Culture - Your Flywheel of Performance!

"Changing your culture can help you achieve goals that have long seemed out of reach”

A company's culture significantly influences its success, value, and approach to change, emphasising ethical behaviour and employee well-being. Altering this culture can empower a company to attain seemingly unattainable objectives.

Distinctively, rapidly growing firms have unique challenges in maintaining their culture. As they grow swiftly, these companies must promptly establish the right people and systems in place to withstand the speed at which they are growing. If they don’t, the organisation can quickly fall apart. Managing culture becomes a high stakes priority when a company scales from 100 employees onwards..

However, business leaders tend to think about corporate culture as a topic that’s hard to measure and hard to change. As a result, many choose not to invest in it despite all the evidence that, when skilfully managed, culture can be a powerful and enduring source of competitive advantage.

How can you aim for meaningfully change your organisation’s culture say in a 16- to 20-month period ?

Consider this if you ask the top team of any company what their highest priority business goals are and you will likely hear answers like “increase market share by 10 %” or “reduce costs by 15 %.” Ask the same question about their highest priority cultural goals and you’re likely to hear a broad range of stereotypes with few, if any, numbers.

Define your culture in terms of clear, observable behaviours & metrics:

Define your culture in terms of clear, observable behaviours & articulating your culture charter along with it the cultural elements and metrics to measure is a good starting point and your logical first step. In addition periodic check-ins by conducting cultural diagnostics will provide a view on the strength of your cultural pillars. You may also feel the need to create a digital library/platform that answers. What knowledge, skills, and attitudes are needed to produce each behaviour? What content could help employees learn these, and how can it be accessible to all?

Develop Clarity on what you want to keep and act on it:

In addition to knowing what aspects of your culture you want to change, identify which pieces you want to retain. Then take meaningful steps to keep that culture a reality.

To be able to manage the culture change initiative better choose top few cultural changes that has larger bearing on your business environment.

Now it is evident that high-performing cultures are characterised by an ability to align (gain clarity on vision, strategy, and shared employee behaviours), execute (move in the agreed-upon direction with minimal friction), and renew (continuously improve at a pace that exceeds competitors).

For example :

• Many family owned businesses realise that “business performance is compromised by their preference to loyalty”. So as their organisation reaches a certain scale, they choose to establish performance orientation as the go to cultural change requirement
• ?Now in business environments that are rapidly impacted by shifting customer preferences, choosing to prioritise customer relationships and building a culture around it makes a winning difference

Implement Cultural Change by building Ownership :

Culture reaches across all parts of an organisation, and all leaders (not just HR ) can take ownership of shaping culture.

From an implementation perspective, one of the ways to seed the cultural change better is to integrate cultural changes with business improvement initiatives & this is your third step.

For example an organisation wanted to pursue an sales improvement initiative & also identified the need to build a culture of developing people. They launched leader peer coaching from high performers as lever for driving the culture and sales improvement initiative.

Business leaders and managers are critical to changing the culture. Not only can employees?model the behaviours of their leaders & managers, but they also look to managers for approval and direction.?

Having said that, leading a successful culture-change program is rewarding work because it allow integration of the human factors that matter to everyone with business concerns.

Summarising at Strategea, our recommendations include define your culture i.e. establish clear observable behaviours, charter & metrics , prioritise top few cultural changes to focus on periodic basis or at-least when you have changed your mid or long-term strategy ?& weave culture change with business improvement initiative together.

Having said that culture resonates well with a clear sense of shared mission and values. How are you achieving this in your business?

Call us to know more about how at Strategea can help you to strengthen your cultural improvement initiatives to drive higher performance, shared vision and values.

About Strategea:

Strategea is your trusted partner on the journey of transforming your business into a thriving and scalable enterprise. Our mission is simple yet profound: to guide business leaders like you to realise your growth ambitions, embrace transformation, and accelerate your path to success. We work with our clients to provide holistic and customised solutions in the areas of Organisation Strategy, Operations, People and Digital Transformation in order to enhance organisational performance and achieve their aspiration!

Business leaders in India face a favourable growth opportunity both in domestic market & globally. To be able to grow to the next level, business leaders need to find a way to replicate their success in new product categories which they need to enter to grow to next level, reduce their learning curve to develop profitable revenue streams in newer markets, achieve efficiencies while they scale their operations and rally their people around the growth vision & business initiatives.

Strategea brings in the required expertise to guide business leaders on solving the complexities that come their way while scaling and expanding their operations to realise their growth aspiration.

Playing the Business Game : Running a successful business is a high-stakes game. Your business journey has routes, detours, and all sorts of obstacles you have to work through. So you need a map. In this book “Playing the Business Game” we are addressing the construct & thinking i.e. what could be direction that you want to take, what model suits you etc. to put your business on a high growth trajectory.

Connect with Us:

We love to hear from you. If you are a business with a rapid growth ambition, don’t hesitate to contact us. Let’s s begin a conversation about how we can help you achieve your goals and set your business on the path to success.?

Call us on + 91 9702 875 475 or write to us on [email protected] and visit us on www.strategea.in