When Culture Eats Strategy for Breakfast
Photo by Jonathan Farber on Unsplash
The title saying is attributed to Peter Drucker, a well-known management guru, so we often think of it with regard to organisations. The unwritten rules of culture will trump strategy any day. But it’s worth also considering with regard to our own lives. How might we be tolerating behaviours in ourselves that undermine our dreams?
I was reminded of this quote in one of the recent modules for ThePowerMBA: Corporate Growth Strategies. This module covers all the ways in which organisations can grow, ranging from product development to Mergers and Acquisitions.
As I’ve shared elsewhere, one of my favourite parts of ThePowerMBA is its human storytelling. Lessons are often illustrated with case studies, which makes everything far more practical and really illuminates the main learnings. Founders share candidly about the mistakes they’ve made, the money they’ve lost, and their circuitous journeys towards success.
But the story told in the Mergers and Acquisitions lesson is the most candid so far. I was genuinely gripped (which, I have to admit, I didn’t expect from a module on corporate growth strategies!).
ThePowerMBA tells the tale of an acquisition that began with a committed, passionate vision for a better world -- and that ended with a cultural crisis that almost threatened to tear Johnson & Johnson apart. That this story is narrated by Jami Taylor, who was part of the J&J team overseeing this very acquisition, makes it even more compelling.
As I heard this story, what jumped out at me was how easy it is to overlook the people element in our desire to scale. Corporate restructurings can be notoriously complex and charged. Exquisite leadership is required to balance the knife-edge of empathy, vulnerability, strategy, and authority that this calls for.
While it’s easy to take this story as a ‘war story’ that other big corporations can learn from, I’ve also been reflecting on what it means at a micro-scale.
How could this story practically translate to entrepreneurs? And how could it be relevant to anyone seeking to build an impactful career that’s also in line with their values?
If you’re a solopreneur in a ‘Company of One’, you may not think of yourself in this way. But of course, we do all create cultures around our work. And being naive about this may mean that our dreams may be undermined by the behaviours that become (consciously or unconsciously) our status quo.
And it’s true even if you’re working for someone else. As a professional today, you need to think of yourself as a ‘business of one’. You’re creating a brand, an ethos, a culture, and a reputation that goes beyond the job that you happen to be in at the moment. As J. T. O’Donnell reminds us: “every job is temporary”.
If our culture is simply a set of behaviors or practices that have become normative, all of us have a culture.
As a founding member of Climate Change Coaches, I recently finished co-facilitating our flagship training programme, designed to help coaches support people around climate change. Our final module was on self-care and resilience.
Most of our attendees were independent coaches, working for themselves.
We asked them to imagine they were instead directors of a coaching organisation, each employing a team of coaches. In this role, responsible for other people, what working culture would they want to create?
For example:
What expectations would they have around their employees’ rhythm of work and rest? For example: how would they view work on weekends or evenings? Would there a maximum number of work hours per day? Would there be guidelines or expectations around email?
How about their employees’ working environments? For example: technology, ergonomic setups, beauty, or natural light?
What budget would they want to allocate towards training or professional development?
What would they want to be the norm for how these people experienced their workplace?
These are really great questions to ask ourselves as entrepreneurs — because for most of us, we don’t treat ourselves like our own star employee that we really want to retain.
We’re guilty of seeing our own energy as an infinite resource: a wide river that — in pursuit of greater and greater achievements — we can just keep on diverting into different streams, and trusting that the water will keep flowing.
Maybe that works if we have five streams. But what if we create fifty? After a while …. they become trickles.
They become more vulnerable to drought.
And the water becomes so shallow that it stops supporting life.
No matter how compelling our vision, if we don’t “protect the asset” — our energy, our vitality, our rest — we’ll undermine the impact that we want to make. Similarly, if we neglect our core values and philosophies in the pursuit of our growth, we might end up with all the trappings of success while feeling deeply unfulfilled. I’ve had mini-cycles of this in my own business. Each one has challenged me to really choose: what kind of person do I want to be, and how do I want my business to reflect this?
So: how can we make sure that culture doesn’t eat our strategy for breakfast?
To play with the metaphor: how can we make our culture the serving dish for our strategy? Something that contains and enhances our vision, rather than subsumes it? (Too much? Ok. Moving on.)
To craft an intentional culture, frame it as a practice, or a series of practices, for us to build into our day. These are designed to live out the values that are most important to us; the values that, if we were asked to design a business for other people, we’d want to be known for.
Here are some really practical examples:
Carve out time to be fully present to your family at certain times of day (for example: once the kids are home from school, work is off the table until they’re in bed). Creating a ‘shut down ritual’ to help close off your workday (and brain) before you transition to time with your loved ones.
Define enoughness for yourself: enough work, enough effort, enough money. And once you’ve got enough, you can take your foot off the pedal. You don’t have to keep reaching for more, just for the sake of more. (This is a great place to get support: find an accountability partner, hire a coach, or join a mastermind. )
Celebrate your achievements with others, and mark them in a way that matters to you, even if it’s uncomfortable.
Build mindfulness into your day. For example: start and end your work day by listing three things that you’re grateful for. Set a timer for morning, lunch, and afternoon to remind yourself to stretch, walk around, and take 60 seconds to breathe deeply and reconnect to the present moment.
Be intentional about the types of companies, suppliers, or clients you support, even if it ends up being a bit more expensive. Maybe it’s ordering books from minority-owned bookstores rather than Amazon; offering subsidised spots in your programmes to minorities, or making B-Corps your first port of call when seeking collaborations.
Consider signing up for 1% for the Planet, or making your business carbon neutral. Find out what practices need to change for you to run your business more sustainably, and begin to make small changes that align with this end goal.
Be diligent about building nature into the rhythm of your day, be it a morning walk, a lunchtime run, or a stroll around the block to help you transition out of the work headspace.
We’re all creating cultures anyway, whether by default or by design.
Let’s be intentional about what we’re practising so that our habits, norms, and behaviours truly support — and more: amplify — the impact we want to have.
Something to chew on: When has your culture undermined your strategy? What happened? And how did you course-correct in response?