The late Peter Drucker—regarded by many as the founder of modern business management—used to say that, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” In other words, the collective expression of values is more important than plans of action. As The Management Centre explains, Drucker “didn’t mean that strategy was unimportant—rather that a powerful and empowering culture was a surer route to organisational success.”
So, how do we define culture in the business sense, and why does it matter? The Management Centre has an explainer about the “cultural web,” a theory that applies anthropological concepts of human culture as a way of interpreting business culture. For our purposes, we’ll concentrate on three of those elements: stories, routines, and organizational structures.
Stories
Stories are the way that people retain a collective memory of the successes and failures a business has achieved or survived. They provide goals for us to aspire to or cautionary tales of what to avoid. Each business’s stories will be unique, but they should all be instructive.
Stories ought to have heroes and villains. The heroes are the people who are a part of your company’s family who’ve toughed out the hard times, and the villains might be the obstacles they’ve had to face, such as poor demand, a weak economy, a global pandemic, or something else. (Villains might actually be literal people, too, or even competing companies!)
Remembering the hard work and dignity will spur your employees to want to become part of your business’s narrative, to fill them with a sense of ownership and personal investment they might not otherwise have had.
Routines
Routines are “the patterns of systematic beheaviour that are seen as normal.” As The Management Centre explains further, routines help determine “what’s supposed to happen in a particular situation.”
Consider teamwork. This is an important cornerstone of any business culture. What routines have your employees learned in order to support one another? When the rush comes during the lunch hour at a restaurant, how to the servers all band together to help each other through it?
Quality customer service is another critical routine. From top to bottom, every member of your company must be devoted to delivering the absolute best customer experience each and every time.
Organizational Structures
Where does the buck stop? Who’s the person in charge of this, or responsible for that? When something goes incredibly well or very badly, who answers? When there’s a question an employee doesn’t have an answer to, where does he or she go?
A culture of anarchy is no culture at all. To project confidence to your customers—and to your employees, too—a hierarchy is necessary. If your business were a boat, your well-trained staff are like her oarsmen. But without a strong sense of direction and accountability, that boat would be rudderless.
The Importance of Culture
Strategy versus culture is a lot like how versus why.
Let’s consider this: a good business strategy would be for your salespeople to offer add-ons and upgrades for the products they sell. That’s pretty important for the bottom line, of course, as it’s a sure way to increase total receipts. That’s a how.
But your company’s culture will help explain the why. Customers who are shown the respect of having their options explained to them—whose needs are heard to ensure they’re getting the right products that will meet or exceed their expectations—they’re the ones that’ll come back. They’ll tell their friends, too.
In other words, suggestive selling is great strategy. Wanting to be helpful is great culture.
Charting Course
Developing a company culture may sound daunting, but the truth is that you probably already have one. Making sure that culture is strong, that your employees believe in what they’re doing, is an iterative process of a lot of small adaptations.
In order to do that, we hope you consider reaching out to The Brandt Group. We’re a customer-service and profit-enhancement consultancy in business for more than 25 years, and we’re big believers in employing strategy and culture. By making use of our mystery shopping and leadership training resources, you can achieve success with both. Check around our site today, and don’t hesitate to reach out as soon as you’re ready to chart the way forward.
