One of my favorite management words in business world is “internalize”. Word web defines it as “incorporate within oneself; make subjective or personal”. This becomes even more significant when you are talking about change management. Forget about the expertise and highly sophisticated tools. Until you have employees internalize the organizational vision/mission/strategy, you are getting nowhere.

Here’s a story from one of HP’s battle cards.

There goes a story that once upon a time, a man visited NASA. In the afternoon, when he was about to leave the man saw a cleaner in one of the corridors cleaning the floor. When the man came closer the cleaner smiled at him and asked: “what are you doing here?” The man answered that he had experienced a tour of the complex. To be polite the man asked the cleaner in return: “And what are you doing here the whole day?” The cleaner answered: “I put man on the moon”…

You see, that is internalisation. The man had the mission, vision and objectives of NASA internalised in his own job; no matter what we are doing in the organisation, no matter who we are, we all need to internalise the way we need to work. That job may well be different for each of the stakeholders. When all stakeholders adopt the new way of working as “the way we do things here” than you have reached your goal. You have internalised!