Reorgs Can’t Rewire Culture
When tools fail to unite teams, leaders often reach for a second lever: structural change. Shift reporting lines. Flatten the hierarchy. Reorganize cross-functional teams.
There can be value in redesigning structures, especially when true barriers exist. But evidence shows that restructuring alone rarely sustains positive change. Edgar Schein’s research demonstrates why: structure follows culture more reliably than culture follows structure.
If a culture promotes territorialism, risk avoidance, or hierarchical deference, those patterns will reemerge—no matter how the org chart is drawn. New boxes and lines simply become new containers for old habits.
One pharmaceutical company I worked with reorganized its R&D division three times in five years, hoping to break silos between discovery, development, and clinical teams. Each redesign caused temporary disruption, followed by the slow return of the same barriers. The problem was not structure; it was a lack of systems that supported shared accountability and cross-boundary collaboration.
Team-Building That Builds Nothing
No intervention is more popular—or more consistently underwhelming—than traditional team-building. Off-sites, trust falls, escape rooms, personality tests: these activities can feel engaging in the moment but rarely change behavior in lasting ways.
The reason is simple: these experiences are separated from the actual work context. Building trust on a ropes course does not translate to speaking candidly in a budget meeting. Personal storytelling in a retreat does not automatically equip people to handle project conflict.
Research on transfer of learning underscores this gap. Behavioral change is more likely to stick when practiced in conditions that closely resemble the real work environment. Team-building activities outside those conditions produce a “laboratory effect”—temporary changes that vanish on Monday morning.
Worse, they can create pseudo-intimacy: surface-level closeness that masks, rather than confronts, hard truths. Teams may leave a retreat feeling bonded yet remain unprepared for the difficult conversations and competing priorities that first triggered their communication struggles.
This excerpt comes from my work-in-progress book on how organizations can move from communication breakdown to genuine connection. I’m sharing these early insights as I develop them, building on the work of practitioners and researchers who paved the way. You can read the full chapter, with complete citations, on my Substack. I’d welcome your thoughts and experiences—they help strengthen this work.