Strategic Planning and Workplace Culture are Equally Important to Your Mission
A client asked me to do Strategic Planning with them. They went on to say, “We have done a lot of work on culture, and now we really need to focus on strategy.”
I realized that they, like many, were seeing strategy and culture as two different conversations. But the truth is that culture and strategy go together like peanut butter and jelly.
The culture norms of your organization are:
The ways in which you communicate.
The behaviors you hold yourself accountable to (even when no one is looking).
How you resolve conflict.
How you treat and support yourself and each other.
The human body is designed with strong bones to form the skeleton, but it is the tendons and ligaments that allow for movement and function.
In the workplace, “bones” are the processes, procedures, and skills that make up the skeleton of your team. And “tendons and ligaments” are communication, empathy, and trust between people.
How well a workplace functions is dependent on how healthy those connecting tendons and ligaments are.
In other words, you can have all the right processes, procedures, and skills in place, but without communication, empathy, and trust, the work is not getting done as effectively or as powerfully as it could be.
It doesn’t matter how clear and admirable your strategies are if you're lacking a positive culture. And it doesn’t matter how positive your culture is if you're lacking clear strategies. Creating that alignment can be tricky, so when I facilitate for clients, I rely on my Navigating Challenging Dialogue® Approach to Strategic Dialogue.
I’m sharing the handout I send to every one of my Facilitated Strategic Dialogue clients.
I see many organizations working harder than they need to because their culture and strategy is out of balance. And the last thing any of us need right now is to be working harder than we have to.
The NCD Approach to Strategic Dialogue
Your team can benefit from my NCD Approach to Strategic Dialogue if you’re:
working harder than you think you need to be.
doing great work despite a negative culture.
dealing with big unanswerable or unsolvable questions
working without any transparent goals or strategies
Schedule your no-obligation call and explore if my Facilitated Strategic Dialogue session is exactly what you need.