Is Your Organization's Culture Preventing You From Achieving Your Strategic Objectives?

Peter is the COO of a financial services organization and has established very high standards of excellence for his operations people. He has created an operating procedures and policy manual that ensures there is no uncertainty about how to achieve those high standards. He holds the managers reporting to him accountable for ensuring that all employees stick to these policies and procedures. 

But Peter is puzzled because his organization is experiencing an increasing level of customer complaints and subsequent loss of customers to competitors who are being more innovative in responding to customer needs. His strategic objective of providing excellent products and service was appropriate and his intentions were to do the best he could for his company. However, the strategic objectives could not be achieved because of the culture he was creating where employees are totally focused on "sticking to the rules" for fear of retribution if they don’t and not focused on delivering excellence.

As a consequence of this strict adherence to a set of policies and procedures customers were constantly being told that their requests could not be met because of company policy.

It never occurred to Peter that his front line employees, the ones who had the most contact with the customer, knew more about what the customers wanted than anyone else in the organization. They actually knew more about how to deliver excellent products and services than he did, but they hadn’t been asked.

Unfortunately Peter’s leadership style is not unique. There are many executives running organizations today who believe that the key to achieving imposed performance goals is to Control people. They make sure employees do what they want by close supervision and strict adherence to policies and procedures creating a culture of fear.

An organization’s culture is determined by the values, beliefs and behaviors that people in the organization operate by and is strongly influenced by the values of the CEO and the executive team. 

In successful organizations such as Southwest Airlines, Starbucks and Wegmans where everyone is committed to a common set of values, beliefs and behaviors the culture is driven from the very top by an executive leadership that lives and breathes the values they espouse and ensures those values permeate the entire organization.

In the absence of such strong values-based leadership from the executive team you are likely to see many different cultures throughout the organization as leaders with different values influence the culture in their own respective department, business unit, branch or team.

What many leaders at all levels don’t understand is the impact their values, beliefs and behaviors have on the culture their employees operate in, and the impact that culture has on organizational results. Many leaders, and I think we flatter some managers by calling them leaders, unknowingly create a culture that prevents them from achieving their strategic objectives.

So going back to Peter let me give you an example of what can be achieved.

The Technical Assistance Centre (TAC) of a large provider of diagnostic equipment and supplies was languishing in last place in their industry survey for customer satisfaction with all five areas measured at less than 50%. As a result there was a high turnover of