Leader Lesson – Culture Part 4

The final episode in a 4 part series about team / organizational culture will look at how to kill culture (I.e. what to avoid doing), including:   

• The lack of psychological safety, and trust 
• The lack of Play, Purpose, and Potential on your team 
• Emotional Pressures 
• Economical Pressures 
• Corporate Inertia 
• Poor Leadership 

Culture Part 1 https://www.buzzsprout.com/2224085/14622862
Culture Part 2 https://www.buzzsprout.com/2224085/14666864
Culture Part 3 https://www.buzzsprout.com/2224085/14710305

Link to Leader Lesson on Psychological Safety https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/leader-lesson-psychological-safety/id1708908093?i=1000642492739

Link to Leading Beyond Any Title episode about Psychological Safety
https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/leading-beyond-any-title-psychological-safety/id1708908093?i=1000633624591

Follow SAIT Corporate Training on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/saitcorporatetraining/?viewAsMember=true

Connect directly with Jennie and Craig on LinkedIn:

• Jennie: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jenniengilbert/
• Craig: https://www.linkedin.com/in/craighess/

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.

Transcript

Craig: 0:00

This is the Leading Beyond Any Title podcast, your guide to transformative leadership. We're your hosts. Hi, I'm Craig Hess.

Jennie: 0:06

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: 0:22

We'll bring you insights on how to lead beyond any title and unlock your own leadership potential.

Jennie: 0:27

And we both hope you enjoy this episode.

Craig: 0:32

Okay, Jennienny, part four of four parts talking about culture. We've hit a point where we are wrapping up our global travels to wherever you've gone to and wherever I've gone to this month and we've gone through three parts already about culture. Talking about the importance of being intentional with it. Talking about the building blocks. In the last episode, we talked about how to initiate a culture change and what you need to think about. And so we'll link all those prior episodes in the show notes for everybody, but we wanted to wrap up this series, maybe on a negative note, not really, but taking the flip side of this in terms of what's going to kill culture, what destroys culture, what hinders your efforts to change culture. And so there's some really key things in here I think we wanted to focus on today.

Jennie: 1:26

Yes, and I'm going to start with two things, which is a plot twist already, because I told you I was only going to start with one, but I'm going to start with two, and I think that's a reminder. So if you are joining us for the first time, as Craig said, three links in our show notes, the beauty, I think, of these four is you can listen in any order you like, but one of the things that we need to remember when we're talking about culture is culture has a huge impact. And so the culture in our workplace organization. Impacts our performance at work, somewhat obviously, it impacts our engagement, but it also impacts our health and our well being, and we take home our work day to our personal lives, so therefore culture impacts our homes and our communities too, and so it is our responsibility, and it's huge, and so whether we go positive or negative within here, I think we just want to hold to that importance, and then the second thing, is as humans, this is commonly referred to when we talk about culture, we are motivated by three main things and they would be play, purpose, and potential. And we're often distracted by emotional, pressure, economic pressure, and then the word inertia is quite frequently attached to that as well. So there's my starting place for you.

Craig: 2:54

Yeah, it's a great place to start from. I love the whole concept of play, purpose, and potential. We don't talk about play a lot after sixth grade, perhaps. We certainly don't seem, we certainly don't seem to talk about it a lot at work, but I think we all intuitively know what that means if you have the opportunity to do things that you're good at and do things that you like and have the opportunity to be involved and have some, hopefully have some laughs at work while you're at it. We'll always go back to Gallup's Q10, do you have a best friend at work? on the Gallup engagement survey always creates such a interesting conversation. But I think the way we've bucketed it here actually reminds me a bit of a LinkedIn post that we saw while we were prepping for this. And the comment on the post was there's eight reasons why passionate employees go quiet. And if you have a good, strong, robust culture, in theory, you probably have passionate employees for the most part. There's always going to be a group of employees who are just happy to show up and be there, collect their check. And frankly, if they're not steering, trying to steer the ship in a different direction, you probably need a group of employees like that. It doesn't mean they're not important. The eight reasons that this post listed was a breach of trust, a lack of leadership consistency, being overlooked. We've talked about how important it is that people really just want to be seen, heard, and understood, right? Dishonesty, a lack of information, lack of communication. Although I always have to chuckle in my career, every time I have seen an engagement survey, communication is always highlighted as one of the big issues. And typically half the people say there isn't enough and half the people say there's too much. So, I'm not sure where we go with communication there. Leadership selfishness, lack of vision and purpose. and lack of recognition and appreciation. And so you can see all of those tie into, I think what we've really identified is four big buckets here. And maybe we can go through them four or five big buckets, but trust being one emotional pressure. Economic pressure, inertia. That's a really interesting one that we can touch, touch on and frankly just the big bucket of poor leadership.

Jennie: 5:10

Yeah. Yeah.

Craig: 5:13

So where do you wanna start?

Jennie: 5:15

Alright, Lynn, let's start with trust. Trust is foundational to everything. I it. When we think about it and we, we do this often. In Leading Beyond Any Title, our leadership journey that we engage in at SAIT all the time. And the question is, what are you paid to do? And most titles in the workplace, you're actually paid by your company to be in conversation. And, and it, so it's fundamental, it's foundational for the work that you do and for the culture that you hold. And if trusts get impacted by ourselves, By somebody else, or sometimes even just by the organization, there's an awful lot of work to do in rebuilding. And so, I think the key is, and SAIT, we use Charles Feltman's model for trust, and I love it because it makes it easy. So, if I say to you, I don't trust you, or we have a trust issue, that's very hard hitting. That's really difficult to lean into and deal with as an emotional conversation. And if you take Feltman's model and break it down into his four domains that he gives, he talks about competence, reliability, sincerity, and care. And so even when you take those four headings and you think about your culture, And you think about the main aim of culture is to look at our people. There's so much that if you build it and look after it, your culture will flourish. If you ignore it, your culture's going to struggle. And so the easiest But an example of that is most leaders care deeply about competence and reliability. Can you do your job? And can you get it done on time for me? Most employees, the people who report to leaders, and you can be a leader reporting to a leader in this space, we're looking for sincerity and care. So we've got two different sort of. Avenues to start with. We use all four and we need all four, but we may have different importance in there. So we know we want to balance them all, I think.

Craig: 7:31

Yeah. And you want to focus truly, this may seem trite and obvious, but you do have to focus on building a high level of trust within your group and between groups. If you don't have that, it doesn't matter. In our last episode, we talked about if as a leader, you want to try and change your culture. Um, you're not going to be able to do the good work of listening to your people and finding out what they like, what they don't like, because that level of trust isn't there. They're likely not to share. They're likely to share what they think you want to hear. And trust really, if we look at these areas that could kill culture is almost, it's almost the foundational piece. It has to be there or everything else that follows isn't going to go very well.

Jennie: 8:17

And who's present in. Everything that we do. So we tie it to culture. We talked about defining behaviors, holding people accountable to that. If I trust you, it is much easier to be held accountable by you. Cause if I trust you, I know that you care and your, your care thought process is about you and it's about us as a team or about me, if we're working just in partnership and if you're holding me accountable to something. I'm much more likely to buy into that and have good conversation about it, or actually just simply do it, like Craig cares, this has got to be for the better, good, I'm going to try this, whereas if I don't trust you, okay, the guards are up, I'm second guessing everything, I'm looking for the hidden agenda, what's in it for you, what's in it for me, and those two are playing against each other, and it's just hard work, and now our energy also is going, To a very different place than where we want it to be focused with culture and the performance of the job.

Craig: 9:25

And so I think we can, we've talked about trust in many other episodes. We will link those in the show notes. And I think maybe as we wrap this episode up, we may think about a strategy or two that we could give folks to. To focus on how do you build trust? Because it is such a, an important concept, but four other areas that we talked about that can really seriously affect culture if you don't get it nailed. Emotional pressure. Why don't we go there? Like right now, let's get to it. Gina, come on.

Jennie: 9:53

You did a nice job or not as a KCV. And here's funny, if trust is your foundation. Then your emotional intelligence is your delivery system. And you just gave us a perfect example there of how that might run. And so that emotional pressure and it, I don't know, my thing most times. The intent is good, the impact is awful. And the part that we could all do with remembering, constantly remembering, is we all carry an emotional weight. And that emotional weight is what do you leave behind you? So you have an urgency, you have a need, you're getting pressure from somewhere else. You bark at me, or direct me, or, I don't know, parent me, tell me, shit all over me, if you like, and then you move on, because your job is done, communication delivered, I'm sure I was assertive there, I simply told her what I needed. and you move on. But the emotional weight that's left behind that can last for, it's just scary, it depends on what's said and how it's delivered, but that can last for days. And sometimes something that you say, your one external sentence, can become somebody's internal story. That's the worst case scenario of this. And so, I think we just need that self awareness is really what it is. And what is the wake that you're leaving behind? Because the confusion that happens here is, okay, we need to be soft and fluffy and nice and treat Jennie with kid gloves. Not at all. There is a big difference between being assertive and caring and being aggressive and uncaring. And we play a part in that.

Craig: 11:37

Yeah. And that's, that's where the leader really has to have the, the discipline and the ability to be. Regardless of what's going on in their day. So in that example, if I came to you and I've got a thousand things on my list and I really just need you to get this done. And I stick my head in the door and say, Jennie, get this done. Just thinking this is another item on the list to check off the damage that you can do, but actually not pausing, taking a breath, making sure you're engaging. Hey, how's it going before you move on? Like sometimes that 30 seconds difference. Can be the difference and if you're super busy as a leader, just acknowledging that too. Jennie, I'm super busy. I can't talk about this right now. Can you please take care of this? And so just, but leaders are people and just like anybody on your team is dealing with issues and has all their to do list or whatever it might be. It's, you're put in a position of leadership for a reason. You sometimes have to be able to pump the brakes and think about somebody else other than yourself when you're getting through your day.

Jennie: 12:42

And I think too, you think of yourself, like the things that sort of jumped to mind as you were chatting, there is own it and label it. I love what you said that today I'm busy. If you message me and I'm facilitating for the day, often my response starts with, I apologize for the brevity. Like I'm going to be quick here because I've got 30 seconds to answer you. And the other part within there is just that sort of understanding. of the people part to it. So look after yourself. You've come out of a meeting where your emotional intensity has skyrocketed because the friction has been high or there's been a gritty conversation. Whatever that might be. And then your next stop is my office or my cubicle or me on the end of the phone. There's no transition in there. And transition time is something that we can all become responsible for. And it can be 30 seconds. It can be simply just stop, take a breath, pause. Okay, what is the energy I need for this next interaction? And that's a really big part of this is what is the energy that you're taking into? Your next conversation or your next meeting or your next room, and when we're in control of that, it's just a pause and a, and a reflection piece.

Craig: 14:03

Yeah, I mean, it, it doesn't have to take very long. I, we, I think we all experienced this during the depths of, uh, the pandemic when we were jumping from one zoom meeting to the next back to back all day, you have to take time. The other piece that we think ties into emotional pressure, and I don't think we'll belabor this because we've talked about this on episodes. Prior, and we can link those as well, but to micromanagement, right? Like that is probably if emotional pressure was a three legged stool, micromanagement would probably be two and a half of the three legs.

Jennie: 14:38

It's it causes stress.

Craig: 14:40

Yeah. Without a doubt. Economic pressure. So we've talked about trust being a foundation. We've talked about the importance of emotional pressure and how that can break culture. Speak about economic pressure.

Jennie: 14:53

I think two things spring to mind. So one. Because we've talked about this culture, people, we've got home lives and we've got work lives. And so I think when we're personally under any kind of economic pressure, that will affect how we show up at work, that will affect culture. And you mentioned this, some people who just show up and do their job. And, We had a bit of a smile a years back now, a couple of years back when quiet quitting was a thing, really what it was people doing their job, like they were living up to the expectation that was created. They just weren't going beyond there. And there are times in our lives where that is all that we can do. And that pressure, economic pressure can weigh really heavy. So that's a different conversation all of itself. But I think the other economic pressure that shows up is fear. and anxiety when budgets are being slashed and worst case jobs are being slashed. Is my job the next one to go? Or what's coming next? Or what will be around the corner? And we're still in the practice of, you know, Reducing means reducing people. We've all got very smart at how we look at that. And so I think it's a realistic one. I think that, that will impact your culture. You can have all the best intentions, but that ripple of organizational transformation, or renovation as we keep saying. It's going to play a part in it, it's going to cause you a few obstacles or waves in there.

Craig: 16:29

Yeah, and there's times organizations are going to go through those periods. And yeah, you're probably going to have a rocky culture for a little bit. As a leader, you need to be thinking about how you're coming out the other side of that. Right? There's only so much you can do in those times. And really, I've been through it a couple times in my career. You were focused on keeping the lights on and the doors open and literally dotting as many I's and crossing as many T's as you can. Like, it's a fact of life.

Jennie: 16:56

It is, but I think we can circle back to one of the things we were saying earlier, too. If you care about your people, you'll take that on differently. Now, sometimes you can't do anything from what comes down, but we can, we read sincerity, authenticity, and care in people, and so I think that makes a difference. And the other part is, Listening. And, and where are people at? And really what we're doing during those times is building resilience, and actually that's just, that's a strange sentence to say, because we build resilience before we need it. We're using our resilience, might be a better way to put it. But there's the recognition within there, and there won't, it doesn't mean all your culture has to go. And I think, When we're in those really difficult times, if we come back to what is the same, and often the way that organizational values are done, that's what is the same, this is tough, this is really rocky, but we are the same six people, and we still have this opportunity to hold true to these behaviors that we've defined, these, this is the way that we will treat each other, regardless, and that actually drives a cohesion that's quite unbeatable.

Craig: 18:12

No, that's a really good point. I appreciate that. And you, you touched on something in there. I think that leads us to the next culture killer and that is inertia, right? I think this somewhat plays a little bit on the most dangerous words in business or this is the way we've always done

Jennie: 18:32

it. Yep, that'll kill your culture. Inertia, yes, just nailed it, it speaks to, we do it because, and that's not going to help a culture, especially when you're renovating a culture. And so it's a really good piece to pay attention to. If your people are all busy and executing, if you're always doing, it's really difficult to stop and take a look at, all right, what are we going to change that we can do better tomorrow. What are we doing that really speaks our culture to those that we interact with and what are we doing that doesn't speak our culture? You can't stop and have those conversations unless you're prepared to stop and have those conversations. And I think you said this in the last one, so that would have been the third episode, is This isn't a checklist. You don't get just to do A, B, C and D and say, ha, look at me. We've got a wonderful culture. It has to keep going. And so we do need to stop and make time to re listen again, re engage in what's working and what's not. And all the good stuff that we've talked about before.

Craig: 19:47

Yeah. And it's, I think we've all been, many of us have probably been part of organizations that just seem so big, so slow, so heavy, too. Initiate change or to try and work through change just seems to be a burden and that, that is, that becomes a bit of an interesting conversation. Can you just start affecting change and affecting the culture in your corner of the world? If it is truly as dreary as that prior, I made that prior comment just sound, maybe you have a choice as a leader as to whether that's the right organization for you or not. But. I don't think you can underestimate the amount of lift it can take in an organization to make a change and especially something around as big as culture, right? This is not a Friday afternoon conversation that we're going to change our culture and Monday morning you start changing it. Maybe you do, but it doesn't happen by the following week, right?

Jennie: 20:50

True. I think it comes back. There's that wonderful quote and I can't repeat it here. Margaret Mead, I think it was. And it's about never underestimate the hands of a few good people or a few committed people or something like that. And you have a really good point. Like the bigger, The organization, possibly the more established, like that foundation. Someone who grew up in England, our traditions and our cultures go back forever and that, that's hard to change. And there are some who just don't want to change because this is the way that it's always been. And that's why I think it's really important. We want to hold a lot of that heritage and that tradition that is part of culture. And how do we. Help and enable the commitment of those to bring us forward. And I think you can do both. I think you can do both very well. You just have to be committed in there. And to your point, it can be really hard work.

Craig: 21:47

Yeah, absolutely. Okay, trust of their foundation, emotional and economic pressure, inertia, all culture killers. If you get all those right, if you've got great trust, you've got an emotionally safe workplace, there's no economic pressures pushing on you. The great thing about inertia is once you get it moving, it stays in motion. If you can start effecting that change, that's great. All this can still be undone by the final thing that we've identified as being a culture killer. That is poor leadership.

Jennie: 22:24

It just takes one, doesn't it? Yes.

Craig: 22:26

Yes.

Jennie: 22:28

Yeah. I actually sitting listening to you. I'm thinking if I was a leader, you're nailing the four that we've just mentioned and by nailing and getting it right and getting it right most of the time because we are all human in these spaces. Then the poor leadership may or may not take place. The other part is you're doing well, but you'll work with other leaders and impacting and affecting them is harder. So what does that poor leadership look like that can affect the culture? I think the biggest one, and we've talked about how important it is to look at humans. And recognize a human. I'm constantly referring to get to know the human beyond the job title. And unfortunately, we still have a large number of leaders who run by control and command, who believe it is their job to parent people when they come to the workplace. And by ignoring the fact that we are adults with a skill set, Who've chosen this career or this job. And let's be fair, like most people who are getting a job these days, you're beating off hundreds of people who have simply fed the job description through chat GPT and are being hopefully picked up because GPT gave them a wonderful answer. So you've got to beat off that algorithm. Then you've got to get through three or four interviews. Any references have got to come true for you. And then you get into the job, right? We're in that job because we want to be there. So recognizing that and holding true to the adult, or I should say, if we're going to flip this way, we're not recognizing that and not being true to the adult in front of you is going to kill your culture in seconds. It's a, it's going to suck the life out of your culture, actually.

Craig: 24:18

Yeah. And I think the piece for me that I reflect on a lot here is that. Leaders are often promoted into that position of leadership because they were good at what they were doing as an individual contributor. Doesn't necessarily mean they're a great leader. Doesn't mean they can't be a great leader. But I think the key thing that has to happen is Organizations need to really approach this from the perspective of if we're going to put leaders, if we're going to put individuals in position of leadership, we have to be able to support them and to help them become great leaders as well. We've talked way back in the beginning of this series about is there such thing as a natural born leader, right? Leadership is, it's a verb and you got to work at it and you have to help people. Your leaders become competent, better leaders as well as an organization.

Jennie: 25:14

It's such a brilliant point. And the, the key was in there too is leadership today is not how leadership was even 10 years ago, eight years ago. And to your point towards supporting and helping leaders, these are different skill sets than we 10, 11 years ago. So that paradigm shift that has actually happened and is still happening is crucial. Yeah. And there's a very few organizations that have a, in terms of growth, have a people track and a technical track. There's a very few who are doing that. And so to your point, we end up with a lot of people who are simply good at their job, end up leading other people. Now they're not doing their job, and worst case, they don't like people. That's a disaster for them and the people around them. There's a lot, there's a lot to unpack in there. And I, I think if you're listening to this and you're not a leader and you're thinking, you know, I want to be a leader. The only question you need to ask yourself is do I like people? If you can answer that with a yes, emphatically, then carry on your path. That was my suggestion.

Craig: 26:21

Okay, Jennie. So yes, I love that point about if you want to be in leadership, you have to like people, you have to love people, but I also. Anytime that you say that I have made a brilliant point, I think it's always a good spot to stop and then move on to wrapping things up. So, what is our big idea today around culture?

Jennie: 26:42

I think that we have underlined and bolded the point. That culture requires constant and consistent care and commitment. That's a lot of Cs. There we are. It is. It's a commitment. Yeah,

Craig: 27:00

absolutely. We almost went back full circle to the first episode where commitment and intentionality are somewhat closely linked, right? We talked about it needing to be intentional. And I alluded to at the start when we were talking about trust being the foundation here. A couple of strategies that we could think about for folks to reflect on trust within their team and the role that it plays.

Jennie: 27:26

Yeah. The role that it

Craig: 27:26

plays.

Jennie: 27:27

So I have two for you, or everybody who's listening. And the first one, I'm actually going to give a big mention to a great colleague of ours, Ila Edgar. And talk about trust expert, but one of the things that she talks about frequently is when we're, when we want to build more trust, we often look to the other person. Here's what you can do for me, and I'll trust you more. And trust is very much a two way street. So actually the strategy is, take a look yourself first of all. So if I wanted to build trust with you, Craig, I might say, okay, so on those four domains that we talked about, sincerity, reliability, competence, and care, how do I think you would rate me? And run that self assessment. And when I look at it carefully, I might think, okay, you're going to rate me pretty highly on the care factor. And I think my sincerity and my integrity holds well with you. Okay. Um, my competence, we've pretty much got that sorted out, but that reliability piece, nah, I've got at least three things that I'm supposed to have dropped or given to you already, I haven't done it. Alright, there's the breach, I want to build trust, I'm going to stick to the promise, the deadline, etc. within there, so, you'll love that, but it's, you know, it's who I learned it from, and assess yourself first. And then build the conversation out to the other person. And the second one, a little bit shorter, much, much easier. Maybe, it's just a question for you to ask yourself. And as you head into wherever you're heading next after listening to our podcast. Where could you extend care for someone else today and let's get intentional about that because care is really important and the ramifications and the return on extending care, they're fantastic and they work for everybody all of the time.

Craig: 29:20

It's good. Really like that. Um, that's the end of a four part series. Although I am somewhat reflecting a little bit on the fact that you talked about, um, You're not meeting a deadline that deadline as we're recording right now is in the future. So I'm thinking you're perhaps telling me you're not going to make it happen, but that's a different conversation. But there is no deadline. If you're listening to this for you to subscribe or follow on Apple or Spotify or wherever you are listening to your podcast. So please be sure to do so. And we hope you've enjoyed this four part series on culture and I look forward to you joining us again. Take care.

Jennie: 29:57

Take care.

Craig: 29:58

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: 30:11

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 you listen to your podcast. Thank you again for listening.