Why is culture and strategy important?

Culture and strategy are important for organizations because they help to shape the way the organization functions and how it interacts with its stakeholders. Culture refers to the values, beliefs, and behaviors that are shared by the members of an organization. It influences how employees behave and interact with one another, as well as how they approach their work. Strategy, on the other hand, refers to the long-term plan for achieving the goals of an organization. It determines the actions an organization takes to achieve its objectives and the resources it allocates to those actions.

Having a strong and positive culture can have a number of benefits for an organization. For example, it can help to create a sense of unity and purpose among employees, which can lead to higher levels of engagement and productivity. It can also help to attract and retain top talent, as people are often drawn to organizations that align with their own values and beliefs. In addition, a strong culture can help to build trust and credibility with customers, stakeholders, and the wider community.

Having a clear and effective strategy is also important for organizations, as it helps to provide direction and focus. It enables an organization to allocate its resources in a way that is most likely to achieve its goals and to respond to changes in its external environment. A good strategy can also help to create a competitive advantage and drive long-term success.

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Culture eats strategy for breakfast

The phrase “culture eats strategy for breakfast” comes from Peter Drucker. It is a popular saying that highlights the idea that organizational culture can be a more powerful force than strategy. It suggests that while an organization may have a well-thought-out plan or strategy in place, if the culture of the organization is not aligned with that strategy, it may be difficult to implement and execute effectively.

For example, if an organization has a strategy in place to improve customer service, but the culture of the organization is not supportive of that goal (e.g., employees are not incentivized to prioritize customer service or there is a lack of resources dedicated to training employees in customer service skills), it is likely that the strategy will not be successful. In this case, the culture of the organization would be working against the strategy, making it difficult to achieve the desired results.

The phrase “culture eats strategy for breakfast” is often used to emphasize the importance of aligning an organization’s culture with its strategy in order to achieve long-term success. It suggests that without a supportive culture, even the best-laid plans and strategies may struggle to succeed.

What does company culture mean?

Company culture refers to the values, beliefs, and behaviors that are shared by the members of a company. It includes the way that the company operates and how its employees interact with one another, as well as the way they approach their work. Company culture is shaped by a variety of factors, including the company’s mission and values, the leadership style of its management team, and the behaviors and attitudes of its employees.

Company culture is important because it can have a major impact on the way that a company functions and the way that its employees feel about their work. A positive company culture can lead to increased employee engagement, productivity, and job satisfaction, as well as a better reputation for the company. On the other hand, a negative company culture can lead to low morale, high turnover, and a poor reputation.

There are many different aspects of company culture, including:

• Communication style: How employees communicate with one another and with management
• Decision-making process: How decisions are made within the company
• Leadership style: The way that leaders within the company manage and motivate their employees
• Work-life balance: The extent to which the company supports a healthy balance between work and personal life
• Diversity and inclusion: The extent to which the company values and promotes diversity and inclusivity
• Reward and recognition: How the company recognizes and rewards the contributions of its employees

Company culture is often reflected in the company’s policies, practices, and the way that employees behave and interact with one another. It is something that is constantly evolving and can be influenced by changes within the company and its external environment

A culture of innovation

Innovative organizations constantly strive to stay relevant to their stakeholders and implement the ideas that work. They are agile and resilient to change.

To create a culture of innovations, most organizations need to innovate their culture. That is what social innovation is all about.

By learning as a team how to provide added value to internal and external customers, you continuously respond to changes and developments in your environment. Often this means: execution is power, but having the culture to validate quickly, learn quickly and adapt quickly is much more important.

an innovative organization needs problem solvers who are looking for results without losing their empathy. They make a positive impact by creating an inspiring workplace in which collaboration and movement arise. They do this by challenging the current status quo of solving complex problems and showing real results in new and modern ways. With this behavior they infect others in a positive way.

When others see this as a positive, they will be more open to join this behavior.

Does your organization have an inspiring culture that leads to more innovation?

 

What are a good people and culture strategies?

Good people and culture strategies are those that are designed to create a positive and supportive work environment for employees, while also aligning with the overall goals and objectives of the organization. Some key strategies that organizations may use to achieve this include:

1. Clarifying the company’s mission and values: Clearly communicating the purpose and values of the organization can help to create a shared sense of purpose among employees and encourage them to align their behaviors with the company’s goals.
2. Promoting diversity and inclusion: Building a diverse and inclusive workforce can help to create a more innovative and creative environment, as well as promoting a sense of belonging among employees.
3. Investing in employee development: Providing employees with opportunities for learning and development can help to build their skills and capabilities, while also fostering a culture of continuous improvement.
4. Establishing a positive and supportive work culture: Creating a positive work culture that values employee well-being and encourages open communication can help to improve employee engagement and satisfaction.
5. Implementing flexible work arrangements: Allowing employees to have some flexibility in their work schedule and location can help to improve work-life balance and increase employee satisfaction.
6. Recognizing and rewarding employee contributions: Providing employees with recognition and rewards for their contributions can help to build a culture of appreciation and encourage ongoing engagement and productivity.

Good people and culture strategies focus on creating an environment that is supportive, inclusive, and empowering for employees, while also helping to drive the success of the organization.

3 examples of people and culture strategies to avoid.

Innovation = learning. So lets learn from others. We have consulted and trained 197 organizations in 60 countries in over 17 different industries – and we’ve discovered these approaches in lots of situations.

These are strategies we try to avoid. We help our clients to avoid them. And now we want to teach you how you can avoid them as well.

If you are ready to understand why you should not fall in this trap and want to discover alternatives – then keep reading.

 

DON’T Start things big and bold.

When you’re looking for ways to make positive change happen with your internal dynamics in a significant way, you can not offer your leaders, managers, employees and stakeholders something that “might help them.. maybe.. one day.” No one’s joining a movement for a long time that costs time, money and effort without social proof. Unless they experience what it can bring them themselves. 

 

If you want to create a group of people with a growth mindset they need to experience it themselves, convince themselves and start selling it to others themselves, so the newbies can experience it themselves too. That is how a social virus works in a positive way.

 

Achieving this is easily said, but of course hard to achieve. You need to find your first believers, get inside their heads and figure out their challenges and ambitions to be part of this innovation movement. 

 

Knowing these challenges is key in making your change effective. Because once you know their struggles, you can offer them a solution, or even better: involve them in creating a solution!

 

You can see the obvious already… You can not achieve this with starting big. We have seen organizations that brought a large group of people together, put them in the spotlight with a vague challenge, expected a huge output and wanted to measure the personal development of all participants to show others how great the program was. I hear you think: “That doesn’t sound so bad…What’s wrong with that?” 

 

Well, let me tell you. When people have to do something new, work on a certain urgent project and others expect a relevant solution, there is one thing that will happen: people will not be open to learning and reflecting. The big and bold challenge they are facing, in a new way of working will paralyze them. Maybe they will like it for that particular experience, but they’ll never repeat it on their own. And before you know it, your program will be used as an internal marketing tool with no results.

 

So what to do?! The #1 rule in this case is to start small and intimate. Start with one, not so urgent, but relevant challenge. Something that will be urgent in 1,5 to 2 years for example. Form a group innovators with a total of 5-12 people. When you have a challenge and a group of innovators in mind, move on. Start learning as much as necessary to keep improving. But don’t let the next strategy make a fool out of you!

DON’T focus on innovations

One of the major keys to be successful as a high performing organization is to stay agile.

And the way to do that, is through the collaboration formula. 

With the collaboration formula, you can dramatically expand the amount of people with a growth mindset, putting yourself light years ahead of the competition – and increase the implementation of innovations as a result. 

 

This way, you see, it’s not about the innovations, its about the innovators! Thinking and doing the opposite is a BIG mistake if you want to stay resilient for ongoing change!

 

The collaboration formula is a two step strategy. We will dig into this in a second. But first let me explain to you why this formula is necessary.

 

Lots of people want to help their organization move forward. There are R&D departments, innovation managers, innovation coaches, design thinkers, lean specialists, scrum masters etc. Most of them focus on innovations. Focusing on innovations could mean that their starting point or intention is to adapt to new technologies, buying startups, trying to create a hub next to the organization or set up a temporary team that has to deliver a new proposition. This will lead to new innovations, but won’t make you an innovative organization. 

 

An innovative organization knows what’s necessary to implement a new solution for a relevant need. They need an engaging idea development process that’s solid as a rock. 

 

What do we mean by that? Well think about this: an idea goes through lots of people before it is implemented and accepted by it’s users. The ones who come up with the idea are mostly not the ones who develop it further, test it, create prototypes, make it ready to implement and finally introduce it into the market or their own organization. 

 

A good idea has encountered different departments, decision makers, clients/citizens and other stakeholders before it was introduced to a wide public, a couple of times. The possible iterations make it even harder to make sure that the information through this process is interpreted well. The only way to do this right is with the right collaboration. 

 

Ok, so let’s get back to the two step collaboration formula.

 

Step one is all about bringing multidisciplinary people together in a project as we described in the chapter before. This will help you to eventually make the movement scalable. People from different departments work together and infect each other and their other colleagues. Look for a process that already exists and where multiple functions already work together. For example, this could be about customer success. Mostly people from IT, Service and Sales come together here.

 

Step two is about the design of the learning experience. Bring your design to a point where you have a process that is repeatable, applicable and generates collaborative results. Normally this takes some iterations. Figure out your time per program, insights per program and ideas per person. Next up, bring that together into a pitch for managers and employees. How great would it be if you can promise to come up with more results in less meetings! Invite them to experience it themselves and then help them to do it on their own.

 

Make the participants ambassadors and help them to involve their team members into the new way of working! If you have the right design, the group will grow. If it doesn’t? You haven’t found your internal product-market fit or language-market fit yet. Keep learning!

 

This way you create a culture that is focussed on collaboration and sharing knowledge. This will lead to more understanding of other silos, acceptance to do things differently and innovations as a result!

 

DON’T train people and expect things will change

There are a lot of organizations and decision makers out there who take the “Field of Dreams” approach to change – “If we train people, they will apply it.” Or, in other words, if we help them to develop new skills, their managers and teams will take notice, ask them to help them with a different approach and decide to do all new projects this way. We hate to be the bearer of bad news but… yeah, that’s not true at all.

If your entire development-driving strategy is “Invest in great skills and hope for the best,” you might as well take your money and light a match to it, because that’s just not going to work. If all it took to reach positive development was creating great skilled people, everyone would do it. And becoming agile wouldn’t be so widely popular.

Great, skilled people are important. But it’s only a piece of the puzzle. If you want to move forward as an organization, you need to be smart about it. You need a strategic system for developing people that not only wow themselves, but play nice with their teams and managers. You need to think about how the trained people could apply what they have learned. And think about why a team member or manager should listen to: “I’ve done the training, let’s do this project differently. Trust me!”

What do you think will happen? Probably they are skeptical and if you’ve just finished a training it’s difficult to be the expert that completely knows what it’s doing. Most trained people feel inspired, know it’s helpful but when they have to bring it into practice they recognize that real life isn’t like it was in the training. 

The pitfall is, that people are not able to convince their direct environment, feel misunderstood and still want to apply the new learnings. Especially in these times, where there is a war on talent, it is imaginable that people will look for other opportunities somewhere else. Because what would you do if you have learned something that you believe in and you can’t apply it in your current role? You don’t want this to happen!

So what could you do to avoid this bad strategy of only training people and expecting things to change? 

Design a learning journey in which people learn new ways of working that can be applied on a small scale. Make sure that they learn by doing. Make it safe for the skilled employees, their teams and managers. In tomorrow’s lesson we will reveal 12 engaging and collaborative tactics you can use as an inspiration to help your people to start change in a small and safe way.