Business Leaders View Culture as a Crucial Strategic Tool, Not Exclusively HR's Responsibility
In today's fast-paced business world, CEOs who treat culture as a vital component, akin to software code, are better positioned to adapt and scale their organisations. This approach, known as 'cultural architecture', involves deliberately architecting, encoding, and resetting organisational culture with the same rigour and clarity as software code.
Successful CEOs, such as Satya Nadella at Microsoft and Tobi Luetke at Shopify, have demonstrated the power of this approach. By aligning behaviour with strategy, these leaders have fostered high-trust cultures that support fast pivots and retain top performers.
Key aspects of treating culture like code include:
- Engaging leadership at all levels: CEOs and executives run workshops to align on shared cultural values or visions that frame strategy execution. This top-down engagement is balanced with bottom-up feedback to ensure inclusivity and relevance across the organisation.
- Building trust through transparency: Just as code must be maintainable and auditable, culture codes require transparency about goals and ethical guardrails. This builds trust and supports consistent execution of strategy.
- Fostering collaboration and inclusion: Successful CEOs ensure that cross-functional teams with diverse perspectives are involved in shaping culture codes. Inclusiveness enhances both the quality and adoption of the culture code, enabling smoother strategy execution.
- Creating feedback loops and continuous improvement: Like iterating on code based on user feedback and error reports, CEOs establish structured channels for employees to express experiences and concerns, enabling leadership to refine culture and strategy dynamically.
- Appointing culture custodians or champions: Assigning specific leaders to own culture embedding ensures accountability and consistent reinforcement of desired behaviours across hierarchies.
- Starting cultural transformation with early enthusiasts or champions: Rather than forcing broad cultural change at once, CEOs initiate change with enthusiastic adopters who act as promoters and examples for others, accelerating adoption and reducing resistance.
By treating culture like code, CEOs strategically design, implement, and evolve culture with the same discipline, clarity, accountability, and feedback orientation found in software development. This disciplined cultural architecture supports alignment and accelerates execution of complex, high-performance strategies by ensuring all parts of the organisation share a common operating logic and values.
A strong culture supercharges strategy implementation, fostering a sense of ownership, pride, and belonging. Conversely, if leadership avoids tough conversations, middle managers don't cascade key messages, or employees are unclear about their work's connection to company goals, it indicates that the culture may be working against the strategy.
Hiring should prioritise fit with the desired culture, not the existing one. Performance reviews and compensation should be tied to cultural behaviours in a company. A high-trust culture, which allows for fast pivots and retains high performers, is crucial for successful strategy execution.
In conclusion, culture is not optional; it's the operating system for a CEO. Strategy failures often stem from a culture that is not built to deliver it. By treating culture like code, CEOs can build a high-performance strategy execution machine.
[1] Forbes Coaches Council, [article link] [2] Alex Brueckmann, CEO of Brueckmann Strategy Consultants Ltd and Wall Street Journal bestselling author of "The Strategy Legacy."
- Alex Brueckmann, as a renowned CEO and author, might have integrated the concept of treating culture like code in his leadership approach, considering it a crucial aspect for fostering high-performance strategy execution.
- Successful business leaders, such as Alex Brueckmann, recognise the importance of culture in financial performance, carefully architecting and aligning their organisation's culture with strategy to retain top performers and support fast pivots, thereby boosting overall business outcomes.
