Maxwell Leadership Podcast: The 4 Dimensions of Culture with Greg Cagle

Mark Cole:
Hey, welcome back to the Maxwell Leadership podcast. This is a podcast that is committed to you. It’s committed to adding value to you with a catch. We want you to multiply value to others. My name is Mark Cole, and I’m going to tell you today I get to be a part of a special bonus episode that I believe with all of my heart is going to be a game changer for you and your organization. Today, I’ve invited Greg Cagle, a Maxwell leadership facilitator and coach, to talk about a new tool that Maxwell leadership offers called the four dimensions of culture. Now, I’ve got to tell you, there’s one thing when you have great content. There’s another thing when that content is directed and authored by a leader that knows how to bring impact.

Mark Cole:
And today, this powerful tool that Greg has developed is baked in years of results. He’s had results on me. I’ll talk more about that in just a moment. He’s seen firsthand the positive impact that this content has had on organizations, on. On leaders, and on the people that those leaders lead. Greg, I’ve got to be honest with you. We talked about this right before we started recording. I am so excited you’re on here.

Mark Cole:
It’s been time, it’s been past time, and here you are. Welcome, my friend.

Greg Cagle:
Man, I appreciate it, Mark, this is a thrill for me. I appreciate you having me. I do.

Mark Cole:
Yeah. And you’re gonna hear so much from Greg. I’m telling you that 30 minutes, 35 minutes will pass so quickly. So grab a pen and paper, because I’ve told Greg, don’t just talk about it. Give us handles. Now, before we even go any further, I’ve got to do two things. One, some of you are just a participant of culture, but you still can shape culture. Others of you, you lead literally thousands of people that listen to this podcast.

Mark Cole:
Some of you are in startups. Every one of us share one thing in common. Culture matters. We share something else in common if we’ll step up. And that is you can make a difference with the culture on your team and in your organization. So two calls to action today, I’m gonna go ahead and tell you. Both of them [email protected] cultureshift. Action.

Mark Cole:
Item number one is everybody needs to pick up this book. It is the four dimensions of culture. And Greg, I can’t wait to dig into this, but every one of you need a copy of this book because it will make you a better participant of something all of us are impacted by, and that is culture. In fact, today I made Chris Godey give up. Chris Gode is normally on this podcast. He’s a co host with me. A lot of times I made him give up his copy. And I checked here, Greg, and he did read it.

Greg Cagle:
He did.

Mark Cole:
He read it. He’s marked it up. And I’m very proud of Chris because we need Chris to read. So, Greg, thank you for writing a book that Chris read. The second call to Action is we have developed content around this book that Maxwell leadership wants to make available to you in your corporate setting, in your team setting, and we’ll talk more about that. But, Greg, enough about me. I’ve got to tell you that I love you and appreciate your work for more than just the fact. A good book.

Mark Cole:
You’re a great coach, a facilitator. I get feedback about you all the time that you don’t even know about. Greg has made a difference for our life. But here’s what I love even more. You’ve been there. You’re a product of the product. You’ve worked in companies, you have shaped culture. You’ve seen bad culture at work.

Mark Cole:
This book is not built on some concept in some thinking chair. This book is baked in practice. Give us a little bit about your story and how you would have even came across developing good cultures.

Greg Cagle:
Well, that’s. I love that question. So, you’re right. I mean, I have, as you can tell by my color of my hair and beard, I’ve been around this thing for a while. And my whole background is pretty much serial entrepreneur. And so I tell people all the time. I think what makes me worth listening to on occasion is I have figured out every way to make every mistake possible. And my journey on culture is as much from the things that have tripped me up and the landmines that I’ve stepped on over the years, as much as it is the success that I’ve enjoyed.

Greg Cagle:
And then my journey with our clients, our corporate clients, and the leaders of both small companies, all the way up to Fortune 50 companies, the opportunity to walk alongside them and really begin to develop this idea of culture and why it matters. I gotta say this. I love what you said a moment ago. You challenged people and you said, listen, you can make a difference in culture. You know, we say this a lot. The good news is one person can change a culture.

Mark Cole:
Absolutely.

Greg Cagle:
The bad news is one person can change a culture. Right. And so. But I want people to understand, the closer are to the front line, the more opportunity you really have to shape the culture. And we can talk about that a little bit more later. But really, what I really decided about here on this book about three years ago, I realized if you asked 15 leaders to define culture, you probably have 15 different definitions. Now, here’s the interesting thing. Ask them, is culture important? Absolutely.

Greg Cagle:
No doubt about it. Ask them if they have a good culture and they can tell you if our culture is good or if it’s seen as better days, if it needs help. They can tell you all that. When you really get and pin them down and say, well, how do you define culture at your organization? They really struggle. And it’s not about, you know, pool tables and beanbag chairs and all that. It goes much deeper than that. And so I just kind of wanted to help leaders really intentionally be able to focus, what are the different components that make up a culture? And then as a leader, how do you construct that in a way that goes out and beats the pants off the competition all the time? And that was really the whole motivation.

Mark Cole:
I want to give one more biographical piece of information. This is probably not in your official bio, but I’m very injured that it’s not. But maybe you’ll add it after this. But podcast listeners, I appreciate Greg because he helps our bottom line. My bottom line of my company is better because Greg Cagle goes out and makes raving fans. So I love that you make raving fans and make their bottom line better. I love that you’re a great coach and facilitator. I love that you’re a practitioner.

Mark Cole:
We go on with the bio. I love that you’re a writer now because you’re not just going out and helping people with something you think you’ve actually put it in so that those of us that want to be shaping culture down the road can actually participate in making it better. But another thing that podcast listeners you will appreciate about Greg is this is the guy. When I share the story and every, every several dozen podcasts, I share the story. When Greg sat me down and said, mark, you can’t set the bar so high for your team and make it unattainable if you’re not accurate in how you assess yourself. He’s the guy that told me, if the best on a scale of one to seven, if the best you’ll give yourself is a six, and how passionate and how bought in you are to the company, everybody else can only be a five, you’ll remember this conversation.

Greg Cagle:
I just now remember.

Mark Cole:
I remember it every single day because I judge people on how I am as a leader. And when you are a leader, and you’re supposed to be more and before and doing things that others want, and you judge them based on your level of commitment, your level of buy in. You’re doing a disservice to your team. Podcast family knows that lesson because I share it often. This guy has helped me in my own self leadership and culture. So I wanted to put that out as a bio because that’ll make a connection to my podcast fan, our podcast family. Here. Here’s what I want to do.

Mark Cole:
I do want you to pick up the book. I do want you to bring this content into your company. Absolutely. But I want to start with this podcast. I want to talk a little bit about the four dimensions of culture. So what are they? And really, Greg, why do they matter to me? What is this? Yeah.

Greg Cagle:
So let’s take the second part of that question first, because I think that’s critical for people out there to understand, is why does culture matter? It matters because the reality is, I don’t care if you’re trying to deliver on your strategic initiatives for your growth plan, sales initiatives. In some of our clients, there’s safety initiatives because we serve a lot of the industrial complex. And whatever it is, culture delivers on that. And culture matters because if the culture isn’t right, it really doesn’t matter what the leader says. It doesn’t get delivered on. And so what I try to help leaders understand is where you’re constantly burying yourself in data. You’re looking at reports, you’re looking at financial reports, you’re looking at your market penetration, you’re looking at your marketing, all those different things, and you’re trying to lead from that. You’re really probably not focused on the right thing.

Greg Cagle:
And I’m not saying that those aren’t important because they’re very, very important. But those get much easier to lead when you set the tone where the culture has the ability to deliver on all the things that you have. And so culture really, really matters from there. And so that’s the, that’s the second part of the question.

Mark Cole:
It’s incredibly helpful.

Greg Cagle:
Now, the first part of the question is, what are the four dimensions? It’s important to understand that there are four. Three of them are positive and useful and should be built out and healthy. One is what we call the negative dimension. And the only reason we put that in there is because it lives with us all. And that is the complacent dimension. So the four dimensions are this, the complacent dimension, the compliant dimension, the committed dimension, and the courageous dimension. And let me just real quickly break each one of those very, very briefly, because I know we got a lot of ground that you want to cover. So complacency is the negative dimension.

Greg Cagle:
And the thing that I try to get leaders to understand is if you found a way to completely eradicate complacency out of your organization, call me immediately, because it’s almost impossible to do. But we want to be aware, number one, that it exists and that it is part of our culture. It’s all kind of always with us, kind of, you know, simmering there. That’s number one. And number two, we want to make sure that we understand how to keep it at a very minimum and not give it oxygen to breathe. And so we talk in the book and in the content that we’ve developed that we’re starting to take into organizations now that you mentioned. We’re talking about how sometimes leaders inadvertently do things and lead and develop certain things within their culture that actually encourages complacency. And we’ll talk about that in just a second.

Greg Cagle:
The other three dimensions are positive. They’re very healthy. They’re extremely necessary if you want long term sustainable success in your business. So you have the compliant dimension. And just think of this as the foundation of everything you do in terms of growth and scale. So this is the order and structure of your organization. So all that is orderly and structured processes, procedures, efficiencies, rules, all of that lives within the compliant dimension and sets the foundation for either eradicating mistakes from the past. That’s why we build in processes and rules or building in efficiencies, because we’ve discovered an efficient way to do something.

Greg Cagle:
So we put in a process or procedure. So all of that lives in there. Why do we call it the compliant dimension? Because it’s our non negotiables. In other words, if I work for you, Mark, you tell me. This is what you say, Greg. This is the processes and procedures and the rules that we’ve developed over time. There’s a lot of scars in this and a lot of trial and error. These are non negotiable.

Greg Cagle:
And so we call it compliant because people are expected to comply with these things. So that’s our compliant dimension. Now what’s interesting is, and I’ll give you this quick example, I want you to think about an organization that starts out they’re on fire and they start expanding their business model and they continue to grow and grow and grow and they’re on this fast track and all of a sudden they get to this place where they are at the top of the mountain, or they’re the industry leader, or they’re the up and comer that everybody’s watching and they realize, wait a minute, if we’re going to scale this thing, we’re going to keep this growth manageable. We better have some systems, we better have some processes and procedures. So what they do is they build that into their compliant dimension to replicate that success. Now, here’s where it gets tricky. If we overdo that, we set too many rules out there, try to systematize everything, try to make a process to manage every possible business scenario. What do you think is going to happen to the people in our organization? They’re going to become robotic.

Greg Cagle:
They’re going to become complacent.

Mark Cole:
That’s interesting. And you’re going to kill the entrepreneur’s spirit, 100%.

Greg Cagle:
No innovation, no creative thinking, no what ifs. It’s just tell me what to do and I’ll do it. And that’s a form of complacency. And so, inadvertently, in an over exuberance to build in too much order and structure to build off of, we actually feed the very thing we’re trying to avoid. Very example there, how that works. And then the other two, I’ll quickly touch on. So the committed dimensions, all about performance and achievement. This is where your performance metrics live.

Greg Cagle:
This is where we set all of our goals. This is where the leaders is expected to motivate people to go above and beyond their best past performance. You just mentioned to me Maxwell’s having a fantastic year this year. That’s part of the committed dimension. You’re continuing to go beyond what you did last year, which was, I think, a record break. So that’s the committed dimension. Goals, performance, achievement. Right.

Greg Cagle:
And then the last one is the courageous dimension. Now, think about this. So your business is successful. You’ve now set the foundation with processes and systems that keep you online and allow consistency in your performance and allow you to scale. You’re hitting your performance metrics and you’re hitting all your goals and everything like that. What’s the one thing missing if you want to stay at the top of the market, if you want to stay as a market leader? It’s innovation, creativity. Right? That’s the. That’s what lives in the courageous dimension.

Mark Cole:
Wow.

Greg Cagle:
Now, we call this the courageous dimension for one reason. Think about how much courage it takes if you’re amazingly successful, everything’s working well, and how much courage it takes to step outside of that and say, wait a minute, let’s abandon what we know in search of what we need to know, because we. Tomorrow’s gonna be different. The competitors aren’t gonna quit. Situations change. Economics change. So we have to continuously be thinking courageously and innovating, even while we’re successful, and be creative in the way that we approach business, even while we’re successful. In fact, the best time to question success is while you’re enjoying it.

Greg Cagle:
Yeah, for sure. And so that’s the four dimensions.

Mark Cole:
So, let me ask you this. I’m a visual guy. We have the five levels of leadership which kind of build off of each other, have the success cycle, which kind of lends itself to the next. Am I thinking of these in steps? Am I thinking of these in circles? Are they interconnected? When I’m looking at these, you need all four of these components.

Greg Cagle:
All right. I love that question, and I love it so much. So let’s go to the five levels for a second, because you and I both know that that’s the cornerstone of everything we teach, right? So, if I am a great level two leader now, I want to move to level three, which is all about production and performance and leading teams for results. But when I get there, Mark, do I stop practicing level two?

Mark Cole:
No.

Greg Cagle:
No. Same thing with coaching.

Mark Cole:
Got it. That helps.

Greg Cagle:
So, I want compliance, I want commitment to our goals, and I want innovative thinking. The courageous dimension. But it’s not a stair step where you get to a point, you go, oh, we’re a courageous organization. No, you are a courageous organization. You’re a committed organization, and you are a compliant organization. And complacency is shoved to its bare minimum. Yep, yep.

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Mark Cole:
I talked on this briefly in our opening comments. You’re a product of the product. You’re not going out and telling people what to do that you haven’t done. So tell me what experiences have brought you to the understanding of these four components of culture?

Greg Cagle:
All right, so these questions are really rich. All right, so when I look back on my career, you tend to remember the mistakes you made more. I don’t know why, but you beat yourself up, and you go, gosh, if I had just done this differently or that differently. And when I look back, I was a well intentioned leader, like most leaders really are, and had all these great intentions. But I was so wrapped up into the minutiae of business that I never stepped back and said, wait a minute. What about the environment that we’re creating here? Is it an I’m asking people to perform at the highest level? And I pushed for that, but I never stopped to think, wait a minute. Does my environment invite that productivity? Does my environment create a motivational factor where people are self motivated, self correcting, self accountable? And when I look back on it, mark, the answer was no. I thought that if we did all the things necessary to be successful, that the culture would be what it needed to be, and it’s the absolute opposite.

Greg Cagle:
The culture will determine the level of success that you have in these areas that you need to think about. And you get that right, and everything else is much easier to manage.

Mark Cole:
Wow. Okay. So I want to go a little bit deeper. I’ve been a part of bad cultures, been a part of good cultures, and it’s not always about the bottom line performance. I mean, you can have a bad culture and be zinging and doing quite well. You can be really underperforming at the performance numbers, the financial numbers, and still feel pretty good about the culture. So there’s something else to culture that I want to understand, and I think you touched on it just a moment ago when you were talking about the connection between complacency and an overabundance of compliance. So you’ve got this interrelated piece to where overabundance, compliance can kill the entrepreneur spirit.

Mark Cole:
We talked about all that, and you talked about how compliance can take you to complacency. What I’d love for you to do is talk to me about those and how they’re signaling potential disaster in the company.

Greg Cagle:
Well, this is really good, because the reality is an overabundance of any one of the three positive dimensions will drive you towards complacency in the compliant dimension. It’s an overburden of rules and process and procedures that eliminate any creative thinking, any innovative way of looking at doing things. And so I become, as an employee, robotic, and, in essence, I show up for work and I say, tell me what to do, and that’s what I’ll do. What does the manual say? Right? But think about this. What about an organization that has an overabundance of the committed performance and achievement dimension, where it’s push, push, push. It’s, what have you done for me lately? And you hit this goal, you move it to the next one. We see this in sales organizations a lot. So what eventually happens? Well, people burn out.

Greg Cagle:
And when people burn out, guess what they do? They become complacent. So complacency looks different in an overabundance of that dimension, it looks like burnout. Let’s go to the next one. You’ve seen this. We have a client that we work with very closely in Australia. I watched this happen in this organization, one of the most innovative organizations I’ve ever had the privilege of working with. I mean, always out on the edge, always there. And they had a leader whose mind just was innovative, and it was really a gifting of his, but in an overabundance of constantly innovating, constantly creating something new, he bred complacency in his organization.

Greg Cagle:
But it sounded different here. It sounds like this. You’ve heard people do this, we’ll just wait till next week. It’ll change again. We’re chasing the next shiny object. So now an overabundance of innovation can create complacency. So what’s the moral of the story? The moral story is this balance and health in each dimension. And the balance is the key.

Greg Cagle:
The right amount of systemization leaves some room for innovation, creativity, the right amount of pushing hard and challenging for results. But let’s celebrate. Let’s celebrate contribution. We don’t always win the game, but we could probably look at the game film and go, wow, mark, that was a heck of a contribution right there. We keep that up, we’re going to start winning games. So celebrate contribution, not just winning. And so it’s very, very important that all of those have to be balanced, and then there’s going to be seasons where you depend on one dimension over the other.

Mark Cole:
Wow.

Greg Cagle:
Think about when the pandemic hit. Everybody out there was dependent on that innovative adaptability that’s in the courageous dimension to get them through it, because it came out of nowhere. And so if that dimension of your culture wasn’t healthy, many of them didn’t make it.

Mark Cole:
Wow. Okay. So we talked about just then an overabundance creating complacency. Yeah. How does an overabundance of the courageous dimension lead to complacency.

Greg Cagle:
It’s constantly innovating and constantly changing because that’s the courageous dimension, is about innovation and change. If you’re leading this organization, Mark, and every time we turn around, you’re bringing us the next innovative idea, a new creative way of doing things that we’ve done before, and you’re changing things all the time. Eventually, the leaders beneath you are going to look at their teams and say, all right, time out, hold off. We’re just going to sit tight for a minute because Mark’s going to be back next week after he goes on a trip with John and he’s going to come back with some exciting things and it’s going to change again. Well, what is. Wait and see. That’s complacency. It’s just sit tight.

Mark Cole:
That’s so good, man. That is so leaders, I’m just going to tell you right, there was gold because all of us think our enthusiasm and our creativity is keeping the organization moving and all of that. Well, what you’re doing is you’re causing dependency on you and then you’re causing hesitation if you’re not in the room, which is creating that complacency that you’re.

Greg Cagle:
Talking about, mark, hold on. That’s brilliant. That’s brilliant. I want you to think about something because you just said something very important. Leaders make this mistake about culture all the time. You said you’re creating dependency on you, but guess what? You can do that in all three dimensions. And that’s really what breeds complacency. When I am only dependent on you, I’m dependent on you to tell me the process we need to do, the system, the organization, the structure.

Greg Cagle:
If I’m depending on you to motivate me to the next level of achievement in the committed dimension, or I’m depending on you to come back with innovation all the time. What is everybody doing sitting and waiting on you? What is that? That’s complacency. So, you know, you’re. You just really nailed it right there. I don’t, I don’t. That. We don’t need to just brush over that. And you know what else, Mark? When we do that, we’re well intentioned, aren’t we?

Mark Cole:
Sure.

Greg Cagle:
See, I don’t want leaders to go, well. Wow, he’s being hard on me. No, no, no. You’re well intentioned. Yeah. That’s not the. But a blind spot is an overused strength. I mean, it’s that simple.

Greg Cagle:
So we have to be very careful.

Mark Cole:
Here and balance that we’re talking to Greg Cagle. He’s the author of the four dimensions of culture. It’s a book that before you do anything else, you need to go pick this book up. Whether you get books at Amazon, whether you get books at books a million or barnes and noble, wherever you get books, you need to go order the book. The four dimensions of culture. I love this subtitle and, and the leaders who shape them, because I want to go to that because we, as leaders don’t. We want to bring out the brilliance of people. And you talk about that.

Mark Cole:
I’ve heard you talk about that before you even talked about it in the book. So let’s talk about this idea of bringing out the brilliance in others. What role does culture play in bringing out someone’s unique abilities?

Greg Cagle:
Well, Mark, I think you are really about this, too, because I know that just your impact on me has always made me want to be a little bit better. It’s made me want to live up to the beliefs that you throw out there and show your belief in me. And I all of a sudden say, wow, I better live up to that, you know? And so I tell leaders all the time, when you, when you take and put that leadership badge on for the very first time, there’s a major shift in what’s needed from you. It’s no longer about what you can accomplish and what you can do. It is about extracting the brilliance of those you have been entrusted to lead. And culture allows that to happen at light speed. Okay? The speed of light. When the culture is right, when I have the right amount of order and structure to operate off of, when I have the motivation I need to achieve a little bit more than I did yesterday, when there’s an innovative spirit that welcomes open debate as a way for all of us to get better and embraces even a little friction and conflict so that we can all sharpen ourselves and have better ideas.

Greg Cagle:
Guess what’s happening. I’m becoming the absolute best version of myself. Yeah.

Mark Cole:
Yeah. Wow. Oh, man. I want to dig into that, too. Good grief, Greg. Okay. I want to spend the lion’s share of the rest of our time. I want to talk to you leaders out there that your culture is driving or impeding the results of your organization.

Greg Cagle:
Culture.

Mark Cole:
Culture. You have got to have the culture to have sustainable results. You’ve talked about that. So some of you that’s already been to maxwellleadership.com, cultureshift, you’ve already seen two things. You saw we’ve got a place there for you to order the book and go get it. You also see that in that same place we have a form for you to fill out because you, Greg and Chris Goede, commonly on our podcast, are going to do a 45 minutes webinar via Zoom deep dive into this, talking about culture from an organizational standpoint. The third thing that you see there is we have developed a corporate training, a process and a deliverable that will help you will come in and work with your organization. In fact, our largest, one of our largest corporate clients, seven figure client, been using Maxwell stuff forever.

Mark Cole:
You should feel good about this. They’re now using the culture content, the four dimensions of culture. And Chris Gody was telling today, absolutely loving it. You should feel great about that.

Greg Cagle:
That’s awesome.

Mark Cole:
You should feel great about that.

Greg Cagle:
I do. I do.

Mark Cole:
And so I want to spend the rest of our time, Greg, and to you viewing this and listening to this, I want to spend time about culture affecting the production of a company. And then I’m going to give you some action items. You’re going to be able to really lean into this content. But how do the four dimensions of culture affect the overall performance of an organization?

Greg Cagle:
Yeah. Okay, so this is such a really good question, because what good is culture if it doesn’t lead to the ultimate performance of the organization, which is what we’re looking for? And by the way, mark, if I can step back for 1 second, because I know there’s some leaders out there thinking, well, this is all great for the CEO or the COO or all the C’s, right? But I just lead a little small team. I want everyone to understand, as a leader, you can build a culture within your team that allows you to deliver on the expectations the organizations have of your team. So if you think that you can’t affect your department or your team, I mean, think about it. If I’m leading the HR team, the culture probably needs to be a little bit different than if I’m in it or I’m leading the sales team. And so it’s very important for leaders to understand, look, you have a responsibility to build the proper culture within your team as well, right? But if we take this back out to an organization that wants to be a high performance organization, here’s the thing. Tell me, tell me if this resonates with you, Mark, because I know you’ve been around a lot of businesses. For an organization to have sustainable, long term success, there’s three.

Greg Cagle:
Three what? I call them the big three. Three things that every organization has to deliver on. The first one, execution of strategy. Every organization has to have a roadmap. That’s your strategic roadmap strategy. And the ability to execute on that, that requires an enormous amount of focus and accuracy. Okay. And that has to be built into your culture.

Greg Cagle:
The other two, navigating adversity and crisis and capturing opportunity. It’s really interesting to understand here that many organizations, when they look back, they’ll tell you, oh, man, when we got through that, whatever that was, adversity, that crisis, things changed for us. It catapulted us to the next level. Or they’ll say, you know, when that opportunity presented itself out of nowhere and we captured it, that took us to the whole new level. Well, here’s what’s interesting. Those three business liberals executing on strategy, navigating crisis and adversity and capturing opportunity. Two of those three, a business or its leaders really can’t plan for. And that is adversity in crisis, an opportunity, say, well, sure you can.

Greg Cagle:
Well, yes, you can to some degree. But the kind of adversity that will completely derail your organization and knock it off the tracks comes out of nowhere in the middle of the night when you didn’t see it coming. Prime example. Very easy to point to the pandemic. Why did some organizations get through that and actually even be healthier? And why did some organizations turn into a fatality because of it? So what culture does is it creates an environment that is prepared for the things you can’t plan for. You can’t plan for it, but if you’re prepared, you’ll get through it. And so when crisis hits, what do we need? We need adaptability. We need to suddenly move in different directions in how we do business.

Greg Cagle:
We went from an on site world to a virtual world for a while in our teachings and trainings because of COVID right. That was an adaptability function that has to be built into your culture. And if you wait until it happens and then try to do it, you’re in trouble. Same thing with capturing opportunity. Most of the time, we get on the other side of crisis. What do we see? An opportunity. And it’s right there. Right then we need agility built into our culture.

Greg Cagle:
At that point, we have to be agile enough to say, there’s the opportunity. If we don’t grab it, someone else will. And so let’s go get it. And if the culture is right, we have the ability collectively to go after that opportunity, grab it, and catapult us to the next level.

Mark Cole:
So it’s what, on podcast. Podcast family. You’ve heard John say, often, when opportunity appears, it’s too late to prepare, right? When tragedy appears, it’s too late to prepare. How do you prepare for opportunity, creating a culture that can respond to opportunity when it presents itself? How do you prepare for tragedy, for challenge? You get a culture, you get a team that can be resilient during that time. Too many times, people want to teach resilience when resilience is needed, rather than resilience when it will make a difference. Resilience after you’ve only fallen apart is only recovery. Resilience is really resilience when you have the ability to sustain through what Greg is telling us here, and I love this, is you can build a culture that is ready made for the unknown ahead. And we’ve just led through unknown.

Mark Cole:
Like you said, COVID was unknown. Well, there’s a tragedy. There’s an economic downturn. There is an opportunity to double your business right around the corner. Is your culture ready for it?

Greg Cagle:
That’s right.

Mark Cole:
Now, here’s what I want to do. I’m going to let you give a couple of last minute thoughts on the book, something that will help. But I want to remind you, maxwellleadership.com cultureshift is a place that you’ll make a difference because of today’s podcast. It’s where you personally can learn how to be a better contributor to the culture that you’re in. That’s where you can pick up the book, the four dimensions of culture. It’s also where you as a leader can determine, hey, I’m ready to take the next step. You guys come to my company like you do with other very large, million dollar, billion dollar companies that we’re working with on culture. And we can bring a training and a workshop and a series of deliverables around this content that will make a difference for you.

Mark Cole:
Go to maxwellleadership.com forward slash culture shift. Now some of you say, I want to hear some more of this. I want to continue the conversation. And you and Chris Gode, I think he told me about a month and a half from now, I think so is going to be on a Zoom call that we want you to be a part of. There’s a form that you can fill out for this Zoom [email protected]. Cultureshift. So you want to go deeper? Fill out the form. Join us on the Zoom call.

Mark Cole:
You want to go ahead and pick up the book, which is all of us, go Amazon, Barnes and noble, go to maxwellleadership.com cultureshef. You can get one there. You want to bring this content to your organization. We’re ready to help you. We’re already working with organizations. We’re ready to help them. And, man, I promise you, Greg and the rest of our team will do an incredible job of adding value to you. So send off.

Mark Cole:
We’ve talked to leaders, we’ve talked to people that want to go deeper. I want to send us off on this concept again. What can I do? Taking these four dimensions, intake, what can I do? I’m not the CEO right now. I’m just a person, a part of a culture that wants to see that culture improve. What can I do as a simple next step to go out of here and make a difference?

Greg Cagle:
Fundamentally, the simplest step you can make is think about this. So I, very early in the book, in the training that we bring into organizations, we say we need a consistent definition of culture. I want everyone realizing what culture is and having the same definition. So here, here’s the simple definition we bring to the table for everyone. It’s how we think, it’s how we act, and it’s how we interact. Those three things. I mean, think about it, mark. If.

Greg Cagle:
If I think ready for this, that leadership is authority and title, my actions are going to be authoritative and title driven and dictatorial. Right. And my interactions with people are going to be dictatorial, what kind of culture is that going to build? Now, if I follow John Maxwell, and I think that leadership is influence, my actions with my people are influential, not authoritative. And the actions that I bring out as a leader are designed to increase my influence, not my authority. And those interactions are now relationship based, and they’re solid relationships that begin to build. So what I would say to leaders is, step back for a second, take a look at your team and say, simply do it this way. If I was bringing a new team member into my team today, and I was going to say, hey, welcome, mark. Welcome to the team.

Greg Cagle:
We’re glad you’re here. But I just want to tell you, if you’re going to be successful here, here’s how you’re going to need to think. Well, if you’re going to be successful here, here’s how we behave. And if you really want to be successful here, here are the expectations on how you interact with your teammates and our customers. Now, what did I just do there? I just set the framework to tell you. I just told you how to be successful. If all of us on the team are thinking in the same direction, not thinking alike, thinking in the same direction, and we’re behaving in a way that we’ve agreed to behave and doing the actions we’ve agreed to do. And we’re interacting in a way that we’ve set guidelines that’s going to extract the brilliance from each other.

Greg Cagle:
We’re building culture.

Mark Cole:
Wow.

Greg Cagle:
It’s that simple.

Mark Cole:
Oh, man. All right, so here’s the action item. Now, I got one more. You need to buy the book for yourself, and you need to buy the book for a leader in your life that is shaping the culture you’re a part of, and you guys need to do it. One of the greatest gifts you can give to your leader before summer vacation is a book that they can go and think about these four dimensions and come back after the summer break and be ready to make a culture that will shape production in the fall. And so I’m going to challenge you. All of you have somebody. I have somebody that shapes my culture.

Mark Cole:
And me and Heather are going to get this book, and we’re going to pick up some things that will help us shape a better culture. Greg, thank you for all you do. You’ve impacted me personally. You’ve impacted me now today as a podcast contributor, and you’ve impacted so many companies. Let’s keep doing it. What do you say?

Greg Cagle:
Amen.

Mark Cole:
Hey, we’re ready to help you. Thanks. By the way, we do all of this. Greg is committed like we are to bringing powerful, positive change because everyone deserves to be led. Well.