A Lesson From Big Tech: Don't Hire Someone To ‘Fix' Your Culture

Twitter's Chief Design Officer, Dantley Davis, has recently come under fire for his 'blunt style' of shaking things up at the tech giant.  While it's possible that his unorthodox approach to fixing Twitter's 'overly-collaborative' culture is unproductive and even offensive, it appears to me that Dantley Davis was set up for failure from the get-go.

I appreciate what he is trying to accomplish, but it seems Twitter has walked right into the common pitfalls awaiting any company attempting to change its culture.

Pitfall # 1 – Asking someone other than the CEO to drive cultural change:  Attempting to shift a culture is difficult work, which often causes more harm than good, and the process must be owned by the CEO. And I don't mean an exercise led by HR with the CEO's 'buy-in.' Nor should culture change be led by a Chief Design Officer, as was the case at Twitter. As a consultant who specializes in behavioral change and cultural transformation, I will also add that