How Does an Organization's Culture Affect Its Strategic Plan?

A well-planned strategy can fall apart if you can't get employees to execute it properly. You may think you can simply order employees to comply, but much of their motivation and enthusiasm depends on the type of business culture they work in. Look at your company's culture to see if it is thwarting or helping your strategies. You may be able to increase your business effectiveness by changing the work environment instead of your strategy.

Your strategic plan may not be consistent with your culture. For example, if your company culture focuses on making the workplace enjoyable and your strategic plan involves ramping up production, employees may resist the need to work harder and faster. Similarly, if your culture emphasizes individual achievement and your strategy calls for teamwork, your staff may show up late for meetings or miss them all together.

Your company has a chain of command that may differ from the chain of influence. Powerful personalities may have more influence than their positions warrant. If your culture allows this kind of power to develop, you could find yourself passing a strategy through the chain of command only to see it challenged by an influential individual. You can either try to remove that person's influence or work with it by spending time persuading the influencer to get on board with your strategic plan and sell it to other employees.

You may consider your formal rules the foundation of your company culture. However, informal rules among employees may hold more sway. For example, if employees agree that quality control is a nuisance rather than a plus, your strategy of improving quality may hit a brick wall. Similarly, if managers have an unspoken conviction that expansion could threaten their jobs, you may find your growth strategy meeting strong resistance.

A company with a culture that encourages individual competition may have trouble implementing a strategic plan. Employees who are accustomed to trying to outdo each other may not have the social skills to pull together to make a strategy work. Your efforts to unite the workforce behind a single goal will have to overcome your employees' desire to work toward furthering their individual status.