When you move to a new organisation it can be hard to adapt to a change in culture. In my experience, if we were to plot the ‘degree of difference between cultures’ vs ‘difficulty in adapting’ we’d find that it’s definitely not a linear relationship.

If your former organisation and your new one are very different, you will have a lot to learn. If they are very similar, you will have less to learn but the details of any differences will matter much more.

Let’s consider the two situations.

Very different culture

Pros:

1. can feel like a breath of fresh air

2. little risk of confusing cultural norms from previous environment

3. offers a chance to reset some of your habits

Cons:

1. lots to learn

2. can feel overwhelming

Very similar culture

Pros:

1. feeling of familiarity (but wait… it’s not that simple)

2. you can make initial progress quickly

Cons:

1. the small differences can be key

2. you may bring bad habits from your previous role

When I moved to Facebook (now Meta) after many years at Google, I got some of this wrong. Meta is home to many ex-Googlers and quite a few of its processes and approaches are derived from how Google does things. The two cultures are hugely different but there are quite a few things which superficially look the same or very similar. My mistake was to assume that some of these were actually the same. On more than one occasion this held me back — my assumption overlooked the small but highly significant differences.

When moving to a new org (including switching to a different team in the same company) make sure you don’t fall into that trap. If it looks the same, check your assumptions… try to find the differences to ensure your mental model is correct and up to date.