Peter Drucker, the ultimate management guru, famously said, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” Most nonprofits will invest hundreds of hours if not tens of thousands of dollars to create strategic plans, while few approach their culture with the same level of intention.
Consultants like me love to design and build things – plans, processes, tools, strategies. Nonprofit leaders and Boards feel they’ve gotten their money’s worth when they have something on paper to show for their investment. However, the value of that work will be significantly limited if it doesn’t live in a culture that values, embodies, and can sustain whatever it is on the paper.
If culture can block, consume, undermine, or re-direct our strategies, then it deserves more attention, in my view.
What is organizational culture?
Though there’s general agreement that culture is real and critically important, there’s also a general acknowledgement that it is hard to define. This Harvard Business Review article describes several definitions of culture and theories about its origins and impacts. However, they mostly agree that it functions in a certain way.
At its core, organizational culture is the system of shared beliefs, values, and assumptions that govern the way people behave in organizations. It is “the way we do things here.” It is the walk that may or may not reflect the talk. Culture is more than just what it “feels like” to work somewhere.
Culture shapes how we communicate, make decisions, set direction, define success, motivate and reward employees, hire and fire, share information, make change, solve problems, manage our time, differentiate roles, delegate, distribute power and authority . . .
How can you see it?
Just like a fish doesn’t know he’s in water, we often aren’t aware of our organization’s culture. That is, until we find ourselves in a drastically different one. I’ve only ever become aware of one organization’s culture when I’ve contrasted it with another’s. Consider another organization you’ve worked in or with. If you had to describe how your organization operates in contrast to that one, what stands out?
I also think culture becomes evident when two values are in tension with one another, and the organization has to make a choice. Which prevails most often? Which way does the organization lean?
| Risk-taking & innovation | v. | Tried & true |
| Concentrated power | v. | Participatory decision-making |
| Free flowing information | v. | Hierarchical access to information |
| Verify | v. | Trust |
| Two-way communication | v. | Top-down communication |
| Cooperation | v. | Competition |
| Conformity | v. | Individuality |
| Autonomy | v. | Accountability |
What difference does it make?
Culture determines what gets prioritized, implemented, or rewarded; which initiatives and changes thrive, merely survive, or die; and your organization’s capability to adapt, improve, innovate, learn, and grow.
Bottom Line
“Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” What’s it going to eat for lunch?
Next time, I’m going to dig into cultures of learning and improvement – what they look like and why they matter. Stay tuned . . .