You don't have to fix a fragmented organization.

Many culture development projects start with the complaint that our organizational culture is terribly fragmented, and please try to fix it. Whatever that means.

Well, we can try, of course.

But I have doubts about whether it's possible. In fact, I don’t think it is. Of course, I can’t prove it, so let’s just say I haven’t seen a case where it truly worked.

When you try to ask concretely and tie these beliefs to data, you hear various combinations of the following sentences, illustrating their fragmented organizational culture:

• Here, they show up, there, they don’t.
• Here, they eat venison stew on Saturday from the deer they shot together, there, they hate each other so much that they’d show up even on Friday just to avoid the other person.
• Here, they sweat blood at 10 PM, and over there, they risk melanoma after fourteen weeks of working 'in swimwear' on the terrace.

And if I say, "this is fine," you’ll already have something to argue with in the comment section. No, it’s not fine. It’s not good that one part of the organization is dying from boredom, while the other is exhausted from being overworked.

It’s also not good that in one place, they honor ROWE (Results-Only Work Environment) - I don’t care where you are or what you’re doing as long as the work gets done—while in another place, they still track your working hours with a stopwatch, even though core hours haven’t officially existed on paper for sixty years.

It’s not good, but that’s how it is. This is how an organization works, at least if it has a minimum of 300 employees, say.

A 300-person organization, no matter how it’s structured in terms of authority, functions roughly the same. Whether it’s wired into small circles or follows a traditional pyramid model, it doesn’t matter. There are 265 experts, 25 middle managers, 8 senior leaders, and 1 managing director. If the company is German, there are 2 or 3 managing directors, a long-standing hobby of theirs that’s quite puzzling to outsiders (yeah, yeah, I get it, but I don’t understand it).

Out of the 8 senior leaders, 4 were hired by the managing director. Two in 1998, two in 2010. The other four worked their way up from the ranks, joining between 1998 and 2024. Two were hired by the sales director, who was fired two years ago for embezzlement, and nobody remembers the other two.

Now, let’s mentally return to the bottom of the pyramid, where that thing called 'organizational culture' happens. The expectations within those 25 little bubbles, under each of the 25 middle managers, are shaped entirely by the whims of those middle managers. The expectations for the 25 middle managers come from the 8 senior leaders. In the best-case scenario, these expectations come from one source, but that’s as rare as a white raven. In reality, someone in a key role, say a controlling manager, is often guided by 3 different senior leaders. So, inevitably, expectations come from all directions.

Of those 8 senior leaders, 4 were chosen by one person, so yes, there’s a chance that their values overlap. Not entirely, but there may be stronger overlaps. The other 4, well, who knows where and when they came from.

So, the values of these 8 people (with 1-3 managing directors above them) determine the organizational culture. The culture that gets filtered through the 25 middle managers under them.

And when you try to change that, you’re asking the 1-3, then the 8, then the 25 people to all think the same way.

Will it work?

Of course not.

The most you’ll achieve is that through the joint work and thinking, all 34 of them (let’s drop the extra two managing directors, you can’t even think like this:)) will become aware and conscious of what they agree on. And then, you can work on the culture from there.

But even then:

• Their attitude toward work,
• Their attitude toward people,
• Their attitude toward the company,
• And most importantly, their values

won’t be the same.

Are you saying it’s pointless to start a project like this?

Not at all. The fact that they are aware of what they do differently is incredibly valuable. In the short, medium, and long term.

What I am saying, though, is that none of them will adopt the values printed on the pen you handed them at the first workshop. As such, your organization will remain fragmented, even at the end of the work.

But let’s say it’ll be glued together with gold, like in kintsugi, and that looks a lot better than being broken apart, doesn’t it?

coffee? -> dorka@y2y.hu