You may believe that your company has a good culture, you may not. Your staff may love working for you or may not. When it comes to culture, what matters is how well it is aligned to your purpose and strategy. In our experience this alignment is what truly drives organisational success. Without it, even the best-formulated business strategies fall short. This is because even the best strategies need a culture to deliver them, and the even the best cultures need a strategy to direct them.
The Importance of Culture
Organisational culture forms organically from day one, whether intentionally guided or not. As a leader, it’s essential to actively shape this culture rather than allowing it to develop on its own. Once established, culture possesses a confounding persistence. A resistant, spring-back quality that is difficult to change without significant insight, effort and special leadership qualities.
Cultures are an inherent, often taken for granted part of organisations. They are highly important for their functioning and have a pervasive influence on their effectiveness. Managed well, culture can be a real economic and strategic asset. Mismanaged or neglected, it can become a liability or strategic disadvantage. Differences in culture can explain why one company succeeds where another fails within the same industry.
What is Organisational Culture?
Organisational culture is often coined “the way we do things around here”. It encompasses the shared values, beliefs, behaviours, and practices that define your company and contribute to its success. It’s the invisible force that guides how your teams interact, make decisions, and approach challenges and problems posed by the mission at hand. It gives orientation, stability, and continuity. It conveys a sense of identity for organisational members and facilitates the generation of commitment to something larger than the self. It provides social control systems that serve as sense-making devices, which can guide and shape behaviour and expectations about what is appropriate or inappropriate.
What is the “Right” Culture for my Organisation?
Successful organisational cultures are intentional by design. There isn’t a one-size-fits-all “best” culture. Your culture should be as unique as the strategy it is designed to support. The norms of the organisation must help execute the strategy through the congruence of its capabilities, architecture, and systems. An organisational culture that is consistent with leadership, vision, strategy, and customer leads to an effective and competitive organisation. Get it right, and it can be a:
- Competitive advantage
- Catalyst for innovation
- Driver of agility and execution
- Unifying force
- Intrinsic motivator
Get it wrong, misaligned, or too strong, and it can work against you, slow the organisation down, cause friction, prevent employees from working effectively, and result in serious performance limitations.
As Founder/CEO, How Do I and the C-Suite Shape the Culture of My Organisation?
The single most impactful thing you can do as a leader is to be deliberate about the culture you need to deliver on your mission. Your organisation’s culture is closely tied to its leadership. The values and behaviours of founders and early leaders set the foundation for the cultural norms that follow. Through clear, visible action, leaders personify the cultural values of the organisation. Organisation members learn what is important by observing those above them, looking for consistent patterns of communication and behaviour. Your core individual characteristics translate into organisational practices that, in turn, contribute to performance outcomes. For example, organisations with leaders who value freedom and creativity tend to hold a higher emphasis on innovation.
How Can You Get Your Desired Culture to Stick?
As Edgar Schein, the seminal thinker on culture is quoted as saying, “The only thing of real importance that leaders do is create and manage culture”. As the primary culture carrier, if time and resources are allocated to culture-building initiatives, then the following ten-steps can help you achieve your desired culture and make it stick:
- Actively engage with employees to determine the culture that serves the vision, mission and strategy.
- Clearly articulate and constantly demonstrate the desired values and behaviours that define success.
- Support middle and frontline managers to connect the dots, to define the winning behaviours with their teams that institutionalise the values and norms and catalyse the diffusion of the culture.
- Foster cultural “energisers”, key influential staff members, to positively influence the mindsets and working practices.
- Embed culture in processes and systems e.g. hiring, onboarding, performance management, and promotion decisions.
- Consistently share stories that reinforce cultural values and connect them to the organisational context.
- Celebrate and recognise behaviours that exemplify the desired culture.
- Be transparent about challenges and how they align with cultural values.
- Understand the “unwritten rules” that influence behaviour, listen to employee feedback and address unintended misalignment promptly and visibly.
- Make culture a priority in strategic discussions and decision-making.
Aligning Your Culture
Business is a team game. It requires everyone to all pull in the same direction. A great strategy can’t win the day if the players can’t work together to pull it off. Similarly, it’s not a given that a cohesive team will overcome competitors who have a vastly better playbook. An organisational culture that is aligned with leadership, vision, strategy and customer leads to a healthier, more effective and competitive organisation. Leaders who recognise this, carefully attend to their culture, and are proactive and rigorous in shaping it are better equipped to achieve long-term success.
At Alignment Cubed, we have seen first-hand how misalignment between strategy and culture can hinder an organisation’s progress. For example, we worked with a company whose leaders desired a culture of innovation but were inadvertently building a culture of efficiency. By realigning their culture with their strategic goals, we helped them achieve their vision. We can support you too in assessing and aligning your organisation’s culture.
We believe that an organisation both has and is defined by its culture. All members, especially leaders, act as carriers of this culture. For its full benefit to be realised a culture must enable the strategic objectives and mission of the business. Rather than (as is so famously quoted), “culture eating strategy for breakfast”, we take the position that for the betterment of the organisation and to its competitive advantage “culture and strategy should eat breakfast together”.
Contact Jonathan or Majid to learn more about how we can help you.
Want to Dive Deeper Yourself?
The following resources cover organisational culture and its impact on performance. They provide a mix of academic and practical perspectives that can help you deepen your understanding of the concepts discussed in the article.
- Organizational Culture and Leadership by Edgar Schein – the book that started it all and set out to transform the abstract concept of culture into a tool to achieve organisational goals.
- The Culture Code by Daniel Coyle – explores how successful groups create and sustain a thriving culture.
- The Advantage by Patrick Lencioni – provides leaders with a ground-breaking, approachable model for achieving organizational health.
- Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance by Louis Gerstner – story of Gerstner’s turnaround of IBM and his insights into changing a large company culture while keeping it aligned with a clear strategy.
- Good to Great by Jim Collins – why some companies make the leap to superior performance and others do not, emphasising the importance of finding what works for your specific organisation.
