As an Army officer, I technically out-ranked any enlisted man. That included the first sergeant, the ranking non-commissioned officer in any company.
Technicalities aside, my WWII veteran father had educated me early that the first sergeant was really the guy in charge. The opportunity, my Dad told me, was to learn from the first sergeant. I’m glad I did.
The cover of WIRED magazine this past month read “How to Survive the Great Tech Panic of 2017”, touching on topics like robot overlords, self-driving cars, cyber warfare, comment trolls, cyber attacks, privacy breaches, Ransomware, text neck, nuke hacks and artificial intelligence.
It’s no doubt that this disruptive digital era has created a more complex business environment for brands as customers today are more engaged and connected. A company’s ability to remain agile, open and responsive in order to develop deeper ties to clients is being tested in unprecedented ways, impacting all industries and disciplines. Fortunately, these technologies have the potential to be growth enablers for businesses and leadership teams, helping serve clients and better interpret their needs more effectively.
Before you spin up surveys, consultants and new initiatives in your organization to transform the culture, each senior leader needs to ask themselves one question:
Is it me?
As Winston Churchill once proclaimed, “History is written by the victors.” While this sentiment may hold a bit less weight in today’s society where even the “losers” can shape the collective narrative with the help of things like the internet, the “winners” do tend to hold quite a bit of power over shaping how future generations interpret the events of the past.
One way to shape peoples’ interpretation of the past is to remove and replace the physical artifacts of a people. The statues, monuments, images, the schoolbooks and stories that do not align with the version of history that you wish to promote. Read More…
Leaders serve in many roles. Yes, they must do the mundane but necessary chores of managing assets and balance sheets, but their most important work is to inspire others. And that involves the leader serving as a teacher, as a mentor, and as a coach.
Often we know how to teach others. And we routinely provide mentoring by setting an example and being available to nurture those around us. In my experience in industry, though, I have found the coaching piece to be the most difficult role for leaders to assume.
I once worked with a CEO of a successful startup. His company had been experiencing growing pains and customer-service mishaps that led to a decline in performance. During a leadership meeting designed to review recent irregular operations, he raised his hand and took ownership of the problem with a blunt assessment.
“The fish stinks at the head,” he said.
In other words, the organizational issues stemmed from leadership errors. These mistakes at the top of an organization can easily trickle down to create cultural issues throughout the team.
Companies undergo cultural assessments for a variety of reasons—and they’re not always because things have gone awry. A company might have a great culture that it wants to preserve during a growth phase. Or it might want to evolve the company’s culture to keep pace with a leadership change, market shift or relocation.
Other times, companies need to know why something unexpected has happened. Leaders might be trying to address increased turnover, decreased market share, a drop in productivity or something as major as ethical violations. Unfortunately, leaders don’t always understand what the aforementioned CEO identified: Organizational issues often go much deeper than culture. Read More…
A few years ago I used a phone app, called Shapr, to expand my social circles, to make new connections, learn new things and enjoy a conversation or two. I met aspiring artists and entrepreneurs who were looking to start a business or were already working on one. They shared their stories and inquired into pro-bono consulting to help them with building their ventures.
In many instances my initial question was, “Where do you want to go with this idea and what are you creating?” Oftentimes, my Shapr’s friends could not clearly respond and this, initially, left me somewhat confused. If I was confused from the start, how would their customers (or potential customers) react?
Compelling vision and mission statements have the ability to provide clarity and direction with regard to why a business exists, what purpose it serves and what value it brings to its stakeholders. Not being able to clearly articulate this can obviously make it difficult to get people on board with your ideas. Read More…
My son turns eleven today. We are all set to celebrate as we always do – our kids love the traditions that come with birthdays, Christmas, Thanksgiving, college football, and too many other events to mention. The house is decorated exactly the same for every birthday. I’m told they love it that way. There will be a special dinner, as always.
All this tradition and consistency got me thinking. My children certainly love new things and surprises: new adventures, trips to unknown places, crazy experiences. And still, for a handful of personal milestones, they seem to want- to need- something familiar and dependable. Certainly, that is to be expected. New experiences bring excitement, anticipation of something unknown, and the possibility of “total awesomeness” (which, I have to imagine, is what the kids are saying nowadays.) Those traditions, the patterns sought out by their own brains, bring them a sense of stability, safety, and comfort. See my recent innovation webinar for more on this. Read More…
How can I communicate better with my team? How can I run a better meeting? How do I make sure my people are “present”?
Try saying “Amen” at the beginning of the meeting, not the end.
We’ve all been there. As people finally straggle into a meeting it inevitably begins to look like the beginning of some prayer session. Heads are bowed, the attendees looking down at their hands, reverently silent. At first, it looks like church – then we see the furrowed brows – and the telltale thumbs and fingers flying. Texts fly into cyberspace and pages on social media are frenetically swept aside.
Everyone is in the room, but many are not “present.”
By Katie Burke
Last year, HubSpot’s Culture Code went viral. The SlideShare, created by our CTO and co-founder Dharmesh Shah, inspired comments and compliments from partners, customers, industry experts, and competitors alike. The deck itself is remarkable, but to me what’s more important than the document is the degree to which we practice what we preach.
At the end of the day, a company’s culture isn’t about ping-pong tables, free snacks or perks. It’s about collective expectations for how you hire, fire, and work on a daily basis. People talk a lot about business plans as it relates to your P&L, cash flows, and strategy to beat your competitors, but invest very little time and energy into codified how they actually run and manage the business on a daily basis.
Businesses who ignore their company’s culture do so at their peril. In a recent study of 15,000 millennials, “people and culture fit” far outpaced any other option as their top consideration for employment. You can give out all the t-shirts and swag you want, but the next generation of world-class talent is cognizant of the fact that they’ll spend years of their lives at work.
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