October 08, 2024

Align on goals not culture (TLP 2024w40)

5 minutes

Cultural conflict is fine (how we do things), but conflict on strategic goals is not (what we are building).

Notes:

Senior leaders tend to spend a lot of time thinking about the culture of their organization.

CEOs for example love to talk about their corporate values, which is often nothing more that a list of cultural talking points that are not enforced.

In reality, an organization is made of of many sub-cultures, which often operate in a radically different way to each other.

Such competition can in fact be very healthy, as that can lead to innovations.

Friction in an organization is good. Too much comfort kills innovation.

Furthermore, a team or a department having the freedom to express their own unique culture is also healthy.

If you enforce the same culture in your organization, the net result will be a mono-culture that will be devoid of innovative thinking.

Rather than trying to get everyone aligned around such a mono-culture, you should align around goals instead.

Culture is a framework, but goals are the destination.

Your team can be misaligned around culture, even having competing sub-cultures, but misalignment around goals is fatal.

Your job as a leader is to point your team towards their north star, then let them figure out how to get there.

Direction is more important than velocity: going fast in the wrong direction is useless.

Steady progress in the right direction is more desirable than that.

Our history is full of examples when conflict drove rapid innovation, through necessity.

You have to strike a balance of course, but in simple terms no conflict can lead to no innovation.

Cultural conflict is fine (how we do things), but conflict on strategic goals is not (what we are building).

If you spend too much time trying to have the perfect utopian culture, but neglect strategic goals, your organization will fail

Media I am enjoying on this week:

Slow Horses season 1.

Notes and subscription links are here: https://techleader.pro/a/663-Align-on-goals-not-culture-(TLP-2024w40)

...more

By John Collins