Many organizations have multiple cultures. Sometimes, these different cultures are associated with different functional specialties in a firm—there is an accounting culture, an HR culture, an engineering culture, and so forth. Other times, these different cultures are associated with different businesses within which a firm operates—one business has a culture that supports its product differentiation strategy, another has a culture that supports its cost leadership strategy, a third unit has a culture that supports its “b to b” business model, while another unit has a culture that supports its “b to c” business model, and so forth. And other times, these cultures reflect the geographic location of a firm’s diverse operations—European operations may have one culture, South American operations a different culture, operations in the northern part of the U.S. may have a different culture than operations in the southern part of the U.S., and so forth.

How do these multiple cultures affect your ability to implement culture change?

Here are six things to remember about managing culture change when your organization has multiple sub-cultures.

1. Having Multiple Sub-Cultures in Your Firm is Not Always a Bad Thing

First, having multiple sub-cultures in your organization is not always a bad thing. Culture change is important when there is a misalignment between your culture and your strategy. If your firm, as a whole, is implementing a single core strategy, then the culture of your entire organization needs to be aligned with this strategy. In this setting, having a firm with multiple sub-cultures can be problematic, especially if some of those sub-cultures are misaligned with your overall strategy.

However, many firms have diverse business operations in different sectors of the economy and in different geographic locations. Sometimes, the best strategies for these businesses can vary dramatically. To implement these different strategies, these different business operations may have to have different cultures.

From the view of the company as a whole, these different cultures can be thought of as sub-cultures. However, if these sub-cultures are aligned with the strategies being pursued by these different operations, then these sub-cultures are not necessarily problematic—especially if these business operations are fairly independent of each other.

The critical question you need to ask about culture change in a firm with multiple sub-cultures is: Is there a misalignment between these sub-cultures and the strategies of different business operations? This is the misalignment that should capture your attention, and motivate your culture change efforts. Thus, the fact that these different businesses have different cultures in order to implement different strategies is not, per se, a cultural problem that you will need to address—as long as strategy and culture are aligned within these different businesses.

2. The Strengths and Weaknesses of Functional Sub-Cultures

Sometimes, the sub-cultures in an organization exist within different functional departments. This is especially likely to be the case when those who work in these departments identify more with their functional specialty than they do with your organization.

This kind of functional sub-culture is a “good news/bad news” situation. On the one hand, having strong, functionally-based sub-cultures in your firm often means that you have deep functional expertise in these areas. This can be very important if your strategy requires this functional expertise.  Thus, for example, having a strong finance sub-culture in your finance group can be very helpful if you are engaging in mergers and acquisitions, going public, or opening subsidiaries. Having a strong HR sub-culture in your HR group can be very helpful if attracting and retaining employees is important to your strategy, going forward. Having a strong marketing sub-culture in your marketing group can be very important if you are engaging in a product differentiation strategy.

On the other hand, these strong functional sub-cultures can make it difficult to integrate the actions of your different functional areas in implementing your overall strategy. Finance might take one spin on this strategy, HR a different spin, and marketing yet another spin. None of these points of view are “wrong,” but they are almost always incomplete. Firms are usually not successful because of finance or HR or marketing, but rather because of finance, HR, and marketing.

In developing a new organizational culture that more fully aligns with your strategy, you will need to build stories that celebrate the strength of your functional areas while, at the same time, pointing to the importance of all these different functions working together in implementing your strategy.

3. Avoid a Sub-Culture Horse Race

If your efforts to integrate the functional sub-cultures in your firm fails, your culture change efforts can quickly deteriorate into a “sub-culture horse race.” Such horse races assume that one functional sub-culture must dominate all the other functional sub-cultures in your firm. To the extent that your strategy requires you to excel at integrating across several functions, such a “horse race” can be very problematic for your firm.

If a “sub-culture horse race” begins to emerge in your company, you may need to take strong action to realize the integration you need to implement your strategy. This could include, for example, firing the leaders of some functional areas—particularly leaders that have deep function expertise and lead highly skilled functional departments. Firing these otherwise competent people because they are unwilling to work together to build a more integrated culture to implement your strategy can be a difficult decision. But, if the choice is between retaining these people and their deep expertise, or letting them go and more effectively implementing your strategy, then this is a decision you may need to consider.

4. Avoid Sub-Culture Autobiographies

A “sub-culture horse race” can be very damaging to your effort to build an overall firm culture to implement your strategies. But there is one version of this “horse race” that is particularly problematic—when the functional sub-culture that ends up dominating an organization’s overall culture is the sub-culture where you, the business leader, have the most experience.  We call this “creating an organizational autobiography.” It’s like having a “sub-culture horse race” in your company, but only one horse—the one you “rode in on”—is running.

At first, you might think that the reason you were promoted to be a business leader in your organization is because of your deep functional experience, and the strength of the functional sub-culture out of which you were promoted. This is almost never the case.

Sure, your functional expertise is important. But, when you become a business leader, charged with the responsibility of implementing your company’s strategy, your task is not just to run the company “as if” it was the functional department where you had the most experience. Your task is to draw on all the expertise in the company to implement your firm’s strategy.

When firms give in to “organizational autobiography” their performance almost always suffers. For example, during the 1970s, General Motors replaced many of its senior managers—people with deep experience in car design and manufacturing—with people with experience in finance. General Motors became dominated by a finance sub-culture that emphasized common car platforms across brands, cost reduction over quality, and risk-averse design over innovation. The result was poor quality cars, with boring designs, and bad performance. And GM’s losses in the 70s through the 90s were staggering. Indeed, the reputation of some of GM’s operations is still being affected by these decisions, almost 50 years later.

It’s not that finance is unimportant in managing companies, especially companies like GM. It’s just that it is rarely the case that a single functional sub-culture—whether it’s finance or accounting or marketing or HR—is sufficient to fully implement a strategy.

5. Culture Change Resistance Can Vary by Sub-Culture

When your organization has different, even competing, sub-cultures, sources of culture change resistance can vary. Indeed, what might make your culture change efforts attractive to one sub-culture may make it unattractive to another sub-culture.

In these settings, trying to accommodate the interests of different and competing sub-cultures is often a fool’s errand. The resulting culture can end up being a hodgepodge of conflicting values, perspectives, and prescriptions.

Rather than trying to find a “compromise” among all these different sub-cultures, our research suggests that successful business leaders focus on the relationship between a firm’s strategy and its culture. Rather than trying to derive a new culture from the numerous sub-cultures that exist in your firm, ask the question: “What kind of culture will we need to implement our new strategy?” And then, build that culture—regardless of its relationship with the sub-cultures that already exist in an organization.

6. Enrolling Sub-Culture Leaders in Culture Change

Senior functional managers in your organization often have an important impact on how strong their particular sub-cultures are. You will need to get their active and creative support in building a new culture for your organization, especially if these sub-cultures are well entrenched.

How do you enroll these people? You begin by engaging in activities that build stories that exemplify the new culture you are trying to build.  You then encourage others throughout the firm to build their own culture-changing stories. Then, you go to these functional leaders, and you invite them to build such stories.

If functional leaders are unwilling or unable to build authentic stories to help change their sub-culture in ways that make them part of the larger culture, then you may have to let these people go.

They may be your friends. They may be very skilled in their function.  They may be admired throughout your firm. This is why enrolling them in your culture change effort is so important. But, failing this, you may need to part ways with them.

So, while having sub-cultures in your firm is not always a bad thing, it can create unique challenges in changing your organization’s culture. However, applying the change management tools described in The Secret of Culture Change can help you overcome these challenges.

Author: Jay Barney is one of the top three most cited scholars in the field of strategic management, who has published over 125 articles and book chapters, along with seven books. He is a full-time professor at Eccles School of Management at the University of Utah. Connect with Jay at JayBarney.org