Misaligned Culture – 7 Danger Signs to Pay Attention To

Do You Have a Misaligned Culture?
Successful organizations thrive on organizational alignment. Their culture, their strategy, and their talent all shift and move in harmony. If any of these three pillars of success are askew, there is performance danger ahead.  Do You Have a Misaligned Culture?

What Happens when There Is a Misaligned Culture
Our organizational alignment research found that culture accounts for 40% of the difference between high and low performing organizations in terms of revenue growth, profitability, leadership effectiveness, customer loyalty, and employee engagement.  When there is a breach in the corporate culture, the entire company suffers. Just think of Volkswagen’s culture with their emissions fraud or Wells Fargo’s sales culture with their fake account scandal.

The lawsuits and the stain on their reputations will continue for years.

Seven Danger Signs of a Misaligned Culture
While the majority of executives know workplace culture is vital to the performance and well-being of their organization, too many still underestimate the power of cultural misalignment in terms of organizational health, people performance, and strategy execution.

Based upon over 25 years of data assessing organizational cultures, here are seven warning signs that you may have a misaligned culture at work:

1. Leadership Does Not Model the Desired Culture
   Workplace culture begins at the top. If the CEO is out of sync with the desired culture, employees will notice. Employees tend to adopt behaviors that are successful, modeled, and rewarded.
2. Senior Executives Are Inaccessible
   When employees feel out of touch with business leaders either because leaders are unapproachable or too alike in their thinking, a positive organizational culture is hard to sustain. Openness and diversity add richness to solving problems, making decisions, and forging new ground.
3. No Clear Cultural Link to Business Strategy
   Strategy, culture, and talent, are dependent upon one another. For example, a traditional, hierarchical culture cannot support an innovative, no-holds-barred strategy. Be clear about where you’re headed and how employees need to think, behave, and act to get you there.
4. Behavioral Expectations Are Murky
   If employees don’t understand what behaviors are expected and desired, how can they be blamed for behaving in a way that doesn’t fit? Make sure you talk about your desired culture frequently and that all employees are clear about how they are to act and get work done on a day-to-day basis.
5. Employee Engagement Is Low
   Employee engagement should be regularly measured. If your employee engagement scores are below industry standards, you need to identify what is wrong and invest in the organizational health required to set the foundation for success.  To thrive, employees must be engaged enough to want to do more for the right reasons.
6. Lack of Rewards and Recognition for Behaving “Right”
   If there is no motivation for doing the right things in the right way, employees are apt to make less of an effort to follow the desired company culture. Find a way to recognize and reward employees who exemplify the desired culture, and others will follow.  Then make sure that there are proportionate consequences for those who do not follow team norms or do not meet minimal performance standards.
7. The Customer Is Not Well Understood
   Have you identified your target customers? Have you checked how satisfied they are? It is far easier to grow existing business than to attract and win new customers.  Check out the customer experience from beginning to end — is your cultural approach to customers helping or hindering your growth strategy?

The Bottom Line
Smart leaders know strategy must go through culture and people to be successfully executed.  High performing companies make sure they do not have a misaligned culture that inhibits performance or employee engagement.

To learn more about creating an aligned and high performance culture, download 3 Research-Backed Levels of a High Performance Culture that You Must Get Right