Align Culture with Strategy Assessment
Culture accounts for 40% of the difference between high and low performance
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Read Whitepapers“LSA’s ability to assess and align our organizational culture to align with our business strategy and implement practical solutions to help us achieve our people and business goals in a practical and focused manner has made all the difference.”
Brenda Wagner | Founder & President | Proxicom
Our organizational alignment research shows that organizational culture accounts for 40% of the difference between high and low performing organizations. Smart leaders not only maintain organizational health. They purposefully align their organizational culture with their business strategy.
Organizational Health
We define organizational health similarly to how doctors describe personal health. We use seven metrics in the areas of leadership, trust, capability and climate equivalent to checking an individual’s cholesterol level, blood pressure, hearing and vision.
Organizational health is important because it serves as the foundation for creating an aligned and high performance culture. We measure organizational health on a unhealthy-to-healthy scale. You want your organization to be in the best possible health to maximize employee engagement, discretionary effort and retention.
Organizational health will only take your company so far, however. Every business has a unique culture, a system of beliefs and values that determine how the organization accomplishes important goals and gets things done.
Unlike organizational health, we do not measure organizational culture on an unhealthy-to-healthy scale. We measure organizational culture on an unaligned-to-aligned scale based upon your unique corporate vision, mission and strategy.
Aligned Organizational Culture
When an organization has an aligned culture –one that is purposefully aligned with the business strategy – it sets the stage for high performance. Done right, an aligned organizational culture focuses not only on “what gets done”, but “how the critical few actions to get you there” are aligned with what matters most strategically.
We have identified 10 dimensions on a scale that define the unique cultural attributes in terms of strategic alignment. Effective leaders shape their organizational culture in a way that drives the business strategy forward to its full potential across these cultural dimensions:
- Market Approach – from adopter to leader
- Customers – from transactional to intimate
- Loyalty – from individual to company
- Focus – from internal to external
- Risk Tolerance – from low to high
- Operational Approach – from low to high process variation
- Decision Making – from centralized to decentralized
- Information – from fact-based to intuition-based
- Atmosphere – from social to disciplined
- Results – from “the how” to “the what”
An aligned culture accelerates strategic results. A misaligned culture inhibits performance and slows growth. Understanding your organizational culture, both what it is today and where it needs to be to support your strategy, is where the real power lies.
The typical steps to align your corporate culture with your strategy include:
Phase I – Define the Needed Culture with the Executive Team
We believe that the same people who are responsible for setting the corporate strategy should also be responsible for defining the culture required to best execute the strategy.
- Agree upon the current culture you have today across the 10 dimensions
- Identify the culture you need to best execute your strategy going forward
- Prioritize the critical few cultural shifts required to better align with the strategy
Phase II – Discover Your Current Culture Across the Entire organization
Once the needed culture has been defined by the executive team, it is time to get a reality check of how the rest of the organization perceives the current culture
- Conduct organization-wide survey to benchmark key organizational health and culture dimensions
- Perform qualitative and quantitative gap analysis
- Review results, trends and suggested roadmap for transformation
Phase III – Develop the Key Actions
Once the priorities have been identified, it is time to create practical and implementable action plans to align your culture to your strategic objectives.
- Prepare people leaders to review results and identify actions
- Cascade results, trends and suggested roadmap for transformation
- Agree upon workgroup level actions and metrics for success
Phase IV- Deploy the Needed Culture
- Identify and prepare culture champions
- Sustain cultural transformation through cohort learning, 1-on-1 coaching and action planning
- Review monthly dashboard metrics and adjust accordingly
Please contact us to learn how to align your organizational culture with your business strategy.
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