Culture Drives Strategic Execution

In today’s unsettled environment, where the global pandemic is impacting every employee and organization, we are all facing dramatic, unprecedented disruption and change. Credit unions have been on the front lines of change because of technological, societal, economic, regulatory and political factors. This level of change has been disruptive, not only for how business is done in the competitive financial marketplace, but also for the internal workings of organizations. This is why the resiliency and strength of your organizational culture is essential in times of change as profound as now. Successful organizations have robust cultures that are the foundation of what makes them great.

Your strategic planning processes must also be up to the task in times of rapid change. Your mission, vision and values are the North Star to guide strategy, and they also underpin your culture. They give people the context for what they do every day. Your mission has power; it is the reason the organization exists. Mission and vision, which describes what organizational success looks like in several years, define where an organization is going. Strategy provides a roadmap for how to get there, and your values are the guideposts that inform behaviors along the way.

Formulating strategy and guiding its execution require the CEO’s and senior management’s strong visible leadership, support and openness. In these times of disruptive change, the outdated command-and-control approach to strategy, in which detailed plans are formulated and handed down from on high once a year, does not work. People need to understand their place in the plan, be able to give thoughtful feedback on how it affects them and the member, and how they are empowered to contribute to it.

Strategy becomes a company-wide initiative, with senior leaders adopting agile methods to create and implement plans. The “plan” is not a static document. It is living and changing, just as the business landscape is changing. Organization-wide effort is required to identify priorities, assign resources and enable teams to make decisions more quickly, and organizational culture impacts successful strategic execution.

A strong culture is a competitive advantage that aligns the goals of the workforce with those of the organization. Employees engage with leadership in plan creation and implementation. Communication around plan development is two-way. Instead of being led by pronouncements from above, leadership’s clear communication of strategy is paired with regular upward communication. Leaders clearly articulate strategy with employees and individuals are empowered to provide them honest, helpful feedback. Management learns how employees understand the organization’s strategic goals, how they will put the strategy into effect, and how personal objectives fit within the strategic framework. In times of rapid change, agility is needed, which means constant observation, analysis and adjustment. This process, when well-managed, has a positive influence on culture, engendering trust and engagement.

Communication around strategy must be crystal clear so everyone has a common language that can easily be internalized and used to guide business decisions. To test if the needed level of clarity exists, ask leaders and subordinates alike: “Can you summarize your credit union’s strategy in a sentence or two?” Simple and precise messaging gives employees understanding that’s indispensable for autonomy and alignment of their objectives and decisions with the organization’s goals. Clarity permits teams to exercise judgment, and indeed it’s expected of them. People are free to innovate and make decisions to serve the members; decisions that are grounded in mission, vision and values.

A culture of openness is a prerequisite for agile strategy. The environment should be safe enough to enable employee feedback to adjust the strategy. Leadership knows that the goal of this feedback is to advance the credit union’s mission. Without a culture of openness and trust, employees likely will fear their honest feedback can be risky, and their comments taken as unwanted criticism to be avoided at all costs. Alternatively, in a resilient, healthy culture, people learn effective ways to give fact-based feedback, and management welcomes it. Indeed, this is critical to the iterative process that agility requires. Strategy succeeds when the entire organization is truly involved in the process, encouraged to discover problems, correct them and communicate the results.

It is senior management’s duty to affirm and reinforce the credit union’s mission, vision and values by expressing it clearly and often. Leaders set the example for strategy-aligned, values-based decisions, which the employees can follow. Everyone comes to work to achieve something and to contribute to the credit union’s success.

Stuart R. Levine is Chairman and CEO for Stuart Levine & Associates and EduLeader LLC in Miami Beach, Fla.