Every strategy needs the right culture to deliver it. Through our Principled Culture approach, we look to close the gap between what the culture needs to be in order to succeed and what people need in order to thrive. We do that by aligning your strategy and your Principled Culture.
A key driver for us is the need to directly align a chosen strategic approach with the right type of culture to make it happen. So often, these two success factors are developed separately. The result is that strategy and culture are brought together and asked to get along, even if there are fundamental incongruities. An ambitious and focused strategy, for example, will not fit well with a relaxed and introspective culture that is risk averse and takes its time to make decisions. To succeed, one will need to change.
Restructuring a culture alone won’t necessarily change its character. And a new structure alone probably won’t be enough to deliver fully on an ambitious and demanding strategy.
Cultures as personas
Of course, communicators and experience designers have been using customer personas for many years to broadly characterise the people they are trying to reach. The difference with our Principled Culture framework is that the characteristics are collective and cumulative. They describe a profile for how the whole culture feels and acts.
Because cultures are “composed” through the actions and attitudes of many people, the goal is to encourage tribes and teams within the culture that are compatible with the overall vibe. This is a multi-dimensional skill, bringing together people with matching characteristics, not clones, and providing them with the logical and emotional supports to perform successfully and effectively together.
The work of others
We’re not the only people who’ve looked to categorise the characteristics of organisational and/or brand cultures. In her book Fusion, Denise Yohn created a map of 8 Brand Personalities which applies very well to brand cultures. Robert Quinn and Kim Cameron have also developed a timeless model that identifies 4 broad types of culture.
In an excellent and thorough article on organisational culture frameworks, Mark Bridges delves into a range of cultures to examine their drivers and priorities.
He characterises a performance-driven culture for example as one focused on driving bedrock behaviours to enhance overall performance. “By strategically focusing on critical behaviours, leveraging existing cultural strengths, and empowering informal leaders, companies can instigate meaningful change that significantly enhances their performance and competitive edge.”
An innovation culture focuses on exploration and breakthroughs. An employee engagement culture is all about creating the right environments for motivated, committed and high-performing employees. A customer-centric culture is the response to how digital customers like to buy. A design-driven culture centres on delivering exceptional customer experiences. A problem-solving culture underpins organisations committed to continuing improvement and a structured approach to problem solving.
These insights have been helpful in aligning strategy with the Principled Culture. The difference with our approach is that we are suggesting the development and evolution of the culture – the cultural strategy if you like – needs to have a direct relationship with the business strategy.
Our Principled Culture framework
Our 10 types of brand culture share some characteristics and names with what others have done. In developing our framework, we focused on the drivers for people within each type of culture because we wanted to ensure their compatibility with the demands of the strategy.
When aligning strategy with the Principled Culture, each type of strategy is compatible with quite different cultural personas. That’s because a particular type of strategy can be delivered in very different ways by very different groups of people.
Three types of strategy
Our approach starts with identifying which of the different types of strategy your business has chosen to pursue:
- Deliberate – where the organisation defines a path for its future and then pursues that strategy with little reference to what is happening around it. This approach is more common with larger, established players that have a clear vision of what their future looks like and need to focus their resources and people to make it happen.
- Emergent or adaptive – where the organisation sets an initial path, but then looks to make agile and timely shifts in that strategy based on what is happening around them. The emergent approach tends to focus on being responsive, while an adaptive strategy looks to trial by experiment to decide which direction(s) to back over time. These approaches tend to be used by brands that back themselves to “meet the puck”, in terms of anticipating what will be required next and being there ready when it does.
- Iterative – where the organisation acts in a more episodic way to pursue its goals. Often, there is no over-arching strategy. Instead, the brand goes from one release to the next, innovating as it does so. The reference points here are often pop culture and social media, and the key requirement is to be continually interesting. We classify many start-ups in this space because often they move from one thing to another looking for whatever will work next.
An example
We then pair that defining strategy with the appropriate brand culture option. For example, a company pursuing a deliberate strategy could choose from one of the following types of culture:
Performance culture
Which we characterise as: Sales and achievement focused, competitive, dominating.
Purpose culture
Which we characterise as: Altruistic, globally aware, moral
Personality-powered culture
Which we characterise as: Visionary, opinionated, confident
Lean culture
Which we characterise as: Price conscious, customer-focused, service driven
Different ways to achieve alignment
As we said, these cultures stem from very different emotions and generate very different atmospheres. What they share as options for a company with a deliberate strategy is that each culture type is single-minded, convinced that they are on the right path and looking to themselves and their supplier, partner and investor ecosystem to get there.
Strategy is powerful and necessary, but the people factor is crucial to bringing strategy off the page and into the market. The Principled Culture you need may be very like the culture you have now. Or it may be very different. If you’d like to examine aligning your strategy and your culture, a strategic session is an excellent starting point. Use it to rapidly identify whether the culture you have is the culture you need. More on the Principled Culture itself here.
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Photo by Alexandre Chambon on Unsplash