9 Steps to Align Culture with Strategy

1.     Evaluate the current performance of your organization

 

Growth, revenue, and customer satisfaction are great places to start when evaluating your organization. Look for things that need to be improved and outline where you want to start.

 

2.     Make preliminary assumptions about where gaps are

 

Some examples of assumptions that can be made are things like remote workers not performing at the high level they used to in office or a lack of diversity of thought leading to a low level of innovation.

 

3.     Measure actual culture

 

Look into the behaviors, motivators, and ideal work environment (BMW) of the members of your organization. This is different than a simple feedback or engagement survey in that it measures the underlying culture of your organization. 

4.     Breakdown culture

 

Now that you know what your organization’s actual culture is, aggregate the data the team level. This data will be used as your initial benchmark for your current cultural state going into the following steps.

 

5.     Learn the difference in cultural traits of top vs low performing individuals and teams

 

What is the culture of those who are achieving their goals and specifically what separates them from those who are not? Use this as a benchmark when looking at future candidates as well. During this step don’t forget about diversity of thought. Organizations that remember and value diversity, equity, and inclusion out-perform those who don’t.

 

6.     Set your target culture

 

Set where you want your culture to go based on performance and diversity of thought, and make plans to get there. What parts of your culture do you need to change? This will be your second set of benchmarks to use in hiring and development.

 

7.     Become Intentional

 

If you have reached this step, you now have the data to become intentional in taking action on building the culture you need to align with your strategic goals. That means, you now know the culture of high performers as it relates to your goals and will have an understanding whether you need more people who fit the high performer profile vs building a team with more diversity of thought.

 

8.     Hiring

 

Take the benchmarks from steps 4 and 6 and apply them to candidate pool to find the right hire for a “fit-to-strategy”. 

 

9.     Manage, develop, and maintain culture

 

Use the feedback produced by measuring and breaking down your culture to engage employees. For example, if a leadership opportunity motivates them, and you can see that in their data, provide them with an opportunity to manage a project. Perhaps their profile matches the profile of a high performer at the next level. Use that information to guide their training to prepare them for that future role.