Is your culture aligned with your business goals?

Taylor Harrison

Is your culture aligned with your business goals?

If you’ve applied your best efforts but are still failing to achieve your strategic objectives, perhaps there’s an invisible culprit. Some may point to the market. Others may claim breakdowns caused by competition, employees, budget, or the plan itself. Yet the problem may be more fundamental: your culture.

Culture is a foundational underpinning of your organization and must be aligned to your strategic objectives. Over time, culture can shift from being a competitive advantage to an active detriment to achieving results. If this is the case, you might hear comments like:

“Our company talks about its positive values. They’ve even got them written on the walls. But it’s just a poster—in reality, they do the opposite.”
“Everyone here does at least two jobs.”
“Who do you turn to for personnel issues if HR is the problem?”
“I don’t really care anymore.”

Broken cultures might not always be that clear, but there are telltale signs. We’ve identified five signals to help you know when to take a closer look and plan for effective action:

1. 'No' isn’t in the dictionary.

When employees refrain from speaking up and saying “no,” it’s an indication that your culture expects only approval, rather than encouraging authenticity and constructive criticism that could protect or propel your organization forward.

Team members who voice disagreement or express concerns can be among your strongest assets, because they see what you might be missing. Constructive conflict enables your organization to identify and address problems and improve business outcomes.

2. There’s aversion to taking risks.

Lack of innovation is often a symptom of a culture that is risk-averse. If employees are penalized or feel they can’t take risks for fear of retribution, they will be less likely to try new approaches and may not feel motivated to perform to the best of their abilities.

To encourage innovation, it’s important to set guardrails for your employees that outline acceptable risk tolerance and create a safe environment for innovation to thrive.

3. Cross-departmental collaborations stall.

The lack of a central company vision or strategy makes it harder for employees to see where they fit into the mission of the larger organization. This impacts their understanding of how to effectively connect and collaborate across functional boundaries.

If you notice a breakdown in collaborative efforts across departments, organizational silos may be preventing your company from achieving its strategic goals.

4. Attrition rates are high.

One of the most consistent and critical signs of a struggling culture is high attrition rates. Talented people will flee bad bosses and toxic team cultures. Other organizational norms, such as a lack of well-defined career paths or lack of clarity in long-term growth potential, can also contribute to attrition. If people can’t see a future for themselves in your organization, they might disengage and, in some cases, pursue their career goals elsewhere.

When employees depart, it costs your organization money and can even end up strengthening your competitors. If your organization is experiencing high turnover, low employee engagement, or you have unusually high rates of people being fired, you may have toxic norms in your organization’s culture that need to be addressed.

5. There’s finger-pointing when things go wrong.

Pointing fingers and blaming others for failed results is a typical indicator of mistrust within an organization. In these situations, people are protecting their own immediate interests, even though doing so creates long-term problems for the entire organization.

A healthy culture establishes trust as the foundation for teamwork and collaboration. Leaders should set the tone in encouraging accountability to call out finger-pointing behaviors and shift mindsets toward solution-oriented responses when challenges arise.

The bottom line

From an inability to successfully implement strategic plans to failing to retain talent, an organization with a toxic culture will consistently find itself fighting uphill battles, unable to grow or operate successfully.

If you recognize any of the five signs detailed here, you could benefit from a quick-turnaround Culture Assessment to identify cultural strengths and pinpoint gaps that may be hindering your organization.

Schedule a call with our specialists to understand your organizational health and build a road map to realigning your culture with your business goals.