Our COO John recently shared some reflections about the ongoing culture change at Manchester United, from the perspective of a football fan and a culture consultant. Here’s a breakdown of some of his curiosities…

The Alex Ferguson era saw huge success for the club. The behaviour and performances of players, the manager and other public leaders were visible evidence of some of the cultural attributes that led to that success.

That success has proven difficult to replicate in the ten years since he left. Under Sir Jim Ratcliffe and INEOS, there is an opportunity to build a new culture, one that could underpin a new era of triumphs for the club.

The ‘INEOS Compass’ is a tool that INEOS uses to guide & embed certain values and behaviours. Comprising ‘Words We Like’, & ‘Words We Don’t Like’, these are the values and behaviours that have been factors in the performance of other INEOS cultures.

The Compass provides a visible insight for people outside the organisation to understand what INEOS believes drives success, and therefore what is expected of INEOS employees:

‘Relentless’, ‘Doggedness’, ‘Tenacity’ feature in the compass alongside ‘Do the right thing’, ‘Don’t avoid doing difficult things’ and many others. This gives an insight into the flavour of the culture that INEOS will seek to encourage.

There are other things they will want to proactively iron out, according to the Compass. ‘Arrogance’, ‘Gloating’, ‘Moaners’, ‘Turf wars’ and ‘Making the same mistake twice’. From the outside, we might expect to see a low level of tolerance for these.

While we might see some evidence of this in the behaviour and performances of Man Utd employees in the public eye, culture change is a system-wide job. A lot of work will be going on in parts of the organisation that we cannot see.

Changes to leadership capability, reward, development, the design of working environments, infrastructure and the processes and systems that support or thwart a high performance culture will be taking place. You would expect this to be happening in line with a plan with clear objectives, deliverables and measures of success – and a healthy balance of patience and expectation.

In culture work, ‘symbols’ can be powerful tools to reinforce a culture. A symbol might be a key decision used by a leader or their choice of words, which onlookers attribute meaning to in terms of the decision maker’s ‘values hierarchy’ (when pushed, what will they really use to guide their decisions?).

When properly understood, symbols can bolster your culture. You can show that you will not tolerate a certain behaviour by consistently punishing people that use it. Or, you can encourage another behaviour by consistently rewarding it. When not understood, unintentional symbols can undermine years of good work.  

A powerful cultural symbol has been issued at Manchester United, perhaps unintentionally. The men’s team have been given priority use of newly developed women’s facilities while their own facilities are renovated. This may be a decision that makes perfect sense all round, or it may not – from the outside we can only guess.

Either way, the symbol has been received by some as evidence of an inconsistency between Manchester United’s stated aspirations for women’s football and the reality of their priorities.  

As a very public cultural transformation continues, we only have guesses and assumptions based on what is visible from the outside. Still, it will be a fascinating journey.