Last week we ran the pilot for our new program on culture which we will be launching in the next couple of weeks. The participants were a group of HR people from an organization who has been doing good work on culture for a number of years. They loved the program and learned a lot. I was interested by which pieces they felt had the most impact for them. There were several. One was the crucial question that I believe creates the link between business drivers and culture. This is the question I ask when I am helping a client to see the value in investing in their culture. And when I train consultants, it is the question I recommend they ask their clients.
Here it is
The answer to this question is the business case for working on the culture. If the behaviors required are different from the current behaviors, then there is work to be done. The organization will need a culture which values these new behaviors. If the culture supports the current behaviors (which it almost certainly will) then these behaviors will remain, and the strategy will not be executed successfully. People behave in a way that they believe will enable them to fit in. Change the culture and you change the messages they receive about what is expected.
All of us who work in the culture arena need to be able to make this link between culture and business strategy in everything we do. Often I see good culture work started without this link being established clearly in the minds of the business leaders. And so, over time, the enthusiasm dies, because culture is seen as something not urgent, something separate from the job of driving the businesss forward. I have found that the link needs to be made over and over again. And the participants in our pilot program realized that they too could do more to really position their culture work in this way.
PS Positioning culture as a way to make people happy and increase employee engagement is not enough. It’s a great side benefit, but the real benefits lie directly in the answer to the crucial question above.
March 3rd, 2010 at 8:51 pm
I would love to hear an example of how you have made this link successfully – do you have one you can share?
March 5th, 2010 at 11:30 am
Thanks for the question. Here's one I worked with recently. Government department who have a big agenda they want to implement. Their people feel at the effect of the rapidly changing demands of their government minister whose time frame is the next election and the next newspaper headline. Behaviorally, they want their people to hold true to a long term set of goals AND meet the short term minister's requirements. People tend to see this as an either/or, with a culture of non accountability caused by these difficult external circumstances. If they can change the attitudes and behaviors of their people, they will change their culture and what they are able to achieve. A difficult challenge, but a classic 'culture impacting strategy execution example'.