The Dangers of Cultural Misalignment

Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at [email protected]. Andy's new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.

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Topics: Organizational Culture

My first full-time job was working for a retail bank in England. As part of the development program that I was put on, I had the chance to work in a number of different locations over the first few years of my career. While they were clearly all part of the same organization from a process, systems and structure point of view, they all felt very different from each other.

Obviously, they had different functions—branches were exposed to customer interactions, so were going to be somewhat different than regional centers that handled some of the back-office tasks. But it was more than that: They felt like they weren’t all part of the same company because the atmosphere, environment and approach of the people involved were different.

That was a long time ago, and I don’t recall the company consciously having a stated organizational culture. Sure, they talked about wanting to be a good place to work, of developing their staff, etc., but it didn’t really feel like a cohesive and tangible commitment. So, it was left to the individual branches and offices to create an environment where everyone felt comfortable, where people could give of their best, and so on. And of course, this was at a time before the concept of organizational culture was widely recognized as an important driver of performance.

Fast forward a few years, and everyone was talking …

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