A Strategically-Aligned Organizational Culture is the best Enabler of your

strategy

Culture: shared values and norms.

•Rules: Formal directives (SOPs).

•Norms: shared standards against which the appropriateness of behavior can be evaluated.

Formal rules, policies, and procedures will hardly result in outstanding customer service, innovation, or quality.

How norms shape organizational culture:

A monkey-see, monkey-do story

•None of these monkeys had ever been showered before.

•Many of them had never seen another monkey being hit by the others.

•Yet they didn’t dare to touch the bananas!

Counterproductive norms

“If you continue like this, you are going to make lots of enemies around here. ”

“We have never done things that way.”

Strategically-aligned norms“I can’t believe you didn’t work harder to find those shoes for her.”

“You can’t treat customers like that!”

Humans use more subtle ways to enforce norms…

The Three C’s of a Strong Culture:Clear, Consistent, and Comprehensive

Turf battles Commitment and (self) control

Mind your business (it

doesn’t really matter anyway)

Go along to get along (or let’s agree to be mediocre)

Agreement

Inte

nsit

y

low high

low

high

Cultural Levers

•Recruit and Select for those hard-to-train attributes demanded by your strategy.

•Socialize, orient, and train to enable the attributes.

•Lead and reward to achieve strategic results and create a spiraling effect.

Cultural Levers

And remember:

If you don’t form a strategically-aligned culture that helps you achieve your strategic objectives,

A culture will be formed anyway!