Beyond Memos: Why Real Culture Change Happens One Conversation at a Time

We've all seen it happen. A new president or head of school announces a bold initiative to transform culture. There are institution-wide emails, professional development days, and updated mission statements on glossy posters. Faculty may nod politely in mandatory meetings, or not. And six months later? Nothing has fundamentally changed. Same after a year.

Roger Martin's recent article in Medium on organizational culture change presents a framework that explains why many efforts at culture change fail—and what actually works instead. His distinction between "wholesale" and "retail" approaches to culture change highlights an important truth that every frustrated school leader should know.

The Wholesale Trap

Martin describes wholesale as "things that can be done from a distance, centrally." In education, like in other sectors, we favor wholesale solutions. They're efficient, scalable, and appear to show decisive leadership.

• Institution-wide curriculum mandates

• New assessment frameworks rolled out via email

• Reorganized divisional or department structures

• Revised evaluation rubrics

• Professional development sessions for 200 people in an auditorium

What’s not to like? These feel like progress. They're visible. They generate activity. But as Martin argues, they rarely change culture because they skip over the crucial layer of how people actually interact with each other day to day.

The Power of the Interpersonal

Martin's framework identifies three interconnected steering mechanisms for events inside organizations: formal (structures and systems), interpersonal (how people interact and solve problems together), and cultural (the shared mental guidebooks that drive behavior).

The main point? Culture doesn't come straight from formal rules. It comes from people interacting—and those interactions shape the shared understanding that become "the way we do things here."

Consider a common scenario: a president aims to foster a culture of innovation and risk-taking. She introduces a new policy stating faculty won't be penalized for trying new approaches that may not succeed. However, in a subsequent department meeting, when a faculty member shares a teaching method that didn't work out, the department chair responds with harsh criticism about wasted instructional time. 

Every faculty member in that room watches. They form an interpretation. The mental guidebook gets updated: "They say they want innovation, but actually, they want perfection." No amount of revised policy language will overcome that single interpersonal moment.

What Retail Actually Looks Like

Martin's examples of successful culture change all operate at the retail level—personal, specific, consistently repeated interactions that model desired behavior:

• A head of school who consistently asks "What insights about how students learn support this?" in every meeting.

• A dean who makes a point of talking to receptionists and cleaning staff, signaling that everyone matters.

• A department chair who problem-solves alongside faculty rather than issuing directives.

For academic leaders, this translates into concrete actions:

Instead of simply stating you value faculty autonomy, spend time in a struggling teacher's classroom asking, "How can I help?" rather than "Here's what you need to fix."

Instead of mandating collaborative planning time, join a project team's planning session and actively share ideas, demonstrating that you see yourself as a partner in solving problems.

Instead of just preaching student voice, take a moment in the hallway to ask a student about their experience and truly listen, showing others the behavior you want them to mimic.

The magic is in the mirroring. As Martin notes, "managers throughout watch leadership behavior like hawks." In schools, this is doubly true. Educators are professional observers of behavior. They notice everything, whether we want them to or not.

Three Rules for School Leaders

Martin offers three rules for successful culture change that apply perfectly to culture change the education sector:

1. Think retail, not wholesale. There are no master strokes from the administrative suite that magically transform school culture. Real change happens in classrooms, hallways, and departmental meetings.

2. Focus on the interpersonal domain. It is the only domain that directly impacts culture. Your new grading policy matters less than how department chairs respond when faculty experiment with it.

3. Change your own behavior first. Every interaction either reinforces the existing culture or models the new one. You cannot delegate culture change—you must embody it in every exchange. Drawing from Gandhi, be the change you seek.

This approach is harder than wholesale reform. It requires leaders to be present, vulnerable, and consistent across hundreds of small moments. It means the president or head can't stay in the central office, the dean can't hide in meetings, and the department chair has to show up differently in every interaction.

But it's also the approach that works. Because culture isn't what we say in announcements or write in handbooks; it’s what we do when we're solving problems together. It's the pattern that emerges from countless interpersonal moments.