Shaping a Culture to Supercharge Your Strategy

In order to get the most value from your strategy, you need to align culture to the strategy

To achieve strategic success, organisations need more than a clear, documented strategy; they need people in the organisation to act and behave in a way that reinforces the strategy. This is because a strategy often represents or requires a new way of working. The way that people act and behave is influenced and shaped by an organisation’s culture, which is the way that people work together to achieve the goals of the organisation. Thus, it is crucial to align culture to the strategy to achieve strategic success. This is demonstrated by a study conducted by Professor Mike West[1]from Duke University, where he found that if culture does not align to the strategy, it could result in significant performance variation. His study found that organisational culture accounted for 17% of performance variability, illustrating the significance of culture on organisational performance.

Most organisations overlook using culture to drive performance because it is unclear how to align culture to the strategy

We find most organisations overlook the use of culture to drive the strategy because culture is frequently characterised as immovable, unchanging, and complex. It is typically conceptualised as something broad, undefined, and ambiguous, representing the core beliefs of a person and instilling generic values like integrity, respect, and honesty. As a result, employees often only have a set of generic values to guide the way they work, lacking clear instructions about what values mean and how to embody them in their everyday work. So, when a leader introduces a new strategy without aligning the culture to the strategy, it is unclear what is expected of employees or how they should behave in light of the new strategy, limiting its success.

MSH can set you up for strategic success by designing a bespoke set of values, beliefs and behaviours which have a clear pathway to implementation

At MSH, we believe that there are two types of culture, human culture and organisational culture. Human culture exists regardless of an organisation’s strategic direction, but organisational culture can and should change to align with the organisational strategy. We have developed an approach to create alignment between organisational culture and strategy by defining and implementing values, beliefs, and behaviours, which are the underpinning components of culture. These components of culture outline the underlying operating principles, why they are important, and guides the way employees should work. We approach designing them by anchoring them to the strategy, which will ensure that any value, belief or behaviour that is designed will drive a culture that accelerates your strategy. Because of our unique design process, we are able to produce a set of organisational values, beliefs, and behaviours that have a clear purpose and employees are empowered to embody as they will not be required to compromise on their personal values, beliefs, and behaviours in order to support the strategy.  Our two-phase approach to developing and embedding values, beliefs, and behaviours is illustrated in the below diagram.

Phase 1: Designing creative and logical values

The first phase is to design your organisation’s values. This involves combining creativity with logic to establish values that are a true reflection of the personality of your organisation and the key stakeholders that your strategy is set out to serve. This will help to drive a culture that will support your strategic aspirations.

We first run through a creative exercise to elicit people’s open and spontaneous perceptions of culture. This is because culture is often assumed, implicit and difficult to describe. By prompting people to articulate how they perceive an organisation’s culture, this enables us to have visibility of an objective picture of culture and its underlying values. We then look at the components of your ‘Unifying Concept’, which is a key part of your organisational strategy, to derive logical values that take into account the different perspectives of the key stakeholders in the strategy. The Passion represents the employee perspective, focusing on what the organisation stands for, the Best in the World reflects how an organisation wants to position their brand offering and takes into account the customer perspective, and the Engine Room represents the single measure for business success from the perspective of the owner.

Anchoring the design of values to the critical components in your strategy and stakeholder perspectives means your organisation can define the bespoke, unique, and meaningful values that will allow you to bring your strategy to life and achieve your vision. Once we have a list of creative and logical values, we combine them and run through a process to identify the most critical ones as we often end up with too many. We do this by ranking each value and asking which is the most important to focus on to achieve the vision, and what could we live without. We can then agree on a set of core values with definitions that are fundamental for the success of your organisation.

Phase 2: Translating values into action

The next phase is to develop beliefs and behaviours which underpin values. Beliefs and behaviours help to bridge the gap between what a value means on paper and what a value means in practice. By defining beliefs and behaviours aligned to values, it helps people know what to do to exhibit the values.

In this phase, MSH works with you to articulate why each value is important, ensuring that values lead to the outcomes your organisation is looking for, and test how they would affect decision making. We then determine how these values would be seen in practice, and define the small number of ‘critical few’ behaviours that will make the biggest difference that represent how people should behave if each value were being embodied. This phase is critical to successfully embedding values, beliefs and behaviours into your organisation that will drive a culture that is aligned to the strategy. This is because it provides a tangible and meaningful way to take a value and turn it into something practical that people are empowered to exhibit through their beliefs and behaviours.

Completing Phase 2 will ensure that employees know exactly what the values mean and what is expected of employees to action them. Leaders will no longer need to hope employees adopt the values and apply them in a consistent way as employees will have the clarity on how to embrace them.  

Culture is a critical enabler of strategic success but only when it is understood and actioned in the right way

Organisations have the power to harness culture to supercharge their strategy. Culture can be broad and an amorphous, untouchable thing, representing the core beliefs of humans like integrity and trust. But at MSH Consulting, we believe that organisational culture can be shaped and should be a defined set of values, beliefs, and behaviours that set the parameters and expectations for how people in an organisation should act and behave. But for values, beliefs, and behaviours to shape a culture that will drive organisational performance, they need to be designed in a way that ensures they are meaningful, provide clear guidance, and are unique. The MSH process does this by aligning the culture to your strategy through designing values, beliefs and behaviours that are suited to the personality of your strategy, key stakeholders, and organisation. By taking ownership of your organisational culture and aligning it to the way your strategy needs people to work, you are supercharging strategic success.  Once people know what is expected of them and how to act and behave, it ensures that you have engaged and energised people to achieve the ‘flywheel effect’ you need to make strategy happen in your everyday work.

[1] Leading Through Values (Michael Henderson, Shar Henderson, Dougal Thompson., 2006)