Alignment with strategy

Have you heard the saying “Culture eats strategy for breakfast”? It’s true. If your culture is pulling in a different direction to your strategy, those social and structural cues will be stronger than any corporate document you can produce.

So, what’s a leader to do, to ensure they release the cultural handbrake when trying to shift to a new strategy? 

We’ve been asked this many times, by leaders who are either about to undertake a directional change, or are well into one that is veering off course, and who suspect that culture is the culprit. 

Navigating culture might seem like wading through fog, but it's crucial to your team’s success. Culture isn’t just fluff—it’s both art and science. Here are some of our top tips: 

1. Balance the art and the science: Combine qualitative insights with quantitative metrics to get a full picture. Understand the behaviours that support your goals, and gather stories that add depth to the data. 

2. Align culture with strategy: Translate your strategy into specific attributes and behaviours. Are you after innovation and speed? Or process excellence and risk management? Align your cultural attributes explicitly to your strategy, and communicate them in a way that makes sense to your team and will resonate with the meaning in their work. 

3. Invite the team to opt in: Many of your team will have joined based on your old mission and values. Major changes might lead to turnover, and that’s okay. It’s about finding the right fit for your new direction, and communicating it clearly invites the team to opt in. 

4. Remove structural barriers: If you want behaviour change, ensure your structures support it. Don’t ask people to walk with no footpath, lead without empowerment, or innovate with no acceptance of failure. Make sure key elements such as ways of working, recruitment, reward and recognition are reinforcing, and not discouraging, the behaviours you’re asking of the team. 

5. Communicate and then walk the talk: Doing what you say you’ll do, and setting the tone from the top is never more important than when it comes to cultural change. The team will be constantly scanning for cues as to whether or not this will ‘stick’. Having a unified leadership team clearly communicating new expectations, and relentlessly role modelling and rewarding them is a non-negotiable for success. 

6. Measure impact and progress over time: Culture is intangible, so being smart in identifying appropriate metrics to evaluate the impact of the changes you’re making is critical. Establish clear KPIs to measure against a baseline, and seek ongoing feedback to ensure you’re on the right track. Accept that this is not an overnight thing. There are no shortcuts here; consistent nudges over time are what will make the difference. 

We love supporting leaders who have the courage to step beyond ‘what we’ll do’ into ‘how we’ll do it’, and celebrating the acceleration in performance and delivery that are achieved when culture and strategy are in sync—it’s okay for culture to skip breakfast once in a while! 

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