How to Find Weak Links in Your Corporate Culture

Weak Links in Your Corporate Culture Can Derail Performance
Is your corporate culture helping or hindering the performance of your business and your people?  A healthy culture creates the foundation to attract, engage, develop, and retain top talent that works well together.  An aligned culture creates the environment to accelerate your strategic priorities.  Weak links in your corporate culture can derail individual, team, and organizational performance.

The Latest Research on Organizational Culture
A strong culture helps an organization to perform at its peak.  Though some leaders still mistakenly believe that culture is soft HR stuff that does not have a quantifiable impact on performance, successful organizations and leaders know better.

• A recent Harvard Business School research report described how an effective culture can account for up to half of the differential in performance between organizations in the same business.
• Our proprietary organizational alignment research shows that cultural factors account for 40% of the difference between high and low performing companies in terms of revenue growth, profitability, customer loyalty, leadership effectiveness, and employee engagement.

Top 5 Warning Signs: How to Find Weak Links in Your Corporate Culture
It is critical, then, to be able to identify the weak links in your corporate culture so you can strengthen and correct them before the whole chain falls apart. Here are some signs that, to be healthy, high performing, and aligned, your culture needs a booster shot:

• Weak Performance Clarity and Accountability
  Success or failure are not clearly defined and low performers who are not improving get to stay.
• It is Too Hard to Get “The Right Things” Done
  Leaders or employees are not convinced that the way things are done align with the strategic priorities.
• People Do Not Believe that It Will Not Work
  Leaders or employees are not convinced that the way things are done will bring success.
• Ineffective Success Metrics
  Success metrics are confusing, conflicting, unfair, or unbalanced.
• Lack of Leadership
  Trust in leadership, specific teams, people’s capabilities, or the company is weak.

The Cure for Cultural Weaknesses

1. Measure Your Current Culture
   Assess your current culture in terms of organizational health, high performance, and strategic alignment. This will let you know where you stand in terms of leadership and organizational trust, individual and team capabilities, organizational climate, and how work gets done vis-à-vis your strategic priorities.
2. Define Your Needed Culture
   Identify the cultural aspects that matter most in terms of areas such as:
   — Customer intimacy
   — Market approach
   — Innovation
   — Brand positioning
   — Internal or external focus
   — Level of risk tolerance
   — Operational process variation
   — Decision making
   — Work atmosphere
   — Results orientation

   Being clear allows you to identify the one or two most critical areas to focus on to get ensure that your culture is helping, not hindering, your strategy.

3. Deploy the Needed Culture
   Prepare people leaders, cascade assessment results, agree upon work group level actions, define metrics for success, and work with culture champions to live and sustain the cultural transformation.
4. Measure Progress
   Review and share monthly dashboard metrics and adjust accordingly.

The Bottom Line
Weak cultures drain the health and stamina of their organizations.  Be on the watch for the weak links that can undermine your desired culture and ultimately your overall business performance.

To learn more about how to strengthen the weak links in your corporate culture , download The 3 Research-Backed Levels of a High Performance Culture that Leaders Must Get Right

Tristam Brown

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.