S7 E12 Strategy and Culture Alignment for Business Sustainability. Strategy and culture for Business Sustainability with Lisa Askwith

To build your Culture and Strategy to become symbiotic is key to your long term business successes and hence sustainability. However, many businesses overlook this key next step. Don't let your business suffer, take the next step and build sustainability too! Mark Emmer, gave a fantastic overview of 10 key steps to a killer strategy, and it allows me to add what that means for your culture, so you can ensure the 2 are working together symbiotically, and you achieve business sustainability; these were 1. Develop a true vision. Culture- make sure the vision is more than a document on the wall it must be living and breathing- KPI’s, rewards, internal documents, JD’s it must be talked about and interwoven through all of this, and include behavioral aspects 2. Define competitive advantage. Culture- Are you people able to raise their voice and add to this. Has this been expanded beyond the leadership team- use your greatest asset, your people to help you here and you will see your culture grow symbiotically with your business plan/strategy. 3. Define your targets. Culture- Are your targets communicated to everyone? Or is it just sales? If you want to build a culture that everyone can feel proud of they need to be connected to the overall objectives too. How are the rest of your people encouraged and engaged to help drive these targets, are they recognised? You need more than sales targets controlled by sales people to generate a culture across the business, others need to be engaged too. This can be key parts of their KPI’s, special projects or shared work. All will help your culture evolve and be supported by your strategy. 4. Focus on systematic growth. Culture- This is a key culture builder that drives synergy. You can gain so much from your strategy supporting your culture on this point, do not miss it in your business!!!! You people are your greatest asset, so make sure you allow them to show that. They have some much experience and many ideas that are easily overlooked that if harnessed can lead to massive gains for any business. Allow your people to help drive your growth, have a shadow board, allow for working teams, source new ideas from the floor and support them through leadership and working teams, have agile focus groups, have new idea focus groups, rotate these, the list goes on. 5. Make fact-based decisions. Culture- Allow and expect your people to present facts, develop them to look for the right data, have appropriate training courses available, have appropriate resources available, teach agile thinking. Build all of this into your strategy. 6. Think long term. Culture- Set agile quarterly reviews, develop an agile mindset through training and encourage your people to challenge assumptions and reset as often as needed. Remove excuses and embrace change. Encourage change and remove fear from speaking up. Develop your leaders through agile training and ensure they are also trained as coaches, and your culture will blossom being supported by all these points being embedded in your strategy. 7. But, be nimble.- Agility is key Culture- Make Agility a core value and build it into your leadership KPI’s, this will then trickle down through the business. Support it positively and reward new ideas and change plus ensure your people are involved. 8. Be inclusive. Culture- Make D&I a key part of your strategy, without doing this it will not live in your business. Include it in leadership KPI’s but more importantly train your leaders to not only challenge assumptions but to learn how to challenge their own fixed mindset. Train the value of mixed teams and different backgrounds. Train the value of cross functional work. Have internal metrics set up to monitor how long people stay in the same role and make sure they are trained in other areas if this passes xx years. 9. Invest time in pre-