Your culture may be your real strategy

Leaders love doing strategy. The grand thoughts, the breakthrough ideas, the disruptive moves. Bring ‘em on!

But wait. Before we get carried away with strategy, there’s something else we need to examine. Our culture.

“Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” You have no doubt heard this line repeated in many a boardroom and strategy retreat. Two things. First, it wasn’t said by management guru Peter Drucker (not his style). Second, everyone says it and then promptly forgets it.

The real truth is deeper. I tweeted it thus back in the day: “Strategy is what you think you’ll do. Culture is what you’ll actually do.”

In other words, before you do anything with strategy, take a very hard look at your organizational culture. Strategy is the excitement, culture is the reality-check.

There is no point going to the lake, mountain, or ocean to spout niceties like “AI-first”, “digital transformation” or “next-gen customer” if your culture has no concept of how to deal with those ambitions.

If your culture is old-world stolid, you can’t pull off new-world nimbleness. If your culture worships paperwork, digital tools may be a painful grafting. If your culture is smug and entitled, good luck trying to turn your people into warriors. If your strategy says innovation but your culture says punish mistakes, it’s dead on arrival.

The seeds of your strategy might bounce off the rock of your culture, even as you design sexy new dashboards and reimagined org charts.

Strategy makes choices, and provides direction. Culture decides whether the people have the habits and attitudes and energy to act on those choices. If one works against the other, the culture will win. It may have to be annihilated if it is to lose.

Does this mean culture is destiny? That we can only choose strategies that are comfortable with our culture? Not at all. Sometimes, strategy must be revolutionary—but then culture needs its own revolution. The strategy you need may be precisely the one your existing culture cannot deliver. You need to become faster, but you have spent decades rewarding caution. You need to innovate, but your people have learned that failure is career-limiting. You need to charm customers, but your managers have been trained to worship internal procedures. 

Strategy can be rewritten in a weekend. Culture has been baked into the organization for years. Changing it requires a deep understanding of human beings, and extraordinary resolve from leaders.

When your strategy demands a fundamental departure from the past, one question must come first. Can this thing be delivered by the culture we have? For many large, mature organizations, the answer will be no.

Your culture then becomes the first thrust of your strategy. You have to examine it, understand what sustains it, and discover where the levers of change lie. And they are not in a vault somewhere, but in the corners of the mind. Understand what makes people tick, what makes them form habits, and what makes them embrace newness. Then change what gets rewarded, what gets tolerated, who gets promoted, and what leaders themselves do every day.

Sorting that out might be the most strategic thing you can do.

THE SIGNAL IN THE NOISE

The leader’s exciting new strategy is the employee’s difficult new reality.

 

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