Culture and strategy is a chicken 🐔 and egg 🥚 situation: Which comes first?
Is it more important to have the strategy (the outline of your objectives and how you plan to achieve them) or the culture (how your beliefs inform your behaviors) in place first to execute your vision?
I dove into this topic recently on my culture series. We explored why "culture eats strategy for breakfast" - or does it?
Ready? Let's dive in.
When it comes to building an intentional culture, I hear the same excuses over and over:
Culture is everyone's job, and culture and strategy go together.
Strategy and culture go hand-in-hand. But most leaders think one comes before the other.
Let’s say you believe strategy leads and culture will change as-needed to support strategy. Your mindset is: “If the strategy works, then our culture will complement it."
But if you want to create a disruption – for example, make faster decisions because the marketplace expects you to show up with newer, better products in a shorter cycle – you need a culture shift. You have to change the way you make decisions as a company to execute this strategy. You have to change beliefs and behaviors.
So the strategy execution depends on a change in the culture – to make decisions faster, the culture has to change as well. Uh oh!
Now, let’s say you put culture first so it leads and enables a new strategy (or at least doesn’t impede the strategy).
The end goal is still to execute strategy, of course. We’re not building company culture for its own sake! But unless there’s a strategic reason for beliefs and behavior to change, they will stay the same.
If there aren’t clear business strategy incentives to shift the culture, your strategy stalls. Similarly, if there are any incentives that reward staying with the old culture, it won’t shift. Uh oh!
You can see why it’s critical to bring strategy and culture together. You need both to create change in tandem for disruption and transformation.
"For me, culture is the beliefs that we have. It’s the way people show up. It’s how they sit in meetings and think about things. It’s how people collaborate and make decisions. The words we use, the words we say to ourselves and each other."
-- Charlene Li, Leading Disruption
Without both strategy and culture being developed at the same time, you’ll miss out on opportunities to create the kind of transformations that help you achieve disruptive, innovative goals.
So how can you ensure you’re giving equal weight to strategy and culture – and developing them simultaneously?
Above all, you have to truly understand your culture. Just like you’d assess your strategy, your market position, and the competitive landscape, you need to evaluate your beliefs and behaviors that make up your culture. Here are some pragmatic questions to ask:
As you design your strategy, make sure you're considering your culture in lock-step. And, as you’re developing your culture, constantly ask yourself, “How is this going to impact the strategy?”
Otherwise, you risk missing out on the opportunities to drive disruption in today’s changing world.
Forward-thinking employers are always looking for ways to reinforce culture. How can HR and executive leadership reinforce a supportive, collaborative workplace that employees can brag about?
One way is to add PTO Exchange to the benefit mix. PTO Exchange is a highly differentiating benefit that gives employees more options to realize the value of their unused vacation, based on their own personal situation and priorities.
With PTO Exchange, employees can now exchange the monetary value of their unused vacation for: