When I started my career I worked for the largest chemical company in the world. The site I worked at already counted approximately 40.000 employees. A huge and complex organization. And it was a complete riddle to me how an organization behaves and how my interaction and my influence on it would be – let alone what an organization should do to be successful.
However, over the past almost 25 years I learned a lot about organizations – and about humans.
💬 Every person is unique in their specific personality and capabilities.
💬 A person performs at its best when playing to her/his strengths.
💬 It is very difficult (if not impossible) to change a personality. We can change our behavior and sometimes even our attitude, but it is hard work and needs the will to do it and discipline (…and we need to do it ourselves!).
Everyone will agree to these sentences. They are well established in human resources development – and rightly so.
When it comes to organizations this thinking is not (yet) as established. However, I think the exactly same logic applies.
✅ Organizations are unique in their history, culture, values and capabilities – I call it DNA. They have a specific set of strengths.
✅ Organizations are successful and perform at their best when they are playing to their strengths.
✅ It is very difficult (if not impossible) to change the DNA of an organization. An organization can change its behavior / way-of-working and sometimes even attitude, but this is hard work and the organization needs to be willing to do it and implement it in a disciplined way.
And that is why we see so many strategies fail that are derived from a pure intellectual and rational point of view and that are not aligned with the DNA, strengths and capabilities of the organization. In many cases only a small part of the organization did play a part in the development of the strategy. And yet we think that the implementation of this strategy by the organization will definitely be successful and sometimes even easy, because it is rational and logic.
„Culture eats strategy for breakfast.“ (Peter Drucker)
For me this is the reason why so many strategies and change efforts fail. And that is exactly the reason why my focus is on helping companies to find a growth strategy that plays on their unique strengths and capabilities. From know-how to #growhow.
Play to your strengths to be successful! Do you agree?
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