Organizational change experts say that this kind of rupture is almost never necessary, and that the messiest transformations are often the least effective ones. “A generation of people actually believe that disruption is virtue, and that’s an enormous mistake,” says Ronald Heifetz, a senior lecturer in public leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School.
Change can be hard, especially for companies with deeply entrenched cultures. But a drama-free reinvention of an organization is possible—and if you can pull it off, it’s the ideal way to transform a company, Heifetz says. “In trying to change a successful and large organization, you want to find minimally culturally-disruptive innovation,” he explains. “When you look at innovative companies, they are building from a lot of strategy, values, structures, procedures, competencies that work, and it should be preserved…Otherwise, you’re throwing out the baby with the bathwater.”
To be clear, even the most drama-free company overhaul won’t make everyone happy. “The goal is not to eliminate discomfort, but to prevent distrust and dysfunction from overtaking the story,” says Amy Edmondson, a professor of leadership and management at Harvard Business School. The first step, she says, is being “very clear about why change is needed.”
“Keep repeating that message in plain language, because when people don’t understand ‘the why’—economic, marketing, technological, whatever it is—they will fill in the gap with their own explanation,” she says.
If Weiss failed on the ‘why,’ she seems to have struggled equally with expressing to her staff ‘what’s next.’
In a memo to 60 Minutes staff introducing Bilton, Weiss and CBS News president and executive editor Tom Cibrowski said they were seeking a new approach that involved “expanding 60 Minutes beyond a one-hour television broadcast, deepening its role across CBS News, and holding everything we produce to the ambition, fairness, and fearlessness that have defined 60 Minutes at its best.”
But “[Weiss] hasn’t succeeded in really making that compelling enough for those that are involved in the situation,” McGrath says.
A company transformation has to be framed as a learning process, rather than top-down execution, says Edmondson. “You can’t roll out a change program, you have to cycle it out. It’s a journey of hypothesizing, trying, learning, tweaking, trying again.”
To his credit, Bilton said he intended to enlist 60 Minutes staffers in setting the show on a new course. In an introductory message to staffers, he said his first order of business was meeting with the show’s team to “hear what you’re working on. Hear what isn’t working…In about 30 days, I’ll come back to all of you with where we go from here. It will be a conversation that we have together.”
That’s the right approach, experts said, at least on paper. “If leaders are willing to acknowledge the uncertainty that lies ahead, and share what they’re seeing, share what they’re learning, and show that they can change course in response to good data, then others will do that too,” Edmondson says.
The most successful transformations look less like detonations and more like construction projects—unglamorous, incremental, and mapped out well in advance. The third step in a drama-free overhaul—“removing obstacles between where we are and where we want to get to”—demands a “systematic” approach rather than “a chainsaw,” McGrath says. Turnarounds take time.
Patience is in short supply in every corner of corporate America, but buying time—from the board and investors—is part of a leader’s job too, says Heifetz.
“When you’re trying to bring people along, then what you want is to help find common ground, something we can all agree on, and then build from there,” McGrath says.
The question for Weiss and CBS News is whether bringing people along is a priority—or if, as they blow things up, they’d rather people get out of the way.
