The Connection Between Corporate Culture And Business Strategy

Corporate Culture and Business Strategy are two of the most important factors in the never-ending questions for top leaders to maintain organizational viability and effectiveness. Strategy provides a formal logic for a company’s goals and helps to orient people around them. Culture expresses goals through shared thoughts and group norms, and it guides behavior through values and beliefs.

Business owners are frequently tempted to prioritize strategy over culture. However, the most successful one will try to draw out the best mix of both factors.

Business Strategy and Corporate Culture are inextricably linked

What are Business Strategy and Corporate Culture?

Business Strategy clarifies and focuses collective action and decision making. It mobilizes people through plans and sets of choices, which are frequently enforced by both concrete rewards for achieving goals and consequences for failing to do so. It should also include adaptive elements that can scan and analyze the external environment and detect when changes are needed to maintain continuity and growth. Leadership and strategy formation go hand in hand, and most leaders understand the fundamentals.

Corporate Culture, on the other hand, is harder to manipulate because it is mostly based on unspoken behaviors, mindsets, and social patterns. It shapes attitudes and behaviors of a company in broad and long-lasting ways. Within a group, cultural norms define what is encouraged, discouraged, accepted, or rejected. Culture can unleash tremendous amounts of energy toward a shared purpose and foster an organization’s capacity to thrive when it is properly aligned with personal values, drives, and needs. Culture can also adapt and evolve on its own in response to changing opportunities and demands.

Business Strategy and Corporate Culture are inextricably linked. Leaders frequently establish new cultures and imprint values that last for decades. Ideally, they develop strategy and organizational culture at the same time from the start, in a connected, integrated approach. As they align the strategic direction with the behaviors that will help them draw the best results for their businesses.

Culture is the backbone for organizational success

Build a Corporate Culture that supports your Business Strategy

One IBC^® believes that strategy was the key to business success. Recently, purpose has emerged as an essential component of doing business – the north star and inspiration intended to guide all company activities. However, there is frequently a significant gap between a company’s purpose and what its employees experience, and a simple communication campaign about the great new company purpose will not suffice.

Culture has provided the fertile ground for both their purpose and strategy to come to life and drive extraordinary performance at scale. Magic happens, in our experience, when purpose, strategy, and culture are tightly connected and aligned, reinforcing one another. Why? Because employees must be willing and able to unleash their individual and collective human genius in order to support the company’s purpose and strategy.

In 2015, the Harvard Business Review identified 6 components of a great Corporate Culture as below:

• Vision: This term comes first and foremost. From a simple mission statement to a corporate manifesto, a company’s vision is a powerful tool. Google’s modern and infamous slogan, “Don’t Be Evil,” is an inspiring corporate vision.
• Values: This is a broad concept, it encompasses the mentalities and perspectives required to achieve a company’s vision.
• Practices: Are the tangible, ethical methods by which a company implements its values. Netflix, for example, values knowledge-based, high-achieving employees and, as a result, pays its employees at the top of their market salary range rather than through an earn-your-way-to-the-top philosophy.
• People: This factor comes next, with businesses employing and recruiting in ways that reflect and improve their overall culture.
• Narrative: Having a compelling narrative brand story, such as Steve Jobs’ and Apple’s, is critical for growth and public perception.
• Place: One of the most cutting-edge developments in contemporary Corporate Culture is the “place” of business, such as the city of choice as well as office design and architecture.

Build a corporate culture that supports your business strategy

A strong Corporate Culture encourages employee engagement and good Business Strategy execution. From investing in new technology and changing business processes to dealing with competitors and clients, company culture determines how much risk your company can take.

By creating a resilient Corporate Culture, you can easily communicate what employees need to do to adapt and deal with challenges. Corporate Culture emphasizes your organization’s values in order to assist each team in implementing your Business Strategy not only with excellence, but also with integrity, purpose, and passion. Your workforce is united by organizational culture in order to deliver consistent quality work to clients and other stakeholders.

This is why it is significant to understand that Corporate Culture and Business Strategy are inextricably linked. Company culture cannot be regarded as a secondary priority because it is what drives strategy momentum and action. While strategy provides direction, culture is what motivates everyone in your company to work toward the same goal of moving the business forward.