“Culture eats strategy for lunch” is now a well-known expression of the importance of defining your organization’s culture and aligning it with organizational vision and strategy.(1) The need to align your values to get the culture that will give you the outcome you want is the underlying premise behind much of organizational development and change management today.

I stumbled upon the importance of this principle through personal experience as part of the leadership team running a business process outsourcing company in northwestern Pakistan. We wanted to run a successful international business and respect local culture while doing it, and ran smack into several cultural dynamics which made cross-cultural conflict inevitable.

Revenge is a cultural value in Northwest Pakistan. “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth” is the respected rule and expected norm. In fact an old, old proverb immortalized as part of the Pashtun code of honor says that “a man is no Pashtun who doesn’t give a blow for a pinch”.(2) A man who doesn’t respond in kind when his honor is disgraced loses it, and the way to get it back is to take revenge.

So there we were, wanting to respect local culture but not wanting revenge to be part of our corporate culture. It’s not that I can’t see the reasons why revenge would be highly valued in the traditional, tribal society, but we knew it could be counterproductive to having the workplace environment we wanted for doing business internationally. Not only that, a heart of revenge can turn small unintentional mistakes into ongoing feuds that ruin the work environment for everyone. So we had to respond.

We didn’t launch a hot and holy anti-revenge campaign as an effort against something we didn’t want. Change efforts against something negative are never quite as compelling or appealing as efforts FOR something good. So instead we focused on what values we did want in our company to give us the results we wanted – a productive, harmonious workplace.

As we chose our company core values, among the usual values like integrity, quality, and service, we also chose GRACE. We defined grace as “giving the other guy the benefit of the doubt, even if they didn’t deserve it,” because we’ve also been (or will be) in need of some grace.

All company values need to be modeled from the top in order to be authentic, so as leaders we sought to model it. Grace doesn’t mean we forgave everything or didn’t have disciplinary processes; rather it means that we had intentional, moderate, and care-full policies and processes that didn’t burn people, even if we had to let them go. With grace as a value we were careful to design our policies and procedures in a way that would not throw our staff under the bus in our pursuit of profit. Rather, grace as a value helped our staff to be proud of the company and more eager to see it succeed for the benefit of all.

We asked our staff to show each other grace, and forgive each other when necessary. And they did most of the time. But because intended and unintended slights just happen in workplaces, and sometimes they had difficulty resolving disputes on their own, we needed to back up our values with processes for dispute resolution. Otherwise our value of grace would seem like so much worthless sentiment.

Now in all my research about core values, I have never found another for-profit company that used grace as a core value, but we did, and it worked. Our company had hard working people stay and prosper with us. We all prospered for a variety of good business reasons which unquestionably included having a nurturing company culture made possible by our value on grace.

I will forever be a “fan-boy” of strategically choosing company values to craft an effective company culture. I’m sold, convinced, persuaded. At our company in Pakistan, I don’t think that having a great business strategy would have helped us succeed if we had not given due attention to our company culture.