The harmony between corporate culture and its wide reaching implications to strategy and output has become central in all successful companies. There is a very particular correlation between  people that make things happen and your company’s financial performance, as explained by author and keynote speaker Brent Gleeson. Gone are the days when employees were just supposed to follow orders from “up top”.

Today, businesses that truly “get it” depend largely on factors such as continuous learning, openness in the workplace, consistent engagement, creative problem solving and a unified mindset to propel into the future. Traditional leadership tactics have become grossly redundant.

President and Co-Founder of WebpageFX, William Craig, states that organizations can only achieve big when they immortalize these values and integrate them in all levels of hierarchy from the leaders in the boardroom right down to the overall work culture.

A company’s reputation, its goals and legacies primarily depend on what’s going on behind all the work the people put in – all the numbers they churn up. It is the culture of an organization that defines its future.

Strategy can never be of any use unless there is a powerful force of culture backing everything up. When you’re offering benefits to your workers or awarding them a performance bonus, there is always culture at work there.

Take a Long and Hard Look at Your Company and the Kind of Cultural Message it Resonates

So many promising businesses fail because leadership ends up jack hammering strategy upon strategy instead of first balancing the overall ambience and culture.  It isn’t surprising that they think culture is an autonomous process, which is far from the truth.

CMO of Live Possible, Peter Ashworth, maintains that culture is primarily about taking care of people who help build your legacy. And to do more for them in order to increase your footprint throughout the globe with your services and products.

Do you really believe that a multinational company such as Starbucks thrived and excelled just because of their coffee? Nope, it wasn’t “just” their coffee that made people drive in groves to them. It is their ambience, their culture and environment that has people hooked.

Ask yourself this, what frame of mind would you rather your employees take home after they’ve been sweating blood and tears at the end of a difficult week? A) A feeling that they’re just meant to work hard like donkeys all their lives? Or B) Going home feeling they’ve contributed an intrinsic, intangible part of themselves working for a leader that truly cares about them and will always remember them?

Instead of sending your employees home with a paycheck every month, why not focus on sending them with something more than just money – an experience, a realization that they’re making so much happen at your company.

True Innovation Comes With This Realization

The core element of a business strategy is your vision as well as the culture of your vision. You have to look beyond procedure, beyond data and numbers. You have to select meaning over measurement.

As per a survey by Booz & Company, organizations had 30% enterprise value and an enhanced profit boost of 17% after they had streamlined their culture with their vision and business strategy.

Sadly, 36% of companies admitted their overall strategy is poorly aligned with culture and approach as an organization. And 46% stated having a brittle and failing culture, which did not support their strategies in any way.

Reflect on your organization’s mission. Peer into whether it has a deeper purpose defined. Join heads with your managers and employees in bringing values into every meeting. Let your team as well as customers define true values and influence the definition of those values. That is the only way you will constantly evolve and keep moving forward; the only way to perfectly align your corporate culture with strategy.

Fatima Mansoor is a writer at Aepiphanni, a small business operations and strategy consultancy that exists to help small business owners CREATE | DESIGN | BUILD extraordinary businesses. She specializes in business & entrepreneurship, digital marketing, and health & fitness. Her focus is on creating compelling web content for small and medium businesses form diverse industries. She mostly writes for entrepreneurs and marketing agencies across the US, Australia and UK.

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