How bad strategy impacts culture
When strategy goes wrong, it can not only adversely affect the culture and the people that work within it, but also the reputation of the company, sometimes for years to come.
Take Wells Fargo as an example. Their strategy was simple: cross-selling. The more products they could sell to each customer, the better. Not the worst sales strategy, to be fair.
Except employees were instructed to sign existing customers up to as many as 20 products, often without their consent. The pressure was so intense that employees were crying, experiencing severe panic attacks, and vomiting in the office became commonplace. One person even ingested hand sanitiser to try to cope with the pressure.
The strategy led not only to record fines and tarnished reputations, but the culture continues to struggle to recover to this day. A report three years after the scandal found that frontline workers still had no confidence the company would improve things.
A good strategy provides a detailed plan of action for any organisation to achieve a set of short- to medium-term goals. But if you have people who don't want to fill in the forms, justify their projects, turn up for meetings on time, or engage in constructive debate with other humans, then you need to address the culture first.
The two are not mutually exclusive. Without a strategy, it's really hard to define how work gets done as there are no clear objectives or goals to aim for. But without a defined culture where expectations around behaviour and collaboration are set, strategy is not worth the electronic paper that it's written on.
Success starts with strategy, but it gets delivered through culture.
