Standing Out vs. Fitting In
Years ago, I had the pleasure of working for a hot minute with one of the most brilliant and talented women I’d ever encountered – for the sake of anonymity, let’s just call her Jenny. Jenny had been recruited from the other side of the country by a blue-chip company which, after decades of success doing more or less the same old thing, was really hungry for change. Jenny had been a bit of a nonconformist since she was a teenager, and this tendency in both her personality and her work had made her one of the most sought-after changemakers in her field. So the blue-chip company lured her in with all kinds of money, perks and promises that they were truly prepared to undertake a huge array of changes in their organization and business model – both Jenny and her new employer felt like they had found a perfect partnership.
In addition to her brilliance and long track record of success, the fact that Jenny was a woman was hugely appealing to the company that hired her, because they knew, deep down, that the “stuck place” they were in as a company had a lot to do with the fact that their executives were mostly 60-something White men who, despite being quite accomplished by traditional standards, were out of touch with their customer base and looking to coast smoothly into retirement within a few years. Jenny was an instant sensation within the company, shaking things up in unprecedented ways, charging bravely into difficult problems and conversations, not to mention inspiring and energizing the younger members of the company. Everyone – including the Board of Directors – loved her and the new momentum that she brought to this somewhat tired company.
Within about a year of her hire, Jenny was suddenly fired. Of course the CEO put a genteel spin of mutuality on Jenny’s departure – “She’s decided to move on to other projects,” he said in a Town Hall meeting; “We’ll miss her, and we wish her the very best.” But the reality was that her boss (one of those too-comfortable White male executives I mentioned earlier) actually said to her face that her popularity and innovative ideas were “making him look bad” and that she was therefore “not a good fit” for the organization. When I had dinner with Jenny a few days after the announcement of her sudden “departure,” she summed up the previous year with the blue-chip organization as follows: “I felt like the whole company just had an allergic reaction to me.”
I honestly can’t even count the number of times I’ve seen this happen, up close and personal; I’m really just focusing on Jenny’s story here because her comment about the company’s immune response to her crystallized a new and important understanding in me about why change-makers are so notoriously short-lived in most organizations.
Even though Jenny was not specifically hired in the Innovation Department, she was definitely tasked with envisioning and implementing company-wide transformation. And she had the skills and experience to do exactly that: she had fantastic interpersonal skills; she had a huge Rolodex of external partners in business and government who were eager to support the kinds of changes she was tasked with making; and this wasn’t her first rodeo – she had enacted exactly these kinds of changes many times before in other organizations.
So what went wrong? In a nutshell, it was an “allergic reaction” of sorts – everything about Jenny and how she approached her job was foreign to this organization, and the unconscious response from every corner of this corporation was to neutralize and expel the “foreign body” that was Jenny. It’s the Catch-22 of standing out vs. fitting in: as a changemaker, Jenny naturally had to “stand out” by doing things differently from how they had always been done, and this stirred up tension, fear, suspicion and resentment among even those people who had championed her hire. If Jenny had tried to “fit in” by dimming her light, asking fewer questions and shaking things up less, her ability to actually create change in that organization would have been completely neutralized, and they would eventually have exited her for being ineffective as a changemaker (that’s the fate that befell the Chief Innovation Officer a year or so later).
All of this is why we believe, at Satya Rasa Consulting, that companies undertaking any sort of innovation or transformation need objective, third-party support – not just to enable the changemakers, but to neutralize the instinctive opposition and resistance that inevitably arise in these situations, and to help the entire corporation evolve in ways that make it more amenable to change. It doesn’t entail firing people or restructuring the organization, either; it’s simply about enabling the organization to see its own areas of resistance so that it can open to new ways of being.