Leaders have many important responsibilities in the exercising of their leadership practice – vision, decision-making, strategy, team building and PR immediately spring to mind; yet there is a ‘hidden’ responsibility that might just be the most important of all: company culture.
The term ‘culture’ has two sides: one being the ‘cross-cultural’ nature of things. The cultural diversity that is part of every leader’s portfolio whether they like it or not; the coming together of people of different cultural backgrounds, bonded by geography, generations or a shared world-view. The other side of ‘culture’ refers to ‘the way things are done around here’ – in other words, the way in which people within your organization behave. This is the ‘culture’ that we are talking about here.
Pieter Koerstenbaum’s organisational model suggests that culture is the leader’s primary focus. This makes total sense yet is seldom the reality. Most leaders focus on strategic formation and execution of strategy, a topic that forms a core part of any leadership development programme and is central to leadership education. Leaders are raised believing that strategy is their main focus and along with strategy comes vision. Of course strategy is important but research has shown that the majority of strategic initiatives fail to deliver on the intended outcomes. Research suggests that only between 10-30% of strategies are ‘successful’ which, given the investment that underpins most strategies, is a very poor return on investment! These are good strategies put together by smart people that raise the obvious question: how then does one account for the failure of these strategies?
From the various research conducted into this area, the biggest reason found for this delivery failure is that the company culture doesn’t support the changes envisaged and embedded in the strategy. In other words the people either unwilling or are unable to support the changes being implemented. The strategy might need to change but if the company culture doesn’t make the necessary changes, the strategy will fail.
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