CULTURE is always at or near the top of the list of organizational items to improve or fix. Connecting a company's culture to its strategy is one of the most difficult challenges a leader will ever face.
Here's why:
Beyond being time-consuming and requiring large amounts of energy and effort aimed at transformational change, many leaders and their teams aren't up to the challenge.
They don't go into the initiative prepared to do what needs to be done and once they meet some resistance, their commitment wanes. They find it easier to maintain the status quo than do what it takes to transform their organization completely.
This ultimately becomes the perpetual back-and-forth battle between short and long-term thinking. Let's face it: there's great comfort and security in focusing on the near term.
Boardview, an Amsterdam-based marketing/technology firm that researches strategy and execution, has done some interesting studies that reinforce the difficulty involved with tying culture to strategy.
Here are some of their findings:
* 80% of a workforce’s primary motivators, necessary for putting extra energy into change (or other efforts), are never tapped into by leadership,
* Fewer than 33% of senior executives direct reports clearly understand the connection between company priorities and their strategy,
* 60% of leaders think less than 20% of the workforce has a basic understanding of company strategy and can explain it
* 37% of leaders say gaining support across their entire organization is the toughest strategy implementation challenge they face.
With gaps the size that these statistics point out, it's not hard to understand why strategy is rarely tied back to culture.
If your plan is to change or re-engineer your organization's culture, here's the starting blueprint.
Great culture is an execution accelerator. When you can establish your culture and align your people with what you are attempting to accomplish operationally, the chances of transforming your organization increase as well.
Your people must always know what is expected of them and how they contribute to strategic success. Their work and level of productivity are outcomes of how you lead them. At a basic level, they want three things:
1) To belong, be seen, and heard,
2) To know that what they do matters, and
3) That what they do can and will be measured.
If you want to tie your culture back to your strategy. Stop thinking about how the company results affect you, and start thinking about how your team members impact the results.
Therein lies the answer to why fixing culture is always at or near the top of the list.
LEADERS set the tone for company culture.
hashtag#ceos hashtag#leadership hashtag#culture hashtag#execution
Join the fastest 23 seconds of wisdom on the World Wide Web by subscribing to my newsletter at https://lnkd.in/gKaqqhPC
Here's why:
Beyond being time-consuming and requiring large amounts of energy and effort aimed at transformational change, many leaders and their teams aren't up to the challenge.
They don't go into the initiative prepared to do what needs to be done and once they meet some resistance, their commitment wanes. They find it easier to maintain the status quo than do what it takes to transform their organization completely.
This ultimately becomes the perpetual back-and-forth battle between short and long-term thinking. Let's face it: there's great comfort and security in focusing on the near term.
Boardview, an Amsterdam-based marketing/technology firm that researches strategy and execution, has done some interesting studies that reinforce the difficulty involved with tying culture to strategy.
Here are some of their findings:
* 80% of a workforce’s primary motivators, necessary for putting extra energy into change (or other efforts), are never tapped into by leadership,
* Fewer than 33% of senior executives direct reports clearly understand the connection between company priorities and their strategy,
* 60% of leaders think less than 20% of the workforce has a basic understanding of company strategy and can explain it
* 37% of leaders say gaining support across their entire organization is the toughest strategy implementation challenge they face.
With gaps the size that these statistics point out, it's not hard to understand why strategy is rarely tied back to culture.
If your plan is to change or re-engineer your organization's culture, here's the starting blueprint.
Great culture is an execution accelerator. When you can establish your culture and align your people with what you are attempting to accomplish operationally, the chances of transforming your organization increase as well.
Your people must always know what is expected of them and how they contribute to strategic success. Their work and level of productivity are outcomes of how you lead them. At a basic level, they want three things:
1) To belong, be seen, and heard,
2) To know that what they do matters, and
3) That what they do can and will be measured.
If you want to tie your culture back to your strategy. Stop thinking about how the company results affect you, and start thinking about how your team members impact the results.
Therein lies the answer to why fixing culture is always at or near the top of the list.
LEADERS set the tone for company culture.
hashtag#ceos hashtag#leadership hashtag#culture hashtag#execution
Join the fastest 23 seconds of wisdom on the World Wide Web by subscribing to my newsletter at https://lnkd.in/gKaqqhPC
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