Throughout my career, strategy has always been a key to my success. However, in recent years, the vision has become a vital component in doing and sustaining business—the sun's brightness and inspiration meant to shine a light on the organization's future. Yet there is a disconnect between most organizations' vision and what their employees experience, and a simple communication campaign about a new idea won't do much good.
Outside of vision and strategy, there's a missing element: culture or the essential way employees and the organization behave, as well as shared beliefs and values. And yet, often, culture receives less attention than vision and strategy. So, what's the challenge?
As a business leader and a student of business leaders, I recognize that a strong connection between vision, strategy, and culture is critically significant because culture plays a vital part in helping strategy and vision come to life. I also know that, as leaders, we can shift and shape our organization's cultures faster and more meaningful than commonly thought.
What do successful organizations like Apple, Google, Microsoft, Netflix, and numerous others have in common? Similar to fertile soil and plant seeds. Culture has nurtured its vision and strategy to come to life and drive performance at a scale. In my experience, transformation happens when vision, strategy, and culture are tightly aligned and connected, supporting each other. Why? Because to keep the organization's vision and strategy, employees must be able and willing to unleash their individual and collective human capability, which can only happen in a culture holistically aligned with both.
In 2011, when I started my leadership journey, the organization I was working for at the time was known for its aggressive, combative, and competitive culture. It was losing ground, having missed fundamental waves of technology innovation. Since then, the company has gone through a remarkable resurgence. The primary driver of the organization's resurrection was the reinvention of its culture in support of that vision, which implied addressing unmet, unarticulated needs.
Conversely, toxic cultures have been responsible for the downfall of companies and their leaders.
A unique, understandable, powerful idea
In my experience, conveying a concise sentence encapsulates culture around a singular, simple, and robust idea that everyone can connect to make it more manageable to shift and shape the culture. Emotional connection and simplicity are meaningful because it fuels action, energy, and focus.
I recently worked with a Bio-tech client where I asked stakeholders who knew the organization best to think about who they were, as a collective, when at their very best. I also asked: if the company were a person, how would it behave? These insights allowed me to capture who they wanted to be and act in every facet of the business. This simple yet powerful insight helped transform how every employee related to each other, customers, local communities, and shareholders. The solution guided their efforts to reshape the business, management systems, and the environment we all operate. In short, it crystalized their culture for every employee and made it easier for vision and strategy to bloom.
The leader is a role model.
Russ Frandin, the lead independent director at Best Buy, said, "The way you change behaviors is by changing behavior." Sounds simple, right? My assessment from his quote is that leaders can signal change and shape the culture through their actions and behavior. For example, when I became an Assistant Vice President with Wells Fargo Bank, I spent the first few weeks working at the retail branches in my territory. I observed and asked questions in the retail stores and over Panera Bread catered dinners with staff. I listened to their concerns and needs. Doing so highlighted the importance of listening to the team to help fix the disconnect. Besides establishing the cultural tone, I also learned what worked and didn't, critically advising what we needed to do to shift the business, including updating legacy technology, investing in the employee experience, and reallocating retail store space.
Authentic leadership is about role modeling one's values. Therefore, leaders should not shy away from connecting their vision and beliefs with the organization's vision and culture they're shaping. Leadership is less about being the most intelligent person in the room. It's about fostering an environment that will enable the vision and strategy to come to life.
How to construct an effective culture
Changing an organization's culture needs more than role modeling. In my experience, there are three pillars companies can use to create an effective culture profoundly: business, management, and "human centric."
Business Pillars
Improving operations influence strategic choices because operational progress creates strategic degrees of freedom, including organic growth, partnerships, and M&A activities. Changes in business operation shape organization culture, too.
When I focused on fixing customer pain points during a Pharmaceutical client turnaround, I highlighted the significance of acting from the outside in and from the bottom up. That made it clear that the organization's future relied on listening to stakeholders and improving their lives.
Management levers
Key management processes directly influence culture as well. What kind of people do you elect to positions of power? What kind of people does your organization recruit? Does performance trump poor behavior? How are decisions put together, and by whom? How do your company measure and reward success? What are essential business cadences? How are meetings operated? What type of controls and compliance is in position? All these systems, processes, and rules can shape and shift culture.
At Netflix, for instance, there is only one policy for travel, entertainment, gifts, and other expenses: "Act in Netflix's best interest." That's all—no company-wide rules on office hours or the number of vacation days employees can take. This represents a culture of "freedom with responsibility" that CEO and co-founder Reed Hastings honors for the organization's radical reinvention into a streaming and creative giant that seeks to entertain the world. But this "no rules" approach goes hand in hand with other management pillars that shape culture, such as seeking to recruit only " internal employees" and rewarding adequate performance with a severance package; providing a lot of contexts to facilitate decentralized decision-making (for instance, by sharing information broadly and open); and offering constructive, honest, and frequent feedback.
Over my career, I've learned to initiate monthly performance management meetings by discussing people and organizational issues, business, and financials. This may seem like a bit of change, but it reinforces a culture that places employees at the center.
Human-centric pillars
These are the fundamental and interconnected elements that create an environment in which people are enthusiastic and able to entirely give their energy and talent to serve the organization's vision.
During my time at Capital One Bank and through research I conducted when studying at Vega, I've learned about the power of six elements: autonomy and human connections, which means psychological safety, a growth mindset, and mastery. How do you present employees with adequate autonomy to allow them to be their best? How do you enable employees to connect what guides them with their work? How do you construct an environment where employees experience authentic human connections? How do you provide a workplace where employees feel safe to be who they are and express their thoughts and feelings? How do you facilitate learning and growth?
Conveying the organization's culture as a unique, understandable, and yet robust idea makes it more straightforward to answer these questions and use all three pillars in mind. This will aid in how decision and action converged towards building a human-centric culture supporting the organization's vision and strategy.
I focused on strategy more than vision and culture for a long time. This was a mistake. In a world that's now particularly uncertain, volatile, and complex, crafting and pursuing a top-down and linear strategy is pointless. Who could have predicted the Covid pandemic? Or put together a detailed plan to survive the consequences of the war in Ukraine? A guiding framework to be effective and energized when unplanned change happens what teams need.