Culture vs Strategy
Most people seem to agree that culture and strategy are important. But to have a meaningful discussion of how to harness them, you need to remember why that is. The problem is that the common definitions of culture and strategy tend to be vague, and hide how they’re related. So I want to discuss two relatively simple definitions that highlight the relationship and can help you think about what they should look like. They also help explain the well-known Peter Drucker quote “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.”
Every organization relies on all its members to make decisions, whether they’re judgement calls in a highly empowered team or decisions about how to interpret top-down orders from command-and-control managers. Culture and strategy can be thought of as complementary ways of ensuring that all these little decisions are as coherent and coordinated as possible.
Whether your strategy is a plan with concrete steps, a prioritized list of objectives, or even a vague but inspirational vision statement, it provides an explicit framework for making all the decisions that add up to the strategy. It allows everyone in the organization to ask the question “How does this decision fit into the overall plan?”
Culture can also take many different forms, from how employees think about their roles to how they interact with their colleagues and managers. But no matter the form, culture ultimately determines how members of an organization make the decisions that fall into the gaps in the strategy, or when they choose not to follow it. It’s how members of an organization make decisions when their managers aren’t watching.
Where strategy is explicit, culture is implicit. Where strategy is designed, culture is emergent. But culture is what fills any gaps in the strategy, and if you’re not careful it can make its own gaps.
So the next time you’re thinking about culture and strategy, start with three questions: 1) How do I want the individuals in my team/organization to make decisions? 2) How are the culture and strategy currently influencing decisions? 3) What can I do to shift them in the right direction?