Let’s delve into the 'five elements of a killer culture,' a strategic blueprint designed for organizations aiming to create a strong, sustainable environment. These elements are not just theoretical; they emphasize the importance of maintaining a consistent culture through various seasons, ensuring that core principles remain intact amidst changes. Steve and Jason discuss the crucial role of leadership awareness during ordinary times, highlighting how this awareness is essential for sustaining a rich culture, ensuring resilience against unforeseen challenges, and maintaining employee engagement.
They further explore the strategies for assembling and nurturing 'A-players,' stressing the importance of hiring top talent and investing in their growth and development. They underline the significance of discipline, proactive action, and having a clear 'North Star' to guide team efforts and cultural alignment, especially during challenging times like the pandemic. And they emphasize fostering a sense of community among employees, noting that workplace friendships are vital for a positive company culture.
“If we want to preserve our culture, we need to avoid isolating people. While this might sound negative, our intention is positive. We aim to promote community and connection through status coaching. In these ordinary times, it's crucial to keep searching for, finding, and discovering ways to keep us connected and engaged as a community.”
- Steve Scanlon
Hello LinkedIn Live World and hello Insight Interviews world. This is your host, Jason Abell and your other host, Steve Scanlon. Steve, say hello to everybody.
Hello everyone. We are live.
We are live. Kind of exciting when live things happen. There's just a different vibe I feel like. When we're recording things, it's one vibe, and when we're live, I don't know. It's just amped up, just that little, little bit. At least for me, it is, I don't know.
I closed my eyes and envisioned, you know, an audience of 10,000 people, and actually panicked just a little bit.
Did you remember what we're going to talk about today?
It's completely eluded me.
Well, if you're here, you probably want to know something about culture, whether it is culture of your company, one that you lead, one that you're a leader inside of, or maybe just one that you're in. And I tell you what, Steve, we've observed some killer cultures, and we've observed some cultures that have, let's just say, been less than killer. And that has led us to kind of make some observations, make some notes, and we've seen some similarities between organizations that have killer cultures and ones that don't, and we want to talk about them today.
Yeah, and, you and I created, you know we had to put that definite article on there, the five elements of a killer.
There's only five.
And we came up with them. No one else knows them but us. So, want to make sure that we get those out to people. But yeah, I know you're going to intro it, Jason. it's such an interesting topic because it is so talked about, and yet remains sort of elusive. Like, how does one observe that? And then furthermore, what I hope we get to today, and I hope what you get excited about listener, is, how do we have some effect on it? We can all observe a cool one or one they were like, man, those people are, you know, not doing good, but we actually have an effect on it.
And there's a thing that exists which, which I've noticed, whether it's one industry that we serve a lot is mortgage and real estate, and when things at least in mortgage were real hot and heavy and very active and around the pandemic, 2020, 2021, like, man, people were go, go, go, and things were happening, and people were productive and teamwork and all that, and then that kind of slowed down and things were a little bit different. So, we've noticed people banding together, maybe around a thing, and I know you've got some neat analogies there that you make, because what about not just when there's a thing, like culture all the time? This is your culture. It doesn't matter what season you're in.
Well, I think when you and I were preparing for this, I was in my mind, I was just going through some words like you were trying to hunt for, like, yeah, there's a thing. Like, let's say the whole company goes to a workshop, or it's an annual event, or it's the end of the year thing. Well, in those moments, I think it's the culture around those things. Like you said, you see it, like, okay, that's cool. I think one of the things that you and I uncovered is there's just so much of any given season a year that those things, those events, they're not there. And the work, it triggered me. You know, for some of the listeners out there, I don't know if this will be interesting, but in the liturgical church world, there is a time that is called ordinary time. There are two main events in Christianity: Christmas and Easter. And in and around those things, there's all these things that happen. East Advent and Lent and Easter and Christmas, and that's the exciting stuff, and the culture that we have around that is like, but guess what? 34 weeks roughly out of the year are ordinary time.
The bulk of the time.
The bulk of the time. And so, the question becomes, what's our culture? And so that was just in my mind, I was like, you know, there's these churches that call that ordinary time, and I'm like, you know, in a lot of the industries we serve, in a lot of the companies that we serve, they have ordinary time. And so, what we want to address, and I think what our elements get to be how do we sustain, maintain, even grow, a killer culture in Ordinary Time?
When just like your church example, most of the day to day is in any industry, in any business, is kind of Ordinary Time, right? Like you can get hiked up around a product or service, or a time of the year-
Or when rates go down, or when inventory comes up, or when economics are good, like, you know?
All kinds of different things, but how about just every day? And that's what we wanted to talk about, is every day. And we kind of painstakingly looked at this because, gosh, there's a ton of different directions that we can go in, but as we listen to our podcast guests, as we listen to our clients and we talk to our coaches, who then also talk to our clients, there were these five elements that kind of raised to the top for some clarity, and we just wanted to bring them to you today.
Yeah, yeah.
So, Steve, number one, what do you got?
All right, so the number one element of maintaining a killer culture in ordinary time, I don't know that we actually called it that, but we're calling it that now, we put it under the category if you're taking notes awareness. In other words, that we would attend to the fact that we have to be aware that we're in that season. As we mentioned, Jason, there’s a ton. There's this great saying in neuroscience that says, and many of our clients are going to hear me say this and go, Steve, you gotta quit saying that. We say it a lot. If you can name it, you can name it. If you're going through ordinary time and your culture isn't good, and you don't even think about it, you don't name it, I tell people, you know, you might get your butt kicked by something you didn't even name.
Right.
We need to have awareness like, oh, we're in ordinary time. This is going on. Because outside of that awareness, when we create awareness that Jason gives rise to these other elements. The other elements that we're going to give about people and stuff that you're going to talk about, if we don't have awareness of the time that we're in, you can forget it anyway.
Yeah, there's no question. Something comes to mind, just this morning. You know, I do discovery calls with clients and prospective clients all the time, and I just had one this morning where we were talking about the expectation of coaching on the organization, and this person was really clear about what they wanted to get out of coaching. And I was like, oh, this is going to be a great engagement, because you're aware. You know things that you want to work on inside of your organization and inside of yourself. And that is our number one element so far is, are you even aware? And so, I love that we're starting off with that one, because, Steve, how many people do we run across in organizations like they're looking around they they're not even aware of what's going on inside their organization, wondering why is our engagement so low? Why is our turnover so high? Why are we losing money, right? They're just not even aware.
Why are we working for the weekend? Why all that stuff? So maybe, in just mentioning that one, you as a leader, you're listening to this. We assume you're a leader, as you probably are. It might dawn on you, like, oh, one of our challenges, we're in ordinary time.
Yeah, that's exactly right.
And again, does that solve everything? No, but it's the beginning, and without that, the other things might not flow, might not mean anything to you. So, number one is awareness.
Before we move on to number two, one or two tangible things, Steve, that if we have a listener, we have somebody watching this right now, and they're like, uh, okay, tell me, I think I should know this, but tell me what's the first step that I take to awareness. What might that look like? I mean, I've got an idea around that, but I want to hear what would you advise a client where they go, okay, great, Steve, that sounds awesome. What's the first step in me becoming aware?
This is what makes live events so sketchy, dude. You know, we didn't prepare for you to ask me that, right?
Yeah.
You're putting me on the spot, on the stage. You get that, right?
Dude, it's what I love doing best, because you're always going to come up with something.
I'm panicking over here. Like, I better come up with something. What is the first step in becoming aware? Like, oh, you know, if you and I could fully answer that, we'd be trillionaires if we had the answer to that. But I appreciate that you came at it from, okay, awareness. It is esoteric. It is like, how do we go do that?
Let’s make it tangible for people.
Well, one, even hearing this, even drawing it to your mind, even listening and having the question, maybe you walk out with a question, and the question is, is this ordinary? Does that make sense to me? Have I heard it? That'd be one, is just cogitating, like bringing it to your mind. You might not even agree or disagree, but it is something that you bring to your mind. And I would say the second thing is, as quickly as you can, have a conversation with someone else about it.
Right on. That's the main one that I was thinking of, which brings in our fifth element, which we're not going to get to yet. But, yeah, talk to other people.
We're not telling you to agree or disagree. Like, what if you walked out of here and were like, I'm gonna go talk to my leaders. In our next meeting. I'm gonna go, Hey, ordinary time. Is it possible that some of our people and how we're doing stuff, like, we're in this time, and we just need to be have this awareness that, oh yeah, and then when you have that, and maybe you're talking about it, that's when awareness starts to lead to some of these other things like, now, what do we actually do with that? But I appreciate your question. So those are a couple things that I would say that come to mind is that when you would listen, you would concentrate, you would actually process this, you know, and then number two, actually speak to somebody about it .
Right on.
And bring it up as a topic.
Love that. element number two of a killer culture is bringing on and developing the best players. Not good players, but like only the best and nothing should get in the way of that. So, let's talk about this a little bit, because it's hard to do. I asked a podcast guest the other day, Mike Keating. His episode is going to drop this July. I asked him, because culture is everything at Norhart Construction, his company in the middle of the US, which is amazing. I highly recommend listening to that episode, by the way. But he has a quote which goes like this. I got to read it. It says you can't bring on the best people unless you are worthy of bringing on the best people. And so, I just thought that that was so interesting, because there's this circular thing that happens where he's aware of his culture, and he's working on it all the time. He's got A- players that already work there, and there's other A- players that want to work there because of the culture and because the A-players they have, so he's made his organization in a way that is worthy of bringing on the best. And I tell you, I see all the time organizations that will settle for less than A-players, and dude, that that messes up culture, that lowers productivity, that raises turnover. It's bad for the locker room, so to speak, which is just another word for culture. Like there's things that happen there, but when you bring on the best and take time to write a really good job description, take time to actually interview people, not bring on warm bodies and make sure that they are A or A plus players and that's it. So really just bringing on the right people and continuing to develop the right people.
Well, like you did to me, we can't do this every time because we would take too long with our five elements, I suspect, but I will put you on the spot a little bit because there were almost two elements to element number two, and one was bring on the best. The other was, develop the best, right? And so, we prepared enough for this call, this live event, that I knew you were going to bring that one up. And for me, I'm like, okay, I love the bring on the best. I love this one. And by the way, that interview was absolutely dynamite. I heard him, and I hope people listen. Development. You made a comment like, we all have A players. Well, what if you don't? What if your players are in a season where they are kind of B players right now? Talk to me a little about that.
No, I'm glad you asked. Most organizations that I observe, they're not actively developing people. So, here's the thing. Anything that you do to help your people develop and grow is going to be good. So just again, making this tangible Steve, a book club, giving them books, giving them a master class availability, coaching, you know, things like what we do. The sales rally, workshop leaders, you know? Even having your leaders check in on the people that they lead. How are you doing today? Anything I can help you with? Like, even the little things. So, what I would say is if you're not doing anything right now and you do even one of the things that I just mentioned off top my head, you're winning. You're on your way. You're doing good. It doesn't need to be this, you know, well thought out and timed and just, first of all, anything, and then once you start doing something like our coach and one of our guys on our team Steve Longen says, “it's much easier to steer a bicycle once the wheels are going”, right? So, once you're doing something, now you can do other things and develop more, and those non A players can develop into A players.
All right. Element number three. Should we keep going?
Go for it.
I don't know that this one will come as any big shock. And Jason, I really respect the fact that you always drive home when you're dealing with mindset coaching, it can become esoteric. And as coaches, it's incumbent upon us to bring this to tangibleness reality. What do we go do so that we're not just navel gazers in a cave getting smarter or thinking about stuff? We do have to think, but then we need to go act. And this one has to do directly with that. Element number three is, drum roll, discipline.
Right.
And that one could be like, duh, but why here? Why now? And what do we mean by that in the context of what it means to have a killer culture? Well, I one time heard someone define discipline, and they said something to the effect of action creates inspiration, and not the other way around.
Yes.
Okay, so if we're all sitting around waiting for Christmas and Easter, waiting for the economics to get better, well, next thing you know, we're all sitting around and we're not actually going out and doing stuff. But it's tricky, because during Christmas and Easter, and I'm using that metaphorically, during those events, during these great seasons and times, taking action is actually not that hard. It's actually taking action when we're in ordinary times.
Right on. Yep.
And in fact, when I hear that, that quote about action creates inspiration, and not the other way around, when I hear that, you know, or how about this one. I got one. Discipline is doing what you should, whether you feel like it or not.
Yeah. I would connect the things that you're saying with element number two of hiring the right people, because when you do that, those are typically the profile of the people that will do the things that maybe they don't feel like doing, or that other maybe B/C players aren't doing.
Yeah, so in ordinary times, we don't have the option to sit around and wait for the external to inspire us to go take action.
Yep.
I think the players that you're talking about, I think they really almost begin to eliminate that as even as it's not, hey, do I feel like doing this? Like that's not even part of it.
Yeah.
We go out and we're taking action and we're being disciplined. In fact, doing what you should do, whether you feel like it or not. I've laughed at that quote, because, frankly, if you feel like doing something and you do it, I don't know that I'd call that discipline, right? It's specifically when you don't feel like it, which, that's the funny part. We often don't in ordinary time, and yet, when we do it in ordinary time, we're not waiting for the external to motivate us. We're not waiting for that big event. We're not waiting for stuff. We don’t go. We don't even have time today. I hope you don't ask me, what are the things that cause you to go, because that's a whole other episode.
Oh, for sure. Yeah, that's exactly right. I will say this, when it comes to organizations that I would describe as disciplined, I do see things like measurables and deliverables. I do see things like accountability. I do see things like celebrating certain milestones. And when you hear the words accountability, don't substitute the word micromanaging, because that's very different than accountability. When you've got the A players, they want to be held accountable. They're probably holding themselves more accountable than you could anyways, but when you're looking at specifics and measurables and time tables, and everybody's celebrating those milestones, and you're not getting beat over the head with a stick when you don't hit them, but there is measurables along the way and celebrations along the way. Oh, man, discipline becomes fun. I mean, discipline becomes something that, yeah, it can be fun, and then you're starting to affect culture in a positive way.
All right, bring us to number four.
Number four, have a North Star. Simon Sinek would say, find your why. And boy, you want to talk about esoteric. We're diving in the deep end of the pool here. But boy, we've seen teams, Steve, that when they don't know where they're going, and everybody's rowing in different directions, the boat doesn’t go anywhere, right? And so at least a North Star to go, hey guys, we're going over there. Oh, okay, let's everybody face in the right direction, and let's go this way. And if it's a compelling enough North Star, if it's a compelling enough why, you'll get everybody facing in that direction pretty easily. There's no forcing in that in that direction.
Are we looking for the North Star? Are we pointing other people to the north star in ordinary time? In these seasons of everything is great, and then we're coming together, and even during a time like, okay, the North Star is there. The why is there? I watch people watch Simon Sinek go, yeah, even after the video, great. And then three weeks from now, it'll be ordinary, and that's when we need to be going, again, remind us of our North Star. Tell us where that is.
Well, and I think it's up to organizations to continually remind because it's amazing how many leaders that I will ask, what is your organizational why? What is your North Star? And sometimes I'll see a deer in headlights and go, okay, we got some work to do here, right? Versus ones that go well, first of all, here it is. I'm rattling it. Go to our website, go to our email addresses, ask anybody on my team, and everybody's, boom, dialed in. This is where we're going. Very, very different organization, and you want to talk about culture? Holy moly, it works. Know your why.
And I don't know how controversial this is, Jason, but some of the things that I've observed in organizations is, ready for this? Sometimes the North Star changes.
Yeah.
And I'm not saying some of the values and stuff like that, but where we're going as an organization, sometimes the North Star is off on the east and we either need to redefine what the North Star is, or reevaluate where we're going, or do it the first time. But like, yeah, I think that's a crucial thing to do in these ordinary times.
Yeah, absolutely. And there are times where it can change slightly, right? Like, do you remember Steve when the pandemic first hit? We're an organization that does a ton of live events. We changed, and I can tell you, we changed, right? We changed, but we didn't. And so, here's what I mean about this. And we've done podcasts on this, we've done workshops on this. So, we went from doing a ton of live events a year to everything in 2020, being booped by the end of March of 2020, being canceled for the rest of the year, so we needed to pivot. But we got our team together and it we agreed as a team, no matter what, whether we can meet people, see people, we're going to affect people positively, and we're going to help our clients, period. End of story. We can't help them live anymore, so what are we going to do? And we got really good at this virtual thing. And so, I think because of some of this north star thing that we're talking about, we went, you know, what? We are going to need to change degree slightly, but we're still going to help clients no matter what. And that ended up working.
And if I understood astronomy any better, I'd come up with some better metaphor for, the North Star didn't really change, but how we got there, and what spaceship we were taking to get to the North Star, but I don't know. All right, I know we're gonna run short here on time element, but number five of a killer culture. We've got to keep figuring out ways to bring people together.
Be in community.
We've got to keep doing that. I was with a group of people yesterday in Dallas, Texas, and we were doing a round table with all these leaders and CEOs, and they still had a certain amount of their people being scattered to the wind, coming in virtual, they still reported this massive problem of isolation. And I'll go dark for a second, then we'll come back to the light, because we shouldn't probably do a whole Linkedin Live on the five killers of a killer culture, but if we would, one of them would be isolation
For sure.
Yeah, you want to kill your culture. Get people isolated. Now that's negative, and we're not negative people. We're trying to be in on a way towards status coaches. So, what we want to say is we must, in these ordinary times, keep searching for and finding and discovering ways to keep us in community.
Yeah, that's exactly right, and anything, kind of like the development piece, anything that you do as a leader is going to be good. So maybe sometimes it's virtual, maybe sometimes it's in person. Maybe it's a birthday celebration, a happy hour, getting together with clients, sometimes it's personal one on one conversations, just checking in. Sometimes it's a group. Any of those things are better than the opposite. Like Steve said, isolation. Being in community, I will tell you time and time again, as I do our podcast interviews, the best of the best, they're in community with people. Like be masterminds. You said you led a mastermind yesterday, where I know that group, really good group of people, and they're rubbing shoulders, they're learning from one another. They're being vulnerable with one another, and that's how people grow.
Yeah, I brought to the table, because this topic, lo and behold, came up in the mastermind from them. I didn't say, hey, we're going into the five elements. They wanted to talk about culture. Why? Because it was a massive need.
Yeah.
And I recall that you and I did some research a couple years ago for a group of people. We were in Las Vegas, and we put together a thing about culture, and we were looking for some scientific evidence, like you and I have all these theories, and it's not just anecdotal, because we're experiencing what we're being with clients, and it's experiential. There's some science to this, right?
Big time, yeah.
One of the key science things that Steve Longen uncovered for us is one of the number one things that builds culture is that in your organization, all people have at least one good friend. That is what the science says. That is what the research describes. You don't have to make everyone your friend, but you have at least one, and so it pointed to community, because Jason, what started happening yesterday in my little mastermind, okay, we can point that out. one good friend. How do we facilitate that?
One good friend at work.
That's what the research is. We didn't make that up. How do we as organizations facilitate that? Which just comes back to our fifth element here, of community.
Yeah, being in community with one another. So, five elements of a killer culture: awareness, hiring and developing the right people, having discipline, knowing your why or your North Star, and getting people faced in that direction, and being in community with people. Steve, how many times does any topic that we're talking about end or have some element of being in community with people, right? Like, how daggone important is that?
Well, I'm stuck on the word daggone, but yes, and well, here's why. It's biology. We need one another.
Yeah.
You can dice that any way you want. The isolation that happened, the research that we saw across the board, on all people, but remember the particular research on between like 21 and 28 year olds, but it was everybody, but there were particular ones that we learned again just how much we need each other.
Yeah, we do.
And we need to be in community, and so that had to be one of our five elements, because it's still such a massive problem for so many organizations. So, it's our hope that you could take that and then go, okay, what are some of the ways that, like you said, we don't have to do all the perfect things, but what are some? And that's what we did yesterday. We were brainstorming. In fact, we had a whole exercise called 100 bad ideas, because what did it matter? What are we throwing out there, and what are we doing?
So good.
Obviously, we came up some good ones. So, there you go.
All right, well, Steve, we would love to be in community with people and so, if you're watching this on LinkedIn Live, or you see a recording of it, there's a QR code up, and that is a way to be in community with us, to get in touch with us. If any of this resonated with you and you'd like to talk about it further, or you think coaching or a workshop on this topic may be appropriate for you, this QR code will send you directly to me. I take these calls. I love it. It’s some of my favorite things to do, so please connect with us. But otherwise, Steve, I think we are done for today.
It is a wrap.
Thank you for your time, and we will see you next time.
See you next time.
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