Culture Before Microsoft Changed

Changing a Company's Culture: Microsoft
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Changing a Company's Culture: Microsoft
Culture Before Microsoft Changed
For almost four decades, Microsoft Corporation has only had three CEOs, with Bill Gates retiring in 2000, Steve Ballmer in 2014, and the current transformative leader, Satya Nadella taking over after Ballmer to introduce sweeping changes in the organization. By the time Nadella took office as the company’s CEO in 2014, the multinational tech firm was on the brink of technological irrelevance that saw its share fall from 90% in 2009 to as low as 20% in 2014. Five years later n 2019, Nadella was named as one of Fortune’s Businessperson of the Year who brought in creative solutions to the company, beating all odds, and tackled impudent goals (IBS Center for Management Research, 2020). Before becoming the organization’s CEO, Nadella had worked at Microsoft since 1992 in various capacities, including the Head of Dynamics Business Software Development, Executive Vice Present of Cloud and Enterprise Engineering Group, Senior Vice President of Research and Development for the Online Service Division, and the President of Server and Tools. In early 2014 as the CEO, he began a complete overhaul of the company’s organizational culture and maintained that the company should not depend on what made Microsoft successful during the 1990s. Instead, Nadella held that the tech industry never respects tradition, but innovation and emphatic collaboration. Ballmer, his immediate predecessor only understood the language of intimidation and screaming at employees when things did not work out. After taking over from Gates in 2000, the company was dominant in the tech industry, but with the dynamism in the technology sector, companies such as Apple, Google, and Facebook became a major threat to the organization’s dominance. He perceived Linux operating system (OS) as a major threat to the company’s source of revenues from Windows and Office tools and attempted to prevent Linux users from using the OS terming it as communist and cancer. Ballmer was also opposed to the introduction of the iPhone in 2007 and even criticized it for not having a keyboard and therefore, not an appropriate tool for sending emails. With Nadella, Microsoft embraced a culture of fighting entropy, resisting attacks, and building complex systems that profited the company without threats (Bodanis, 2020). Nadella changed the old culture to forge relationships with Facebook, Google, and even encouraged Microsoft to work with Apple as partners.
Steps the Company Took to Change its Culture
To ensure the long-term success of renovating its culture, Microsoft has followed three critical steps under the leadership of Nadella: plan, build, and maintain. As he took the helm at the organization, Nadella understood that the ability of the company to change its culture would be the ultimate indicator of its future success and that the form of leadership buy-in largely defined the success of the cultural transformation. As the culture champion, Nadella has committed time and resources to see a change in culture in Microsoft (McLaren, 2019). However, buy-ins from an organizational leadership only comprise a fraction of these efforts, and organizations have to co-create a new culture with the existing employees. Leaders need to survey and talk to workers about what the changes involve (Abiodun & Olu-Abiodun, 2017). At Microsoft, Nadella has ensured that employees answer at least one question daily to understand what is happening and be able to understand aspects that need a change and those that should remain unchanged. This is because while there were approaches adopted by Gates and Ballmer that suppressed the culture of information sharing and significantly dwarfed the progress of Microsoft, Nadella believes that some cultures maintained by his predecessors are still meaningful to the company. The second step that Microsoft took to change its culture was to build and reinforce change. Nadella wanted to identify important influencers to effect change and it was necessary to ensure that managers were telling the story and be on the same page. By ascertaining that the managers undergo compulsory training to help model and care for their teams, the company can strengthen its core values defined in the new culture. Lastly, maintain the ace of the new culture became part of Microsoft’s focus because Nadella’s leadership understands that the most critical stage in cultural change happens after a change. One aspect of the changes included having a different perspective on performance practices. Rather than rating employees on a scale of one to five based on the competitive culture, the company now rates workers through a Talent Talks review process and constructive conversations (McLaren, 2009). Through these three distinct stages, Microsoft has managed to change its culture in post Gates and Ballmer’s era.
Impact on Employee Such as Employee Retention
Like in many organizations, the first impressions that new employees formulate about a company determine their decisions to stay in the l...