Why Culture Eats Strategy For Breakfast … Lessons From A “Corporate Anthropologist”

I was really excited about having booked Michael Henderson (cultural coach to the NZ All Blacks) to present a workshop for BlackbBelt Mastermind Members in September 2015

So you can imagine my disappointment when the All Blacks changed their World Cup preparation schedule and Michael had to postpone our BBM workshop until the December 2015 workshop.

However, it was worth the wait and I wanted to share a few of the key points that resonated for me from his workshop.

It wouldn’t surprise me if those people who were at the workshop have a completely different list of key takeaways.

There are so many elements which go into what eventually makes up your practice culture, that I imagine what people took from Michael’s workshop would be very personal to them.

The MOST Important Thing is to know what is The Most IMPORTANT Thing

Michael asserts that if you have more than two people involved in your practice, then you already have a culture whether you know it or not. Therefore, you need to acknowledge this and you might as well decide what kind of culture you really want, rather than risk accepting the default culture that evolves (which may or may not be in line with your own core values).

As business owners, we often think we can create the culture from the top.

Michael subscribes to a twist on this view that you can’t CONTROL culture, but you can INSPIRE it

In a practice situation, this means you need to be able to convey WHY you do the things you do, rather than just WHAT you do.

Which TYPE of CULTURE Do You Want To INSPIRE in Your Practice

Here’s how Michael described the 3 Kinds of Culture

 

The CONTROLLING Culture

This type of culture is important where you need to control relationships for safety reasons for example, or where price is a big issue.

The RELATING Culture

This type of culture values creating customer intimacy as the most important. This is the culture to inspire if you wish to emphasise quality of service.

The DEVELOPMENT Culture

The example Michael gave here was Apple above all else, they value innovation and being able to continually come up the next greatest thing.

The CULTURE / Strategy Relationship

One of the biggest mistakes business owners make with their culture is NOT to ALIGN their culture with their STRATEGY.

For example, you could never expect a platoon of American Marines to develop the latest and greatest in tech gear, because you would be asking an organisation with a culture of CONTROL to work towards a strategy that requires innovation.

Likewise, you can’t expect your Receptionists to develop customer intimacy with patients if you are inspiring a controlling culture in your team.

Michael also introduced a model that really helps to clarify why your practice culture is such an important driver in reaching your goals.

 

The feathers on the arrow represent culture. The job of the feathers is to elevate and stabilise the shaft as it flies towards the target. They keep it on track and give the arrow its power to go the distance.

The head of the arrow represents strategy. The strategy defines the direction of travel.

Strategy Without CULTURE is POWERLESS, and 

CULTURE without Strategy is DIRECTIONLESS.

Logic Makes You THINK, but,

Emotion Makes You ACT.

Therefore, the reason CULTURE is more POWERFUL than strategy is that it has more influence over people’s behavior (and performance) than strategy because it is underpinned by emotion. Strategy is created with logic.

Defining Your Values – CULTURAL QUESTIONS FOR YOUR TEAM

The next step for you as the leader of your Podiatry practice would be to involve your whole team in a workshop to define a set of common values.

Raise questions like

1. What do we agree to BELIEVE in?
2. How do we agree to BEHAVE with one another, and with our patients?
3. What determines that someone BELONGS or does NOT BELONG in our practice?

It’s only when you can empower your team to take ownership of your practice culture that you can start to create it, because the culture belongs entirely to the people who are in it.

At the December 2015 Mastermind workshop, we broke into groups and used images as inspiration to spark ideas about values that meant something to us, and then each created a statement about how that value relates to the group.

One of ours was

COMMUNITY

We bring together like-minded practice owners from the Podiatry profession and provide education and support to help them move towards their individual goals, irrespective of the stage of their journey 

Have you consciously thought about your own practice culture, or is a culture development workshop going to be part of your 2017 planning?

 

until next time,

Jon Heath