Blog | Walking the Talk Blog

What you need to do to get culture on the strategic agenda

Written by Amanda Fajak | 27-Nov-2017 07:11:00

Getting culture onto the strategic agenda is usually a function of 3 conditions.

The first is an ‘enlightened’ CEO or influential Executive team member who through experience ‘gets’ the criticality of getting the right culture to achieve business success.

The second condition is more common, when a regulator or a board or a reputational event trigger an executive to ‘do something about their culture’. 

The third is a passionate senior leader or HR trying to get culture on the agenda.

 

In the first case it is often the sheer will and enthusiasm of the CEO or influential leader that puts and keeps culture on the strategic agenda. Unfortunately, even in today’s world these passionate executive are still quite rare.

So, if you don’t have one of the few passionate CEOs what do you do? The answer is to tackle culture rationally and logically and to get every Executive where it matters – their strategic objectives.

Culture efforts succeed and sustain when Executives make an intellectual link between the business outcomes that they are committed to deliver and the fact that whilst human beings deliver on those strategies, their patterns of behaviour matter.

Here are 3 key questions to help you:

  1. What are the business imperatives for which culture is important?
  2. In order to achieve these business imperatives, how you need people to behave?
  3. What is at risk if people don’t behave this way?

 

For further insights view our selection of case studiesebooksreports and white papers or contact us to learn how we can transform your culture.