If cash is king, culture is queen.
Strategic planning: The role of cash
No matter the structure of your organisation, in strategic planning money definitely matters. It’s prudent to always ensure the financial health of your current state, as well as any impact the proposed strategy may have. At a bare minimum consider your cash flow forecast and your quick and current ratios. Engage with your Board around your reserves and, if you have a corpus, their appetite to potentially invest part of this to execute your new strategy.
Strategic planning: The importance of culture
However, cash is not the only critical foundation upon which strategy has to be built. Culture, which can have negative connotations of being ‘wishy washy’, is actually a crucial enabler for strategy execution. It’s all well and good to have a beautiful document, but if the culture is at odds with the intent of the plan, it will never be brought to life. If your strategy calls for large- scale transformation, but your culture is based on ‘stick to what we know’, you’re doomed to fail from the starting line.
Not only does your culture underpin the execution of your strategy, but it can also be an asset to the development of great strategy. A strong, unified culture can help set the tone for your strategic appetite (e.g. risk, change, ambition etc.), and the behaviours that manifest as a result of your culture will create the experience that assists collaboration and consensus.
Strengthening culture through strategic planning
You can also use the strategic planning process itself as a means by which to reinforce or reset culture. If it’s a collaborative culture you are trying to breed, divvy up some of the tasks and get Board members to collaborate with staff members on different areas and report back. If it’s a culture of innovation, get a guest speaker in that can share predictions of the future of your industry then run some lateral thinking exercises based on different scenarios.
Exploring your own organisational culture
It would be remiss in this section not to answer the question of what, exactly is organisational culture? Basically it can be understood as the values, expectations and practices that guide decision making and actions of everyone in your team. It can be helpful to think of the logic link that values drive beliefs, which drive behaviour. Working backwards through this framework is a great way to unearth your organisational culture i.e. what are our current behaviours? What does this indicate that we believe? Therefore what are the fundamental values behind this? EG we always own up to our mistakes, therefore we believe that taking responsibility for our actions is important, which signals a value of accountability.
Remember that culture is influenced both from the top down and the bottom up. The saying, ‘the fish rots from the head’ warns that bad behaviour set at the top will be emulated throughout the organisation. Similarly, your strategy is the very overarching document off which all other plans hang, so ensure that it is authentic and evidence-based. If it’s seen as just a ‘tick box’ document, other subsequent plans are likely to be produced in the same vein. Yet culture also needs to be embedded in the grassroots of an organisation if it is to truly represent the behaviours across all altitudes. If you have decided to have a Board and / or Executive led strategy development process, yet wish to be inclusive, developing the culture and values is a great engagement exercise to open up to the entire team.
I’ve been involved in many team culture sessions and the development of values to underpin new strategic plans. My favourite was the overarching value we set for an organisation I had the privilege of being CEO of, and this value statement did truly guide our culture: ‘Love not fear’.
Putting it into action:
Top down: For the leaders of your organisation it is imperative to link your culture to the emerging strategy. To do so you must identify what will be required to actually get the strategic plan done e.g. transformative requires boldness, openness to change etc. Do you have this or is this something that needs to be worked on? In communication of the strategy, how will you lead by example in representing the values e.g. if it’s collaboration, why not jointly present the final plan to staff alongside a group of people from across the organisation at all altitudes?
Bottom up: To ensure that the culture is authentic across the organisation, run a world cafe exercise where you ask teams to first brainstorm examples of behaviours that bring out the best in their work, e.g. when deadlines are tight and people lend a hand even when the work doesn’t align to their KPI. Ask for some real life examples to explain these. On the next rotation, get teams to deduct from these behaviours what beliefs they think drive these, e.g. everyone steps in to help each other during hard times, then finally ask them what value they think is driving this belief that can be represented by way of a company culture e.g. supportive.
To figure out how to best articulate your culture through values for your strategic plan, run an exercise where you look at many other companies’ values (it can be fun to play a ‘guess who’ matching game with your team to guess which values belong to which organisation). From here, ask for an intuitive initial feel around style that resonates with the team; is it one word, a sentence, or a punchy phrase? This can be a great guide for how to express your values.
