Tag Archive for: culture

Your Strategy Isn’t Necessarily the Problem

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Your Culture Might Be.

Your executive team can be fully aligned—and the business can still struggle to execute. 

That’s not a contradiction. It’s a clue.  Failure isn’t necessarily because the strategy is weak.  The executive team has debated it, pressure-tested it, and aligned on the direction. On paper, priorities are clear.

And yet execution slows. Decisions get revisited. Teams hesitate. Initiatives often stall quietly, not dramatically.  The issue isn’t strategy. It’s the gap between your strategy and your culture. 

 

Culture is how work gets done when leaders aren’t in the room.

It shapes:

  • How decisions actually get made
  • What risks feel safe to take
  • How conflict is handled—or avoided
  • Whether accountability is real or symbolic

When strategy asks the organization to behave one way, but day-to-day habits and norms reinforce another, execution stalls.  Not loudly. Subtly.

You see it in:

  • Decision ownership that’s unclear or constantly escalated
  • Lingering fear of risk
  • Competing priorities that haven’t been resolved
  • Mid-level leaders left to figure out how to turn strategy into action on their own

From the executive suite, it can look like resistance or capability gaps.  From the middle of the organization, it feels like confusion—or whiplash.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: The organization is executing—just in the way the culture allows.

Closing the gap between culture and strategy isn’t about more communication or motivation. It’s about:

  • Clear decision ownership and authority
  • Explicit trade-offs, not just priorities
  • Clear guidance for how leaders turn strategy into day-to-day decisions
  • Calling out behaviors and habits that work against the strategy

This is the hard, often overlooked work between agreement on the strategy and results.  So, if execution is slower or messier than expected, the question isn’t:  “Why don’t people get it?”

The question is:

“How has this organization been trained and incented? What has it been told is acceptable?’ ‘What have we channeled what is expected?’ And does our strategy require something different?”

That’s where execution actually begins.

The Case for NOT Being So Busy

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Some people are busy but not productive.  That’s because they’re not the same thing. For that matter, the most productive among us are not always the most effective, which is a higher level of performance than productivity. Here’s the case for not being so busy.

The most recent Harvard Business Review magazine’s cover story is The Busyness Trap.  It warns us to not conflate activity with achievement. Almost simultaneously, Sunday’s Boston Globe featured an article about how family life slowed down during the pandemic – and how many parents hope to maintain that slower pace.  Lately, we’re seeing two ends of the spectrum; one is that feeling that we’re supposed to be busy, all the time, and the other that says, slow down.

I was very lucky early in my career to work at a small firm where our president focused on the results we achieved. He was part of a movement at Ford Motor Company in the 1970’s to share profits based on outcomes. He was very clear that our performance was viewed on the impact we made for our clients, not on working the most hours. After that, I went to a global firm that was all about how many hours you worked. So, you saw a lot of busyness that may or may not have been tied to an outcome that benefitted the client or the person working the long hours. As a matter-of-fact, clients were often suspicious about why we stayed around long after they left for the day. I knew the reasons for this philosophy – increase billable hours and/or impress your boss – but, right or wrong, it seemed ridiculous to me because of my previous experience.

Are you or your team getting caught in the busyness trap?  Are you focusing out activities? Or, are you more focused on outcomes? Obviously, there is frequently a connection between the two. You need a certain level of activity to achieve outcome. But there often isn’t a one-to-one relationship.

Why busyness can be counter-productive.

Busyness has become a badge of honor, a status symbol. Our worth seems to be defined by how busy we are. The problem is that, in today’s complex, rapidly changing world, we really won’t create the innovative breakthroughs by always being so busy that we’re at risk of burnout. Instead of doing a good or okay job on a whole lot of things, it’s usually more effective for the organization if you do fewer things exceptionally well. We need time to think, experiment, and reflect. When I am working with leaders to build resilience, I’ll ask them to be silent for 30 seconds to check in on how they are feeling. Too often they tell me they couldn’t shut off their to do list or the many things ahead of them. My question is then, what if you took one or two things off that list, how would it make you feel? Would you be able to be more productive, efficient, and effective at the other things you’re doing?

The person with the longest list doesn’t win.  Let’s let go of being so in love with busy. Start by setting aside a few minutes each day to slow down – to think, to connect, to invent, or just be quiet and rejuvenate. You’ll be amazed at what a few minutes of unbusy can do.

Does Your Business Discourage Dissent?

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Diversity of experience and ideas, like other types of diversity, are critical to the success of your business. Even with a deep connection to your mission and strong leadership, an insular approach to strategy and decision-making can leave you vulnerable. It can hinder your ability to see early warning signals in the market or changes in customer profiles, and it becomes too easy to believe that past success will almost guarantee future success.
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In her recently published article from Harvard Business Review, Edith Onderick-Harvey provides some practical insights into how to ensure your organization stays resilient. The article was written for the family business audience, but the challenges and solutions are applicable to virtually all organizations.
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By Edith Onderick-Harvey