Strategy and Culture Are at Odds? 4 Immediate Steps to Take

Growth is Limited When Strategy and Culture Are at Odds
Project postmortem analyses confirm that company growth stalls when strategy and culture pull in opposite directions.  Why? Because strategy doesn’t execute itself — it moves through people, and people operate through the norms, beliefs, and behaviors of the culture around them.

When those two forces are misaligned, even the best strategy gets:

• Diluted.
• Distorted.
• Resisted in day-to-day execution.

Examples of Misaligned Strategies and Cultures
It quickly becomes evident how difficult execution is when an organization’s stated strategy conflicts with its lived culture. In these environments, employees are often pulled in two directions — what the business is asking them to do versus what the culture actually rewards and reinforces — creating confusion, resistance, and inconsistent execution across the organization.

• Customer Focus Example
  Imagine the difficulty in executing a strategy to deliver long-term and relationship-based value (a customer intimate approach) like Whole Foods Market in an organizational culture that values short-term, transactional interactions (a transactional customer approach) like McDonalds.
• Market Approach Example
  Imagine the difficulty of bringing new and innovative software solutions to market (a market leader approach) like Tesla if the predominant organizational culture focuses on legacy hardware products and only introduces new products to market after the market has shown they work (a market adopter approach) like Kia.
• Decision-Making Approach Example
  Imagine the difficulty of making effective and timely decisions in the field if the predominant organizational culture values all significant decisions be made by top leadership (a centralized approach) like the US Military versus allowing individuals to make decisions at the front line (a decentralized approach) like Southwest Airlines.

Strategy and Culture Alignment Matter
Our organizational alignment research found companies that align their culture and talent with their strategy grow revenues 58% faster, are 72% more profitable and outperform unaligned companies in terms of:

• Customer retention.
• Leadership effectiveness.
• Employee engagement.

Your corporate strategy is the path you intend to take to profitably grow your business. But when your approaches to how work gets done and your workforce are oriented in different directions, there is little chance you will achieve high performance business results.

4 Immediate Steps to Take When Strategy and Culture Are at Odds

Here are four steps to take when your strategy and culture are at odds:

1. Clarify Strategic Goals
   Strategic clarity, often created through strategy retreats, accounts for 31% of the difference between high and low performing companies.  You would be surprised to learn how many leaders try to change their company culture before they have a clearly defined strategy for success. While we applaud the intentions behind improving corporate culture, we know that a culture must align with and support a clear, believable, and implementable strategy if you want it to help, and not hinder, strategy execution.Is your strategy clear enough?
2. Understand Your Current Culture
   Too many leadership teams rush straight into defining their “ideal” culture, but that shortcut often creates blind spots. While clarifying the desired culture is essential, the more effective starting point is a candid, shared assessment of the current culture that actually exists today.Without an honest, cross-functional agreement on the current state — how decisions are really made, what behaviors are truly rewarded, and where misalignments show up — efforts to shift culture tend to remain aspirational rather than actionable. In practice, you cannot design a credible path forward until you have a grounded, collective understanding of where you are starting from.

   Do you have a shared understanding of your current culture to help identify and close key execution gaps?

3. Define the Culture You Need to Execute Your Strategy
   Once your business strategy is clear enough and you have a good handle on your current workplace culture, it is time to define the cultural attributes required to best execute your strategy. We like to look at ten research-backed cultural dimensions:

   — How You Approach Your Market: from adopter to leader
   — How You Treat Customers: from transactional to intimate
   —  Where You Want Customer Loyalty to Reside: from individual to company
   — Where You Focus Your Energy: from internal to external focus
   — How Much Risk You Tolerate: from low to high risk
   — How You Operationalize Your Strategy: from low to high process variation
   — How You Make Decisions: from decentralized to centralized decision-making
   — How You Value Information: from fact-based to intuition-based
   — The Type of Atmosphere You Want: from a social to a formal work environment
   — How You Balance Results and Behaviors: from “the how” to “the what”

   Have you defined the needed culture to best execute your strategy?

4. Prioritize the Critical Few Cultural Changes that Matter Most 
   When it comes to culture change, we have found that less is more. Trying to make more than one or two major cultural shifts at once is often the recipe for disaster.  Pick the one or two cultural changes that matter most to your strategy and worry about the rest later.

The Bottom Line
When strategic priorities are reinforced by the everyday behaviors, decisions, and mindsets of your workforce, alignment becomes real — not theoretical. Energy stops leaking in different directions, execution becomes more consistent, and people begin pulling in the same direction with clarity and intent toward shared success.

To learn more about what to do when your strategy and culture are at odds, download The 3 Levels of a High Performance Culture

by Tristam Brown: CEO

Tristam Brown is an executive business consultant and organizational development expert with more than three decades of experience helping organizations accelerate performance, build high-impact teams, and turn strategy into execution. As CEO of LSA Global, he works with leaders to get and stay aligned™ through research-backed strategy, culture, and talent solutions that produce measurable, business-critical results. See full bio.