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