#40 Culture

“Culture eats strategy for breakfast” we’re told in the rather biological, hierarchical food chain-esque themed cliche.

It’s such a simple, clear statement yet it leaves so much to digest.

To understand why strategy matters much less than culture (or more specifically, matters after it), we need to view culture and strategy amongst the other key organisational tools. These are the tools that assemble an organisation’s why, what and how.

The Organisational Strategic Toolkit

Typically, there are a set of tools any organisation gets to wield when defining who they are, why they matter and where they’re going for their staff, customers and stakeholders.

Purpose is the primary tool and answers “Why do we exist?”.

Vision comes next, describing the aspirational future achievements, making clear the answer to “What does where we’re heading look like?”. ?

Values comes next and answers “How do we behave as we head there?”.

Culture comes next and describes “How it feels as we go”. It’s not a question. It’s a vibe.

Strategy follows, describing the logical mechanics of “How we will achieve our vision”. It’s not a question either. It’s a complex, multi-year conceptual plan.

But you’ll notice in this all-important toolkit hierarchy that culture is an outlier.

Purpose, vision and strategy are all defined by the board, executive and leadership.

But nobody gets to define culture. It just is.

Why would culture eat strategy?

Let’s expand on strategy and culture to understand why one might ‘eat’ the other.

Strategy, in a business sense, is the carefully thought-through definition of an organisational approach to optimise their performance in alignment with their purpose, vision and values to maximise their long-term objectives in a sustainable way.

Defining a strategy takes time, grey-matter, care, foresight, business knowledge, experience and sometimes even a management consultant or two (some outside input certainly benefits the process).

Culture, on the other hand, in a business sense, is what it feels like to work in the organisation.

Strategy is something finely crafted, that’s laid out for the future. Culture is something that’s organic and steeped in the past.

Strategy requires people to execute it. It is not only defined by people, but it can be managed by people.

Culture is the aggregated vibe that emanates from employees. It’s an aggregation of how employees think, behave ?and feel when representing their organisation.

There’s no value in ‘defining’ your culture, unless it’s for someone in an interview or you’re doing it with the intention to preserve it or change it. Three highly valuable reasons to reflect on your culture.

But, ultimately, no one is in control of the culture. It is a people-based, aggregated feature of an organisation that’s in the wild.

Because of this, the best laid strategy is doomed to be gobbled up (and spat out), unless the culture supports it.

Given how critical and powerful culture is, you’d think we’d spend more time reflecting on it.

How is culture shaped and how does it evolve?

As you’d expect for a complex organic concept like culture, there are myriad influences that shape and evolve it. These include:

• The Past: Where has the organisation come from, what’s its whakapapa, its history?
• Previous Leaders: What trajectory did they set it on? What stories are told of those people and times?
• Current Leaders: Where are they taking us? What’s important to them? How are they role-modelling?
• Cultural Awareness: How many staff understand the culture and the importance of their role in preserving or changing it?
• Internal Stories: How does the organisation talk about our past?
• External Stories: How is the organisation portrayed by the outside world?
• Values Reality: Are we living our values and are values transgressions dealt with? Do our values really matter?
• Hierarchy: How do people experience the leadership structure, style, and sub-culture?
• Corrections: How are problems identified, handled, fixed and learned from?
• Openness: How open is the organisation to feedback, improvement, honesty and harsh truths?
• Behavioural Checks: How are deviations from acceptable norms managed (for all staff)?
• Behaviour Under Pressure: How are staff, customers and partners talked about, treated and engaged in times of high pressure or stress?
• Alignment: Do the processes and systems embrace the strategy, embody the values, enable the vision?

There’s an infinite list of factors that come together to shape an organisational culture.

There’s a shorter list of things that can influence a change in culture, although being the organic feature that it is, responses to some of these influencing factors can be unpredictable. Such influences include:

1. A change in leadership, that can result in fundamental shifts to any combination of the above;
2. A significant increase in employees from another (differing culture) organisation;
3. A restructure (especially one managed in a manner inconsistently with the culture);
4. A merger or acquisition;
5. Passage of time – nothing is for ever, the environment changes inside and out and so does culture; and
6. Sub-cultures.

With so many factors influencing how a culture has come about and how it evolves, it’s no wonder we don’t spend a lot of time neck-deep in culture reflections. It could be difficult to get the ‘day job’ done if we went there, right?

Wrong.

No only can culture eat strategy, it has the power to derail a vision, undermine a purpose and cause values drift.

Because it can’t be defined and enforced, there’s a nuanced and artful leadership skill in understanding the culture, understanding how it sits amongst purpose, vision and values, and guiding it gently through the myriad influences (some listed above) that define it. That’s top-down, but there’s also the bottom-up skill that can be employed.

The Importance of Sub-cultures

Sub-cultures are cultures aligned to the organisational purpose, vision and values but that define the culture within a tight business group or even simply a team. They exist in sufficient isolation for them to forge their own sub-culture in alignment with the organisations, but either holding close key cultural aspects that are under threat, foundational and therefore must be preserved, or new aspects that they’d like to be adopted.

Sub-cultures present employees with room to experiment and role-model the embodiment of the purpose, vision and values in their group, and allows leadership to observe, embrace and celebrate the successes the sub-culture generates.

Sub-cultures within teams can shift the dial on culture in positive and negative ways. When they come from a good place with positive intent, the influence across other peer groups and up the hierarchy can be quite contagious.

So here’s the challenge: Find some white space in your calendar and mind in the next month. Think about how you’d explain what your organisation’s culture is really like. Reflect on why it’s like that. How did it come into play? What are some aspects of it that you’d like to be different? What aspects need to be different due to the changing landscape outside, or inside? How could the culture be changed in that way? Is there a sub-culture you have a part to play in that you can use to start that change.

If culture eats strategy for breakfast, why not understand your culture more deeply so that you can give better effect to your purpose, vision and values, and help strategy swim into the future without becoming fish food.