A Misaligned Workplace Culture Creates Problems

A Misaligned Workplace Culture Undermines Performance
When you recognize that workplace culture is a critical driver of organizational success — as research consistently shows — you can shift your focus to addressing the gaps that hold your company back. Data from organizational culture assessments reveal that a misaligned culture directly contributes to:

• Increased disengagement among top talent.
• Higher turnover of high performers.
• Inconsistent strategy execution across teams and functions.
• Suboptimal performance across the organization.

The Definition of Workplace Culture
Workplace culture is the underlying force that determines how work actually gets done. It shapes how people think, behave, and interact, influencing every decision and action within the organization. Culture encompasses the behaviors, systems, and business practices that drive critical business choices — especially those made by leaders in hiring, promoting, and letting people go. To achieve success, your business and people strategies must flow through the lens of your culture and the people who embody it.

Why Culture Matters
Peter Drucker famously said “culture eats strategy for breakfast.”  Research agrees with him:

• Watson Wyatt found that culturally aligned organizations return 286% more value to stakeholders.
• Harvard Business Review reported as much as 50% of the competitive difference between companies in the same industry can be attributed to culture.
• Our own organizational alignment research found that culture accounts for 40% of the difference between high and low performing companies in terms of revenue growth, profitability, customer satisfaction and retention, leadership effectiveness, and employee engagement.

The Definition of a Misaligned Workplace Culture
A misaligned workplace culture exists when how work gets done is out of step with what needs to get done to execute your business and people strategies effectively. In such an environment, achieving the right outcomes becomes harder, processes are slowed by friction, resistance to change is high, and dysfunction is common.

Conversely, our research shows that a well-aligned culture can boost productivity by up to 25%. Imagine the difference that level of performance could make across your organization — impacting results, engagement, and overall business success.

Why Workplace Culture is Often Misaligned
Creating a strategic plan — often during an executive strategy retreat — can feel straightforward. Shared goals are defined, tasks are documented, and a path forward is outlined. But once execution begins, that apparent simplicity often unravels, and culture is usually the hidden complexity.

Corporate goals rarely fail simply because structural obstacles weren’t addressed — though many plans overlook these challenges. Project postmortem analyses consistently show that strategic initiatives falter when organizations haven’t clearly defined or aligned their cultural “business journey” to support the vision for change. Culture is difficult to shift because organizations often operate with a fragmented set of underlying beliefs that shape how goals are interpreted and acted upon.

The critical beliefs — the “secret sauce” needed to understand and execute strategic objectives — are seldom articulated, measured, or deliberately cultivated. Without this clarity, even the best-laid plans struggle to gain traction.

Top 2 Warning Signs of a Misaligned Workplace Culture

1. Weak Leadership Trust And Accountability
   The first warning sign of a misaligned workplace culture is when the basic building blocks of leadership — trust and accountability — are lacking.  Misaligned workplace cultures lack confidence in their leaders to follow through, make necessary changes, and to act in alignment with the company’s core values.
2. Strategic Ambiguity or Confusion
   When beliefs are in misalignment with and disconnected from the strategy, it is difficult to hold individuals accountable. The second warning sign of a misaligned workplace culture is a lack of strategic clarity regarding:
   • Team Goals and Accountabilities: what each individual and team is expected to accomplish and why.
   • Team Roles and Responsibilities: who is is expected to do what and why.
   • Team Norms: how everyone is supposed to think and behave to remain in good standing.

How to Create Culture and Strategy Alignment
If you are afraid that you may have a misaligned workplace culture, here are four steps to get you started in the right direction:

1. Uncover the Current Culture
   Your first step is to assess your current corporate culture to get a clear and accurate picture of the way things are getting done and why. This is very different than your aspired culture and desired corporate values.  You want the unvarnished truth of what it is like to work at your company on a day-to-day basis.
2. Identify the Needed Culture
   Your next step is to agree upon the desired workplace culture that is required to best execute your strategy.  We have identified 10 dimensions of an aligned workplace culture which provide a framework to define and align the appropriate continuum of beliefs needed to best execute your strategic goals and make it easier to get things done.
3. Agree Upon the Critical Few Strategy-Culture Gaps
   Not all cultural dimensions are of equal importance in terms of strategy execution and organizational health. We know from action learning leadership development programs that leaders must agree on the one or two cultural shifts that will have the greatest positive impact on moving the strategy forward for your unique situation in a way that makes sense.
4. Deploy an Aligned Culture
   Once you identify the one or two areas to create strategy and culture alignment, it is time to identify and prepare culture champions to design practical action plans to close the strategy-culture gaps.

The Bottom Line
To achieve peak performance, your company must purposefully shape a culture that aligns seamlessly with its strategy. This alignment accelerates strategy execution while boosting employee engagement. When culture and strategy are in sync, people work with greater interdependence, think more cohesively, and act with a unified sense of purpose — driving results that would be impossible in a misaligned organization.

To learn more about how to align your culture with your strategy, download How to Build a Purposeful and Aligned Corporate Culture.