StrAgility

Newly hired executives rarely fail because they lack the ability to actually do the job. When someone new to the role stumbles, when he/she destroys rather than adds value it's, more-often-than-not, because the individual in question either didn't fully understand or was poorly equipped to respond to the cultural challenge. Bringing someone new to the organization without factoring in the emerging culture is the business equivalent of attempting to cross a busy intersection with one's eyes closed. In today's business climate, introduce really bad weather into that scenario.

Conventional wisdom suggests that culture follows strategy. The dilemma: in a world where strategy is persistently under attack "the plan" has to be constantly revisited. The new dictum: culture enables strategy. What endures, what provides the platform for growth, what shapes future performance, what enables different strategic scenarios to unfold, is culture. The quote "culture eats strategy for breakfast" was displayed prominently in the war room where Ford Motor Company "Way Forward" plan was developed in 2005.¹

The work that supports the link between culture and performance goes back well over a decade. Research, in particular by Kotter and Heskett, found a strong correlation between performance and culture/context fit (Corporate Culture and Corporate Performance, page 38/39).

The challenge, of course, is not merely to possess a strong culture but to build a business environment that shapes how people act and, at the same time, supports emerging strategic scenarios. With this in mind, the assessment that follows uniquely looks at both strength (leadership, communication and teamwork) and agility (the customer's voice, talent management, and challenge the status quo) as a means to: (1) assess today's culture; (2) enter into the culture conversation with a view to take culture to the next level; (3) assess "culture fit" when bringing someone new onto the team.

Organizations that have both strong and agile cultures are defined, in the scoring section of the assessment, as delivering "StrAgility."

¹ This term appeared earlier in Informatics and Primary Care Volume 10, Number 4, 1 November 2002, pp. 195-196(2).

Note: the assessment draws on, and was first published in Myth, Magic, Mindset: A Template for Organizational Culture Change (2008). John O. Burdett