A Recent Event That Showcases a Change at a Larger Level
The selected change event refers to Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, Inc. and the cultural shifts that followed it. In April 2022, the renowned entrepreneur initiated the deal with the social media giant by offering $44 bln for the company (Jia & Xu, 2022). The deal was completed in October, making Musk replace Jack Dorsey as the company’s CEO and resulting in a series of controversial decisions to reset Twitter’s culture.
Analysis of the Event
The Change’s Focus and Intended Results
The change effort initiated by Musk was focused on forcing rather than promoting a cultural shift to make the workforce more self-demanding and obedient. In his e-mail to the employees, Musk clearly stated his expectations regarding Twitter 2.0, requiring employees across various hierarchical levels to commit to “the hardcore culture” or leave their jobs (Ding, 2022, para. 1). For the intended results, Musk hoped to make the culture less employee-centered and emphasize excellent performance and dedication to improving Twitter. This was evident in his attempt to make the workforce prepared for “working long hours at high intensity” (Ding, 2022, para. 2). He anticipated creating an organizational culture of obedience and hard work and demonstrated the producer archetype in terms of leadership signatures by stating his commitment to tangible results and development rather than the team’s interests.
Factors Leading to the Change and Making It Worth Doing
Musk’s successful acquisition of the key decision-maker’s status has led to the change, and his detailed perspectives of Twitter’s tech-related drawbacks as a platform have made it worth doing from his perspective. Musk became the CEO and removed the previous board of directors, thus eliminating competition from the other internal sources of power, which has made drastic changes possible (Ding, 2022). Musk’s understanding of the change’s importance revolves around Twitter’s ability to revolutionize content evaluation processes to allow free speech, increase the platform’s transparency, and improve bot detection/banning (Ding, 2022; Milmo, 2022). Being effort-intensive, all these plans require the Twitter team’s ultimate dedication to meeting stricter performance standards and total agreement with Musk’s vision.
Political/Strategic/Cultural Challenges during Change Efforts
Musk’s rather disorganized change process could have promoted various issues, many of which can still emerge in the nearest future. Political challenges that might have occurred during the change process include more strained India-U.S. relationships resulting from Musk’s decision to fire over 80% of Twitter employees in India (Bond, 2022). Dedication to getting rid of staff members from a different culture might reveal the propinquity effect and Musk’s determination to create stable networks based on their members’ proximity. This very act could have resulted in cultural challenges, including the remaining Indian workforce’s growing negative attitudes to their U.S.-based counterparts for doing nothing to challenge Musk’s chaotic staff policy decisions. In terms of strategic issues, removing opportunities for remote work and mass firings could have undermined Twitter’s human resource strategy by lowering the subjective attractiveness of joining the team, thus leaving various crucial positions unfilled.
How the Process Has Gone
Regarding how the process has gone so far, Musk has already instrumentalized his formal status to initiate mass firings, thus eliminating open resistance to a new culture. Competence and likeability are leaders’ personal assets in promoting their vision, but Musk has demonstrated neither of them in his chief decisions. Eliminating the opportunity to work from home and the plan to leave up to 50% of the employees jobless have caused intense negative reactions from the workforce and the global business community (Ding, 2022). Change efforts have sought to remove barriers to Twitter’s success, as understood by Musk, such as the previous leadership’s excessive employee-centeredness and commitment to people rather than results.
Decisions that Have Worked Better/Worse
The initiative that has worked better in terms of forcing Musk’s vision of Twitter’s culture refers to structural changes to suppress the plurality of opinion and achieve managerial hegemony. Musk dissolved the social media giant’s board, firing the leading financial, legal, and operational decision-makers and bringing his like-minded attorney and fellow tech investors to the team (Ding, 2022; Milmo, 2022). Despite undermining the balance between leadership and management by removing the experts with sound knowledge of Twitter’s business environments, Musk has successfully eliminated the potential sources of intraorganizational resistance. Since Twitter’s long-standing decision-makers elicit more trust and are seen as more competent and likable compared to the new CEO, Parag Agrawal and other fired leaders could have inspired internal opposition to Musk’s culture-changing policies.
Musk’s initiatives related to policy and non-leadership staff have worked much worse due to violating organizational change logic and spreading fear among the workforce. Change theories, including Kotter’s eight steps, advocate for the graduality of change, which is absent in Musk’s case. As opposed to Kotter’s perspective, in which the vision is communicated thoroughly and taught by example from the guiding coalition, Musk’s approach is chaotic and creates uncertainty for the workforce (Ding, 2022; Milmo, 2022). Instead of establishing a coalition with much experience in operating social media platforms, Musk has invited over fifty coding specialists from Tesla, which is a totally different market, to join the team (Ding, 2022). Along with the VUCA world approach, addressing the volatile speed of change forces requires a clear vision (Antonacopoulou, 2018). The speed with which Musk has initiated changes to work-from-home policies and demanded total agreement with the new culture reveals his ignorance of the graduality concept. Over 3,000 Twitter employees have changed their LinkedIn status to “open to work” (Ding, 2022, para. 15). Such reactions reveal a climate of uncertainty and fear, which is not conducive to success in resetting culture.
References
Antonacopoulou, E. (2018). Organisational learning for and with VUCA: Learning leadership revisited. Theory and Practice Management Journal – Leading Brazilian Journal, 8(2), 1-26. Web.
Bond, S. (2022). Twitter’s chaos could make political violence worse outside of the U.S. NPR. Web.
Ding, J. (2022). Elon Musk attempts ‘hardcore’ culture reset at Twitter. Will employees buy in?Los Angeles Times. Web.
Jia, Q., & Xu, S. (2022). An overall analysis of Twitter and Elon Musk M&A deal. Highlights in Business, Economics and Management, 2, 436-441. Web.
Milmo, D. (2022). What changes has Elon Musk made at Twitter and what might he do next?The Guardian. Web.