02/23/2022

The Senior Leader's Checklist for Shaping Company Culture

Culture eats strategy for breakfast

In more than 30 years of either working for senior executives, being a senior executive or coaching senior executives, I’ve come to a few conclusions. One of them is that, too often, there’s an overemphasis on strategy and an underemphasis on culture. When that’s the case, the outcomes usually aren’t the greatest. There’s a reason the late, great Peter Drucker said, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” Your organization’s culture is the leading indicator of whether or not your strategy is going to be successful.

Culture needs constant attention. In the absence of being intentional about shaping it and investing time, attention and effort in doing so, you’re going to get whatever you’re going to get. The chance that whatever you end up randomly getting is going to support your strategy is somewhere between slim and none.

In this post, I want to share a short checklist of things senior leaders need to think about and do to shape and drive cultures that make strategies successful. My thinking on shaping culture has evolved a lot over the years and will likely continue to, but here’s what’s on my checklist as of now.

Please select this link to read the complete blog post from the Eblin Group.