Creating Organizational Alignment: Strategy, Culture, and Talent

By Lynda Silsbee
Today’s Advisor features an article on organizational alignment strategy by Lynda Silsbee, CPT, SPHR. Silsbee is the founder and principal consultant at Performance Dimensions Group, a boutique consulting group that provides the resources and skills to nurture organizations along the path to achieving high performance.

After countless client projects involving strategy formulation and execution, I have learned many things—one of the most important being that having a strategic plan does not mean the strategy can or will be executed. Failure to execute the strategy is the reason a strategy fails, but the most important lesson is that one’s organizational culture either enables or disables the ability to execute … to borrow a quote from Peter Drucker, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast!” Culture is so powerful that this quote was posted in the War Room at Ford Motor Company.
As an HR professional, I know that HR can impact strategic execution and culture in a big way.
The problem is the leadership team creates a strategic plan and hands it over to managers and frontline employees to execute … What happens between leadership and management is the problem.
There is no in-depth explanation of the strategy and, if there is, it sounds almost like a foreign language, loaded with phrases like, “stakeholder value,” “profitable growth,” and “creating value for customers.”

How HR Contributes to Strategy Execution

Employees need to see strategic initiatives broken down into digestible chunks without any fancy terms—just call them goals and objectives. HR possesses the perfect skills and tools to drive goals and objectives down to the middle managers and employees on the frontline. It’s called the “performance management system.” HR can become a strategic partner just by leveraging the organization’s performance management system as a tool to drive strategic execution.
Before I go any further on strategy and the ways HR can contribute, let’s take a more in-depth look at how to create a high-performance culture that should be aligned in a way to execute strategy.
Way back in 1999, I created our “high-performance work environment” model (the word “culture” was viewed a squishy, nonbusiness stuff back then) to enable organizations to improve their ability to achieve business objectives, attain financial and customer goals, and create a sustainable, competitive advantage. Together, these make up an organization’s talent-management practices, and they are broken down into specific elements that can be evaluated and improved on when needed.

Three Significant Drivers of Culture

First, we should define what we mean by “performance-oriented culture.” In short, culture is the glue that binds an organization together. It’s the collection of values, beliefs, symbols, and norms that the organization follows and that defines the organization and how it does business each and every day. Three significant drivers of a performance-oriented culture are:

• Leadership. Leaders must be communicators (in words and deeds), constantly and consistently conveying your organization’s mission, vision, values, and objectives to employees. But that doesn’t mean those elements can’t evolve. Leaders also need to challenge processes that aren’t working and need to work toward change for the better. Those in leadership positions must ask for feedback and should listen carefully to what they hear. From there, sound problem solving and decision making must take hold.
• Mission, vision, values, and business strategy. Your organization must define these elements very carefully, and it must revisit them regularly as it improves. Mission is simply your purpose for being in business. Vision is your desired long-term results—what is your destination? Values are how you and your employees should and will behave in seeking to attain those results. Business strategy is the methods your organization will use to achieve results and sustain its competitive advantage.
• “The Match”—organizational and employee match. The relationship between organization and worker is a kind of dance that needs to stay balanced but also must move forward. First, the employee’s competencies (technical and interpersonal skills, knowledge, and necessary experience level) must match the organization’s requirements in executing its mission. There also needs to be a cultural match, whereby the employee’s own motivations, values, behavior, and style are a mutually good match with the organization’s values and culture.

The Top 5 Ways HR Can Impact Strategy Execution

In my experience, these are the top five ways HR can impact strategy execution:

1. Be part of (or lead) the strategic planning process so HR is involved at the beginning.
2. Assist in the creation of some simple communications of the plan with understandable terms for all employees, and make sure middle managers in particular understand the strategy and how their function aligns with the strategy.
3. Align the HR strategy and function to the new organizational strategy so that all HR programs link to and can impact strategy.
4. Update the new behaviors and/or competencies needed to make the strategy successful in job descriptions and a performance management system.
5. Work with leadership to align all rewards and performance management processes to desired business performance goals or outcomes.

In tomorrow’s Advisor, Silsbee discusses the role of leadership in transforming company culture.