Company Culture in Building High-Performing Organizations: The Critical Levers

Maintaining organizational viability and effectiveness is a constant challenge for company leaders. Among the most powerful tools at their disposal are strategy and culture. While strategy provides a formal logic for achieving goals and focuses on people around them, culture expresses those goals through shared values and beliefs and guides activity through group norms and assumptions.

The importance of strategy in mobilizing people and achieving goals is widely recognized, but culture is often overlooked as a critical lever. Culture is an elusive force, anchored in unspoken behaviors, mindsets, and social patterns, making it difficult for leaders to manage. However, culture and leadership are inextricably linked, and the best leaders understand this relationship and can deftly influence the process.

Unfortunately, many leaders seeking to build high-performing organizations fail to recognize the power and dynamics of culture. They may lay out detailed plans for strategy and execution, but without a deep understanding of culture, their plans may fall apart. As the saying goes, culture eats strategy for breakfast.

But there is hope. Culture can be managed, and the first step is for leaders to become fully aware of how it works. Culture is a critical component of organizational viability and effectiveness. It defines the social order of a company and shapes attitudes and behaviors in profound and lasting ways. When culture is aligned with personal values, drives, and needs, it can unleash tremendous amounts of energy toward a shared purpose, fostering an organization's capacity to thrive. However, it can also become a liability, thwarting even the most thoughtful and well-executed strategic plans.

The academic literature on organizational culture is extensive, with a plethora of definitions, models, and methods for assessing it. Yet, despite the lack of agreement on specifics, four generally accepted attributes have emerged. Culture is shared, pervasive, enduring, and implicit.

Leaders seeking to build high-performing organizations must be aware of these attributes and understand how culture works. They must appreciate the powerful role it plays in shaping an organization's destiny and the need to manage it effectively. Unfortunately, many leaders either let culture go unmanaged or relegate it to the HR function, where it becomes a secondary concern for the business.

In conclusion, culture and leadership are inextricably linked, and the best leaders are fully aware of the multiple cultures within which they are embedded, sensing when change is required and deftly influencing the process. Leaders who can harness the power of culture, in conjunction with strategy, can build organizations that thrive in even the most trying times.

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