|
By Richard Goldberg It's not easy to get a business strategy right — balancing
short-term financials with long-term direction. A solid strategy requires
insight and an understanding of your customers, marketplace, competition,
current and emerging technology, and economic trends, in addition to your
organization's strengths and weaknesses. Your
strategy also must outperform your competitor's strategy. Your competition's
objectives most likely will be similar to yours — a relentless and
uncompromising commitment to achieve customer loyalty and deliver the highest
quality, while maximizing performance with the fewest possible resources. It's
little wonder business leaders become aggravated when their well-conceived
and highly competitive strategy doesn't play out as planned. Frequently,
when an excellent business strategy is not paying off, it can be linked to
faulty execution. In short, people are not doing the things required to make
the strategy happen. This becomes even more maddening when these people
possess the required skills and competencies to achieve the desired results
but simply aren't delivering. Sometimes,
organizations are lucky and pull the right lever, bringing their organization
into alignment, and the execution problem is solved. But most often, the
answer is a bit more complex because the principal culprit is very likely a
misaligned or misguided organization culture. Culture
might feel like a stilted term, but plainly put, culture is a way of
describing the commonly accepted behaviors and values an organization
demonstrates. Generally,
culture develops through the reinforcement of organization policies and
procedures, and, most important, leadership behavior. Organization culture
provides subtle clues about how to make decisions, set direction, create
solutions, practice innovation, achieve goals, work with colleagues and serve
customers. Therefore,
if the organization's culture is out of alignment with its strategy,
effective execution is thwarted — people most likely will not be doing the
things necessary to drive desired results. So,
what should organizations do if their excellent strategy is not paying off? The
first question is: Are you effectively setting the right behavioral
benchmarks for your employees? From a strategic perspective, this includes
communication vehicles, such as your company's vision, mission, critical
success factors and, especially, values or guiding principles. It
is common for organizations to differ on how they define these terms, and
therefore they are used interchangeably. However, because of the messages
they send, it is crucial that these benchmarks precisely describe the
organization's direction and the behaviors/actions required to achieve that
direction. These
benchmark definitions must be easily understood. Each and every employee must
understand the behaviors that are key to his or her performance. They need to
internalize an understanding of how their job provides an important
contribution to the overall company direction. The values or guiding
principles are the most crucial vehicle for managing or changing the culture
because they focus on behavior. To
help analyze current values or create new ones, organizations find it useful
to measure the values currently at play. It is also a good idea to limit
values to those most important and differentiate ones that can be considered
the key or driving value. Again, this helps employees prioritize and focus on
the most important behaviors. If
an organization thinks that its vision, mission and/or values are describing
the right message, the cultural disconnect might be lack of alignment. There
are 12 organizational elements that should be examined for alignment issues:
organizational values, business vision and strategy, individual
accountability and responsibility, operations and systems, rewards and
recognition, growth and development, selection and retention, leadership, job
design, communication, teamwork, and standards and continuous improvement. Even
if an organization's strategic behavioral benchmarks are well conceived, true
communication occurs only through alignment. A typical incongruence might be
an organization that has determined that building broader business within
existing accounts is crucial to its strategy, yet employees are recognized
and rewarded only for establishing new accounts. In examining alignment,
organizations have found it useful to collect feedback on the current and
desired effectiveness of all elements. Finally,
two other critical components are crucial in managing or changing an
organization's culture. These components are the communication strategy and
performance management alignment. The
organization's performance management system must specifically reinforce
demonstration of the cultural values, especially the driving value. To ensure
commitment throughout the organization, all levels of leadership — especially
senior leadership — must support the culture and values. As
with all effective communication strategies, actions speak louder than words.
With the organization's culture properly focused and aligned, there should be
increased confidence that your excellent business strategy will deliver the
desired results. Richard
Goldberg is president and CEO of Heartland Management Consultancy, Inc. in
Lee’s Summit, Missouri. He can
be reached at rgoldberg@heartlandmci.com
or (816) 272-2048. ©
2003 American City Business Journals Inc. |
|
|
|
March
24, 2002 
