Culture; the Steven Bradbury of Strategy

Many of us spend our day largely ignoring our physical health, until there is a crisis.

Many of us delay controlling our personal budgets and delaying purchase gratification, until there is a crisis.

​Many businesses put off training, process improvement, and capacity building – because there are usually, and legitimately, more urgent things to deal with, until there is a crisis. 

​Workplace culture is much the same. 

Organisations shouldn't wait until everything else falls over before doing something about their culture. ​

Many of us spend our day largely ignoring our physical health, until there is a crisis.

Many of us delay controlling our personal budgets and delaying purchase gratification, until there is a crisis.

​Many businesses put off training, process improvement, and capacity building – because there are usually, and legitimately, more urgent things to deal with, until there is a crisis. 

​Workplace culture is much the same. 

Organisations shouldn't wait until everything else falls over before doing something about their culture. 

Culture – as a strategic imperative - is usually considered very important, but more in words than deeds, and is rarely deliberately focused on, unless there is a crisis.  It remains strategicallyImportant but Not-Urgent Enough to prioritise, and so tends to languish at ‘Strategic priority #4’. 

If your strategic plan is like most I’ve seen, it will have some standard strategic objectives.  There will be one or more that relate to growth and sustainability in one form or another.   There will be something to do with the market or strategic positioning (i.e. the type of organisation we’re aspiring to be).  It is likely there will be either a compliance or operational/process improvement initiative, or both (e.g. change to a new, more efficient ……….., or develop product/region ………..). 

And there will be something about how awesome, valued and important our people and culture is.

The strategies for the first few will be reasonably clear and measurable with challenging and reasonable time frames.  The culture one will have a measure, like “turnover/retention” or workplace safety, and strategies, like “Recruit and train the right people”, with little understanding of what a ‘right person’ looks like.

It’s always there in the minds of leaders.  There are plenty of “Our people are our most important asset” or “we really should do something about the leadership culture” intentions in the minds and plans of most executive teams. As are questions and prompts to improve or change said culture, but little action and change initiated until or unless something goes wrong.  Culture remains the thing the business can deal with ‘tomorrow’.

Then, at the board meetings, the focus will be on the stuff that is easily measured, and where decisions can be made, such as:

• “Does the Board approve of the investment in the new IT system?"
• "Does the Board agree to sound-out potential alliance partners?" 
• "Does the Board agree to stopping/starting a given product or service line?" 
• "This is the PnL and the business KPI’s, how are they tracking to budget? How might we bump those number up?" 

 
Then, just like the feel-good news story tacked on to the end of the nightly news report, comes the ‘actionable items’ for company culture.  

Typically, “How is everyone travelling?”, “What was the response from staff to the XYZ policy change announcement?”, “Why did so-and-so leave? Is there anything we ought to worry about there?” All fair enough really.

Because culture is recognised as important - it is always in the mix, but because it is a little bit 'fluffy people stuff' and rarely urgent, it tends to sit and languish at item #4 on the list of priorities.  And whenever it looks like making it to position 2 or 3, something else comes along that requires urgent attention and consumes the Board Bandwidth. For example, a challenge that is often more definable and even fun to problem solve, so it gets the priority and investment and culture projects sit patiently at #4.
Until… something or someone goes very wrong.  Then it becomes an expensive, time consuming and all-important focus for the organisation. 

Next minute, there’s a chorus of “Our workplace culture is all wrong/broken.” 

Leadership is blamed (which is reasonable, given culture is part of the remit of the leadership) and expensive remediation is engaged to prevent the whole shebang from falling apart.

So, why does workplace culture, almost universally acknowledged as a key success factor, tend to remain important, but not urgent?

There are a few, quite legitimate reasons.

1. It is messy.

• PnL and sales targets are tangible and auditable measures, sales activity, safety incidents are all reasonably clear problems to solve. Whereas "People" are annoyingly different and not easy to de-risk.

2. The Board is often separated from direct access to culture.

• Where the Board is largely non-executive, its direct contact with the attitudes, fears and feelings of the employees is removed. Where they are executive directors, they are often part of the problem.

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3. The ROI is tricky to be specific about.

• See point 1.

4. There are usually more urgent, and more easily solved, problems.

• Sales growth strategies, new markets and ‘new IT systems’ are far more tangible projects and, more often, within the skill-set of the Board (who typically have backgrounds in financial and accounting, legal, sales and marketing, or industry experience).

5. Comfort Zones and skill set of decision makers

• If you're a board member with project management background, then you're going to be able to contribute more, and more confidently, to the site re-location project than the "grow an emotionally intelligent leadership culture project".

6. The belief that there isn’t much you can change (the “you can’t change people” excuse);

• that engaging expensive consultants gets you a nice report and better recruitment policies, but not much in the way of behaviour or culture change.
• This is wrong – you've just got to target the right things (hint: communication skills training, or re-badging the ‘company values’ infographic on the wall in reception is not it).

In NFP Boards most members are volunteers and non-executive. 

Culture is often a felt experience. You only really get the sense of how people are feeling and behaving by being and working among them. The managers are generally on their best behavior at the Board meeting, and it is in their interest to be seen to be managing the people (that's their job, after all). Hence, they will tend not to mention, will minimise, or brush over culture/people-related symptoms. They will label incidents as a 'one-off' or say that the person had a bad attitude and was the 'problem' and that now they’re gone, things will settle.

While it is true that there can be some particularly toxic people infecting a workplace, it is easier, and in the interests of the CEO, to present them a cause, rather than a victim.

There are culture strategies you can direct that are simple, effective and much less expensive…

1. than stress leave,
2. workers compensation,
3. redundancy payouts,
4. performance management and
5. team "rebuilding" workshops for the few battered and bruised leaders who are left.

My recommendation is to focus on the emotional well being and mental fitness of your leadership group. 

This is not about MBAs or project/communication skills. Rather, like personal fitness training for the mind.

Just like when a person invests in their own health, a business investing in the emotional fitness and mental well-being of its leaders is taking a proactive step that gives culture the strategic attention and resourcing it needs.
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You can do other things of course, but whatever you do, don't let the people stuff become the ‘play of the day’ at the end of the Board agenda. Give the minds of your people more attention – after all, it is the minds of your people that run your business.