Defining the Culture of an Organization - Step 1

Is Your Leadership Ready for Culture Change?

There is often a large gap between how an executive will define their corporate culture and how their stakeholders define it.  The easiest way to determine the perception of your culture is to ask.  That may be the hardest thing to do in an organization for two reasons: you don’t want to hear the answer and you aren’t ready to make any changes.

If that is you, you are not alone.  Culture is one of those topics that many like to dance around.  It is often the elephant in the room at executive meetings.  When it is brought up, most will agree that there are some cultural issues, but as a topic of conversation it rarely rates an in-depth look.  Culture is a reflection of leadership, and leadership doesn’t want to look in the mirror and see a monster staring back at them.  Nobody likes to feel like they are causing issues in the company, especially if it is their company. 

Defining culture can be an evasive task.  If someone asked you to describe your personality, it would be almost as difficult.  We can all use relatively ambiguous words to describe ourselves, or we choose words that are fitting to the conversation.  The difficult thing about defining a culture is trying to quantify that definition.  We hear all day long about using data to drive change, so how do you empirically define your culture.

The first step to recovery is admitting you have a problem.  I realize that sounds a lot like a twelve step program, but it holds true here as it does there.  All of the tools in the world won’t help you fix your problem if you aren’t able to be honest with yourself that it even exists, much less plays a major role in your organization.  Even admitting the problem won’t help if you aren’t ready to understand the depth of the issues or prepared to develop strategies to change them.   Before any culture change can happen, there are hard, honest and often difficult conversations that need to happen.  If you can’t make it through that step, you won’t go any further.

The good news is that for all of the bad press that corporate culture gets, there is a path to improvement.  This path takes you on a journey through different phases with the end result being a direct reflection of the honesty and desire you have when you start your journey.

Enlightenment – This is the first step on often the most difficult of the journey.  If this phase bounces back and forth between enlightenment and denial, don’t feel alone or bad.  Keep pushing until you are ready to continue.

Discovery – This is the stage of the journey where you find out just how big of an impact your culture has on your stakeholders.  You will need to ask the questions that you are sure you are ready to hear the answers to and be prepared to make necessary changes.

Engagement – To truly engage your stakeholders, the most important thing you can do is become credible.  If any of them feel that you aren’t being honest, candid and self-aware, you will have a much more difficult journey.

Delivery – You know you have an issue, you are aware of what that issue is and your stakeholders are ready to support you.  Now is time to deliver.  Show the stakeholders that you mean what you say through your actions.  Bring your plan to life and work through those issues.

Like any other change, this isn’t a solo act.  This is one of the most difficult things to do, and trying to do it alone can lead to frustration and potentially deeper issues.  Find an expert.  This is one of those things that requires objectivity.  Align yourself with an advocate that isn’t involved with your day to day activities.  There is nothing wrong with asking for help, especially if you mean it.

Nimble Strategy

The Importance of Maintaining Strategic Initiatives through Agile Processes

“No plan of operations extends with any certainty beyond the first contact…”  Helmut von Moltke.

The need for strategy in a business environment is predicated by the desire and need for ongoing success.  With the globalization of our markets, and the technological improvements we have seen recently, the desire for a more strategic approach to business has become more necessary and more prominent in a wide variety of industries.  With these environmental changes, strategic planning processes and platforms need to evolve as well.  Continuing to operate on long term strategic plans without the ability to maintain and adjust for changes becomes difficult to do. 

Strategy is by definition “a careful plan or method for achieving a particular goal usually over a long period of time.”  The problem in today’s economy is that particular goals become harder to determine and the long period of time is a relative phrase that is in actuality becoming shorter and shorter.

For years, strategic planning was based in large part on using data and information to determine best practices and a better approach to move forward.  A large part of that process was coming up with the right information.  Now, almost all of the information we need is at our finger tips at a moment’s notice.  In fact, there is so much data that it sometimes becomes difficult to figure out what to use and how to use it.    The trick is not succumbing to the analysis paralysis that seems to grip so many companies as they struggle to adapt to so much additional information.

Strategic thinking is to a large degree intuitive, and requires the practitioner to understand data points as well as their utility in the process.  Data alone won’t build strategy, it has to come with someone, or a group of people that understand the numbers, but can also use their instincts and experience to build a platform that can adjust for variables and can be adjusted as things vary. 

Being truly agile means that you aren’t stuck with the information you have in front of you.  Agility means you can stretch your limits, can move quickly from place to place, topic to topic or goal to goal and that you can do it all without causing injury to yourself.  Having an agile strategy means you have a nimble business.  For so many years, we are taught to stay the course and stick to our targets.  We have been cautioned that straying from the plan is inefficient and ineffective and that keeping in our swim lanes returns the highest rewards. 

Times have changed, and the ability to adjust goals, change direction at a moment’s notice, and become more instinctual are the building blocks to building a more comprehensive yet nimble strategic environment.  The benefits of this type of strategic plan are that you are constantly redefining your business, you are evolving instead of just changing, and surprises truly become opportunities instead of roadblocks or hurdles.  Agility requires active participation from everyone involved and encourages by its nature a more engaged and task oriented business environment. 

A nimble strategic environment requires everyone to know exactly what their role is.  It also requires everyone to know what they are accountable for and how they can get it accomplished.  Having true agility in a business environment means you are constantly asking why you are doing it that way, how can it be improved, what else can we do and how can we engage our stakeholders even more.  With agility, size doesn’t have to matter.  Small, medium or large, if you are willing to put in the work, you can make it happen.  You don’t have to be a gymnast to be agile, I’ve seen some 350lb defensive linemen perform some pretty impressive feats.

 

 

The Five Components of a Nimble Strategic Model:

 

1.      Engagement – Strategy isn’t driven by one group or one person, it is driven by the business and all of its stakeholders.  Everyone has an active role in determining what direction they want the business to go, and how they want to get there.

2.      Dedication – To win the war, you may have to lose a few battles.  Dedication isn’t about staying the course or keeping your plan intact, this dedication is about developing an ongoing evolutionary environment, and dedicating the proper resources to each problem. 

3.      Analysis – The analysis component is two parts.  The first is having the information to properly analyze the direction you want to go.  The second being able to track the actuals to make sure you are getting there.  The analytical component also includes the ability to know which critical variables are important in strategizing and which are just there for information.

4.      Timing – The thing that separates the haves from have nots is often the timing.  It is the timing of their ideas (innovation), timing of their efforts (entrepreneurship), and timing of their implementation.  In this environment, being able to be timely plays a large part in its success.  Having the ability to make in time decisions requires the ability to receive timely information.  Being able to make timely decisions is only relevant if you are able to have timely actions.

5.      Efficiency – Efficiency in this environment is the string that holds the rest of these components together.  While being proactive is the sign of a healthy environment, being efficient when you have to react becomes a sign of a highly successful environment.  Putting together the tool boxes you may need in an emergency means when it happens, you will be ready for it.