Does Your Firm’s Culture Support Its Strategy?

A Challenging Question

Does your firm’s culture support its strategy? If not, you’ll need to retool your culture, and that’s not so easy to do. The values, beliefs, and norms that make it up are intangible and diffused throughout your organization, and employees tend to resist anything that threatens established behaviors and relationships.

The Challenge of Cultural Change

To figure out the secret to doing cultural change well, the authors examined how business leaders around the world approached it. They learned that successful ones didn’t begin with workshops, studies, or new HR policies. Instead, they began by creating stories highlighting actions that were deeply inconsistent with a firm’s established culture but reinforced an alternative culture more aligned with its strategies.

Authentic Stories

The most effective stories were authentic, featuring the leaders themselves, offered a break with the past and a path to the future, appealed to hearts and minds, and were dramatic and memorable.

Empowering Employees

Most critically, they empowered employees to begin crafting their own stories about cultural change so that everyone in the organization ended up co-creating a new culture together.

Cultural Change: The Bottom Line

The key takeaway is that cultural change requires leadership, not just a new set of policies or procedures. It requires creating a new narrative that aligns with the organization’s strategy and values, and empowering employees to write their own stories about the change. This can be a challenging and complex process, but the results can be transformative for the organization.

Conclusion

In conclusion, does your firm’s culture support its strategy? If not, it’s time to retool your culture. The key to successful cultural change is creating authentic stories that align with your organization’s values and strategy, and empowering employees to co-create a new culture.

FAQs

What is cultural change? Cultural change refers to the process of transforming an organization’s values, beliefs, and norms to better align with its strategy and goals.

Why is cultural change so challenging? Cultural change is challenging because it requires transforming the behaviors and relationships that are deeply ingrained in an organization, and employees tend to resist change.

What is the key to successful cultural change? The key to successful cultural change is creating authentic stories that align with the organization’s values and strategy, and empowering employees to co-create a new culture.