Why is culture the new strategic advantage in business?

It is a well-documented fact that a new level of strategic advantage is realized when employees are aligned with the company’s values. To gain the strategic advantage through your people means executive leaders must lead by example and celebrate the values while holding those who don’t live the values accountable.

The workplace as we know it is in the process of radical change. People have more work options than ever before. Individuals are finding, post-pandemic, that their priorities have changed. They wish to work in a place that goes beyond just getting a paycheck. Employees need two critical elements to be happy and engaged: alignment with the company values and the ability to work in a place that gives meaning to their lives.

The keystone to enabling the employees of a company to flourish is holding everyone accountable for living the values. All employees must ensure that everyone’s work objectives contribute to the meaningful purpose of the company. Living the values makes the work environment a safe and predictable place. When you have a psychologically safe workplace, employees struggle less, find ways to survive, and find a meaningful path to navigate the challenges in their personal and corporate lives.

Living the values activates the means to drive employees to achieve strategic objectives. Living the values, especially when times are arduous, creates a positive energy to embrace change, not curse change. People do not fear change if it happens in the context of the values, and, at the same time, they clearly understand how the change benefits them and moves the company towards its vision or purpose.

Values-based organizations outperform their competitors because they live the values without compromising the behaviours that define living these values. By doing so, they create healthy functioning humans resulting in healthy-functioning teams that culminate in a thriving business.

Where Is Your Company?

There’s no secret: your business’s success depends entirely on your people. You need employees to be working with commitment and purpose. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a for-profit or non-profit – The commonality is people. You need your people to be functioning and working well together. They need to know that the work environment is safe and that people’s actions are predictable. When you have a working environment that reflects:

• High stress,
• Massive budgets,
• Big audacious goals,
• Critical deliverables,
• People from various cultural backgrounds, Different skill sets and different personalities.

The only way you will successfully implement a strategy to achieve shared success is when you have individuals and teams that work well, helping across business units, knowing, and feeling that alignment with the values guides a common code of conduct. When this happens, employees work well together, irrespective of backgrounds and skill sets. When we see misalignment with the behaviours of the values, the working conditions are tenuous, and this is a straight line reflected in a company’s success. People have anxiety when anticipating others’ reactions. When people are at odds and confused as to their goals and the expectations people have of them, it creates silos; the culmination of uncertainty is very expensive.

In short, whatever the setting, you need your people working well together. Employees need a common foundation of beliefs and a single focus on a positive future. Having the values expressed so the leaders can “check a box,” but without leaders having the accountability to live the values creates a worse situation than not stating the values at all. People will work well together to benefit the business only when leaders live the values. Hence, organizations that live their values outperform those who are not living their values.

Values create a cohesive collective and are the number one contributing factor why culture is the focus for many businesses today – to the point that culture is now known as the new strategic advantage in business. No longer can the values be wall décor; take down the motivational posters. It’s when the values are aligned across the hearts and minds of people within the entire organization at all levels and business units that make an organization can be poised to be competitive and successful.

Values are reflected in the artifacts.

Values are standards of behaviours always expected of all employees and with all human interactions. They are FIXED. Culture is how you transform those values into reality by forming a cultural perspective. The result is a variety of artifacts that say, “we live the values.” There are corporate legends and stories, guideposts to people who lived the values, usually in difficult circumstances. A company’s values are reflected in its rituals and ceremonies, the stories that happened that ensure evidence of the values in the workplace. You institute the values in how you recognize achievements and structure the work environment’s layout. Your business processes properly reflect your values when the employees’ jargon or usage of language gives understanding to your values and, in turn, your culture. Words matter. Every decision by a leader can be decoded if it is in line with the values or not.

What message are you sending when you set up the ergonomics so there is isolation and compress the work into fewer employees by adapting lean philosophy? What message are you sending about the values of collaboration and caring? Are the actions of implementing lean-cutting staffing to drive profit because a consultant says they are popular? What happens when the actions cause values to clash? What happens is that employees become disillusioned and disenfranchised; values don’t matter when they’re just words on a wall and not actually and truly lived by the company. The disconnect becomes real. Overworking people so they don’t have time to get to know their employees as people leave them feeling like they are just pawns to make the executives rich. Too often, a new strategy or organizational structure is implemented without considering the existing values and artifacts of the culture. While the strategy or new structure seems to work for other firms or is good, in theory, the nuance of your firm’s existing values will be a sinkhole causing you a failure. Don’t forget what made your company what it is and what values the founders put in place.

For the values to be authentic and the foundation for all interactions and decision-making, people look to the actions of the executive team. When interacting with individuals at the executive level, they must experience a strong and consistent alignment between values and actions at the executive level. Leadership is the critical piece to delivering a message that reinforces the values. Why? Because people are always looking to their leaders to decode the right way of acting. It is not what they say. It is what they do. I have heard many employees complain about the conflict between words and deeds. When the disconnect between the executive team’s actions and the company values is strong, I remind people of an old Yiddish saying: A fish begins to stink from its head.

Once an organization defines not only the words that describe the values but also the behaviours that are guideposts of living the values, leadership has an obligation to role model living the value behaviours every single day. These values hold everyone, from the custodial staff to the COO, to the same standard. Once the values are communicated to the employees, they no longer remain aspirational. The leadership cannot say they are a work in progress, allowing people to violate the value behaviours while achieving desired results. It is incumbent on the leadership to lead from the front by example.

The articulation of the values must paint employees a vivid picture of what it looks and feels like to have your company’s employee experience. When done correctly, the values and behaviours expressed by the employees are based on an authentic work experience, and employees develop pride and commitment to the organization.

People talk about the organizational culture and intellectually understand that their values are the cornerstones of the culture, but often fall short of reinforcing the values when they set up processes, policies and physical artifacts that seem to send a contradictory message. Before implementing a new structure or strategic plan, consider if the actions will align with the behaviours of the values. If not, change the strategy or structure to be congruent with the values. Why? Because changing one’s values is not something you can ask people to do overnight. How long did it take for you to understand or realize what your values are? Will you change your values if asked by a new leader you never worked with before?

One word of caution. If the CEO and the others in the C-Suite will not hold themselves or other people accountable to the point of dismissing an individual for repeated violation of the values, don’t begin the journey and don’t allow yourself to fall into the abyss of being an executive hypocrite. It is very difficult to come back from that.

Your turn

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