Three Tactics to Ensure Your Strategy and Culture Are Aligned

Company culture was first identified back in the 1950s by Dr. Elliot Jaques, in his book entitled The Changing Culture of a Factory. In it, Dr. Jacques shares results from a longitudinal study he conducted at a ball-bearing plant in England and the impact various methods of operations had on both production and employee engagement and relations. 

While groundbreaking at the time, the idea of corporate culture, as we know it today, didn’t start to enter the mainstream business environment until the late 1980s. Culture was used to describe how people interacted with each other inside the organization, how knowledge was created and shared, and how change was managed. To put it simply, company culture became known as ‘how things get done’ within the organization.

If culture is focused on the how, strategy, by comparison, is focused on what and why – what needs to get done and why it will benefit the organization. It is impossible to implement strategy without taking into consideration culture. For starters, culture is one of the driving motivators for employee productivity. More than half of workers polled in JobVite’s annual Job Seeker Nation survey said they would leave a company if the culture was not aligned with their expectations and values. And 72% of leaders and employees cite culture as the driving force behind achieving successful change initiatives (PwC).

Company culture also plays an outsized role in garnering support for strategic initiatives. Even if leadership has bought into a strategy, without the support and effort of rank-and-file members of the team, a strategy remains nothing more than an idea. Yet knowing this in the abstract and managing this in reality are two different things. Sadly, misalignment between corporate culture and strategy is all too common. 

Short of micromanaging every employee’s thoughts and interactions, how can organizations today do better at aligning culture and strategy? Consider these three key areas:

Understand your culture and simplify your strategy

A common misalignment in companies comes from a difference in understanding the nature of culture. Leadership often focuses on the aspired culture, where employees are more aware of the actual culture. To remedy this disconnect, start by talking to employees at every level of the organization. Ask hard questions and be open to the answers. The purpose of this exercise is to create a benchmark to work against – even if your culture isn’t where you want it to be, by evaluating the employee experience at every level, across all departments, you have a tangible starting point from which to grow. 

Next, focus on your strategy and work to ensure it is clear, concise and justifiable. Is there buy-in from all levels of stakeholders? Is it realistic, and can it succeed? Once you have your strategy well defined, look again at where your culture stands. Rather than try and boil the ocean, focus on one or two important changes needed within the culture that will have the biggest impact on achieving your strategy.

Get to know your customers, your competition and the culture outside your organization

Customers influence your culture and, believe it or not, your competition does as well. These external forces can have a powerful impact on the internal workings of your organization and should be evaluated as part of your ongoing strategic planning. What’s more, the external climate around your organization matters—everything from socio-economic factors, political pressures, the environment, public opinion and more influence the company and its culture, posing the potential of disruption for strategy.

It’s not always possible to mitigate or control these external forces, but they must be accounted for and addressed. After all, your team members are impacted and influenced by each of these factors, to varying degrees. Hearken back to your company’s mission regularly and conduct internal SWOT analyses to understand both the company’s weaknesses and potential threats, as well as the opportunities that lie ahead. Evaluating these external forces through the lens of strategy and culture alignment helps companies better prepare for the unexpected and differentiate in a noisy market. 

Prioritize transparency, communication and workflows

One of the ways a company has greatest control in aligning culture and strategy is to ensure there is a priority placed on breaking down silos, improving communication and championing transparency whenever possible. While doable, this isn’t always easy. Organizations and individual roles have grown increasingly complex, leading to a natural siloing that works well for task-oriented work but less so for cross-collaboration. Some clear indicators that your company is misaligned due to poor communication and lack of collaboration are missed deadlines, time wasted in unproductive meetings and frustrated employees.

The good news is that these problems can be addressed with the right tools and structure. For example, start by centralizing company resources. After working with organizations of all shapes and sizes around the world, we see that it is a pervasive issue for resources to be scattered across various tools and technologies—sometimes even siloed on just one individual’s computer—causing a wealth of issues, including reproducing work that already exists and delaying deadlines while waiting to track down necessary information. Centralizing these resources not only makes it easier for employees to do their jobs, it makes it easier for new team members to onboard and for leadership to quickly access materials.

Investing in tools that allow for easier cross-collaboration can also increase transparency and productivity. Platforms such as Zoom and Slack help improve communication across departments, while more visual tools that help with workflow management can give teams a quick snapshot of the status and ownership of various projects. At StrategyBlocks, for example, we’ve purposefully designed our platform to address these common concerns as they relate to strategy, including how best to communicate, execute and track strategic initiatives, effectively report to senior leadership and navigate changes within the organization in a way that aligns with the company’s culture.

For a company to succeed in the long term, there must be more emphasis placed on assuring that its strategy fits well within its culture and vice versa. The data backs this up—one study showed that companies with cultures highly aligned with innovation strategies see a 30% higher enterprise value growth and 17% higher profit growth than companies with low degrees of alignment.

The good news is that when strategy is clearly defined and understood, a strong culture can help ensure strategic initiatives are well executed.