Summary

Part VII

  • Culture is a set of behaviours replicated within any given context.
  • It's easy for strategy intent to become lost in translation — particularly if it is discussed in conceptual terms, rather than concrete behaviours.
  • In order to translate strategic intent into specific behaviours, we need to storyboard how strategy might play out within our culture. This is achieved by developing personas, exploring scenarios and mapping out the pathways each persona may take. For any area of potential friction — things that get in the way of desired behaviours — your leadership team can discuss how this can be mitigated.
  • Part of this involves the identification of keystone behaviours. This is where your leadership team determines what specific behaviours are representative of enterprise values and your strategic intent, and models them.
  • Structures and artefacts also influence work culture. Visible structures include all the physical things you see — for example, a workspace layout congruent to a culture of collaboration may have movable desks, or plenty of shared communal workstations or hot desks. Invisible structures include policies and procedures, and the systems we use to get work done. A key invisible structure is your internal communications platform — how people connect.
  • Rituals are the conscious routines we hold sacrosanct. They are our deliberate efforts to engage in behaviours conducive to the cultural values of the enterprise. Such rituals can be mapped out over ...

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