How Does Corporate Culture Really Impact Strategy Execution in Your Organization?

Rosario_Longo
How Corporate Culture Supports Strategy Execution

It is an axiomatic fact that strategy execution and corporate culture play a remarkable role in the attainment of organizational success. From a chronological point of view, it can be argued that the significance of corporate culture emerges between strategy formulation and strategy execution. An organizational strategy can indeed be properly developed on paper, but if it is not also appropriately executed with great or sufficient precision, it is hardly imaginable that an employer might ever be able to successfully point in the right direction and achieve its scope, that is to say, successfully pursue its intended strategy. The most effective and appropriate KPI to assess corporate culture can hence be identified with its capability to support organizational strategy and, more particularly, its consistent and successful execution.

The values, beliefs, behavior, and "the way we do things around here" fostered within a business by an employer, considered crucial to the attainment of its objectives, clearly vary from organization to organization. The fact that each company has a different corporate culture peculiar to itself should indeed represent the distinctive characteristic of each organization, somewhat like its DNA. In the unlikely event of two or more organizations fostering exactly the same type of culture, nonetheless, even remarkable differences between these are likely to emerge due to their different execution.

It can be very pragmatically concluded that the efficacy of corporate culture sorely depends on how helpful and supportive it proves to be for strategy execution. To be deemed appropriate and coherent with the employer's wants and expectations, an organization's culture essentially needs to ease and favor the effectual strategy implementation process.

Every business founder concentrates and focuses his/her efforts on fostering and promoting a type of culture peculiar to his/her organization to enable it to achieve a competitive advantage. Notwithstanding, some features and components can be identified, which, if they properly underpin corporate culture, should contribute to considerably increasing employers' chances to successfully implement their strategy.

Readiness to Change

The speed at which change occurs in the exogenous environment habitually requires employers to introduce changes into their organizations at the same pace. The fact that employees may oppose and resist change, albeit necessary for their organization to stay afloat and remain competitive in the relevant market, and the delay in its implementation this habitually entails, are likely to have a remarkably negative impact on strategy implementation.

Individual readiness to change should hence be considered one of the main underpinning pillars of corporate culture and should invariably be inspired by concepts like dynamism, energy, adaptability, and innovation. The metaphor of the organization as a chameleon might prove effective in properly conveying the message. This species of lizards has adapted to live in trees and developed the ability to change the color of their skin to match their surroundings and escape predators' attention (though this theory has been relatively recently opposed by some scientists who sustain that the change in the color of their skin is rather used by these reptiles to communicate and control their body temperature). Since for modern organizations gaining and maintaining a competitive edge is crucially important, like chameleons, they should aim at constantly growing throughout their lives. Being informed of what occurs in the external environment and about their competitors' moves is clearly of pivotal importance, too; like chameleons, hence, organizations should be able to simultaneously look in two different directions with a 360-degree view and promptly focus on what they see.

http://rosariolongo.blogspot.com/201...-strategy.html
saiconsult
Nice input, Rosario_Longo. What makes today's business leaders sit up and take notice is the speed at which the world around them is changing rapidly. Seamless markets and technology have brought about sweeping changes in the way you do business today. Someone aptly said that you cannot conduct today's business with yesterday's systems and methods and still expect to remain in business. You need to develop the ability to adopt new systems and methods; otherwise, someone else will nibble at your cheese. Developing this capability is the job of the culture. Therefore, business leaders, whose responsibility it is to develop a culture conducive to change, need to propagate those values and beliefs throughout the organization that encourage learning but not depending, innovation but not imitation, and strategic thinking but not static thinking if the organization is to achieve its goals.

Regards,
B. Saikumar
psdhingra
Good to read! But, a pertinent question arises, who will bell the cat, the top management or the bottom of the line? Should the culture run from bottom to top or top management should take the lead to be followed by the middle and lower management and the bottomline of a corporation?
Rosario_Longo
Thank you so much for your comment, Mr. Dhingra. I actually devoted a post to this topic - "Who develops, shapes, and controls organizational culture?" - [URL: HR Professionals by Rosario Longo HRM: Who develops, shapes, and controls organizational culture?](http://rosariolongo.blogspot.com/2014/10/who-develops-shapes-and-controls.html)

Hope you'll find the time to read it.

Many thanks,
Rosario
psdhingra
Dear Rosario, sure, I would like to go through your article when I find some time. However, I hope you would agree with me that for the development of corporate culture, ethical leadership has to be taken by the top management. This ensures that the culture permeates from the top down to be followed by everyone. Otherwise, it remains a theoretical concept confined to management and leadership literature, with no practical implementation of corporate culture in reality.

Regards,
[Your Name]
bijay_majumdar
Execution and Implementation of Strategy with Technology

Execution or implementation of strategy converged with the latest technology is the key to keeping pace with growing market trends for business organizations. Employees must have the willingness to adapt to such changes and look forward to aligning with the organization's strategy to achieve the organization's goals. Here, organizational commitment plays a significant role, while on the other side, employers need to leverage employees by providing a conducive environment for learning and growth.

Having said this, we arrive at understanding the development of organizational culture from the perspective of employees, their training, their welfare, and overall growth in terms of quality of life and work-life balance.

Yes, indeed a very good post. I appreciate it. Thanks.
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