Growth Strategy and Company Culture
The time of year when many organizations work on or publish strategic plans like we regular humans set New Year’s Resolutions — with the greatest of intention and a struggle with follow-through. For resolutions and strategic plans, it is the same barriers to success year over year — those pesky comfortable beliefs and behaviors that we failed to focus on when strategizing our change.
Strategic planning is a long view of the business direction — setting goals, objectives, and priorities for the future; focusing organizational efforts on common goals. A good strategic plan will clearly layout critical drivers necessary to move the company forward, such as:
- defining business growth
- aligning resources for optimal results
- prioritizing financial needs
- building competitive advantage
- planning for business risks.
However, organizations often fail to assess the impact of their company’s or team’s culture on the so carefully outlined strategic plans, leaving the intended outcomes just out of reach due to misalignment, neglected underlying assumptions, competing values, and undue influences.A section title here
Strategy Aligned with Culture
Anthropologist C. S. Ford defined culture as “composed of responses which have been accepted because they have been met with success.” That is to say, an organization’s people make decisions and display behaviors that have served them and the company well during their tenure. It is the collection of these very judgments and actions across an organization that defines its culture — the values, beliefs, and norms — and informs how business will actually be done.
As a strategic plan outlines the adjustments a business needs to make to meet its next characterization of success, the change means violating the norms on which leaders, managers, and employees have as a precedent for success. And much like those new year’s resolutions, there may be some great effort towards change in the early rollout of the plan. However, teams will revert to those old values, beliefs, and norms if the new, expected, and necessary behaviors are not clear, aligned, actionable, and reinforced. So before rolling out those plans, hoping new behaviors will emerge and desired results will follow, develop a sense of the company’s culture by examining the people, processes, and communications.
Consider the Talent Policies and Practices
What traits, values, and competencies does the organization look for when hiring and promoting?
Do they align with the organization’s strategy and purpose?
If there is a misalignment, consider a revision to ensure the behaviors, values, and beliefs align with how the company expects to see outcomes achieved. For example, does the new strategy require more collaboration, cross-functional alignment, and resource sharing, but the culture data indicates that historically an entrepreneurial, competitive culture has guided the hiring, development, and promotion processes? Do the reward systems neglect teamwork and team outcomes in favor of individual achievement? Revise those hiring, development, and promotion practices to emphasize the right areas and demonstrate that the new behaviors are welcome and expected.
Consider the Systems and Processes.
Do the systems and processes support or conflict with the needs of the new strategy or behaviors required to achieve it?
Is the culture supportive of subverting processes and systems; operating by shadow means and methods?
Consider a strategy that requires a faster pace in the workplace — onboarding customers more quickly, delivering innovation to market faster, anything that requires teams to speed up. Suppose the organization’s formal approval processes entail endless rounds of reviews and approvals, or in a heavily hierarchical organization, the approvals must traverse a long list of management layers. These approaches may be slowing the pace of work. These process slowdowns are in opposition to the strategic imperative. They may result in either the slow pace continuing to plague the strategic outcomes or avoiding formal and informal processes, working around and outside the system.
An often-missed consideration that connects talent practices with processes is the impact of informal influence. Not all influence is hierarchical. Suppose the new strategy has a change management process that is primarily focused at the top of the hierarchy, don’t miss the opportunity or threat informal influencers can have on culture change. The organization likely has standout individual contributors or middle managers who are the go-to’s for direction, guidance, and advice by their peers and subordinates, or the de facto trainer for new employees. They set the pace and the bar for a team. These informal leaders should be included in the change early on as change agents and to mitigate undue influence they may have in reverting to old “this is what worked” behaviors — particularly in groups or business units with an outsized influence on the strategic direction. Forgoing the opportunity to manage these undue influences could derail strategic shifts.
Consider the Communications
How leaders and managers communicate, what they emphasize, and which words they choose must impart the importance of adjusting values, beliefs, and behaviors to meet the new strategic plan. Sharing the vision through storytelling and defining clear expectations and, in some cases, behaviors, are imperative. Managers and Leaders have to communicate in a way to demonstrates they have embraced the new — it cannot be what “leadership has decided,” setting up a “We” versus “Them” dichotomy. Otherwise, they are essentially saying, “‘ They’ are changing. I don’t have an incentive to change, so we aren’t changing unless ‘They’ force us.” Red flag!
Another consideration is the ability to create a vision through storytelling and delivering the “what’s in it for me (WIIFM)” to ensure employees understand that adjusting is the best thing for the company, as well as what not adjusting means for the company, and them specifically. The organization has to do its part to support shifting to the new as well. Suppose skill growth and development are required inputs for achieving the new strategic outcomes, corporate investment should indicate that those words are not just lip service. Are the communication choices supporting a culture that reinforces the strategy?
Questions to Ask Yourself
For each of these three areas, be sure to ask -
- Are the strategic plans complementary to or in conflict with the culture?
- Does the strategy and culture support the same values and encourage similar behaviors?
- Does the strategic plan require new or different behaviors than the current culture encourages?
- Are informal rules or regimented processes thwarting the strategic plans?
- Does the change management plan bring the right people along to ensure the culture shifts with the strategy?
A well-planned strategy can fall apart if employees are not able to execute. Simply ordering employees to comply and adjust is not a workable solution. Much of employee motivation and enthusiasm depends on the type of work culture. Investigate culture to see if it is hurting or helping strategic plans. Consider the strategic planning process as an opportunity to enhance the organization’s culture-plan for your culture the way you do the rest of your business.
About The Author
Originally published at https://www.wyld.work on January 5, 2022.
