Want to Change Your Strategy? Change Your Culture First

If you’re like most business leaders today, you’re probably re-thinking your business strategy.?Whether because of the economic downturn, the need for digital transformation, or changing customer needs and expectations, now is the time to re-consider the strategic foundations of your business and determine if you are positioned to grow and thrive in the years to come.?

However, to change your strategy – your what – you need to change your how – your culture. ?And you need to change your culture first – because your culture is what will enable your organization to execute on your strategy.?

This was the message I shared in a recent keynote to a global technology company that is seeking to undergo a strategic transition.?Its newly launched five-year strategy is intended to change the company from a mobile telecom to a digital platform brand, including fintech, digital services, and even network-as-a-service (NaaS).?The executive committee (Exco) had assembled nearly 500 of its top leaders to enroll them in the transition, and at this event there was certainly a lot of excitement about the future potential for the company.

The Exco had also recognized the need to shore up the organization’s culture and had spent months leading up to the meeting reworking the company’s core values.?But, the effort only resulted in a list of “refreshed” values that were simply tweaks to the previous version.?

In my presentation, I explained that the strategic changes the company wanted to undertake are not simply changes in degree – they are changes in nature. ?Because of this, their culture needed to undergo a significant change as well.?And because of that, their core values needed to:

Be different. ?Core values must inspire actions that clearly are clearly different – from other companies and from the way the company used to do things.?

As I’ve written previously , most companies’ core values aren’t unique – they use common words (integrity, teamwork, customer) and reflect generic ideas (we’re trustworthy and passionate.)?But if you articulate values that are the same as any other business in your category, at best, you will get performance from your employees that is the same as any other business in your category; at worst, your people will find your stated values meaningless and start making up their own.

Moreover, to support and advance a change in strategy, core values should clearly change as well.??Your new values should help your people recognize and embrace what needs to be different.?You must be explicit about the differences – you might even flesh out your values by indicating “We used to do X; we now do Y.”

Align to the strategy. ?To make a strategic shift, your culture must fuel the changes in beliefs and behaviors needed to make that shift.?You can’t expect your people to intuitively start working in new ways – especially when the strategy involves substantively different operations.?Your values should explain and drive the necessary changes.

For example, the client I was speaking to wanted to shift to a NaaS model. ?NaaS involves offering flexible subscriptions of hardware, software, management tools, licenses, and lifecycle services, and access to an ever-evolving suite of technologies and service levels.?To provide this revolutionary kind of service, I explained that the people in the company needed to be able to handle extremely complex operations; to work agile enough to develop, sell, and service in real-time with reliability; and to engage in different kinds of partnerships where ownership is shared with customers and other vendors.?As such, the core values needed to promote these new ways of working.

Apply externally and internally.?As I’ve shared many times before (including in this Harvard Business Review article and in my book FUSION: How Integrating Brand and Culture Powers the World's Greatest Companies ), companies create tremendous power and value when they integrate their external brand identity and internal organizational culture.

When your brand and culture are aligned and integrated – fused – you increase the efficiency of your entire organization and the quality of your outcomes because your workforce aligned and focused.?You improve the sustainability of your competitive advantage because it enables you to produce intangible value that is difficult to copy or undercut. You pass the customer test of brand authenticity and inspire trust because you are on the inside what you say you are on the outside. ?And, you move your organization toward its vision more quickly, easily, and successfully, because you’ve established a singular motivation and focus for everyone in your organization.?

All these were goals of the company I was speaking to – but to date, their internal core values had been developed separately from their brand strategy. ?I see this happen all the time because organizations tend to operate in silos.?So, I show them how to bring their external and internal aspirations together with core values that apply to both.?

Instead of expressing a set of values for how you want to do things internally in your organization and identifying a separate list of brand attributes to describe what you want your company to be known for externally, you need a single set of core values that drives everything you do – outside and in – brand and culture.

After laying out these guidelines for core values, I described how to operationalize them – that is, put them into action and apply them to everything from organizational design and operations, employee engagement, practices and policies, and more.?After all, articulating and defining your values is only the first step. ?You must cultivate a culture that lives out the values.

Fortunately, the group I spoke to took these points to heart.?And even in the workshop that we conducted immediately following my keynote, people started identifying new values the company needed to embrace, new ways of operationalizing them, and new metrics and standards to measure their progress.?

It was so gratifying to see them willing to challenge themselves and re-think their culture and core values.?I walked away from the experience more confident that the vision and strategy they had set their sights on would become a reality because they are embracing a new culture first. ?

This is my hope for you as well.?Please let me know if I might inspire and teach your organization how to fuel your strategic change with transformation of your culture and values.

related:

-??????How to Cultivate Brand-Culture Fusion

-??????Build a Culture to Match Your Brand

-??????All Types of Organizations Need Brand-Culture Fusion

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