Article: Align organizational culture with right talent

Culture

Align organizational culture with right talent

Strategy and growth work in parallel only when there a right fitment of people who can understand your business across all levers financial, strategic, operational and personnel.
Align organizational culture with right talent

Many times an organization struggles to work out an alignment between its culture and strategy to create an apt market image. The missing link? It’s picking up the right people to fill the alignment gap.

Let’s face it: no organization can perform in a standalone way, especially when either the strategy is too romanticized (and vague) or the culture is not meshing well with the organization’s broader goals and vision. And so, what’s needed to fix this sticky wicket is getting right people onboard who not just think strategically but also imbibe the cultural attributes that set the brand imagery of the organization.

Here’s how you can make the right culture/ strategy connect by fixing the missing pieces of the organization’s so-called puzzle (aka information gaps).

Envision your primary strategic business priorities – and reverse engineer. Your organization’s strategic priorities might be to boost innovation, upgrade your product’s features or building a strong employer brand – you have to carve your business priorities before you begin to establish a culture that complements your overarching business goals. Once your strategic business levers are laid out, you can then mobilize the requisite resources or reconfigure your existing manpower to achieve these priorities. Working backwards from the goals whilst having a progressive outlook that reflects in your work momentum will give you the best business results.

Define your value systems. Perhaps it is openness or transparency, authenticity or rewarding meritocracy; your value system governs your work approach not just internally but also externally – for your clients, partners, alliances and your business ecosystem in general. Your market responsiveness hinges on your ability to respond with your value-driven culture. That way your customers will trust you in the long-haul for being consistent with what you truly believe in as a part of your cultural DNA.

You need people who are not just culture carriers; but also culture contributors – and see your organization outperform others.

Onboard the right people. For a company to succeed in the long-term, it’s crucial to employ the best talent in the industry. People who are knowledge-driven and agile enough to cope up with the market dynamism are the ones that would sustain with time; not the ones who are commercially driven in their work approach. A right balance of EQ and IQ will go a long way in determining what kind of people will understand your organization – functionally and emotionally – thereby helping you carve the business imperative relative to a given business context/ scenario.

Get your leadership and employees’ strategic buy-in. Just as how it is important to get your management’s buy-in when coming up with a content calendar that defines your company’s thought leadership holistically, as is the case with aligning your organization’s strategy with your leadership’s and employees’ qualified inputs – in the form of strategy, decisions, consensus, meetings, etc. To map out a strategy, your organization should involve every employee to contribute in their own significant ways and accept the status-quo that needs a transition from a continuum of plain surviving to thriving. Once the leadership and employees are in sync with the organization’s bigger focus and growth drivers, their efforts works in synergy towards one common goal: growth.

Analyze progress, incrementally. Once the right resources (manpower) is mobilized, it becomes fairly simple for you (as an organization) to realize the bigger goals, one step at a time. Quite ironically, focus on transient wins – and keeping seeding such wins to create a sustainable, competitive advantage for your organization.

In conclusion, strategy and growth work in parallel only when there a right fitment of people who can understand your business across all levers – financial, strategic, operational and personnel. So, pick the radical yet doable ‘brain’s to boost your organization’s growth and passionately execute on the carved out strategy.

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Topics: Culture, Strategic HR

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