Executive Podcast #344: Building an Extraordinary Culture

Perry Holley:
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Perry Holley:
Just text the word exec to 55123 for your free copy. That’s exec to 55123 to start accomplishing more while juggling less with welcome to the Maxwell Leadership Executive Podcast where our goal is to help you increase your reputation as a leader, increase your ability to influence others, and increase your ability to fully engage your team to deliver remarkable results. Hi, I’m Perry Holley, a Maxwell Leadership facilitator and coach.

Chris Goede:
And I’m Chris Goede, Executive President with Maxwell Leadership. Welcome and thank you for joining. I want to encourage you. We we talk a lot about what are you doing with what you’re hearing, what are you using with your team, with your volunteer group, with you, with your family for that matter, the conversations that you’re hearing. And I want to encourage you to go and download the learner guide that’s created. Perry puts these lessons together for us and then creates a learner guide. So go to MaxwellLeadership.com/Podcast if you’ll click on this episode, you’ll be able to download that learner’s guide. Well, we’re going to talk a little bit today about building an extraordinary culture.

Chris Goede:
We talk a little bit about culture being kind of how you think interact. We’re going to go a little bit deeper than that and we’re going to say, hey, this is what we’ve learned recently and we’re going to kind of share this model with you and the process. And I believe that if you follow this, in addition to what you hear from us 100%, you will build an extraordinary culture. And so it happens to be seven steps of building a culture that we learned just a couple weeks ago from A group that we were part of, and we’re just going to share it with you today.

Perry Holley:
It was a great experience. And because we do talk so much about culture here, we know that it’s probably one of the most important things a leader can establish with their team and with their organization. Just a couple of points about culture before we really get deep in this, but all cultures are built on your core values. And as Chris will always remind us about how you think, how you act, how you interact, it’s driven by what you believe and what you stand for and your core values. Culture exists in your absence. I think that’s a lot of things leaders don’t understand is you can’t always be present. So whatever that culture is, is happening. By the way, you can’t not have a culture.

Perry Holley:
You either define one on purpose or you default to whatever’s there. So you always have a culture, and it is revealed, as said, by how people think, act, and interact. So anything to pile on or add to that.

Chris Goede:
It’s also more than the words that you put on the wall or the team comes up with, here’s our coffee mug. Here’s our core values. Yeah, like, and this is what we believe, and this is our mission, our vision. That’s awesome. And you should have that. But it is right more caught than taught. And it is something that is much deeper than, say, oh, well, that’s our culture right there. It’s that we.

Chris Goede:
Whatever, whatever, whatever. And so this is actually going to give you a little bit deeper and some traction on how to go about doing that. How do we live that out? So let’s start. Step number one is to inform continually. You have to have repetition. You have to have that common language. One of the things that we try to do here is that every team meeting, both at our leadership level or even down into our team meetings, is that we start with, hey, what are we doing here? What’s our purpose? What do we got? What are our values? And then, not only that, but then how are they lived out? And I always encourage my team to saying, hey, this is kind of our culture is our values here. And I.

Chris Goede:
I don’t want to hear about the individual that lived out this. I want to hear about the value first. I want to hear about the. What was the culture impact? Oh, and then, by the way, hey, Perry did that, man. Thanks so much for doing that. So how are we informing continually our team to make sure that they understand what it is that we value and that that is a strong part of our culture? The other thing is, I also think it’s very important, not only kind of what are we informing them, but how are we doing that? And I kind of, I just blended in a couple of examples there for you of the how. Right. Make sure you’re lifting up the values and the mission of the company first while you’re informing them of things and of the culture.

Chris Goede:
And so that’s kind of how we go about doing it. But then also make sure they know what it is.

Perry Holley:
Yeah, I think part of what you’re informing them of as well is I’ve seen, like you said, it’s not so hard to put up. These are our five core values. We put them on a wall, on a poster, on a coffee mug, whatever, and you should have that. But how are each of those core values defined? And you can’t leave it to your interpretation if you, if you say, yeah, we value everyone, what does that mean to you versus what does that mean to me? So you don’t leave a core value interpretation up to the masses. You, the leadership, you define what it means and you inform people. These are the definitions and that these are the behaviors we’re going to be looking for.

Chris Goede:
Yes, I do. You can tell because I’m just coming up like here, right? Like what does that mean here? Because it does mean things that are different. And another thing we learned was if you’re putting up statements and it’s not self explanatory, then right underneath it, you better have what it means to be here.

Perry Holley:
Right.

Chris Goede:
And so I was thinking this about this a little bit where you know, I want to go back to. We had a really good friend of ours, a great partner and I think our all time downloads of a guest, Brian Porter from Hendrick Automotive Group and Mr. H, who is his organization, they within the last maybe five, six years put servant leadership as one of their core values. And you know this because you coach a lot of their executives. And it’s like, okay, servant leadership means. This is just as an example, it means a lot of things. But what does it mean here? And for them being a founder driven organization, what does it mean to Mr. H to have a servant leadership culture? Like, and that’s what Perry’s talking about here is like, let’s get specific on what it means here because you can use a lot of different definitions for a lot of different words.

Chris Goede:
But no, these are our core values and this is what it looks like here.

Perry Holley:
Yeah, even the servant leadership is. What do you think it means? What do I think it doesn’t matter. What does Mr. H think it means?

Chris Goede:
That’s right.

Perry Holley:
And that’s how we define it here. And we’re going to be looking for that in how you think act and interact is going to show up. Is it really real?

Chris Goede:
You recently developed a training course for us, Ascend to servant leadership. And it’s an incredible training course, which we were kind of hesitant to go that route because of what people perceive that to be. And in there was the core basics of this. And while that is in alignment with some of Mr. H’s beliefs, it’s a little bit different than our training course. And so they need to know what that is as an example for that. Good.

Perry Holley:
Number two, step two, about another I word. So you said inform. Now we say involve. Involve the team in the experience. It’s a regular inspiration, boost morale and commitment. That. That you involving others to have a voice in that, to let them know that you’re involving them in the culture development, that they. They feel it.

Perry Holley:
That they feel ownership in that. Does this resonate with you about getting the team.

Chris Goede:
Yeah.

Perry Holley:
Committed into culture by involving them in it?

Chris Goede:
Yeah. You talk about how everyone wants to be seen, valued, and heard, and we all don’t have to have our way. But as long as our voice, our opinion, especially if you have a point of view and a perspective and experience in that area, then your voice needs to be heard so that you make sure that that individual feels a part of that experience. Right. They want to be invited into the conversation. And I think about it, for us, like, if we were going to do a corporate training or a corporate coaching program, we were going to build the content. And I said, hey, this is what we’re going to do. So I’m informing everybody.

Chris Goede:
But then I didn’t necessarily involve you in that experience. You’d be like, I’m out. Like, what do you mean? Like my voice? Yes. Wait a minute, wait a minute. This podcast is mine. I’m going to. But as an example, we just need to make sure that we’re involving our team in that experience. And when you do that and they understand why the decisions were made, how the decisions were made, they’re part of that environment.

Chris Goede:
It will drive team engagement. I just read this week that the second ever. I don’t know if you saw this. It’s a Gallup Poll poll came out the second time ever that the global engagement level has dropped. And so I went back and I looked since they started tracking it, and sure enough, you know, the chart kind of continued to go up, up up, up, level, up. I think it was 2008 is when it dropped for the first time. Second time ever just happened, down to 21%.

Perry Holley:
Wow.

Chris Goede:
Now that’s a global number. Okay, globally. I think the. The, you know, domestic for us right here in the United States would be in the low 30s right now. But even that, I was like, second time ever. How do you do that? How do you keep that from happening? There’s lots of ways. One of them is already with these two eyes we’ve talked about is how are we informing them, but then how are we involving them in the experiences of the team?

Perry Holley:
Very good.

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Chris Goede:
So number three, and if you haven’t found out, we’re gonna go with a theme, and it does start with I. It’s inspire. What do we need to be doing to inspire our team? What does that look like? And oftentimes teams and. Or leaders will go, hey, yeah, no, man, I want to inform you, I want to involve you. And then they kind of skip this step. So talk a little bit about even just from your experience and what you hear in the marketplace of how important this is as part of their culture.

Perry Holley:
It has a lot to do with being present yourself. Are you. There’s so much of this culture talk and core values and things can be handed down and can be posted and can be. But are they seeing you? Is your presence being felt? Do they know that. That they see you and you’re the example? Are you exhibiting these core values? That’s just a culture killer right away is if you put out all these great words and then you don’t live those out. So you’re inspiring just by being a part of it. I know this person we were learning this from said that he was putting himself out in the mix. He would walk among the team as John Would say, walk slowly among the.

Perry Holley:
The crowd. He’s there, he’s acting out, he’s picking up trash. He’s showing the example about what they’re teaching from the top. He’s living with them in the midst of it. You don’t just pitch the culture over the wall and hope that it sticks with people. You’ve got to be living it and be present and be talking about it. Continuing to go back to the first eye, being informing, continually involving others in that and continuing to inspire. It’s this cycle, I think, that gets people going on.

Perry Holley:
That leads to step four, which says inspect is that, you know, what are we inspecting? We’re inspecting what we expect, the way that goes. But what do you think about this, this phase of your building an extraordinary culture?

Chris Goede:
Yeah, I think you have to do this both inspecting in the people in and around your organization, on your team, but also in the entire organization. And what, what does that look like? And so you talk about, hey, that’s what, you know, that’s what we expect. Right. When we inspect it. Another way to say it is what gets inspected also gets respected. You were talking about just a minute ago about inspire, and I could really see this being something that could fall kind of under the inspire, our team and the organization, or inspect. You were talking about the individual who is a leader of this big organization picking up trash. Well, I heard a story when we were up there, and I don’t know if you’re with me or not, but someone shared.

Chris Goede:
They said that a, a trash truck that was on property.

Perry Holley:
Yeah, right.

Chris Goede:
And then all of a sudden he, as an individual, was walking, he’s inspecting, and he said, this can’t be. So he starts picking up trash. A dorm where some, some girls were in a dorm on property, saw him doing this, and they were, they were not only inspired to. To move to action, but they also were like, well, listen, that’s something that we respect. Right. Because we know it’s going to get inspected. Came down and started helping clean up the trash. Like, that’s part of that culture.

Chris Goede:
That’s part of the importance of inspecting it. I think the other thing too, for us is that we are, from a culture standpoint, we are inspecting is what we’re doing aligned with who we are and who we want to be known for and what are our core values of the organization. And if not, then we’ve got to make some correction around that. And I see a lot of leaders to your point, maybe they don’t not live it out, but maybe they Delegate the culture to somebody else. Right. Like, and then they just kind of disappear. But if you don’t stay close to it and you don’t stay close to what matters and you’re not inspecting it, you’re not inspecting it in a inspector gadget like a negative way like you’re trying to get somebody in trouble. It’s just, it is something we’re talking about culture, that everything in your organization we’re going to continue to inspect.

Chris Goede:
We want to continually make it better.

Perry Holley:
Well, people know you’re watching. Seriously?

Chris Goede:
Yeah. That’s it. That, that is it. And so this leads us right into step number five. We need to. It’s continuous improvement. But I need to start with an I. Sorry.

Chris Goede:
Improve continually. And so it starts with an eye. You like that? How about that? And so this is something we talked a little bit about last week in the unwells which yet if you haven’t listened to that, encourage you to go back and Perry made up a word and then we’re trying to get it now in the dictionary about unwell. But we talked about this and this is the reason, this is the reason why you inspect things because you want things to be a little bit better. Right. As simple as why do we look at our kids report cards? Why do we like what does that look like? Why do we look at our financial statements? Why do we look at our. Our customer service index? Why do we do those things? We do them because we want to continue to inspect them to get better. Not to start putting people under the microscope.

Perry Holley:
We’ve got to go back. Are you a change agent?

Chris Goede:
Yeah.

Perry Holley:
If you can’t, you know you’re going to be complacent. You got to be constantly improving or you’re going to go behind. But number six says increase another. I wor. Increase capacity. I thought this was interesting about increasing capacity. The comment avoiding complacency, it was always, why can’t we just stop? Why can’t we just keep doing what we’re doing? No, we’re going to continually improve. We’re going to increase our capacity to grow and expand.

Perry Holley:
We might be increasing our capacity, increase our customer reach, might increase our market share. We might increase our capacity in every part of the business to do more, to be more, to show more. But that expansion of capacity and ability to get things done comes as this culture where people are involved and they’re working for a purpose and they’re inspired by the actions. We’re taking this example of this person we were watching, it just kept getting bigger. And bigger, the capacity kept increasing because their culture could handle it, could handle it.

Chris Goede:
It makes me just think about, how efficient are you? One of the things I was looking at going into this year was on our team, how do we continually increase the capacity? Right. Well, we got to continue to improve. It’s a. It’s a cycle, so that we become more efficient at what we’re doing, so that we can serve any organization, any team. So I think it increases the efficiency as well. So step number seven, and the last one here is impact. And that is what we do. We are about impacting people.

Chris Goede:
So this one really resonates with me. We want to create a ton of powerful, positive change in people. We want to impact people, including our teammates, including our customers, the community. And you’re all in the people business. It doesn’t matter what industry you’re in. It doesn’t matter if you’re making widgets, selling widgets. It doesn’t matter if you’re. Whatever you’re doing, you’re in the people business.

Chris Goede:
And that is the goal of everything that we want to do is impact people.

Perry Holley:
Absolutely. And so I encourage these eyes or. Yeah, I think they really add to a lot, but why don’t you go ahead and wrap it up?

Chris Goede:
Yeah. I want to give you a little bit of a different perspective of what we just taught you. We. We just gave you seven words, and I want you to now think about those seven words. But I want you to think about it in the process of which Perry’s challenging us is saying, this will create change and it’ll make your culture extraordinary. Right. But they all go together, and this was very strategic. And when you begin to look at these, we want to make sure that you think about them in this order in everything that you do.

Chris Goede:
So I’m just going to repeat them, but I’m going to repeat them with a little bit of a different statement. He’s like, hey, we want to inform them, and then we’re going to involve them. And then we want to inspire them. And then it said, we’re going to inspect so that we can improve, so that we can increase, so that we can impact people.

Perry Holley:
That’s good. Do you wake it up yourself?

Chris Goede:
Oh, my gosh. I am now taking. How about that? Perry’s been with me for years, and that’s probably the best thing I’ve ever.

Perry Holley:
Somebody make a note. He’s taking over the content.

Chris Goede:
Amazing. Just for these three minutes. But when you think about this, it gives you a different perspective on this process that Perry is saying, hey, this will create a culture. And if you repeat this over and over and over again, you will create a product, your people. Right. That you’ll be proud of and that people want to be a part of what you’re doing. And so I think this is something that we could all learn from. I know.

Chris Goede:
Even myself, I’m challenged, thinking of everything that we do on my team. Am I going through this process so that I get to the end that it’s impacting the people that we have the privilege to do? And the answer is not yes in all the areas, but my goal is to begin to work towards a yes.

Perry Holley:
Say it one more time.

Chris Goede:
Yeah. So when I was listening to him, then I went back and I was reviewing my notes. It I understood. I began to put arrows, and I. I listed them top to bottom, and I put arrows from one to the other, one to the other. That’s what I said. I said you inform them, then you involve them, then you inspire them, then you inspect. So that.

Chris Goede:
And a little bit transition there. You like that.

Perry Holley:
Like that.

Chris Goede:
So that you can improve, so that you can increase capacity, efficiency. So that you impact people around the world.

Perry Holley:
Love it. Fantastic. Well, thanks for that extra creative action there.

Chris Goede:
Wow.

Perry Holley:
I’m inspired now.

Chris Goede:
That was a wow.

Perry Holley:
That is a wow. Thank you for doing that. And just want to remind our listeners that if you’d like to have the learner guide for this episode or learn about our offerings or other podcasts that we offer, you can do all that at MaxwellLeadership.com/Podcast. You can also leave us a comment or a question there. We love hearing from you and we’re very grateful you’d spend this time with us today. That’s all from the Maxwell Leadership Executive Podcast.