pops up after being overwhelmed by what we’ve shown them in the global innovation ecosystems, “...all of these things like how startups managed to push their culture towards value creation, agile working methods, a permission to fail approach and purpose driven culture are great, but how do we do that with 120,000 employees?" This is an actual question from an executive at this very company. And the answer is simple. You don’t have to do it with 120,000 employees, you only have to do it with yourself and your peers. That alone will likely push half the company into the right direction. Marcia Morales-Jaffe, the former Chief People Officer of PayPal said it best, “you need culture champions,” and if those are your executives, you wield the most powerful tool to create meaningful change in your organization.

*Names have been changed for confidentiality reasons.

About the authors

Ryan is the founder and CEO of MCL.digital, an transformation consultancy that unearths insights and develops innovative concepts in Retail, Workplace, Mobility, Tech, and Design.

Brian is a strategic advisor at MCL.digital and co-founder of BTblock, a leading blockchain, cybersecurity and digital transformation consultancy with offices in Denver, New York, Boston and Stockholm.

Unlocking cultural change at a 120,000 person organization with just 200 people