Every now and then something happens that makes me stop in my tracks and think.

I remember in the mid 1990s running a management training programme for an organisation in the nuclear industry.  The workshops were aimed at instilling certain skills and a different attitude in management at all levels, to fit with the new culture towards which they were working.  I ran a number of these programmes all over the UK, with great success.

But then, in the middle of a workshop on one of their sites, one of the people on the course stopped me and said "I can't do what you're teaching me".  I probed a little further and discovered that, as a foreman supervising people who were working in radiation areas, he was legally obliged to do certain things.  The approach and techniques on my workshop were great for management working at higher levels or in support functions, but those managers were unencumbered by the masses of detailed legal requirements and liabilities faced by the foreman.

This made me realise, for the first time, that corporate culture often becomes a mantra, a statement of policy that is applied without sufficient thought about how the people who have to apply it actually have to work.  This particular example was an extreme case, the foreman was prohibited from conforming to the corporate culture for legal reasons.  But I began to realise that other people struggle to conform to a corporate culture for no reason other than it is the mantra.

In fact, this was never more clearly illustrated than when I visited the HR Director of another company, in the sports industry.  A couple of years before some consultants had helped them formulate a corporate culture, but the Directors were struggling to live up to it. 
"Being creative, for example", he said "is just impossible.  None of us directors are like that.  We have all these words in our cultural vision about innovation and so on, which we know the company needs, but the team of directors can't do it".
"What is the role of the team of Directors?" I asked.  "Do you come up with the ideas and cascade them down the organisation?  Or do you have people in the organisation who come up with the ideas and the Board have to make the hard-nosed assessment of which to pursue?"
"It's the latter, definitely", he replied.
"So why are you trying to be creative?", I asked.  "You don't want one culture that every team conforms to, you want each team to have a culture that is appropriate to their work.  If the Board are there to make the business judgements, it's for others in the organisation to come up with the creative ideas".
The light bulb went on.  "This will be such a relief to my colleagues" he said.  "We've been trying to live up to this ideal for two years and failing".

This story is by no means unique and illustrates one of the problems with many cultural change programmes: they take a one-size-fits-all approach, eg: trying to make crime investigators adhere to the same customer care policy as support staff, or training expensive technical specialists to spend more time doing administration in the guise of empowerment.

There are often some elements of corporate culture that need to be shared across the whole organisation.  But there are equally differences between groups whereby their work requires a different culture.  What is often required is not just a corporate culture, but lots of sub-cultures that are appropriate to the local work of the team.

Tomorrow, I'll outline an approach that can be used to change corporate culture in a way that allows teams to have their own local cultures.