What is strategy?
“A plan of action resulting from strategy or intended to accomplish a specific goal”.
What is culture?
“The set of predominating attitudes and behavior that characterize a group or organization”.
Can you see right there in those definitions how culture would eat strategy for breakfast?
Let us go deeper into this…
A good strategy will empower a great culture to perform remarkably well.
By the way, like ideas, there is no such thing as a good strategy.
A strategy is good only in hindsight, only if it accomplished the intended outcome.
A strategy is only as good as the outcomes it produces.
How can anyone know if it is good or not?
After you have created some momentum with your strategy. Only then can you pause, and say, “yes, this is a good strategy”.
A Bad Culture Kills A Good Strategy
A good culture lifts a good strategy to the heavens. In fact, good culture is so powerful it can even make a bad strategy work.
Culture is the DNA of your organization. You can only see it in the behavior of your people. It is embedded in the things they do when no one is looking.
Like a marriage or friendship, It takes a long time to build, and in a careless action a short time to destroy.
Because it is invisible it is the hardest thing to change.
You may think you have a great business building strategy.
A bad culture (i.e. a poor performing, or toxic culture) will sabotage strategy every time.
Then, bad managers will often use fear (out of frustration with poor performance), crack the whip, and drive down the strategy road even harder and faster….
…and over the cliff.
It is harder, and in the long-term more productive to work on building an awesome culture.
How is this done effectively?
How You Treat Your Team Is How They Will Treat Your Clients/Customers
Want an awesome client culture?
Treat your Team as your clients.
Nurture them.
(Of course, screen for attitude in your hiring process).
You, as owner/CEO, are not in the top of the food chain. You are underneath your Team, supporting them, giving them the tools they need to perform.
Be THE Example
Walk the talk.
Walk the talk.
Walk the talk.
This cannot be repeated enough. If you treat your employees/Team with disrespect, mockery, or you gossip behind their back, then expect a stinky culture to emerge from you and around you.
You are the source of the culture. Take it seriously.
Your Team will follow what you do, not what you say.
Create Performance Standards
Establish awesome service Performance Standards for your company that are based in reality.
By “based in reality” I mean they are measurable in reality.
Here is an example of what I mean:
One of our telephone Performance Standards is:
“Answer the phone on the second ring”.
This is easily observable in reality. It is either done, or not done. It is not a motherhood statement or opinion.
Create Your Cultural Values and Express Them As Actions
Choose 4-6 values that embody the best of your culture.
Turn them into verbs.
Here is an example:
“We do excellent work, virtually invisible to our clients freeing them to concentrate on growing their business”.
The verb is “do”. The outcome is “clients concentrating on growing their business”, without being distracted by the work of bookkeeping and accounting, which most business owners hate.
If I stated our value as “excellence” it means nothing until fleshed out into an action statement.
Be Consistent
Be so fanatical about your culture that you refuse to compromise it.
Apologize for anything that veers your culture off course.
Live your values, and standards every day, all day. Even on a bad day.
Never take your temper out on your Team.
The Power of Culture Over Time
Once you have created, nurtured, fed, and grown your corporate culture now you have the opportunity for performance.
Notice I said, “opportunity for performance”, not guaranteed performance.
Now strategy can help.
It is the rudder on your ship. Culture IS the ship.
Without culture you have no ship to steer.
Thanks for reading…