Does Your Company’s Culture Reinforce Its Strategy and Purpose?
Good strategy has traditionally been seen as the key to business success. More recently, purpose has become an essential element of doing business. But something else is missing: culture, or the essential elements of how an organization and its employees behave, as well as its governing beliefs and principles. And yet, culture often receives less attention than purpose and strategy. The author thinks of purpose, strategy, and culture as a triangle: Each angle connects with and shapes the other two, and if one changes, the other two must evolve and adjust to maintain balance and shape, or the triangle breaks and falls apart. He presents three types of levers companies can use to profoundly shape an effective culture and allow their strategy to come to fruition.
Early in my career, strategy was seen as the key to business success. More recently, purpose has become an essential element of doing business — the north star and inspiration meant to orient all company activities. But there is often a large gap between a company’s purpose and what its employees experience, and a simple communication campaign about the great new company purpose won’t do much good on its own.
So, what’s missing from this picture? We’ve all known for a long time that besides purpose and strategy, something else is critical: culture, or the essential elements of how an organization and its employees behave, as well as its governing beliefs and principles. And yet, culture often receives less attention than purpose and strategy.
As a business leader and as a student of other business leaders, I now believe that a tight connection between purpose, strategy, and culture is critically important, because culture plays such a powerful role in making purpose and strategy come to life. I also believe that, as leaders, we can shape our companies’ cultures faster and more profoundly than generally thought.
What do successful companies like Microsoft, Netflix, Best Buy, and many others have in common? Culture has been the fertile soil that has enabled both their purpose and their strategy to come to life and drive extraordinary performance at scale. In my experience, magic happens when purpose, strategy, and culture are tightly connected and aligned, reinforcing each other. Why? Because employees must be willing and able to unleash their individual and collective human genius to support the company purpose and strategy, and this can only happen in a culture perfectly aligned with both.
When Satya Nadella became CEO of Microsoft in 2014, for example, the company was known for its aggressive, combative, and competitive culture. It was losing ground, having missed key waves of technology innovation. Since then, the company has gone through an amazing resurgence. Yes, Nadella and his team did update the company’s purpose from putting a computer on every desk to “empower[ing] every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.” But I believe that the major driver of the company’s amazing resurgence has been the reinvention of the its culture in support of that purpose, which implied addressing unmet, unarticulated needs. Central to that strategy was moving from a dominant “know-it-all” culture seeped in a world domination and zero-sum-game mentality to empathy and a growth mindset critical to a more open culture.
Conversely, poisonous cultures have been responsible for the downfall of companies or their leaders. Hubris, for example, is directly related to energy giant Enron’s web of fraud and financial misconduct, which led to the company’s collapse in 2001. And in 2017, Uber’s co-founder and CEO Travis Kalanick was forced to step down after it emerged that the ridesharing company, famous for its “bro culture,” was rife with bullying, sexual harassment, and discrimination.
