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Integration Of Corporate Culture, Core Values, & Strategy

Core Values, Corporate Culture, & Strategic Alignment

If summarized in three sentences, this is what most of the clients go through in common:

  • “Our leaders don’t take core values seriously.”
  • “Most leaders are unfamiliar with our core values and don’t use them right.”
  • “Our leaders don’t prioritize our strategy and don’t know how to act based on it.”
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Problems:

Wrong Core Values

Most companies’ core values are bland, ineffective, and often dishonest or unrealistic.
As such, unrealistic value statements create cynical and dispirited employees, alienate customers, and undermine managerial credibility. Picking the right core values must be done by someone who understands entrepreneurship, culture, and strategy because core values must be compatible with your vision, mission, culture, and strategy.

What Should Be Done?

Extraction of the core values can only be effective if an expert engages an organization’s founders/senior levels. In other words, only the founders know whether employees should prioritize pace over customer-centric behaviour or vice versa, or when to prioritize which. Core values are a compass to help employees make such decisions in the absence of the founders.

Wrong Use of Core Values:

Quite often companies start the cascading of the core values at levels other than that of senior leadership. If the founders and senior executives of an organization determine the core values, they should also be the first ones to learn how to communicate them throughout the organization. More importantly, applying the core values by the senior leadership requires skills that leaders as Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) have usually never learned.

What Should Be Done?

There are ways to include core values in the skills that leaders use daily such as feedback, delegation, coaching, and team and individual decision-making.

Lack Of A Deep Alignment

Most companies treat core values as ethical principles unrelated to anything else. Core values must not only be integrated into a company’s vision, mission, and thus strategy, but core values also shape your corporate culture.
Depending on whether or not you deliberately apply your core values daily—say in how you give feedback, delegate, coach and make decisions—you will have a culture that you control or not. The more intentionally you treat your core values, the more you will be able to manage the culture that is taking share in your organization. You can ignore your core values. A culture will still form. You are not only in charge. In the worst case scenario—which is actually in most companies—ineffective core values are contrary to honesty because the core values do not reflect the true reasons why founders established that company. They are also not properly communicated throughout the organization. Therefore, they are not well defined, well designed, properly shared, institutionalized, and honoured in ways to create an alignment of:

  • Values
  • Culture
  • Strategy

The Ultimate Solution

For close to two decades, we have been working with a wide variety of multinational corporations as well as North American, European, and Middle Eastern local companies in areas of stakeholder management, industry lobbying, people management and development, culture, leadership development, and strategy. This experience has given us the gift of insight: We understand culture, strategy, and leadership. But more importantly, we understand how they are interrelated.
We are also the only company in the north of Toronto that bases all of its services on the latest findings of neuroscience. This means that in addition to understanding how to integrate core values into your culture and strategy, we know how the human brain functions during feedback, delegation, coaching and decision making which we will use to help your leaders communicate your core values and develop your next generation of leaders.

How We Can Benefit You

Our experience and expertise in leadership combined with neuroscience and strategy qualifies us to train your managers on unique skills. We are not aware of another company worldwide that trains leaders on using core values to develop people and stick with the strategy.
We empower your managers to develop their subordinates and build your next generation of leaders. In our leadership development program, we train your leaders not only how to help their subordinates grow, but also how to guide them towards your strategic goals focusing on your core values. In other words, when we help you extract your core values, we will also make sure it’s integrated into your vision and mission statements. More is, we make sure your leaders apply your core values to uphold your culture and strategy daily.
This said, when we work with you, we make sure:

  • Your core values are genuine, effective, and true to your purpose
  • Your leaders understand how they are related to your strategy
  • Your leaders are empowered with skills to use core values daily—this is a promise—to develop people and stay loyal to your strategy and contribute to your culture.

How It Works

After extracting your core values, we will engage your leaders and HR to make sure your core values are cascaded down throughout the company. To do this, we use Hutteman’ss model which focuses on answering the following five questions:

  • How can leaders and employees own the core values?
  • How can leaders define the core values within the daily routines and activities of their teams?
  • How should leaders share core values?
  • How are HR and leaders supposed to help core values be institutionalized in the organization?
  • How do HR and leaders honour those who properly apply core values?

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