A clearly defined Strategic Compass is critical to keep a certain culture during periods of rapid growth and change. Why? Because the compass will guide and drive the decisions that the organization will make.
When you have high employee growth, it is difficult to instill the fundamental values that guide the decisions in each person, which in turn determines who you are being in the world. This is because each new person has their own context that defines how they should make choices in different situations. The greater the number of people, the greater the diversity in context. This dilutes the collective context, what is often called culture.
By developing the Strategic Compass and making it explicit, you are establishing a singular context for everyone. When people deviate from it, you have the tools in place to bring them back to alignment with it.
I developed the elements of the Strategic Compass from my experience at Hewlett-Packard. HP had a very strong culture that was well known as the HP Way. When I joined in 1973, we learned the HP Way by osmosis. We absorbed it through our daily interactions with older employees and in the guidance and feedback we got around decisions we made. There was nothing written that defined what the HP Way was. It was an energetic feeling that created alignment around how employees behaved and the choices we made.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, HP went through a major growth spurt, growing at 50-70% per year. I was promoting people who had been with the company less than 18 months into management positions. These people would lead and represent the HP Way, but they didn’t have time to really know what that meant or how to make decisions in alignment with it.
HP took the time to document what we meant by the HP Way. We developed training to help new hires understand what it meant and how it applied to the way we did business. We created stories that reflected how to make decisions in alignment with it and stories that showed what it looked like when it was compromised. For the next decade, we continued to grow and not lose the essence of the HP Way.
This experience led to the creation of the Strategic Compass which contains the elements necessary to communicate what it means to “play the game around here.” It defines why we exist, who we serve and how, what impact we are focused on making, and what our character will be.
The exercise of creating the Strategic Compass is just the starting point. To truly maintain a specific culture in a high-growth scenario requires an implementation plan to ensure that everyone in the organization is living by it. Without it, you have nothing to implement and almost assuredly the culture will be impossible to maintain.
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