The 3rd episode in the 4-part series about culture, this episode will look at how to lead a culture change, including:
Culture Part 1 https://www.buzzsprout.com/2224085/14622862
Culture Part 2 https://www.buzzsprout.com/2224085/14666864
Follow SAIT Corporate Training on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/saitcorporatetraining/?viewAsMember=true
Connect directly with Jennie and Craig on LinkedIn:
Have burning questions about leadership that you'd like us to address? Email them to leadership.questions@sait.ca and let your voice be heard.
The 3rd episode in the 4-part series about culture, this episode will look at how to lead a culture change, including:
Culture Part 1 https://www.buzzsprout.com/2224085/14622862
Culture Part 2 https://www.buzzsprout.com/2224085/14666864
Follow SAIT Corporate Training on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/saitcorporatetraining/?viewAsMember=true
Connect directly with Jennie and Craig on LinkedIn:
Have burning questions about leadership that you'd like us to address? Email them to leadership.questions@sait.ca and let your voice be heard.
This is the Leading Beyond Any Title podcast, your guide to transformative leadership. We're your hosts. Hi, I'm Craig Hess.
Jennie:And I'm Jennie Gilbert. Each episode of Breakfast will bring you weekly quick lessons and conversations about topical leadership challenges. You're guaranteed to leave with one big idea, two applied strategies, and three questions to consider that can help enhance your leadership every day.
Craig:We'll bring you insights on how to lead beyond any title and unlock your own leadership potential.
Jennie:And we both hope you enjoy this episode.
Craig:Anyway, okay, Jennie, we are back for part three of a four part episode. You and I are here, there, and everywhere on this great planet for the month of March. And this is our third part of a four part series on culture, how to build it, how to change it. What are the key factors? We've had a couple prior episodes that we'll link to in the show notes and certainly encourage folks to go back and give those a listen. In our first episode, we talked about how we need to be intentional about building culture and the importance that you just can't leave this to chance because if you leave it to chance, you'll get what you get. And that's never a bad thing. You might fluke into something, but it's not the way to get there. And we talked about in that needing to know who your influencers and your energizers and your blockers of culture are. And so that was a really good conversation. I thought.
Jennie:It was very full actually, as we look back on it. And I think what it brings to light is that this isn't easy and it isn't a checkbox exercise. And so culture has to be high priority from everybody for it to really take effect and take hold.
Craig:Yeah, absolutely. And then in our second episode, we chatted about what are the building blocks of culture. We've established that it's important. You need to be intentional. You need to know who's going to be with you, who's going to be against you. In this journey, but the building blocks are really quite important. We identified nine of them, really the values and purpose of your team, your priorities, defining your non negotiables as a group, how are you going to reward and recognize individual team effort? We talked about psychological safety. We talked about the conversations that you have as a team. My favorite, cause it sounds so academic. We talked about artifacts and rituals that you build in to support culture. We talked about the importance of the meetings that you run, right? And the last piece, the last building block that we touched on was, how do you make decisions? What's your decision making process and how does that reinforce, reinforce the culture? I think we left that conversation giving folks some really interesting thoughts around what are the key pieces that you need to focus on when you're building culture?
Jennie:Yes, and again, with a list as long as nine, we got through a lot, actually. There's so much to, to take in, and I think that's one of the things where people stumble is, as you look at culture, what actually is the culture that you strive to be, that, that would be a really good place to start, because If you listen to people carefully, they want to be a collaborative, a learning, a performance, a caring culture. And I don't think you can do all of those. I think you have to pick what it is that you want and hold to that. And it's possible to have a performance culture and still have people who care deeply, but a caring culture and a performance culture will probably have different behaviors and values attached to them. Once you've decided the kind of culture that you want to have, then that list of nine, and I'm not even going to try and repeat it, becomes really important because you can align that to what it is that you're trying to achieve for your company and for your teams.
Craig:Yeah, absolutely. And I think what you just touched on there is the comment around once you've decided what type of culture you want to have, and that's where we wanted to go today was. So you're a leader who's decided your culture needs to change. You're not happy with the culture that exists right now. Things aren't quite working. You see a path to a bigger, better, faster type of team organization, and you've decided your culture needs to change. What's next? How do you do it? And I think that's what we want to focus on today.
Jennie:Yes, and actually this point, pretty sure it's Kevin Oakes, says let's talk about renovating cultures as opposed to transforming, going for the wholesale change. Change is difficult as we know, and change is constant as we know. There's just tons of turbulence everywhere for anyone. So if we start to use the terminology renovation, then it becomes easier. If you renovate your house, most of the time you keep the parts that you like, and then you do some really good work on the other parts of the house. And so as we renovate a culture, one of the things that we can do is, what is it that we like? And if we're just, if we're talking about a team, that's a great team conversation. What do we do that we're proud of? What do we do that we. Believe holds true to who we are and who we want to be to our clients, to our members, to our stakeholders. And those are the parts we don't want to lose. That's comfortable. We do it already. And if your team's proud of it, then we definitely want to keep that.
Craig:Yeah, I love that analogy of renovation. It actually just triggered a thought for me that we actually didn't really talk about in our prep for this conversation. But if you are going to renovate, if you've decided you want to make some changes, you want to make some improvements. You are often not playing with the foundation. You're not playing with the big pieces, right? And it's probably very applicable to most leaders that would be listening to this in that you're a team, you're a room within the house that's being renovated. So you still have the foundation of the organization that exists, all those pieces that probably aren't yours to touch or play with. But you can still work on changing the windows changing the flooring, changing the color of the walls or whatever you want to do. And so that's interesting. And so where do you start then? You decided your team, you need to make a change. You want to improve that. We know the foundations are going to be there. Where do you go next?
Jennie:Yeah, that's killing you. Take a great big deep breath and a nice large cup of coffee. And then a, like what she said there though, in that the beauty of this is house or room within a house, it doesn't matter who you are listening, this is, this can be flickable and. Once you've got that idea into your head, my first place I start is spend some time watching. Is it just you or is it a shared perception? Because we're very good at creating stories and it might be random cases. Is a bee in your bonnet? Okay, that's a much smaller task than our culture. We've had culture define the behavior, the worst behavior that you're currently tolerating. Okay. All rewarding. And so once we get to that point where it's not sitting, as you said, it's just not sitting quite right, then I think the first thing to do is to listen. The worst thing that can happen ever is for a bunch of leaders, whether it's in within the company or right at the very top of the company to close the door and discuss the culture because they know so little. And that takes me back to that. I think it was. From Japan originally, the Iceberg of Ignorance, and at the very bottom, underneath the water, the part of the iceberg that you can't see, are your individual contributors, and they know 100 percent of the problems, why they're occurring, what's occurring, who's involved they know everything. Their front line of leadership knows, I think, and I'm guessing here, I think it was 74 percent of the issues and the problems and the things that are going on. And then you go above the water and once you go any higher than that front level of leadership, you're down to 9%. And your C suite are about four. And wherever you're at, the step number one is listen, and listen carefully. And listening is listening in conversation, listening in one on ones. You hear people talk frequently about skip level listening. So create your role, your title is director, so to skip level. You've got various levels that you can skip and go have conversation with. That would give you more information than just chatting to the leaders that report in to you. But there's other places we can go. What is Glassdoor or Indeed talking about? And generally you get your very passionate critics there, but that's information, that's good. What are you seeing? What are you hearing? It's all data. Your engagement surveys, you and I have talked often about how useful is an engagement survey. It depends on what you're doing with the data. And with AI now, there's so much that you can do with the data too. So step one, listen, get a real picture for what's really going on.
Craig:Yeah. And what I'd actually love to find is AI that can complete the engagement survey for me. So I don't have to worry about doing that. But so the listening piece is interesting. I think. It makes a ton of sense to me and obviously something that has to happen. It just triggered a thought for me though, there has to be something that happens before that communicates what we are now here to listen for. And so let's take an example of a leader of a 10, a team of 10 to 15 people or whatever it might be. You've got one leader at the top. So you don't have a team of leaders that can go sit behind that door as you talk about and decide what the culture is going to be. Okay. In that case, the idea of changing culture rests in the mind of one individual. And so I think a trigger that has to happen before we have that listening piece, perhaps, and this is my thesis, try and nullify it or support it if you like, but at some point that Leader of one has to go to their team and say, Hey, this is where I think we need to go, and this is where I want to take the team. And now I want to be able to listen and get your feedback.
Jennie:Yes. And
Craig:yeah,
Jennie:that's my political view. Perfect. I am saying I agree with most of that.
Craig:Yeah, that's fine.
Jennie:And I do. I think. If you listen to the language where this is where I want us to go, so what we have to be really careful of is being married to that idea before the listening has happened. And so the passion and the enthusiasm of a leader is so compelling. And we've talked about this before. This is where we get into the HIPPO, highest individually paid person's opinion. This is where we're going. And if I hear that, I'm like, okay, I could have seen us going a little bit this way, but you want to go this way. So we'll just talk about this way. And there might be some good ideas in the part that I'm holding back because I've heard we're going to go this way. So I think coming back to what you said is know what you're looking for. Yes. And how do we. Extend that open mind or extend that mindset that you might not have the answers and your job is just to ensure that it aligns with where the company's heading. So the company's vision, the company's purpose, your job is to ensure that it aligns there. So what are the questions that we can ask? He, they become along the lines of. Our company has five values. How do you see our team living into these values on a day to day basis? How do you see me as a leader? Walking the walk and talking the talk. What do you like about the values that we have? What do you like about working on our team? What would make working on our team actually good and go for it more enjoyable? And we want to stay away from that typically because I'm sure that work should be enjoyable and if we enjoy work We generally produce better results. We know that so I think it is a case of, yes, with some pump, some guardrails in there, but spend some time thinking about the questions that you want to ask and if you've got the psychological safety, what is the worst behavior that is currently tolerated or rewarded on our team, but get into the nitty and the gritty.
Craig:Yeah, no fair enough. And I think I knew you were gonna come back with the hippo thoughts on that one, but. It was something that was sitting in my head because as a leader, you are paid for your judgment about your team and where you're going and how you fit in and the direction you have to take. And there is, there are times where a leader will see things where you have to say, no, we're going to go do this. But if you're talking about something perhaps a little larger and it's not existential, but a little bit more foundational to the collective of the team and how you as a team are going to operate. I hear exactly what you're saying and so trying to figure out how to, you can have your presuppositions, you can have your ideas, but how to ask those questions that don't necessarily reveal your hand, so to speak.
Jennie:I think so. And it thinks that when we come right back to human dynamics, every single person has a want to be seen, heard, and understood. And by listening first and having that conversation, you're doing all three of those things, seeing, hearing, and understanding. Ask good questions, enter that with curiosity, then we'll achieve that part. Now, in the end, if you're able to stand there and say, Here's the questions I asked all of you. Here's the key things that have come out. Can you start to build towards that culture? Very naturally, as we've already said, you can't have everything. But I feel very different if I know when I listen to you or look at whatever it is that you preferred, prepared for us. I can see that my ideas have been heard. And I can see how they maybe don't fit in as we move towards that part. And I think that's what you're talking to there. Yes, you are paid for your judgment and your knowledge and your ability to align us.
Craig:Makes sense. Okay. We've listened. We've skip level listened, right? Let's, I'm just backing up to where we were. We decided that culture needs to change. We then decided that the first step here is to really listen to our teams and listen to our people and try and gather information as best we can to figure out where they are at. Okay. And to tie it back to your renovation analogy, this is analogous to on Pinterest, you're on Instagram, you're looking at pictures of houses, you're looking at pictures of kitchens and bathrooms and trying to figure out what style you want, what you want to do, you've got a plan in mind. Now, the next part of any renovation is really taking a look and deciding what do you like and what are you going to throw away?
Jennie:Yes.
Craig:And so how does that, what's the corollary here as we look at building culture? Or changing culture. Sorry.
Jennie:I think that's the key. Okay. So what are we going to keep and what are we going to get rid of? And then to me, the next step becomes that. That communication, so we have to define what that looks like. And so in my small experience, companies that simply define their values and put them up on the wall, don't get very far because it's just a word up on the wall. And you and I were talking about this previously, one of the Microsoft C chief people officers, Kathleen Hogan, I think her name was, you can't. Freeze culture in a declaration. So if you, if let's say that you're using the values or maybe it's even just simple behaviors, what are the behaviors that you're looking to see? Define it so that the next step, and we talked about this in a previous conversation, we want to see it, say it, and live by it. And we can't do that if we haven't defined it. And so the more that I understand what are the behaviors that are expected of me within this culture, the more that I can live into them and then live beyond them. That's another part of this eventually is we want to be able to scale this and take this up with us too. So I think your next step is defining the behaviors. And that can go both ways. It can define what we want to see, and it can define what's no longer acceptable or appropriate, whichever way that we've put that.
Craig:And so I love that idea, which is easier and how do you reinforce it? I love what we want, they define what we want to see in terms of a behavior or the what's no longer acceptable. I have to think the what's no longer acceptable is the tougher one to break, right?
Jennie:And this I think is where your influences, your energizers and your bookers come in. And so who are you people and who can help you with this as well? It's a bit of a recap. Our influencers are, they're often not titled as a leader, but they're the people in our group or our team. People move towards them. They choose to sit next to them. They go towards them at public events. If you have a lunchroom, they've always got a big busy table. That's going on there and it may not be an extroverted version, they might just be the people who we hold them as this age and we go to them for advice and for attention or to ask, how does this work? Your energizers, those are the people, they love it and they get it and let's say part of your new culture is to ban meetings on Fridays so that everybody can finish their week with a productive streak. Your energizers will be all over that, and they'll be really happy to say, No, sorry, can't come to the meeting, it's a Friday, can you rebook it? And those people are, they'll adopt early. And our early adopters are the ones that carry our message for us. So it's not so much work on just the leader. And this has to be a whole team exercise too, that's the other part within it. And then who are your resistors? Who are your blockers? And sometimes those blockers just like what's going on and they're just going to keep going until somebody actually physically says, no, we don't do that anymore. And so the hard part of it is, are you ready to stand by the boundaries that you've set because you get what you tolerate. So if you let it happen, you're saying, actually, we made all these decisions, but you're special and you can do this and you're an exception to the rule that sends a huge message to your team. So there's a collective commitment. I think too.
Craig:Yeah, though. Are you saying your blockers would actually insist on the Friday afternoon meeting?
Jennie:I'm really struggling to think of anyone who would insist on it. Okay, maybe not a great example, but they would just keep doing it.
Craig:Yeah, no, I'm fully tongue in cheek. Yeah, no, I didn't. You can't. I think the thing I want to be hesitant of in this conversation because we come into this from the here's a checklist. You decided you wanted change. You're now just going to go listen to your team. You're going to decide what you like and you're going to throw out the rest. You're going to say, here's the new behaviors that we want, and here's the behaviors that we're not going to tolerate anymore. You're going to figure out who's going to help, who's going to hinder. And your culture's changed. Congratulations.
Jennie:No. That's not quite that simple, right? No, it isn't. One thing that just struck me there as you were talking, actually, is that wonderful phrase, vision drives decision. Define the behaviors, no more meetings at three o'clock. But the part that, That speaks more is the story behind it. So what is the purpose? What is the reason why we would do that? And so vision, talk about the vision, lay out the vision of what this is for. And we might have to move away cause I'm not sure my three o'clock meeting is a great example, but if we can tie into the vision and the purpose and understand the why, we're much more likely to adopt those desired behaviors. If you simply say, you can't do this anymore. We all have an inner child and an ego that says, all right, let's see if you're serious about that. Whereas if you say what we're looking for is better efficiency, productivity, a way that we can all hold. a great start to our weekend by finishing off the week sound and completed or whatever that might be. You'd have to spend time on what that looks like. That makes more sense. And the other part that's cool within there is when you get someone who appears to be a blocker, they're not helping you, or a passionate critic, like most passionate critics. Just don't want to be disappointed again. And so that's a great conversation. So the minute that you observe a blocker or you're aware of it, don't write them off. That's another conversation. We're back to listening again. Like it is a constant work piece because there's a reason. Nobody gets passionate for no reason. Like we just don't manufacture that for no reason. So what is it that's behind that?
Craig:Yeah, that's so good. I just keep coming back to the fact that this is not. Simple stuff. And I think, especially for me, where I've struggled with this in my career, and perhaps we can go here next before we wrap up with our big idea, tactically and practically, right? You've gone through all this, you've worked with your team, you've done your listening, you've decided what you want, you've thrown out the rest, you've defined behaviors. This isn't now a project that has ended, to your point, it's ongoing. But how do you, at some point you have to say, okay, here we are define the new culture. We've set the vision. Your very next team meeting and your team meeting after that on a daily basis. How are you reinforcing, what are some tips around how to just not lose sight, not lose traction on all the great work that you've just done?
Jennie:If you're not talking about it, your people aren't even thinking about it. And I think the easiest in quotation. The thing for a leader to do is to keep talking, keep the communication consistent, and live by it. You gotta practice what you preach here. But also recognize other people. The billions of dollars that go into deciding what are our values, what are our defined behaviors, keep them alive. How will you recognize them? How will you support the people who are living within them? And it ties into so many other things. Okay, so Jennie, you didn't hit your metric this month, but actually what I really appreciated was how you went about it, and I can see how that lives, eats and breathes, everything that we stand for, and then the conversation is how are we going to support that so that we can get that metric up beyond that? Like you're constantly referring. Back to the culture, recognition, appreciation, validation all go a long way. Now I'm never ever talking about giving people a ribbon for showing up to work, but if you're attaching what they're doing to the culture and you're doing any one of those, recognizing, appreciating, validating. You're tapping into that five to one relationship that we've talked about many a time, five positives to one negative for a high performing team. And so there's so many opportunities, and interesting enough, when you start to talk performance, one of the conditions that drives high performance is attention. So as a leader, where are you paying attention? It's so easy to get caught up. In all the black and white of the day or the numbers of the day. And actually what your people want most is for you to pay attention to them. They probably want that more than they want any feedback from you. They want to know that you're paying attention. So use that and use it in relation to the culture and. It, for some companies, it depends on budget and we've talked about this, but there are companies that will hire people or give a budget line to someone within the team, probably an influencer or an energizer to say, okay, your job is to embrace our culture and here's how you can do this or create a cross silo That's a culture committee. How are we living, eating and breathing everything that we claim to and bring back the data for us. And that data exists in terms of stories. It exists in numbers. It exists in connection. There's so many different ways that you can play with this. And I think, Relida, that's it. Put some time in your calendar, reflect on what's going on and what do you need to do?
Craig:Yeah. So you're saying money can't buy happiness, but it can buy culture.
Jennie:I knew you were going to hold me to that. And that's not how I'd like to be quoted. Thank you for asking.
Craig:I didn't think so. Although, if that money is well spent on that culture person. And it creates a happy workplace. Maybe money can buy happiness, Jennie.
Jennie:Alright, that would have been a very smart answer. You're back to your academic purpose. There you go, you nailed it.
Craig:Okay good conversation and all tongue in cheek about money buying happiness. What is our one big idea that we want folks to wrap up with here today? I
Jennie:think we have to steal Chris Voss line, Vision drives decision. That's it in a nutshell. If we can see the picture, we can make the decision.
Craig:Yeah, no, absolutely. That is such a good one. And it really goes back to where we started, right? You're right. A leader, you've decided culture needs to change. Clearly, you have a vision. As we talked about, maybe there's some ways to go about this and maybe we have a couple strategies that we could focus on where the hippo doesn't necessarily run through the room.
Jennie:That'd be a disaster, a hippo in your house. And actually, where I'd start, and it's for hippos, but it's for everybody, is Learn to listen. And so our obvious, okay, I want to do this. I'm going to go out and I'm going to listen. And so many of us don't actually know how to listen. Our default version is, we call it stingy listening. We're distracted. We're not quite paying attention. We're listening for what we want to hear. And find a way, learn to listen better, let's get rid of the fake acts of listening and really lean into the generosity that can be afforded by paying attention properly.
Craig:So that's one strategy, anything else we could give folks to walk away from?
Jennie:I think so, I think that we talked quite a bit about what will you keep, what will you get rid of, and when I've seen it done at it's best, I think KPIs will hang around for a while for better or for worse, but I'm now seeing more KBIs and that's key behavioral indicators. So whether it's for your values or whether it's for even your non negotiables. What are the key behavioral indicators? And that just gives us that clarity of expectation. If we say that we're trustworthy, let's define what that looks like, what that sounds like, how we're going to operate. And again, that's time. And there's a lot of collaboration within there. It's not all the leader's job.
Craig:Perfect. Yeah, no, that's so good. And one of the key behavior indicators we look for is if you're enjoying this, please do follow the podcast on Apple, Spotify, wherever. Please do share it. Hopefully you've walked away from these first three episodes on culture with some really interesting thoughts around how is your culture working? What changes do you want to make? We're going to flip it on its head in the next episode and talk about how do you kill culture? And we just thought that might be a fun way to wrap it up, but of course there will be some positive takeaways from that. Thank you all for listening and we will see you next time. Take care. Thank you once again for joining us on the Leading Beyond Any Title podcast. If you'd like to stay connected and receive more updates from us, please follow SAIT corporate training on LinkedIn. Stay in the loop with the latest insights and valuable content through the link in the show notes.
Jennie:Additionally, don't miss out on the opportunity to experience Leading Beyond Any Title live. Sign up for our webinars and experience the podcast before anyone else. Finally, make sure to rate, review, and subscribe wherever it is that you listen to your podcast. Thank you again for listening.