Strategically Aligned Culture: 4 Research-Backed Steps

Do You Have a Strategically Aligned Culture?
Once your business strategy is clear, believable, and implementable enough, it is your job as a leader to understand, shape, and align your corporate culture to drive your key strategic initiatives forward in a way that makes sense for the business AND the people who are responsible for executing it.  We call this a Strategically Aligned Culture, and it is required to consistently and effectively execute strategic priorities after your strategy retreat is completed.

While most senior executives agree that a sound strategic plan is imperative, few agree on what to do next.  In fact, less than ten percent of even well-crafted strategies are effectively executed.  For most fast growing and evolving companies, the biggest obstacles to success have little to do with designing a winning strategy, but with consistently implementing it.

Culture is Often the First Roadblock
We define culture is how things truly get done in an organization.  It includes the underlying corporate values and assumptions that drive key business practices and behaviors. Many still mistakenly believe that culture is “soft HR-type stuff” because it does not appear to 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.
• Gartner research found that aligned cultures can lift employee performance by up to 22%.
• Our organizational alignment research found 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.

Organizational Cultures Exist by Design or by Default
As a leader, if you do not understand, shape, and align your culture and strategy, you and your organization will not performing at your peak.  Jet Blue President & CEO, David Barger, said it well:

“We got our board together four years ago to discuss best practices and strategy.  We ended up with 23 objectives and 4 pathways.  Fast forward and the 23 became 14 in year two and then 10 in year three.  Now they are crystallized into 2 – culture and offerings.”

Not only did “culture” ascend to its rightful place toward the top, but the leadership team did themselves a big favor by narrowing and simplifying their strategic focus.

4 Research-Backed Must Have’s for a Strategically Aligned Culture
If you want a strategically aligned culture to drive peak performance, start with these four research-backed tips that are based on over thirty years of research with high performing organizations.  Be sure your company culture is:

1. Clear and Modeled
   To impact performance, the desired workplace culture must be clearly articulated to employees and consistently monitored, modeled, and rewarded by the company’s leaders.
2. Aligned and Believed
   For culture to matter, it must not only tie directly to your strategy, but employees must also believe that it is a key driver in helping them to achieve their personal and professional objectives.
3. Experienced and Consistent
   To be effective, employees must experience your company’s desired culture on a regular basis.  A strong culture should ruthlessly defend against business practices, behaviors, and actions that do not match how you want things to get done.
4. Soft and Hard
   On the “soft side,” meaningful missions and cultures make employees proud and motivated to do their best.  On the “hard side,” performance-based cultures ensure that substandard performers (when given the required support) must improve relatively quickly if they wish to remain employed.

The Bottom Line
Great leaders know that a strategy without the culture to fuel it is just wishful thinking.  Great leaders strategically and systemically shape their culture by being clear and consistent about how they want things to get done.  Have you assessed your corporate culture to see if it is helping or hindering your strategy?

To learn more about how to align your culture with your strategy, download The 3 Levels of Culture that You Must Get Right to Create Higher Strategic Performance