Culture eats strategy for breakfast
Rory Sheppard
Generational Transition | Nonprofit Impact Acceleration | Success Happens When You Create Simple, Sensible Systems that Drive Consistent and Repeatable Results
BusinessWeek called Peter Drucker “the man who invented management.”
Drucker defined, developed, and disseminated many of the management theories that we follow today.?
Peter Drucker's secrets of managing effectively
With a focus on management, objectives, and measurement, it may be surprising to know that Peter Drucker famously said, "Culture eats strategy for breakfast". This is a very true and often overlooked by business owners who are frustrated by their inability to get their staff to change and implement new strategies.
Culture in a business is like personality. Our personality is the sum of all our habits. Therefore, changing the culture of the business is about changing the collective habits of you, your leaders, and your employees. We know changing an individual habit is hard and requires lots of discipline. So similarly, it will require lots of discipline and persistence on the part of the leadership in a business to change the prevailing culture.
Habits don’t change overnight; cultural norms will not change quickly either. You must be disciplined, dedicated, and stay the course to enact meaningful change in your organization’s cultural DNA.
Primary Leadership Behaviors needed to drive change
Pay attention to, measure, and control areas that need change on a consistent and regular basis?- What gets measured, gets done. For example, if you want to change the activity levels of your sales team then you need monitor this on a consistent basis (weekly, daily).
React to critical incidents or crises in a manner consistent with the culture you desire?-??if a workplace without discrimination is part of a culture you desire, then, if someone discriminates you must take action and deal with the incident regardless of the offender.
Allocate resources to effect the required change?- this could be an allocation of time to implement or manage a desired change or could be an investment of funds in training to assist employees to change a certain behavior.
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Be a role model, teacher, and coach for the culture you desire?– like it or not,?our businesses reflect our leadership.?To change the culture, we need to model the culture we desire to our employees. Spend time teaching and coaching them to do the same. For example, if we want our company to be known for customer service, we need to model exceptional service levels to our internal customers (our team).
Allocating rewards and status for complying with defined culture?- while bonuses and increases are often linked to exceeding job expectations, these can also be linked to achieving a behavior consistent with the desired culture of the business.
Making compliance with company culture a basis for recruitment, promotion and dismissal of employees?- we should only recruit people who are willing to fit with our desired culture and for current employees their future progress should be dependent on their willingness to embrace this culture.
Additional ways to reinforce the actions taken above and would include:?
If you are not happy with the culture in your business then the starting point is to clearly define the culture you would like, make sure you model this yourself and then use the above framework to effect the change in culture in your business.
Only Action gets you closer to your dreams - do something today that your future self will thank you for."
- COACH?
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