- JAXONLABS
Align Organizational Culture To Your Business Strategy
Updated: Apr 14, 2023
Your customer doesn’t care how much you know until they know how much you care. – Damon Richards
Let’s face it, a business with a positive emotional impact on its employees, customers, and stakeholders in addition to being highly profitable is the holy grail of building a company. Success like this is a result of healthy organizational culture and a robust business strategy.
The most exceptional companies in the world like Apple, Bridgewater Associates, and Virgin have all found a way to achieve this balance which allows them to sustain lasting success and attract/retain the best talent.
Where does building a business of this magnitude start? More importantly, how can smaller and medium-sized companies leverage some of the same practices these global powerhouses use to create a similar business model? Even on a modest scale.
Well, it starts with understanding the relationship between your business strategy, and organizational culture. This relationship between these two concepts has a tremendous effect on your brand value.
Below we outline 3 factors that you need to consider to merge these two concepts.
Philosophy and Values
Expectations
Business Processes
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ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE & BUSINESS STRATEGY PHILOSOPHY/VALUES
The philosophy of an organizations culture and its core values make up the foundation a brand and business is built on.
Business processes tie everything together to fulfill the wants and needs of your customer while bringing self-worth and accomplishment to your employees and organization as a whole.
Many established business leaders have a guiding philosophy that has proven some levels of success. How you handle good news, or bad news, your way of dealing with customers, and what kind of products or services you will support.
However, even though you have success, remember most people are not exempt from bad habits and can work to improve their approach to running a company continuously.
That being said, change is daunting because we become comfortable as humans in our methodology of running our lives.
If we are brave enough to dive into the effects of our guiding philosophy and the outcome of our businesses, we will surely understand how we can influence to create a healthier organizational culture.
Once we begin to develop a clear understanding of our philosophy for making decisions and managing people, we can start to simplify this philosophy into precise terms that will become our core values.
Values are an integral part of building organizational culture into a business strategy because they determine how we should act throughout each step of our operations, marketing, and customer service cycle.
Strong brands make a concerted effort to stay consistent with their guiding values. A lack of consistency creates confusion and mistrust in the eyes of customers and key stakeholders.
Know any organizations that you have come in contact with that lack this consistency? More importantly, if your company is one of them we can show you how to correct these behaviors.
ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE & BUSINESS STRATEGY EXPECTATIONS
Expectations are where organizational culture originates in practice. How a founder, executive, or high-level managers expect things to work around them has a ripple effect throughout a company.
A question to ask yourself:
Do you want to build a company that runs based purely on authority or would you rather ideas be judged on their merit? How does this affect the core values or guiding philosophy?
Perhaps you are forward-thinking and interested in cultivating growth and development within your organization.
You’ll want to create systems that support employee freedom and accountability, which are required to help any business operate autonomously at its highest level of potential.
ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE & BUSINESS STRATEGY BUSINESS PROCESSES
The final step in the process is to integrate your core values & expectations into your business strategy, then train employees to align with them.
Aligning these two components is a challenge, especially for dysfunctional organizational cultures. However, with the right process, you can correct any incongruent behavior.
We like to dive into the minds of our client’s employees and understand their hang-ups. To correct them and align their thinking with the brand’s core values and philosophy while doing their job when need to establish their current state.
One major obstacle is overcoming your own bias as an owner/manager and being objective enough to dive into the details of why cultural alignment is off in the business’s operations.
Employees feel intimidated by management and owners and are reluctant to reveal their true feelings. Whereas, with an outside party, employees might have an easier time discussing their beliefs because they know their information is somewhat confidential.
Developing a safe space is a critical first step to deploy the necessary tactics and strategies to create efficiency and satisfaction.
Now is the time to decide whether you are going to actively invest in developing your company to be the best version of itself.
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