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Retaining the Best of

Your Culture Amid
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Organizational Change
Four ways to preserve key values and behaviors while undergoing a
transformation. by Rebecca Newton
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 HBR / Digital Article / Retaining the Best of Your Culture Amid Organizational Change

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Retaining the Best of Your
Culture Amid Organizational
Change

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Four ways to preserve key values and behaviors while undergoing a
transformation. by Rebecca Newton
Published on HBR.org / November 13, 2023 / Reprint H07VOU

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VICUSCHKA/Getty Images
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There has been a lot published on how leaders can do the hard
work of building organizational culture for the better. And this is
hardly a surprise: After all, culture shapes our experience of work and
our organizations. A firm’s culture is strongly related not only to its
performance and value, but, importantly, to the way it handles change
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(such as M&A integrations), fosters workplace well-being, and espouses

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 HBR / Digital Article / Retaining the Best of Your Culture Amid Organizational Change

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ethical practices. Changing its culture can help a company achieve goals
that have long seemed out of reach.

But I’ve been seeing that for leaders in this time of great change, an

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equally difficult challenge that doesn’t get talked about as much is
keeping a culture steady. As companies go through transformations
— M&As, organic growth, digital strategies, hybrid work, leadership
transitions, generational changes — they need to retain the best
elements of their shared assumptions, values, and common behaviors.

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Even when these are codified in policy documents or value statements,
they can begin to erode or shift in reality.

Based on my work as an organizational and social psychologist —

and 20 years of advising firms and leaders on culture, soft skills, and
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performance — here are four strategies to keep the culture you want
when going through a transformation.

Clarify what you want to keep and act on it.

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First, most basically, in addition to knowing what aspects of your

culture you want to change, identify which pieces you want to retain.
Then take meaningful steps to keep that culture a reality.

When my firm began working with a leading European financial

services firm on leadership development, my colleagues and I asked
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them to describe their culture. The firm’s leaders quickly jumped to

what needed to change in the face of common challenges in a rapidly
growing firm with an increase in hybrid work.

But it took longer to elicit a core component of their culture that they
wanted to keep even as they grew: collaboration. Working productively
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together had been a meaningful and embedded part of their firm for so
long that it was assumed and rarely spoken about.

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Based on our discussions, the firm’s leaders recognized the value of
collaboration to the firm and re-focused energy and priorities to keep
it at the center of their culture even as they grew and transformed
rapidly. To do so, they amended meeting rhythms, revised onboarding

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programs, and clarified collaborative behavioral expectations at the
partner level. These efforts fostered a shared, renewed commitment to
working together in the ways that had positioned the firm so well for
growth initially. (In this and all of the stories in the article, I’ve changed
some of the details to maintain our clients’ privacy.)

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Listen to concerns.

When you’re going through a transformation, keep your ears open for
comments from colleagues — from old hands to new hires — about what
they are worried might be lost from the company’s culture. While this
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can be hard to untangle from the general increased anxiety often felt
around transformation, stay attuned specifically to concerns about how
the changes might affect the expression of the company’s values. These
can be red flags about unintended culture shifts.
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When we worked with a Scandinavian tech company on a culture

refresh, the CEO and CPO told us that the company’s creativity was
a strong and important aspect of its culture. But when we asked
longstanding team members, they felt that their ingenuity was actually
being stifled by the increasing professionalization of the company,
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which they attributed to ownership changes and the greater control

that came with them. Upon discovering this, the company leaders raised
the perceived conflict between increased accountability and creative
freedom explicitly with the investors and adjusted some performance
metrics to protect the company’s innovative drive.
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 HBR / Digital Article / Retaining the Best of Your Culture Amid Organizational Change

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Know when you’re being nostalgic.

Ah yes, the good ol’ days. It’s likely that you and your team will be
nostalgic as your company changes — so many of the good parts of your
culture got you to where you are now. But make sure that the parts

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of your culture that you have identified as worth retaining are clearly
aligned with your purpose and strategy for how you’re going forward. If
not, you’re likely to hold your company back from change and realizing
its potential — or your culture will begin to shift whether you like it or
not.

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Another client, a professional services firm, was going through a merger.
Both firms in the transaction had a strong “people” value in their culture
frameworks, and many team members across both firms described a
“family feel” to daily life, including accessible leadership with open-
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door policies, open-plan offices, and widespread informal banter. As
this value had been important to both firms, leaders expected that it
would naturally be brought into the merged entity.
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What they hadn’t anticipated, though, was the impact of doubling in

size coupled with an increase in hybrid work. Leadership suddenly felt
inaccessible, offices sat empty, and banter was reduced to largely work-
related exchanges. Team members mourned the decreasing family feel
and leadership wondered whether they could somehow work harder to
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recreate the warm, personal feeling they missed.

But with increasing consolidation of firms in their market, the

company’s strategy anticipated aggressive growth, including through
continued M&A activity. The leadership team realized that given this
vision, maintaining a family feel across the firm was simply unrealistic.
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Instead, firm leaders explicitly acknowledged the shifting culture and

the challenge it represented and were clear about the strategy and

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its implications for the culture going forward. We then worked with
them to run workshops with team members to define together what the
“people” value might look like in a much bigger firm. Ultimately the
value focused more on behaviors like respect, inclusion, friendliness,

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and kindness than an overall family feel — supporting the strategic
direction of the firm rather than clashing with it.

Marshal data.

Sometimes an organization’s culture may shift in unwanted ways that

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take time for leaders to recognize — and then it’s too late. Rather than
trusting your gut about what’s going on, conduct a regular culture
assessment to gather evidence on the lived experiences of employees
across your organization.
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For quantitative measures, create a survey and tailor your questions
around the specifics of the culture you want to keep. If, for example,
being entrepreneurial is important to your culture, ask whether it’s true
that “We create a safe space to learn from mistakes.” You’ll also want
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more qualitative feedback; for this use free-text questions in the survey
as well as interviews with a representative sample of the team. Ask
whether the culture is shifting, why they think the shift is happening,
and — importantly —the perceived impact of that change.

When interpreting the data, split it by geographies, teams, service lines,

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and so forth: You may find that your culture is changing in some
areas and not others. With this information to hand, you can make the
necessary changes to keep the culture you want.

We conducted such an assessment at a telecommunications company.

All members of the organization were invited to share their views
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through a team-wide survey and we also gathered qualitative data

through semi-structured interviews from key stakeholders. The results

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revealed significant differences across departments. For example, while
the operations team felt they were continually strong in the area of
“excellence and professional standards,” the services team reported
something different. Rapid growth and demand for their offerings was

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leading to consistently high pressure and they felt the quality of the
services they used to provide was slipping and inconsistent. As a result,
organizational leaders were able to give the team more resources and
training to keep this part of their culture alive and well.

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Culture reaches across all parts of an organization, and all leaders (not
just HR alone) can take ownership of shaping culture. That can mean
both pushing forward the changes you need and maintaining the parts
of your culture that you need to keep driving your success into the
future.
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This article was originally published online on November 13, 2023.
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Rebecca Newton, Ph.D., is an organizational and social

psychologist, Senior Visiting Fellow at the London School of
Economics and Political Science, and teaches on executive education
programs at Harvard. Newton is the CEO of CoachAdviser, consulting
to leaders globally (access her case studies here). She is the author of
Authentic Gravitas: Who Stands Out and Why.
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