5 Steps to Align Culture to Get Your Employee’s Strategic Buy-In

Culture eats strategy… strategy trumps culture… on which side of the culture/strategy divide do you fall?

I’ve written about this before, and I tend to side with culture – primarily because culture drives the behaviors of individuals who are the one that achieve your strategy (or not). But culture is the driving force.

Regardless of where you stand, it’s undeniable culture and strategy are deeply intertwined in organizations large and small, global or local, public or private, for-profit or non-profit.

Why culture change efforts fail

Last summer, Towers Watson produced a report on just how deeply this interweaving between the two is and why achieving strategy/culture alignment is critical for success.

Towers Watson also defines culture as “the shared beliefs (either explicit or implicit) that exist within a company and drive behaviors. They write, ”The real question we should be asking is: “How do we understand, manipulate, redirect or recreate the shared beliefs in such a way to drive the real behaviors we need to succeed?”

The report attempts to dig into this, looking at why most culture change efforts fail, identifying a lack of two key elements (quoting):

A view of culture that goes beyond generic notions of “high performance” and focuses on those aspects of culture uniquely relevant to a company’s particular strategic goals.
A focus on the underlying systems, processes and behaviors to support long-term culture change.

To resolve those challenges, Towers Watson did deep analysis, resulting in a definition of the five (5) primary company strategies for success and the associated “cultural profiles” to achieve those strategies. That breakdown is illustrated here:

5 steps to a strategy/culture connection

This is quite valuable, but how do you make this kind of strategy/culture profile connection real to employees who are the ones focused on achieving the goals? I recommend a five-step process (using the “Customer Service” strategy as an example):

Redefine the culture attributes into actionable core values. (Information Sharing, Teamwork, Customer Focus, Leadership, Decision Making, Taking Action)
Define behaviors associated with each of those core values. (Teamwork behaviors: Committed to common goals, active participation and leadership, open communication up and down the chain, willing sharing of resources)
Frequently and very specifically recognize any and all employees who demonstrate those behaviors by calling out clearly the core value demonstrated and explaining how those behaviors impacted you, the team, the customer or the company for the better. (Sam, you really lived our value of Teamwork when you went out of your way to locate the necessary research materials needed to move the Juno project forward. You didn’t have the information yourself, but you knew who did and how to get that information in the right hands. By doing so quickly and without prompting or direction, you helped us beat project deadlines, thrilling our client and making them a partner for years to come.)
Share that recognition across the organization so it can serve as training for others on what desirable “Teamwork” behaviors look like in the daily work, encouraging others to demonstrate similar actions.
Closely monitor, measure and report on areas where values are being more or less recognized to intervene where necessary with additional training or resources to ensure all employees both understand and are committed to achieving the company’s strategy – in their own work, every day.

What is the primary strategic goal for your organization? How are you aligning your culture (and the associated daily behaviors of employees) to achieve your strategy?

You can find more from Derek Irvine on his Recognize This! blog.