“Strength lies in differences, not similarities.” – Stephen Covey
You are probably aware of the quote from Peter Drucker “Culture eats strategy for breakfast”. The intent behind this quote is that a very good culture and a decent strategy will out-perform and amazing strategy if the culture isn’t right.
After well over 25 years in HR I am fully behind this sentiment. However, there is another angle that needs to be considered. This is that a great culture can be significantly undermined by a business or, in particular, an HR strategy that rubs up against it. The two parts, culture and strategy, need to work in harmony like wine and cheese. Individually they are both good, but together…
This post was inspired by a couple of conversations I had earlier this week. One was with someone who used to work for an organisation that was very successful despite a culture that a lot of people outside of the organisation turned their nose up at. The other was with someone who was taking a step back to look at their strategic HR approach and we were discussing the cultural considerations that were required.
In both cases the cultures we were talking about were what a lot of us would call quite cutthroat. They were very sales focussed, in one of the cases it was as extreme as ‘win or be fired’. Neither was a culture that would have appealed to me and, in talking with a lot of HR professionals, to a most of them either. However, both were cultures that were successful for those organisations. You see, cultures aren’t right or wrong. Cultures need to be relevant.
In one of the conversations we were discussing about softening the edges of the culture. Making it a ‘nicer place to work’. However, despite the concerns that the culture wasn’t right, the employee turnover and other metrics were positive and the business as doing well. My counsel was to make sure that they didn’t throw the baby out with the bathwater by trying to introduce a cultural environment that felt better, but ended up with the organisation losing its edge.
A good way to look at these challenges is through the lens of the Competing Values Framework (CVF). I find that this is a brilliant model for defining culture in tangible terms and identifying the strengths and risks of both a desired culture and the ways of working that either support the culture or create friction with it.
The CVF identifies 4 core types of culture; Clan, Adhocracy, Hierarchy and Market. These are laid out on a 2 x 2 grid to highlight the tensions between them. Clan and Market have a strong tension – it’s really hard to have both of these present to a high degree, one must partly give way to the other. The same is true for Adhocracy and Hierarchy. It’s very hard to have the innovative culture of Adhocracy if you set up your business with the control of Hierarchy.
No business will sit fully in one of these 4 quadrants. There will be elements of each in all organisations, but it’s to what degree that shapes the culture. Choosing to have Market as a dominant trait (this is about being highly competitive in the market), for example, will provide great context for the HR strategy you need. It can very helpfully inform your structures, what type of talent you require and how you go about engaging them.
So, Drucker remains right, culture does eat strategy for breakfast. But let’s make sure that the strategy doesn’t burn the toast (sorry – I’m not sure that this last analogy works, but all this talk of food has made me hungry!)