“LSA’s Cultural Alignment Assessment helped to identify our people and business priorities in a practical and focused manner and has made all the difference in accelerating our performance.”
Brenda Wagner | Founder & President | Proxicom
“Our business is going through a transformation. We knew we had to do a culture assessment and define our values to transform culturally. This process helped our executive team to focus on the right things at the right times to align our culture with our strategy.”
Cathy Landman | Chief Legal Officer & SVP | YA
Our organizational alignment research shows that workplace 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. And that starts with assessing the level of strategic and cultural alignment.
Cultural Alignment Assessment Part 1: 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.
Cultural Alignment Assessment Part 2: 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 cultural 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:
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 – Executive Strategy and Culture Alignment Session
The first step is to align the executive team. We believe that the same people who are responsible for setting the corporate strategy should also be responsible for defining the workplace culture required to best execute the strategy.
Phase II – Assess Organizational Health & Cultural Alignment
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 workplace culture in terms of health and alignment.
Phase III – Prepare People Leaders
Once the assessment results have been analyzed, the next step is to prepare people leaders with the tools and practices to connect the What (Strategy) and How (Culture) for their teams.
Phase IV- Sustain the Needed Culture
The final and ongoing step is to sustain your cultural transformation by building capabilities and overcoming obstacles.
If you want to get aligned and improve strategy execution and performance, please contact us to learn more about our Research-backed Cultural Alignment Assessment.
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