Innovative Leadership — Culture Doesn’t Have to Eat Strategy: Tending to Human Factors During Strategic Planning

The phrase “culture eats strategy for breakfast” is often true – certainly there are situations where strategy is consumed by culture – but strategy and culture are not mutually exclusive. Why not tend to them both at the same time during strategic planning?

Strategic planning is daunting

Many nonprofits begin strategic planning work with trepidation and possibly even scar tissue from prior efforts. Often the process takes great amounts of time, energy, and money, it strains relationships, and, in the end, doesn’t really strengthen the organization and nothing really changes.

Under these circumstances, it’s tempting to narrow strategic planning efforts and simply bite off less, all in the name of efficiency, focus, discipline, and, in the worst cases, “box checking.”

Audubon Canyon Ranch recently completed a strategic planning process that took the opposite path — we expanded the process to include the human factors that would shape how we did the strategy work and to have a better chance of successfully implementing the plan.

In the end, we believe this expansive process worked well. We’d like to share our approach and the lessons learned along the way. 

Set co-equal goals

The essential first step is to intentionally set co-equal goals. The goal of any strategic planning process is to create a cohesive and focused strategy that will result in greater mission impact, and this was true for us. However, we judged it essential to set additional goals that had equal weight in their importance – ours were to use the strategic planning process to build strong teams and leaders and to create a culture that informed, reflected, and reinforced our values. And that would ultimately help us deliver on strategy.

10 tips to feed culture and strategy in your planning process

To meet these goals, we suggest following tips, which, while presented independently, were mutually reinforcing. 

1. Build teams and leaders.

We had board and staff strategic planning task forces, both with the goals to develop strong, high functioning teams and elevate leaders and the organization’s leadership capacity. Many on the staff task force were new to strategic planning, and, as such, were unclear about what specifically was being asked of them (that was part of our journey together and the method of learning). We took time to share the strategy tools we would be using and make sure they developed a level of confidence.

We often started our working sessions with leadership and teaming exercises and discussions, and we then put those learnings into practice throughout the process.

For example, with your own team, consider opening with a discussion about the difference between a team of leaders and a leadership team – the former is a team where individual/departmental interests are advocated for while the latter has shared accountability with individual/departmental goals derived from overall organizational goals.  

2. Get clear on foundational principles.

We tried to build alignment up front — especially with the board — about some basic principles about the strategy process, including: we’re going to make hard choices about what not to do; we’re going to address the real challenges in doing what we want to do; and — possibly the most difficult — we’re going to give a lot of deference to the staff, who know the work best and put their hearts into it every day.

If your staff doesn’t see themselves in the work — and they don’t feel supported by the board, the final plan won’t have much of a chance of getting off the ground.

3. Reassess everything.

We didn’t just look at strategy. We also had hard conversations about mission (why we exist) and vision (what kind of world we’re working toward). We talked about how much the world had changed in the 60 years since the founding of the organization. We tried to be honest about what had become outdated and needed to change. 

Has your organization’s mission and vision kept up with what the world needs from you? If not, be bold and make a change.

4. Focus on values.

Perhaps one of the most important steps we took was to examine our values and align on those that would serve us best in the planning process and in the long term. Values both reflect, influence, and reinforce culture, and we wanted ours to be able to help us make decisions and get things done. We wanted our values to challenge the status quo and not reinforce it. We wanted to have values we could actually use, every day, so we narrowed them to just three (heart, boldness, and impact), acknowledging that you can’t live them if you can remember them.  

In defining your values, try posing some questions for each that you will use to make large and small decisions. For example, in using our value of “boldness” we ask ourselves: Are we taking risks for greater impact? Are we being creative? Is the work stretching us?

5. Take a phased approach.

To put our mission, vision, and values to work in creating the more detailed part of our strategy, we first needed to get all staff and board input and then official board approval. So, once we received and addressed that input, and the board and staff task force teams were aligned, we put the new mission, vision, and values in front of the board for official approval. Once that was obtained, the team used them to craft the specific outcomes, tactics, etc. for the full plan.

6. Be honest about challenges.

Strategy work covers a lot of different elements, many of which we describe here, but many organizations overlook one critical question: what’s going to be hard about what we aspire to do? We worked through mission and vision and then stopped and asked that question. Audubon Canyon Ranch is exceptionally fortunate, in many ways: we have a strong volunteer base, stunning nature reserves, good financial resources, and a long history. We took a frank look and concluded the most salient challenge was internal: a culture of inertia. That sparked a lot of discussions about how to evolve that culture in support of strategy.

7. Work on trust.

Trust is critical to organizations, and nonprofits have their own unique version of this truism: trust is both critical to strategic planning and tested – even strained – by it. We talked about trust by defining it as series of conscious and unconscious assessments we make about someone’s motive, competence, and reliability. Because the CEO (Tom) was new, and the organization had deep roots, the consultant (Jonathan) needed to host a special session with the board, without the CEO (Tom), to address trust issues. These were important conversations and not easy. But it takes a high level of trust to make strategic planning useful and effective. Which leads to the next tip … 

8. Put trust to work.

Many nonprofits have a natural inclination toward consensus — a negotiated outcome that represents compromise — as the decision-making standard. It is often consistent with their mission, values, and culture.

We were aiming for alignment instead — a willingness to support choices, even if they weren’t the first choice of some. We had many listening sessions (staff, board, volunteers, funders, and partners) to gather input on the core strategy questions (e.g., “What has changed in the last 60 years about what the world needs from us?”). In the end, smaller groups and sometimes just the CEO (Tom) worked on elements of the plan that were later reviewed with the task forces, followed by the board, and finally all staff were given the opportunity to comment. We had some struggle, yes, and ultimately the challenge was to maintain enough trust. While broad participation was essential, sometimes clear, bold, and insightful thinking can only happen in smaller groups. We put a high value on extensive listening and discussion.

When trust is high, staff can reach alignment over consensus.

9. Bring the aspirational culture into the work.

Sometimes it was more explicit, sometimes less so – but we tried to use the strategy process as an opportunity to seed a culture we thought would be helpful for our future. Yes, even before we knew the strategy. Part of that culture included an openness to healthy conflict, even when it was uncomfortable. We modeled the behaviors we wanted to see. 

10. Celebrate

Strategy work is hard. There’s no getting around it. Our process had clear milestones that allowed us to celebrate. That built up some good will along the way and restored people’s emotional reservoirs. Again, we want to be clear it was hard. There was conflict, issues of trust, and periods of confusion and impatience. The times of celebration were critical to get through the tough parts.

We made sure to celebrate the behaviors we wanted to embed, so we made sure to celebrate the hard work of team members and their willingness to stretch outside their comfort zones.

In the end

In the end, we have a strong strategic plan we are proud of and – most important – that has changed the trajectory of Audubon Canyon Ranch for greater impact. We can say with confidence that having multiple co-equal goals around strategy, leadership and teams, and culture seemed ambitious up front. We can also say these multiple goals and our co-equal focus on human factors were the cornerstone of success. 

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About the Author

Tom Gardali

CEO at Audubon Canyon Ranch

Tom Gardali is the CEO of Audubon Canyon Ranch, a nonprofit conservation organization founded in 1962 in Northern California. Today, the organization collaboratively stewards a system of nature preserves totaling 5,000 acres across 26 properties the San Francisco Bay Area and works to make a significant difference for nature and people through its Strategy for Resilience. Tom also has a long career as a conservation scientist publishing over 60 peer-reviewed publications and one book.

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Jonathan Becker

CEO at Audubon Canyon Ranch

Jonathan Becker is a management consultant with This Team Works, focused on team performance and results. He supports teams with trust and relationships, strategy commitment, and individual growth and learning. He has worked with a variety of for-profit and non-profit organizations across sectors. He is the board chair for Children Rising, which provides tutoring to student in the Oakland (CA) Unified School District.

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