What leaders usually conclude
The easy explanation is a poor assessment of fit — the wrong hire, or an interview process that failed to surface a mismatch. That explanation puts the fix entirely in recruitment technique. It does not explain why the same pattern tends to recur across a firm’s different offices even when the hiring process itself has not changed. It also tends to survive a firm’s first attempt to fix it, because the fix usually targets the interview stage — more structured questions, more interviewers, a longer process — while leaving the underlying brief, and the assumptions baked into it, untouched.
What the evidence suggests
Donald Sull, Rebecca Homkes and Charles Sull’s research on strategy execution, based on more than 250 companies and several thousand managers, identifies cross-unit coordination — not vertical alignment — as the central execution problem in most organisations. Only 9% of managers surveyed said they could rely on colleagues in other functions and units all of the time. What their work suggests, applied to a multi-office firm, is that a written brief captures what one office’s culture treats as worth documenting, and every office has different tacit expectations about what “obvious enough not to state” actually means. A firm with three offices does not have one culture with three locations; it has three sets of unstated assumptions, each internally coherent and each invisible to the people who hold it, because nothing that seems obvious ever gets written down.
This is compounded by Jay Galbraith’s observation that organisations facing rising information-processing demand — which multi-office growth inevitably creates — need explicit lateral relations and information systems to carry what informal proximity used to carry for free. A single-office firm relies on people simply overhearing each other’s standards. A multi-office firm has removed that mechanism without necessarily replacing it with anything.
There is also an incentive dimension worth adding, drawn from Steven Kerr’s research on reward systems. Where offices are measured substantially on their own individual profitability, each office manager has every rational reason to optimise locally — for their own clients, their own staff, their own numbers — and comparatively little reason to invest time reconciling standards with a sister office several hundred miles away, even where the firm’s stated brand promise assumes a single, consistent standard everywhere. The firm may say it wants one coherent culture; what it measures and rewards is usually each office’s own performance in isolation, and the behaviour that follows tracks the measurement, not the stated aspiration.
Competing explanations
A firm might reasonably suspect its recruitment process itself — interview structure, reference checks, realistic job previews — and improving that process can genuinely help at the margin. But the consistency gap tends to persist even where recruitment technique is strong, because the source of the mismatch is not the screening step; it is the brief’s inability to capture what each office’s staff consider too self-evident to write down.
There is a second, related explanation worth separating out: client expectations themselves often differ by office, not just internal culture. An office serving predominantly long-established local clients may have built its informal standards around a slower, more relationship-led pace, while a newer office in a more competitive market may have built its standards around speed and responsiveness — neither wrong, both invisible until a hire trained in one moves into, or serves clients from, the other. Firms sometimes treat multi-office inconsistency purely as an internal management failing, when part of what they are observing is a genuine, reasonable divergence in what different client bases actually expect.
This dynamic compounds with each new office a firm opens. A firm’s second office typically inherits its standards through direct transfer — often staffed partly by people relocated from the first — which keeps divergence relatively contained. A firm’s fifth or sixth office is more likely staffed locally from the outset, with far less direct exposure to how the original offices actually operate day to day, and correspondingly more room for an independently developed, locally coherent but firm-wide inconsistent set of assumptions to take hold.
Where this shows up
People working in professional services firms will probably recognise this pattern first. The wider Professional and Knowledge-Based grouping and the other sectors page show how it presents elsewhere.
Questions worth considering
- What does each office in this firm consider too obvious about a role to put in writing — and do the other offices consider the same things obvious?
- Has the firm ever compared how the same role is actually described, informally, across two different offices?
- Is a recent hiring mismatch a screening failure, or a sign that two parts of the firm hold different unstated standards?
- Would a candidate who succeeded in one office necessarily succeed in another, given identical formal qualifications?
Your team is facing similar challenges?
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