Stanislav Belyaev
Empowering Teams, Advancing Engineering
Corporate culture dissolves through a hierarchy
In my experiences, I noticed that great cultural values for a company set at the top become vague while they go through the company’s levels. Why does it happen?
One example is a known bank. The bank’s general values are to become flexible and agile and leverage employees’ creativity by dedicating them to those values. The company even has built a green office with the incorporated agile into processes. But it happens only at the top of the hierarchy. At the bottom, managers live by short-term goals and no democratic values, only an autocratic management style. And the deeper you go down, far and far away you of the initial them. At the bottom, people even hate and disrespect them.
And that is not the unique case in my experience.
In contrast, I worked with companies with a flat org structure, where any employee is three levels away from the top management. And every single person there was attached to the values that the company set out. People shared them, and they lived by them. Truly.
And that makes me think that the more management layers a company has, the harder keeping the company’s values clear.
Be my guest, to argue with me here. I believe more factors influence it.