Can you push organizational change?

One of the greatest lessons for me in 2020 was the reorganization of my company and my participation in it. The company wasn’t really struggling but also didn’t grow for years, it just got stuck, frozen in time. Every issue we had was known by everyone, but we just stopped talking about them, and even when they came up during coffee breaks we just simply noted with sour sarcasm that this is the culture of this company, this is the way things are.

When the reorganization started, I did not really care, I had been reorganized a lot of times before and usually the result was always the same. For the people on the bottom nothing has changed and the people on the top got a new title, more money and they did the same work as before. Nobody got fired, nobody got hired, everything remained the same while the leadership was shaking hands with each other over how good they carried out the reorganization. I want to mention here that I don’t talk about one particular company, I heard many examples about such reorganizations all around the IT industry, mostly in large multinational companies. This phenomenon is in front of us everywhere yet people either don’t recognize it or just ignore it. Nobody talks about it.

Despite of my best attempts to avoid taking any part in the reorganization, for various reasons I got involved and I was not only involved, but I became part of the team of external consultants who were hired to get rid of all skeletons in the closet. And they did it, they got rid of lots of people on the top management level who shouldn’t have been working there for years anyway. So I got into the team which had actual authority to do something and this had triggered something in me. Suddenly I realized that I’m in the right place, at the right time and I have the opportunity to change something. All the pain I was suppressing for years, all the hurt found the way out and I just started to tell and tell and tell what the problems are in our daily work, how the people on the bottom suffer, how they are being consumed day by day a little more. I was angry and I wanted the management to feel my anger too.

Making issues visible vs. complaining

If you have a bit more experience, you might have already recognized a crucial mistake I made. I got emotional. However I believed that I was helping to make issues visible, after a certain point it just turned into giving my frustration away. Don’t get me wrong, I was right in every single point I said and people even…

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