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The Best Business Mistakes I’ve Ever Made

By gothamCulture
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Recently, I have been taking stock of my journey as an entrepreneur. I’ve realized that I had learned quite a bit the hard way. Making mistakes and learning from them, as an individual leader or as a team, is enormously beneficial. Now, I’m not advocating for making mistakes to make them, but I am suggesting that we don’t let a good mistake go to waste.

Making mistakes is part of leading. They are part of life. If we fear failure and bash those who make the occasional mistake, we stifle people’s ability to take risks and innovate and may find our competition leaving us in the dust.

In reflection on some of my most colossal blunders over the years, I came up with a list of key learnings that have helped me both professionally and personally.

#1. Bad decisions don’t get better with time. Decisiveness is critical in helping you move faster than the competition, but it also means sometimes having to make decisions without the benefit of reams of data to back them up. We all make poor decisions sometimes. The real shame is when we don’t admit the blunder and try to ride it out in hopes that things will get better. Being able to identify a misstep quickly and being decisive enough to course correct is critical to success.

#2. You’re not always the smartest person in the room. As an entrepreneur and leader of a team, I felt intense pressure to have all the answers. Looking back, I recognize my faulty assumption. I may have started the company, but I’m certainly not the only one with all the answers. We have a smart and creative team that analyzes things in very different ways than I do. This is an enormous source of strength for us as we discuss and debate business topics before making decisions. This diversity of thought helps keep me honest.

#3. Hope is not a plan. We started our business on a hope and a dream. What we quickly realized is that hope is not a plan. As our organization matured and we became more established leaders in our industry, we took tangible steps to be intentional about who we are, where we’re headed, and how we plan on getting there. With the assembly of our Board of Advisors, our market repositioning, our all-hands strategic planning processes and reviews, we developed a planning cadence that focuses our work effort throughout the year.

#4. Don’t be afraid to fail. Starting a new business was a terrifying experience. What I realized quickly, however, is that fully experiencing life is about taking risk. Now, I don’t mean a constant Vegas-style gamble, but I am an advocate for putting yourself out there in an uncomfortable situation where you very well may fail. Assess the situation and mitigate as much risk as possible to stack the deck in your favor, then execute with everything you’ve got and don’t stop until you’ve succeeded in your endeavors.

Theodore Roosevelt made a speech at the Sorbonne, in Paris, France on April 23rd, 1910. I’ve memorized and carried part of this speech with me throughout my business endeavors:

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”

There is no great effort without some level of error and shortcoming. And when you make a mistake, don’t get so caught up in wringing your hands that you don’t capitalize on the learning opportunity.

Little Victories: How Big Change Really Occurs

By gothamCulture
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As the saying goes, even the longest journey starts with just one step.

Over the years, we have engaged with many clients who are dedicated to creating large-scale, significant, and sustainable changes in their organizations in an effort to drive success. Unfortunately, many of these well-intentioned executives believe that there is a silver bullet, or some grand gesture of change, that will accomplish their goals.

While significant changes can and do drive sustainable performance improvements, in my experiences, truly transformational change results from a few elusively simple things.

#1. Greater than the sum of its parts.

Large change is comprised of MANY small changes, or what I call little victories.

Think of any truly transformational change in society that has sustained the test of time, and I will show you a series of seemingly small steps that built upon each other toward the final outcome; events that very often inspired others to create little victories of their own. Those instances challenge the underlying beliefs and assumptions that people hold to be true about the current state.

#2. It takes a village.

One person can rarely create and sustain organizational change that is truly transformational. It takes dialogue that creates a spark in people to step up and do something differently themselves. Engaging everyone in not only having a voice but in having a responsibility to drive small change at their level helps to build momentum and sustainability of what could be.

#3. Shout it from the rooftops.

Find ways to communicate the little victories to the masses. Let the positive change go viral throughout your organization. Transformational change achieves terminal velocity through the stories that people tell. These stories bring change to life; if they are capitalized on, they reinforce the desired behavior change.

At the end of the day, silver bullets are just about as rare as werewolves. Real, transformational change takes careful forethought, the investment of time and energy, and the willingness to let people take ownership of it.

What’s your little victory?

Changing Organizational Culture

By gothamCulture
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One of the most common questions we are asked about organizational culture change is:

Should it be top down or bottom up?

The answer is: Yes.

Decades of leadership development research and common sense tells us that individuals at the highest levels in organizations have the most influence on the organization, as a whole, in the shortest time. But what about the tens, hundreds, or thousands of employees that keep the organization moving forward each and every day? Are they able to influence culture based on sheer number and longevity?

Influence works in both directions, so alignment of energy moving up and down the organization is key to culture change. A strategy that emerged from an initiative with one of gothamCulture’s clients is “top-down, bottom-up” (to be clear, the goal of this approach is to create an open organizational culture that values employees’ opinions and closes the distance between the frontline and executives). The trick to carrying out this strategy is to do both in concert.

It isn’t enough to set leadership loose with a plan to communicate the strategy of the organization and hope that everyone follows. This can result in leaders excitedly running up the metaphorical mountain of change and looking back to realize that no one is following. By the same token, it isn’t enough to provide a survey to engage employees without leaders taking action to address survey results.

Here are some “top-down, bottom-up” lessons we’ve learned over the years:

* Communicate strategically to inform everyone of happenings around the organization. Designate a small team to act as the nucleus to drive communication efforts and translate information coming from the top and bottom. A dynamic communication system is critical to a lean and nimble organization that can compete in today’s business environment.

* Ask employees how to move the organization forward and carry out the initiatives worth pursuing. They are closest to the issues that may derail your plans.

* Provide “face time” for the frontline to meet executives and share concerns and ideas. This doesn’t mean a token executive appearance at a ‘town hall’; we’re talking about creating space for these groups to roll up their sleeves and work together.

* Listen to the workforce with sincerity and empathy. Today’s employees expect their jobs to be fulfilling, challenging, and worth investing time into (which is often more important to retention than compensation packages).

Five Keys to Building a Healthy and Productive Virtual Culture

By gothamCulture
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gothamCulture is a truly virtual work environment. With a team that is separated by geography and time zones, it is imperative to learn how to best work together in ways that help us live our value of Authentic Community. Here are a few of the tricks we’ve learned along the way

1. Use technology to your advantage

This seems like a no-brainer, but you would be surprised how challenging it can be to break people’s old habits to get folks to adopt new ways of using technology to get things done. We make a concerted effort to utilize chat and videoconferencing technology on a daily basis to help maintain and foster effective working relationships with staff and associates. Every effort is made to minimize the “space” between people.

2. Keep the team “up to speed”

In a fast-paced small business like ours, with team members who may be in a different city each night, it’s easy to get caught up in our own little worlds- working feverishly to provide top quality services to our clients. Based on feedback we received from our staff, we instituted structured, weekly team meetings where team members log into a Google Hangout from wherever in the world they may be to connect with the rest of the team. Everyone contributes to the weekly team meeting. We not only get a chance to give the team a feeling for the bigger picture, we are also able to identify areas of risk and reallocate resources in the short-term to ensure that all of our client engagements are executed flawlessly. Typical weekly meeting at gothamCulture.

3. Set rules of engagement for virtual work

In order to help expedite effective working relationships virtually, we recommend setting clear rules of engagement up front that team members can agree upon and to which they can hold each other mutually accountable. These norms may evolve over time as you refine the ways in which you interact virtually, but we’ve found that setting some ground rules at the beginning really helped us to bake virtual work into our culture in an effective way.

4. Be crystal clear about your purpose, mission, and values

We can’t overstate this enough. When all else fails, we know that our team members will know exactly where to spend their time and attention and how best to prioritize their workload. By ensuring clarity of purpose and alignment around what is truly most important to us as an organization, all team members can manage themselves to be most productive – even in the absence of direct and timely supervision. If you aren’t clear about who you are and where you’re going, how can you expect your employees to know where to focus their energies?

5. Find ways to encourage collaboration on project work

At gothamCulture, we are deliberate about structuring work in ways that force team members to collaborate across great distances. Not only does it result in higher work quality, but it also creates reasons for team members to interact in ways that they might not have otherwise done. These long-distance collaborations give newer members of the team a chance to learn from our more seasoned experts.

The Culture Grinder in Mergers and Acquisitions

By gothamCulture
Published at In Category Blog Tags: ,

I recently posted a blog entry discussing the concept of the Culture Grinder, our term for organizations that attempt to drive strategies that are in conflict with the culture despite countless examples of how this just doesn’t work. Having recently supported a client with a culture integration of a recently acquisition it reminded me of how the Grinder can rear it’s ugly head no matter what the strategy.

In this case it was a growth strategy through acquisition. The purchasing company sought to expand its reach and to expand its service offerings with current clients by acquiring a small organization that had expertise in a particular area. The strategy was sound and people approached the situation from a positive perspective of mutual gain through working together.

Through facilitated conversations with the senior leaders of both the acquiring and the acquired company, we were able to make explicit the underlying values and “keystone habits” of each organization. By doing this, the team was able to discuss the role of culture as an enabler or detractor in their collection ability to drive the strategy that they envisioned. Continued dialogue helped the leadership team identify areas in which the culture of the integrated organization may need to evolve in order to reduce risk and increase the likelihood of continued success and growth.

Only time will tell.