BMB 670 Module 9 Milestone Three Example

Culture and Ethics Change Plan

[Student Name]

Southern New Hampshire University

BMB 670: Music Business Leadership and Ethics

Milestone Three

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

The organization, setting and figures below are a composite written as a model document. No real employer, client, colleague or patient is described.

Culture and Ethics Change Plan

Introduction

Milestone Two recommended written policies on crowd safety, fees, sponsorship and harassment. Policies change what the company says. Whether they change what its people do depends on culture: what people believe is expected, what they see leaders do and what happens when they raise a concern. This milestone diagnoses the company's current culture, describes the culture it needs, sets out five initiatives, sequences them over eighteen months, addresses resistance and defines measures. It assumes the leadership transition in Milestone One proceeds alongside it, and in fact depends on it.

The Culture Today

In the office, staff are committed and hard-working, and they wait. Decisions go to the founder, meetings rarely include disagreement and concerns are raised privately, if at all. Safety is seen as the security contractor's responsibility rather than everyone's. In production, the culture is different: shift leads make decisions on site, volunteers are trained to watch out for each other and the operations director thanks people publicly for catching problems. Edmondson (1999) found that a team learns when its members trust that owning up to an error or questioning a plan will not cost them, and the company has one team where that is true and several where it is not.

The Culture Needed

The company needs a culture in which anyone, from a first-year volunteer to the head of talent, raises a safety or conduct concern immediately and expects it to be acted on; in which managers make decisions within their authority without waiting; and in which the founder's two written values, fair treatment of everyone the company works with and a festival where everyone feels safe, are used to settle hard questions. The production team's culture is the model.

Five Initiatives

First, a code of conduct written with staff, crew, volunteers and two artists, rather than by the founder alone, stating expected behavior toward fans, artists and colleagues and what happens when it is broken. Second, a speak-up route: concerns can go to the operations director or to an outside human resources adviser, by phone, text or form, with anonymous options and a promise of a response within five days. Third, stop-work authority: every shift lead, stage manager and security supervisor can pause an activity or a performance for safety without seeking approval, and will never be blamed for a good-faith stop. Fourth, training: responders at every show learn to handle harassment reports, managers learn to receive concerns well and everyone learns what the code and stop-work rule mean in practice. Fifth, leader behaviors: the founder, the incoming chief executive and the head of talent will thank people who raise concerns, share what was done about them and admit their own mistakes in staff meetings.

Brown et al. (2005) found that employees learn ethical behavior largely by watching leaders, which is why the fifth initiative carries the others. A code means little if a manager rolls her eyes at the first concern raised under it.

Sequence and Early Wins

Kotter (2012) argues that change efforts succeed when leaders build a sense of urgency and a guiding group, communicate a clear vision and create visible short-term wins before trying to change everything at once. The plan follows that logic in three stages. In the first six months, a working group of eight, including two volunteers and a bartender, drafts the code, the speak-up route opens and stop-work authority is announced before the festival. The early win is the festival itself: a publicized example of a shift lead pausing a set for a crowd surge and being thanked on stage. In the second six months, training reaches every manager and responder, and the first quarterly report shows staff what concerns were raised and what was done. In the final six months, the code is built into hiring, volunteer onboarding and artist contracts, and the first annual survey measures change.

Resistance

Long-serving staff may see the code and speak-up route as a sign of distrust or as bureaucracy in a company that prided itself on informality. Some managers may fear that complaints will be used against them. The talent buyer may worry that conduct clauses will cost bookings. The plan responds by involving staff in writing the code, framing it as a description of the company at its best, training managers before the speak-up route launches and showing that the festival's safety record improved after the 2025 heat decision. The founder's visible support, before she steps back, will matter most.

Measures

Four measures will be reported quarterly: the share of staff and volunteers who agree they can raise a concern without fear, from an anonymous survey with a baseline taken in the first month; the number of concerns raised and the median days to response; near misses logged by production and security; and the number of stop-work actions, which should rise at first as people use the authority. Training completion will be tracked but not treated as a sign of success.

Costs and Responsibilities

The working group that drafts the code meets every two weeks for three months, with paid time for the volunteers and bartender who join it. The outside adviser handles speak-up concerns that involve managers and reports quarterly to the board, at a cost of about $30,000 a year. Training costs about $45,000 in the first year and $15,000 a year after. The operations director owns the program day to day, the incoming chief executive owns its results and the founder's role is to endorse it visibly and then step back. Shared ownership of a program usually means nobody drives it, so these assignments are deliberate.

Conclusion

The company has good values and a team that already lives them. The plan spreads that team's habits across the company through a code written by the people who must follow it, a safe route for concerns, the authority to stop unsafe work, training and, above all, leaders who respond well when people speak up. Over eighteen months, measured by behavior rather than activity, it aims to make the new policies part of how the company works.

References

Brown, M. E., Treviño, L. K., & Harrison, D. A. (2005). Ethical leadership: A social learning perspective for construct development and testing. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 97(2), 117-134. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.obhdp.2005.03.002

Edmondson, A. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350-383. https://doi.org/10.2307/2666999

Kotter, J. P. (2012). Leading change. Harvard Business Review Press.