Culture , a pain in the strategy.

The most many people who are in management know about culture is the famous saying by peter Drucker that puts strategy as the first meal of the day for strategy.

Last year with a good pandemic friend we spent the evening debating online if strategy should be developed based on the existing culture of the organisation or the culture should be aligned to the new strategy the organisation has. That's a long discussion for another article.

What really makes culture key for success of an organisations strategy, how are the two related ? To uncover this we may need to look at the type of strategies that an organisation can have.

1. Incremental strategy
2. Transformational strategy

The incremental strategy assumes there is no burning platform so, no need to change, just do what we were doing better and more efficiently

The transformational strategy assumes all hell has broken loose or is about to break loose and if the organisation does not change then it is likely to close shop , loose market share, face reduced revenue and this becomes the burning platform from which the change agenda comes from.

The change agenda will lead the executives formulating the strategy to think deeper and come up with new ways to survive in the market, attain market leadership, retain and acquire more customers , equip their teams with skills to achieve and support this new planned performance , look at the processes to see what needs to happen to them so as to support the success or the plan. You cant plan to double your revenue , double your customer base and do nothing about your people`s skills and the processes to support double revenue and double customers acquisition, double customer orders processing, double service delivery or product production. Which unfortunately is what many executives decide for the organisation. lets double revenue, double customers and do nothing on the processes and the skills and people count in the organisation.

So now you have your transformation strategy, strategy is executed by people. People have a way of doing things, the organisation has over time adopted a specific way of how things are done, the attitudes, the behaviors that exist in the organisation mostly due to leaders and managers in the organisation. These current behaviors can either lead to the success or failure of the strategy.

Culture is one of the Human performance factors and falls in the internal environment in a performance needs analysis model I recently developed . The internal environment can support or be a drag to performance. Performance for our case we will define it as the measure of each employees contribution to the success of our strategy

Changing an organisations culture is not a one day affair like waving a magic wand, it comes with change which we mostly love to hate, we want things to change and want no part of the change.

The Harvard business review (HBR )January -February 2018 focused on culture and will be a good read for any leader aiming to identify their organisations culture profile. The writers offer key guidelines on how to shape the organisations culture (Don't forget to contextualize to your organisation)

The key to Culture is to identify the desired culture of the organisation , then find out the current culture in the organisation and create interventions to close the culture gap. Many organisations conduct Culture audits against global standards and then compare with themselves and create interventions.

Culture will remain a pain point for HR managers and the only way to reduce this pain to to become students of corporate culture and change management. Identifying the culture gap is only one strep , designing the interventions is a second and the third is implementing culture change management . Doing one of these without the other two would be just for purposes of marking the culture KPI on the HR Managers scorecard, a good waste of scares resources and revenue for the consultants taking on the task.

Let not your organisation take on a culture audit if you will not also do the Culture change ,this would be likened to looking where you are on a map, not knowing your destination and then on knowing where you are not move a step. To crown it, you congratulate your self for knowing where you are.

The Author is a management consultant at iperformance Africa , focusing on Strategy formulation, execution, performance improvement and Learning and development. He can be reached on email [email protected].

if your organisation is looking to formulate a new strategy for the next performance period, looking to review the current strategy, wants to figure out why current performance is not in line with expected performance . you need to set up elearning for you employees or create a learning Academy for your organisation? get in touch with Martin wanjohi