It's important for leaders to understand their organization's culture and determine how it is affecting strategy implementation and ultimately performance. This knowledge can then be used to target the changes necessary to the culture and/or the strategy so that the alignment necessary for effective implementation of strategy is achieved.

The Culture-Strategy Fit Profile™ helps leaders understand the culture of their organizations, how it affects performance and achievement of strategy, and where to focus to improve culture-strategy alignment so that strategy implementation is accelerated and goals are achieved faster.

Will today's cultural patterns fit tomorrow's needs?

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Rather than focus on general attributes of organizational culture, hypothetical ‘ideal' culture states and industry norms that fail to address the unique strategic needs of each organization, Strategic Business Alignment developed the Culture-Strategy Fit Profile™ to focus on the specific elements of culture that have the greatest influence on strategy implementation and organizational performance. It is specifically designed to provide leaders with a practical view of the current culture 'reality' that can be compared to the organization's specific strategic context.

For example, an organization that wants to implement a strategy that is entrepreneurial and aggressive is going to have difficulties if its culture values low risk taking, hierarchical decision-making and positional power. On the other hand, many of these same cultural attributes can contribute positively to the effectiveness of a heavily scrutinized regulated company. In other words, organizations have diverse cultures and must be carefully assessed to ensure they support new goals and strategies.

Click here to find out more about what differentiates the Culture-Strategy Fit Profile™ from other culture surveys.


Assessing culture-strategy alignment

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The Culture-Strategy Fit Profile™ and its 'sister' diagnostic the Culture-Strategy Fit Check-Up™ are based on research started in 1988 in a cross-section of organizations and industries. It is designed in two parts: 1) organizational culture and 2) strategic context. The organizational culture section consists of 90 item statements that focus on five cultural dimensions:

• Social Dynamics: the political landscape of the organization (trust, courage & power)
  
  
• Flexibility : the organization's ability to adapt and change in response to internal and external needs (responsiveness, risk orientation, adaptability)
  
  
• Focus: the emphasis on consistency of execution and achievement of outcomes (rules & procedures, results orientation, process orientation)
  
  
• Engagement: the extent that organization members are engaged in the work of the organization (flow of information, collaboration, involvement, decision-making)
  
  
• Affiliation: the connection that people feel for the organization (identity, people orientation, purpose)

This provides us with the information we need to develop a detailed profile of your organization's current culture, which is compared to its unique strategic context to identify the implications of the culture for strategy implementation and performance. Responses are also compared by position/level and by sub-group (organization, business unit, function, location) to identify differences that may influence the success of strategic plans.

The organization's strategic context is identified from research into a wide range of internal and external contextual factors, an interview with the top leader and the results of the strategic context definition section of the survey completed by top leaders. Customized item statements are often added to assess executive team alignment on specific strategic choices. Up to 30 customized item statements can be added. For more information on strategic alignment, click here.





The Culture-Strategy Fit Profile™ Report

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