Beauty Parlors, Barbershops, and Boardrooms: What leaders of corporate change can learn from the American civil rights movement.

By Skip Griffin

From the Vault

“Today I work with people who are trying to institute profound changes within their organizations. Those who succeed understand that the change occurs in its own time. It can’t be hurried by throwing managers at it, any more than you can hurry a baby along by putting more doctors in the maternity ward. You need to do all the things we did in the civil rights movement: to discover the nature of the needed change, to gather the many people who believe in a similar transformation, to let a field of energy evolve, to ‘contain’ that field inside some new formal structures, and to recognize and amplify the leadership that rises to the surface. I saw the same kinds of shifts at the Boston Globe; I believe they take place in all movements of change, including such diverse groups as the American conservatives after the defeat of Barry Goldwater and the Eastern European dissidents before the fall of the Berlin Wall. It’s not just the structures that have to change. And it’s not just the culture out there in the organization. It’s the culture in here, in ourselves, as well — the culture that leads us up to the threshold, and then, if we’re ready, gives us the courage to step across.”

Though this piece was published in strategy+business 20 years ago now, it’s as resonant as ever. Skip invites readers into his personal story of growing up in a community at the heart of the U.S. civil-rights movement, and through that teaches us more than a little about how meaningful change really happens.

He argues that just as the movement relied on countless informal gatherings, shared language and persistent reflection, so too do organizations that succeed in transformation. The visible to-do—the courts, the protests, the press—was just the tip of a deeper field of activity: the hidden networks of preparation, the containment of energy into structure, the readiness of people to lead when the moment arrives.

Impatience and over-structuring will always derail progress; leaders need to engage in the “in-here” culture (what happens inside individuals and groups) as much as the “out-there” culture (the formal systems). Even two decades on, his insight resonates: today, the foundational work of dialogue, gathering, and internal alignment is the essential soil from which any genuine transformation sprouts.

Read Article at Strategy+Business

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