Strategy doesn’t drive behavior
Tom Peters is an inspiring thought leader. A post on his blog today highlights how important it is for management to be able to align strategy and culture.
"A beautifully crafted strategy can fail when the employees in various divisions within an organization clash. Logically, we think that strategy should drive behavior, but, in reality, it’s the culture—underlying norms, values, belief systems—that dictates how effectively people work together. Employees’ behavior has direct impact on the bottom line, costs, revenue streams, level of productivity, customer satisfaction, even the brand—every aspect of the business is affected. If strategy and culture are not aligned, the culture may support behaviors that conflict with what has to get done—and actually block execution of the strategy."
I have worked in a Fortune 500 in the last year where the focus was on making sure everyone got along. Clearly there was some understanding that conflict wasted a tremendous amount of energy in businesses. Anything that lead to conflict was undiscussable. This made it impossible to point out where what someone was doing wasn’t helping get the job done. It also made change very difficult to implement. The behavior’s that were intended to reduce the conflict clearly blocked the execution of the strategy.
Notably, this is a ubiquitious problem that effects almost every company we engage in. Most companies lack an effective way to connect strategy and culture in an actionable way. Developing and communicating strategy is itself a daunting task. Deliberately shaping culture can be overwhelming. If you agree that culture must be aligned with strategy, what are you doing to make it happen? Do you have a systematic way to make sure the culture and behaviors are creating results aligned with the strategy.