Walk into any Apple retail store and you will experience the distinctive culture that is Apple – you know it when you are experiencing it. It is almost visceral.
In general, culture is a rich mixture of distinct values, common heritage, ideology, social norms and a history of unique shared experiences. It is the force that unites and aligns people with an identity and purpose.
Organizational culture, like the one at Apple, is no different; common values, competencies, human capital performance, strategy and expected behaviors coalesce into that distinctive brand of glue that holds a business together, gives an organization that distinct “feel” and aligns human capital performance to the organization’s identity and objectives.
Some organizational cultures are positive, driving employee engagement and performance to the realization of strategic objectives. Employee pride and motivation for high-performance, emanates from an intentionally developed and purposeful organizational culture.
Unfortunately, many businesses have ill defined, negative, fragmented and inconsistently led organizational cultures. These cultures are demoralizing, disengaging and lead to organizational disarray. In organizations with such cultures, you have to question if leadership ever focused on a cohesive sense of identity and belonging. If they had, they would have understood that organizational culture is the force that aligns and wraps employee engagement and performance around the goals, objectives and purpose of the company.
At Prism Partners International, we understand the value of organizational culture. We help Executive Leadership develop a cultural framework and embed the resulting values and behaviors into the fabric of the organization.
Here are 5 leadership actions that will anchor your organization’s cultural foundations:
- Articulate, communicate and reinforce the organizational strategy consistently and timely, to all levels of the employee population.
- Unify and align values and expected behaviors both upward and downward. Upward to the strategy of the company. Downward to the competencies, roles and employee performance that produces the desired customer experience and achieves strategic objectives.
- Live the organizational culture – always and consistently. Communicates the culture – always and consistently.
- Develop and manage talent to be culturally aligned.
- Pace the culture with the organizational strategy, assessing and evolving the culture to align with fundamental shifts in strategy.
At Prism Partners, we understand that optimizing your organization’s strategic success is dependent on a cohesive culture of high performance linking your strategy with your people – your human capital.
We can help you unlock the potential and capacity of your people by aligning people to, and assessing people’s performance against, your organization’s strategy and culture. The result? A more engaged workforce, a notably enhanced customer experience and improved financial returns.
Please contact us to learn how we can help. We invite you sign-up for our weekly blog posts at http://www.prismpartnersintl.com/blog. We also ask that you join our LinkedIn group, Strategic Human Capital Alignment Forum, Like Us on Facebook (Prism Partners International) and Follow Us on Twitter (@PrismPartners).