Filling the Culture Gap with Brett Hoogeveen
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“The relationship between an employee and their company is a pretty good proxy or another way to think about how compelling and valuable your culture is.”
— Brett Hoogeveen
The Culture Gap Explained:
The culture gap refers to the difference between an organization's ideal workplace culture and its actual environment. This gap can vary in size, with some companies struggling with significant issues like low trust and toxicity. The aim is to help organizations continuously improve their culture, regardless of the gap's size.
Strategies to Close the Gap:
To close the culture gap, it's essential to have a designated individual or team at the executive level responsible for culture improvement. This requires four key components: knowledge, tools, support, and power. The absence of a dedicated person or team with a strategic approach to culture is often why gaps exist.
Defining Culture:
Culture encompasses the attitudes and behaviors expected within a group, influenced by HR and the CEO. Many HR teams lack the necessary resources or mandate to foster a positive work environment.
Key Areas for Improvement:
1. Executive Team Performance: The quality and dynamics of the executive team are crucial. Their ability to lead by recognizing and valuing cultural efforts sets the direction for the company.
2. Managers: The effectiveness of managers is vital in shaping culture. Selecting and developing the right managers improves employee experiences and performance.
3. HR and People Operations: Aligning HR processes with cultural goals reinforces desired attitudes and behaviors.
4. Culture Champions: Developing leaders within the organization who are passionate about cultural initiatives helps in driving local culture-building efforts.
5. Engaging Employees: Initiatives that enhance the employee experience, such as fun events and workplace improvements, are important. Addressing all areas simultaneously is key to ongoing cultural enhancement.
Addressing the culture gap involves a comprehensive approach that includes leadership, HR, and active engagement from all employees. Continuous improvement in each domain is essential for a vibrant and rewarding workplace culture.
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Mike Goldman: Brett Hoogeveen is the co founder of Better Culture and Mindset LLC, two prominent leadership development and consulting firms with clients spanning from entrepreneurial startups to fortune 500 companies, an international speaker, coach, consultant, and trainer. Brett focuses on providing practical advice on leadership and culture that produces better leaders, better teams, and better businesses. Brett and I met a bunch of months back at an event, fell in love with all the things he was talking about today. We're going to talk about everything culture, really excited to have you have him on the show. Brett, welcome to the show.
Brett: Hey, thanks, Mike. Happy to be here.
Mike Goldman: Brett, in your opinion, what's the one most important characteristic of a great leadership team.
Brett: It's a great question and I appreciate the heads up on it.
Mike Goldman: What heads up? We don't talk before. This is all...
Brett: Yeah, no, this is the one thing you gave me heads up on. And I think you know, we do work with executive teams and, you know, we do a workshop on 10 characteristics of high performing executive teams. And so asking me to think about one thing was surprisingly hard work. If I was going to lean into one thing, it would probably be relationships.
And I know that can cover a lot of ground. I think having relationships where team members know one another personally, but also trust one another. So that's a big word trust that I could have also used, but.
Mike Goldman: And sometimes the more you know them, the less you trust them. But hopefully that's not the case.
Brett: That could happen, but hopefully it doesn't. I think, you know, an executive team should be aligned. I think they should be tight. I think they should be working as one. And I think they've got to really know each other, know their strengths, know their weaknesses know where their buttons are.
Know when to push, know when you can't push and know how to function really well as a team. And I think, I think deep meaningful personal relationships are at the heart of it.
Mike Goldman: Love it. There's no right answer, but that was a damn good answer. So thank you. Brett, I know you talk about the gap that every company has related to workplace culture. What is that gap? What do you mean by that?
Brett: Yeah so we're in the business of helping organizations that want to be better places to work and to our advantage. Every company in the world, in the universe, probably has a gap between the culture that their leaders, that the executives inside of their organization, if I get to meet one on one with the CEO and I say, tell me the type of company you want to be, tell me the type of workplace experience you want from your employees, I will get an answer that sounds good, right?
And an answer that that executive believes. I also will tell you that it's always going to be a little bit better than the culture they currently have. So the best company in the world, they just won the number one best place to work in their metropolitan area. I promise you, they still have a gap.
Between the culture and the employee experience that they'd like to be able to create for every employee and the culture that they actually have. And in some organizations, that gap's really big. Culture's tough right now. The employees don't trust their organization or their managers, or it's a toxic work environment, or there are things that really need significant improvement.
They're seeing big turnover. They're seeing unhealthy conflict. They're getting exited information from employees that are saying, yeah, here's exactly why I'm leaving. And it's a long list. Sometimes that gap is big, but even in the best companies, it exists. And that's that's what we exist to do is to help organizations think about how they can continuously build a stronger culture to close that gap, whether it's a big gap or a small gap.
Mike Goldman: So two questions come to mind and I had to write them down because I don't want to say the first and forget the second one. But the first one, so you talk about, you define the gap as the gap between the culture they want to have and the culture they actually have. I want to ask you about a different gap.
And I also work with companies on culture and I was just with a Group of CEOs yesterday. I work a lot with an organization called Vistage and it's this peer
advisory group of CEOs. And, they fill out this assessment. One of the things they assess is how strong they believe their culture is. And what I find almost every time is there is a very big gap between the culture, the CEO thinks they have and the culture they actually have right? You're talking about the gap, what they want and what they have. I see CEOs,
CEOs always think their culture is an eight or nine out of 10. And reality is it's a five or six out of 10. Have you seen that gap? And what do you think is, I mean, I have a suspicion as to what's behind that. But have you seen that gap? And what do you think is behind it?
Brett: Yeah, I absolutely have. I've done speeches where we talk about the reasons for the gap right. And you've, you've hit on one of those reasons for sure, which is information doesn't filter up accurately right. So an employee on the front line you know, a different location in organizations that are spread out, you know, they may be having a certain experience, but when their manager tells the VP, you know, hey, how are things going in your division?
He's not going to say, oh, people are hating it. You know I think a lot of people don't like me and there's a lot of, they're going to say, you know, it's going good. And so as information filters up, it gets filtered right. And so that's a problem that most organizations face is
people like to give good news as opposed to not great news and they like to think well of themselves and they want others above them to think well of them and what they're doing And so there's an absolute filtering of information as it goes up the chain and most organizations, you know it doesn't have to be the CEO.
It can be even even just frontline managers if you ask them questions about the culture they're going to give more favorable responses than the average employee will give for sure. So, you know, in order to close that gap, you either got to really get great at getting out of your office and really talking to real people, or you need to have some consistent way to measure, you know, to get data from directly from your employees about how they're feeling about the organization.
Mike Goldman: Which leads to the other question. You said culture is tough right now. Why is that? What makes it tougher today than it was five years ago?
Brett: So when I said that, I meant it in the context of just a hypothetical company that has a big gap. Like, if they had a big gap between the culture they have and they want, things are tough for that company. That being said, I don't know if culture's tough right now, but it's more complicated than it's ever been, I think, right now.
Because we have so many organizations that are attempting to still prioritize culture. I mean, culture really matters, right? Culture is what your employees are experiencing while they are working for your organization. And if you don't think that matters, then I don't know what to tell somebody like, yeah, are your employees, are they walking into a positive uplifting, supportive environment?
Do they feel connected, etcetera right. But because so many companies have had to run sort of experiments with their workforce, whether that's remote working, whether that's, you know, things post COVID return to work policies, managing hybrid teams, whatever that might look like. I have a lot of both current clients and just folks I'm visiting with who are trying to say, yeah,
what is our new culture supposed to be and for those organizations that are relatively small and have everybody in one location? It's just simpler to explain what we're all about to hire the right way to role model etc. The more spread out you are the more you're working on different shifts the more you're working in different locations the more you're working in different modes or formats. You know what you end up with is more micro cultures that are less aligned and you have employees that are less connected to the overall entity and people start to ask questions like, well, if we've got, you know, 100 remote employees, and they're happy, you know, just punching the clock and doing what they want and living where they want to work, how hard do we need to work to really bring them into our culture or to have this great alignment?
Is it really that important? And then you end up getting into different situations where people are talking about, okay so do we operate on two ways of thinking about the type of employee experience that we're building those for people that are that are real, that want to be heavily involved with their company and those who don't right?
And is it okay to think about managing those two different groups of people differently? And so I think it's more complicated for sure. We have some clients that haven't missed a beat and they are continuing to build culture in the way that we always have. And we have some other clients that are struggling to figure out what's the type of culture we want to have today? How much emphasis do we want to put on it? And how do we create it?
Mike Goldman: Yeah, all that, I'm a hundred percent in agreement. It's a real challenge and, you know, your answer to the first question about what's the most important characteristic of a great leadership team is relationships. And one of the things I see as a real struggle today is you can do work over zoom and be pretty productive over zoom or off of zoom, sitting and doing your work in a home office.
You could be very productive, but are you building relationships? And there's one example, I have a client I've been working with for many years who had a gentleman who is in his mid seventies. He retired about six months ago, but he was in his mid seventies and he was kind of the company historian and he wasn't the driver of a lot of important projects at this point in his career. He didn't have a lot of people reporting to him, but the value he added was he was the guy at, you know, he's the guy you want to have the water cooler talk with. He's the guy you saw in the hallway. Just had a conversation and he was able to share the history of the company. He was very valuable as just being kind of this, you know, walking bundle of knowledge about the organization. And when the shutdown happened and everybody went remote, his value. And his real value and the value he believed he was adding went close to zero. It was such a shame to see, because no one's going to call him and say, tell me about, they're busy doing work, but they didn't see him in the cafeteria or in the hallway or by the water cooler.
So it does impact relationships if you're not really proactive about it.
Brett: Yeah and that's such a great point. You know, I like to think of relationships, right? We talked earlier about the executive team. But the relationship between an employee and their company is a pretty good proxy or another way to think about how compelling, how valuable is your culture, right? And what happens is when you've got those one way that you build culture and you build a sense of pride, a sense of whatever you want to call it, that connection to the company is you've got to give people information.
You know, I can't be proud of the company I work for if I don't know anything about it. I've got to know history and stories and tell me about great things people have done for our customers or innovations we've made, et cetera. And if you put me on an island. And I work for a company for nine months and I do a job, but I'm disconnected from all of those things.
What the company has missed is an opportunity to really build a relationship between that employee and their company, right? They're sort of a gun for hire that is doing a job, and they'll be just as happy to go do that job for somebody else. They'll offer the same benefits package and, you know, those folks that are great storytellers, or that are community builders, or that can help people laugh, or that can, etc.
They're tremendously valuable to building a culture that helps you attract and build and motivate and keep people. And it is so much harder in a hybrid work environment. There are some companies, Mike, that are all virtual, right? If you're virtual from the get go and all of those community storytelling elements are built virtually you can actually do this pretty well.
If your whole employee base is used to interacting over slack or whatever those channels are, the communication actually happens pretty well. And you can build a pretty effective culture that way. It's the companies that are trying to do that are mostly in person, but have a little bit of virtual. Those are the ones that are really struggling.
Mike Goldman: Yeah agreed, so pulling back up from the remote hybrid, although it's all included because that's the world we live in today back to your thought that there's a gap. A gap between the culture leaders want and the cultures they have, what's the one most important thing companies need to do to close that gap?
Brett: Yeah well, the number one reason there are several okay. But the one that I'm most passionate talking about in the last year or so is really a new, a new realization that we've had as we look at our clients that are most successful as we're looking at the organizations that have built the type of cultures that are actually adding business value on a regular basis to the organization.
The thing that you see is when I interact with those companies and I say, hey, look and I'm going to get to a point here. Okay, but let me set it up. If I say who is in charge of technology inside of your organization, they point to somebody and they say, Paul, he's our VP of IT or whatever. I said, great.
Who oversees finances in this organization? And they point to somebody and they say, well, Jane's our CFO. You know, if something relates to how we're expending our resources, she oversees that strategy. If I go to that same entity and I say, who is accountable for driving your culture?
They all kind of look at each other. They all kind of say, well, I mean, we all are right. And one of the reasons our best clients and the organizations that have been most successful at building a valuable culture over time, they don't say that. They have a person or a very small group of people that have a really clear and intentional strategy for how they're building and driving the culture that they want to have.
And that's the biggest reason for this gap that we see in organizations is there isn't a person. Or very small group of people. This is not a culture committee thing. This is an executive level person that raises their hands and says, I'm accountable for driving continuous improvement in my workplace culture.
And the reason, Mike, that most people, most organizations don't have this, is most of them haven't thought about it. But in order to take accountability for something, if you're a CFO, you have there's a body of knowledge to be had on what does it take? What are the proper accounting practices for running a business operation?
There's, you go get a CPA, you learn how to do it, right? So there's knowledge. There are tools that enable you to host your accounting processes, right? So knowledge, tools, support. There's somebody to call and ask if you run into trouble or if you're not sure. You call a consultant. You call, you know, one of the big four accounting agencies.
You call whatever that is. Someone to audit and say, hey, how do we get back in compliance or how do we address these things? And lastly, you've got to have power in the system. So you've got to have power to say, no, no, no, I'm not approving that budget. Okay in order to effectively drive any process in an organization, you have to have those four things, knowledge, tools,
support and power. And when it comes to driving culture, most organizations, what knowledge? I mean, what is the body of knowledge that it takes to continuously improve workplace culture? What tools should we be using? Who should we go to for advice? We can give you those three things.
So through a product that we're launching. We can give you the knowledge base. We can teach you. We can give you tools that will help you along that path. We can support you and be a part of your community as you build that. But the one thing we can't give you is power. So we can't work with a culture committee
that wants to throw a party once in a while. We can only work with executive level people that when we say, you know, your employee onboarding process really stinks and you need to do something about it, or your compensation models. You say you value culture, but your comp model doesn't have it built in at all.
When you're evaluating people, you need to address that or your executive team is talking the talk, but they're not walking the walk. And here's some best practices for how to build a great executive team and what they need to do to support culture. We've got to have somebody with enough power in the system that says, yeah, okay, I get it.
I'm going to go to work on that and make a little bit of progress consistently over time. So that's what it takes is a driver, and that driver has to have those four things.
Mike Goldman: So I want to dive into that, but I realized before I do, and I probably should ask you this question five minutes ago, how do you define culture? Let's agree on that. And then I want to dive into this culture driver thing because I've got some real questions about it.
Brett: Yeah, so my favorite definition for culture, there are quite a few good ones out there, but is the specific attitudes. and behaviors that a group of people comes to expect from one another. So this applies in a workplace. Okay close your eyes. Think about when you show up to work tomorrow, what are the attitudes and the behaviors
that you can expect from your colleagues. Okay, what energy are they going to show up with? How are they going to behave? Right, and we just had Thanksgiving. Okay, when we're recording this, that was a little while ago. If you can envision getting together with your family for any kind of gathering, most people have a pretty clear picture of what are the attitudes and the behaviors of the people that I'm going to interact with.
In my family, in my friend group, you can crystallize what that is. That's really what that culture is. It's the attitudes and behaviors that people expect from one another, and those can either be really supportive, uplifting, energizing, or they can be the opposite.
Mike Goldman: I like that. Interesting. Okay. So with that said, I think that's an important context with the culture driver. What I have seen, depending on size of company. Very often the culture, if I ask that question, hey, who owns culture? Who drives culture? The answer I typically get is HR does. Now, smaller companies may or may not have HR.
If they do, it may start off very tactical and administrative. They do HRIS and they do payroll. But in companies that have the ability to bring on someone in HR, and by the way, I keep saying HR, but I hate that term. I'd rather it be called employee experience or talent development or something, but in a company that may be a little larger could afford to pay someone more strategic in that role.
I typically hear HR. Do you hear that? Do you think that's the right place for it, or could it be anywhere?
Brett: the two most common responses. Well, there's three. One is they all look at each other and they're like, we all do. Okay but if not that it's either the CEO or HR, the head of HR. Those are the most common answers we get. When you talk to those HR people and you really drill down and you say, so tell me what's your mandate with regard to culture?
It's fairly narrowly, the way they envision that is somewhat narrow. And it's not because they don't want to own more of it. It's just the box that they end up in is kind of recruiting, hiring, onboarding, evaluations you know, benefits, perks, like but culture is every day.
And it's, how is your manager showing up and, you know, what type of environment are they creating on their team? And most HR departments may not have the knowledge and the tools, the skills, or been given the mandate to say, no, no, no. It's my job to ensure every employee in this company has an opportunity to work for a fantastic supervisor.
And I'm going to do everything I can to make continuous improvement to make that the case. And if that means we've got to move line and staff charts, if that means we've got to demote somebody and put a new manager in, if that means we need to get better at evaluating talent for management positions, if that means we need to develop people, if that means etc.
I'm not going to sleep at night if I haven't done something to create a better work environment for, you know, my team that's overseas in another area, I need to be doing something to make that employee experience better on a regular basis. And most HR teams, most management teams, they don't know what to do, they don't know how to do that.
They'd like it if it happened, but they don't have a process or a framework for thinking about how to drive that.
Mike Goldman: So who should own, is there a should or could, I mean, it's got to be someone you mentioned with the power and the, the authority. Who should own it?
Brett: So some companies, and this is not a recommendation, but some companies have like a chief culture officer, right? Some companies, if they're big enough, have a chief people officer, chief culture officer. And in those instances, that's the person. Like that's the job they already have and there are some things we can teach them or tools we can provide them or structure we can give them what I find even if people have that title, they often don't have a really clear framework for thinking about what does it mean to do this job across the whole organization really well.
So that's the easy answer is if you have, if you're that rare company. That has a chief culture officer or chief people officer that usually sits above HR. They either are the head of HR or they're the umbrella over HR. That's the person. If not, then the answer to that question, Mike, is it's your highest powered person that really wants to have a better culture every day for people.
And if that's your CEO, it should be your CEO. They got to make a little time for this. It's not a full time job. They just have to make a little time for it. But what we have found is you can't, you can't assign this to somebody begrudgingly, like you got to want it.
You know, you got to want to say, no, I don't care if you're the head of operations, if you're a director of facilities, heck in a certain organization, if you're the person that has a passion for people and culture, and you can get the buy in of the executive team to give you some runway to move the needle on things and back you on it.
You need somebody with that drive and that energy that wants to tackle workplace culture, and we can teach them how to do it. But you've got to have a little bit of power or a lot of power is better. And you've got to have that drive that the want to to say, nope, I'd love the opportunity to make a difference.
Got itand then you need a framework and you've hinted a couple of times that the framework and people listening go, Mike, shut up with the other questions. We want to hear the framework. So tell us a little bit more about that framework that you have.
Well, I got inspired a couple of years ago with this really simple, you know, I've said the words continuous improvement a couple of times and when we work with manufacturing organizations or, you know, I don't want to get nerdy because I'm not qualified on say the lean six sigma approaches or those, there are other really well established areas of business operations that say, if you want to improve quality.
On a manufacturing line, there are processes in place to help you drive continuous improvement right. And in almost any area of your life, okay, this could be health, fitness, diet, you know, financial success, personal finance. There's no shortcut, you know, for anybody that got successful, there's only one way that they got there.
I don't care the path. It's one step at a time. There are very few shortcuts in almost any area of life. And I got really inspired by this idea of saying, why are people not closing these culture gaps? And it's because they don't have a person who has knowledge, tools, support, all that stuff. But they're also not thinking about their job isn't to fix this tomorrow.
Their job is to find little consistent wins and to stack them up over time. Because if you do that, I can't promise you tremendous results in a month or three months or six months, but three years or five years from now. If you're just intentional about what we're trying to create and you're investing and getting there and you're making a little bit of progress consistently.
Organizations will be amazed at how much progress they can make on that employee experience, their culture scores, and all the outputs of that that are good for the business if they'll just focus on continuous improvement. So that's number one, Mike, is this idea of your job as a driver is not to do everything at once.
Your job is just to take accountability for continuous improvement. And we say it's continuous improvement in five areas. There are five pieces of the puzzle. That you need to be thinking about as a culture driver. Are you ready for this?
Mike Goldman: Ready. got my pen in hand. I'm writing them down.
Brett: So number one, and this is right in your ballywick, okay. Is executive team performance. Okay is the quality, the function. The alignment, the strategy and the execution of your executive leadership team, if they're not on board with, hey, we know culture matters and we know the culture we want to have if they're not clear about it, and if they're not walking the walk, and if they're not growing as a team and as a unit, and if they're not, you know, leaning on their strengths.
Not every person on that team needs to be the culture cheerleader. You got to have an agreement that this is a priority, and you got to police one another, support one another. And it's okay if two or three folks are like, yeah, this isn't my thing. I got my, okay, great. But you can't undermine our efforts.
You got to make sure that we as a team are supportive of what we're trying to build. And so executive team performance, we think of that as both bricks and mortar. If you think of an analogy, you got to have the right people, the right bricks on your executive team, but you've got to have the right mortar as well, the right relationships among that team.
And there's a lot that executives can do to support these efforts that I'm going to talk about in the other four pie pieces of this culture driver model to just you know, that little bit of the kind words, the recognition, the praise, the celebration of the stuff that we want for our culture, when executives notice that stuff and show that they care about it, it exerts a tremendous amount of power on the rest of the company.
So executive team is number one, consistent improvement on the function, the relationships and the impact that that team has on the rest of the organization.
Mike Goldman: Excellent. What's number two?
Brett: Number one. Number two is managers. Okay leadership effectiveness. You've got to consistently as a culture driver put consistent effort forth to help ensure that you have a stronger, more capable, more effective group of managers in your organization.
And that can be via putting the right people in those positions. Or it can be by developing them by teaching them. 50 to 70 percent gallup says, and I believe this as well of an employee's experience can be connected to the relationship that they have with their direct manager and to a certain degree, the team that they work with.
And so if we're tackling culture, frontline managers are a huge aspect of that. So as a culture driver, it's your job to look at that team of managers, whether you're a relatively small company or a really big company, and say, what am I doing to continuously improve the quality of that management so that my employees are getting a better experience, so that their managers are better serving them.
And again, this isn't an overnight thing. It's a marathon, but if we can consistently improve that, what we're doing as a byproduct is consistently improving retention, consistently improving performance, you know, all of those things that come.
Mike Goldman: I want to pause on this one before we go to number three, because when you talk about it, I picture a whole bunch of people writing down, oh, so we need a management training program and that's great and it sounds wonderful, but the reality is in a lot of the companies I've worked with over the last 35 plus years, some poor leader in HR is tasked with putting together a leadership development program. They plan it. They do a bunch of work. They figure out who we're going to bring in. What videos. Maybe we'll do this on LinkedIn learning. We'll do all these different things. They spend a lot of time. It's never taken seriously. It's tends to not be very good and relevant to the work leaders really need to do. It's not always supported, back to the executive team, it's not always supported by the executive team, because they say, no, no, no, you got real work to do first before you go do that stuff. And sometimes the managers are going through training that the executive team has never been through. So they don't even have the right role model.
So when you talk about leadership effectiveness and developing it, is it about, hey, a company should have a leadership development program, but you got to do it right in here. Or are there other creative ways to help make sure your managers, your leaders are leading and coaching and mentoring in the right ways.
Brett: So this is going to take me a second to answer, but man, is that a good question. Okay so my background and the background of our organization, we've been in the leadership training business for the last 15 years and our company got started by my father who built a company that was five times in a row, voted the number one best place to work in the Omaha, Nebraska metropolitan area.
Okay, five times in a row, the number one best place to work. And the biggest secret to that is upskilling managers So they create that type of culture. So for the last 15 years, we've been in the business of doing leadership development training work to help managers understand what it is they can do
to help the organization attract and build and motivate and keep great people. Okay, so that's our core expertise as we're building out this culture driver vision for helping educate organizations on how to do this. Our goal Mike is to go from us having to us showing up in person for every single client and conducting that training to equipping them to do it themselves
So what we have built is it's an off the shelf.
It is the best of all the leadership training work that we've done for the last 15 years, and we built it into a video based program that can be facilitated by an internal person in the organization. So we've tried to take at least the hassle. And the pain and the friction and the time that you started with out of creating a leadership program, just snap your fingers and use ours.
Right so if you're a part of our culture driver community having access to that program, depending on your tier or level is either 100 percent free. It just, if, If you've got a driver that's learning from us and is a part of our membership community, we'll help you quickly get access to the tools that'll help you execute this vision.
Right so sometimes we end up facilitating it for people for an additional fee, whatever that looks like. But we make it really easy to say, no, no, no, no, no. Don't start from scratch. Don't re envision this thing. Just take these best practices that 85 percent are on the mark for what managers need in your company.
And you can supplement it with other stuff. You know, you can add other things in if you want to, but let's make this easy and let's move, right? Let's make it really easy for a culture driver to implement a management development program you know, at a low or reasonable or free cost, depending on how that's working for them and their membership with us, and we provide a facilitators guide, it's video based, you know, that kind of thing.
So that's our goal mike is we teach seven principles of leadership that have applied across industries, across lots of different organization types. And we used to be a little reticent about saying, ah, you don't have to use our principles. You just got to have some. And what we've learned is what we teach
has worked for hundreds of organizations, and it'll work for your company, too. And it's easier to just get it off the ground and supplement it with other stuff if you want, than it is to start from a blank piece of paper and say, let's build the right thing. Because exactly what you described is what happens.
People don't have the time to build it. When they cobble it together, it doesn't work very well. It doesn't get a lot of buy.
Mike Goldman: Love that.
Brett: So, long answer, but it's a great question, and it's probably the number one most important thing that organizations can do to improve the overall employee experience is be leaning into that management development component.
Mike Goldman: So, the first piece was the executive team, second was managers, what's the third?
Brett: Third is HR and people operations. So the third is just like, this is if you think about the company functions, the processes, the forms, the things that we go through, whether all the way from onboarding through, you know, my evaluations and how I'm paid and all that kind of stuff. If we're saying to our people, we care about culture.
We care about these attitudes and behaviors that if people show up and do these things, it'll make life better for everybody, including our customers, including our colleagues. Our HR stuff has to align with that. We've got to make sure that all of the people processes that we've built are operating in a way that reinforces those things.
And so what we try to do is help culture drivers realize here are all the different processes that you're running in your organization and just, again we don't do all this from the get go, but when an organization is ready to say. You know, maybe you want to look at your evaluation process and do you want to put some attitudinal behavioral stuff in there so that you're actually rewarding and or punishing people that are helping you achieve these goals, right?
Do you want to look at your onboarding process? We can give you a best practice template and show you what other people are doing and learn from our community and all those things. This HR function in our culture driver community is where people cross share the most information. We don't have to be experts on everything.
We've built a community of people who are trying to improve their workplace cultures, and they, they share resources within, in particular this HR bucket to say, how are you doing that? What are you using for this? Etcetera
Because those tools and processes that support those functions are important. And if we can make that easier for organizations to improve, that's what we want.
Mike Goldman: I love, I love that, and I know when we first met, I think we were talking about the community. But what I love so much about that culture driver community idea is, I think CEOs have communities of other CEOs, peer advisory groups. I mentioned Vistage earlier. There's YPO and EO and a host of other things. CEOs have that. They don't all take advantage of it, but they have these peer advisory groups where they could talk openly to others about the challenges they're having and get feedback. Other roles within the organization typically don't have that. So whoever that culture driver is to have that community around them. It just sounds like that has the potential to be incredibly powerful. So I love that.
Brett: That's what we're launching presently is this community that teaches those four, well, three of the four things. It teaches people the knowledge, like what is the frame, how do you think about building a better culture? What is the process? What are the frameworks etc.
That we provide or we help people find. If we can't provide them, we provide recommendations for the tools that are going to get you there. We and our community give support right? Support to one another as we're trying to figure out how to improve things inside of our own organizations. And then that fourth thing is power.
Well, if you don't come into that community with buy in from your organization, you can get all the good ideas you want. But if you don't have the ability to say, no, no, no, we're going to change some things then you're going to miss out on that opportunity to make real progress. So that was the third thing, HR.
The fourth is what we call emerging leaders and or culture champions. So these are people and by the way, this is usually the last bucket that people will get to this is a little bit more sub larger organizations, but it's developing that next level of managers and or just identifying people that at a local team or division or department or location level.
Just get excited about this culture work and they can support that driver right? So this is the person that, hey, maybe we supply the company with 20 great ideas for just fun stuff to do at a team meeting. And the culture driver can't go to all the team meetings and like say, hey, we're going to do five minutes of this.
Cause it'll be good for relationship building or a fun activity or whatever. You know, if you don't like team building activities, that's fine. Okay we got other stuff too, but what you can do is you can hand that. To a culture champion at a local level, and that person can say, hey, yeah, that's my job is at the start of every team meeting is to do something that furthers these culture goals that we have, or the highlights people that are doing a great job or whatever that is right.
So it's a way of thinking about both. How do we develop our next level of leaders, identify talent, maybe put a development program in place. Caveat to that, sometimes you got star performers that shouldn't be leaders, and it can be just as valuable to think about how do we make sure they're happy and successful in their current role, and so that they don't think the only way to continue to be successful is to move into a management role.
Okay, that they may not be well suited for, those are different skill sets and or finding these culture champions. So it's a curriculum, it's a way of thinking about how do you really do those three things. Build future leaders, help your current stars, if they shouldn't be managers, just be real happy where they are. And number three, find other people that can help you just do fun stuff around culture.
Mike Goldman: Excellent. Love it. What's number five?
Brett: Last bucket is the easiest it's not easiest, it's the broadest bucket, but it's all employees. It's what can we do, what ideas can we have that will immediately, most of the stuff is quick, some of it's longer term, but what is it that'll change the employee experience for everybody.
Okay and this is where sometimes it's just the fun stuff. Like, yeah, have a company party and invite families or have some fruit trucks come up or, you know, this could be like paint your walls a brighter color. It could be, you know, just anything that changes the daily experience for employees.
It's just what we want to do is we want to push companies to think a little bit differently just to think you don't have to do all of our ideas, but we want you to think about is there just some easy stuff that you could do to make work a little more fun, a little more rewarding, a little more lively, a little more whatever for every employee on an everyday basis.
And so some of this is really easy, low hanging fruit that companies just you know, if somebody just gives them an idea, they'll say, oh, yeah, that'd be easy. We should do that. Our employees might appreciate it right. And so most of our ideas that we teach in this segment are pretty easy to implement.
There's a few things that are like, well, how are you development pathing every single employee, you know, and career pathing. There's some heavier stuff that we can teach and talk about in there, but most of this is like, are there some quick wins, some easy things we can do to improve the employee experience.
Mike Goldman: Do companies typically work on all five in parallel? I know you said a lot, some never get to number five, but do they work on these in parallel or is it more, we're going to start with the exec team when we've got a beautiful executive team that's all trusting each other, bricks and mortar. It's lovely. Then we're going to go down to managers like, how does it actually work?
Brett: So we think it works best and I'll be real candid with you right now. We're starting this community. We have our current advice, which is we think step one is learn how to be a culture driver and that we have to teach you what that means. There's a little bit in there of like, how do you envision your role?
How do you position yourself, connect yourself to the influencers, et cetera. After that, it's a little bit of a choose your own adventure. We don't walk every single person down the same path. It isn't month one this, month two this, month three this. What we're going to do is we're going to say, look, your job as a culture driver is to drive continuous improvement on your workplace culture.
And you can do that across these five areas. During the first year of our partnership, as we get started, we walk them through that strategy and we say, you need to pick where you think is the right place for you to start. And we're going to make resources available for you and for any other members that are working on those same things
at the time you want them available. So, Mike, there's not a clear, nope, it's not, you know, six months with the executive team and then three months here and then, no, pick where you want to go. We'll have on demand resources as well as live virtual trainings. Conversations, Q and A's, community resources that, you know, yeah, maybe you want to start with the manager development program.
Great maybe you want to start with executive workshops. Maybe you want to start with HR processes. Maybe you want to start with some quick, easy stuff that all of your employees will notice. Great, awesome. There's not currently, we don't think a best practice because in our 15 years of consulting work with organizations.
We've never found that there's some obvious way to start and where to go next and where to go next. We listen to our clients and we say, what are you struggling with? What are you trying to accomplish? Great let's help you with that. We want our culture driver community to be the same way. We want to be able to provide the type of resource and expertise that you're looking for when you're looking for it, not on our timetable, on your timetable.
Mike Goldman: If a company has, and this, I think is going to be my last question before we start to wrap up, the company has the leadership team really wants to build a stronger culture. They decide who the culture driver is, and it's not the CEO. And the reason I'm specific in saying it's not the CEO, because my question is, what do you do if your CEO is just not a big fan of the whole culture thing. I mean, we've been there, right? Where there's members of the leadership team, like we want to build a stronger culture and man, the CEO in one word, in one email could blow everything by saying that crap's not important. We got real work to do. So if you've got a CEO, if you, if someone's listening to this and they're not the CEO, they're a member of a leadership team that really wants to grow a stronger culture, but the CEO is just not very supportive of that. Is there a way around that or are they shit out of luck?
Brett: Well, I was gonna say you might not like my answer on this, but number one, have their CEO talk to us. Okay, you know, see if we can win them over. You know, I love talking to financially minded people. I love talking to people that I just want, you know, brass tacks sort of thing.
Okay we love having conversations about why culture will get you there. If that's not possible, if you just can't get that CEO on board there's not a lot you can do. I mean, there's just not, there's a reason that fourth thing we talk about is power. Okay, knowledge, tools, support, power. If you don't have the power, candidly, you're not going to be a very good prospect to do the work with us because, you know, every time you get excited about something, if it gets shot down, I mean, if people see, oh yeah, you know, I want to be on the CEO side, so
I'm going to make fun of this stuff. I'm going to say, you know, Oh, culture. Oh, another team building. Yay if the CEO, you know is reinforcing that. Good luck, you know? So my advice would be either just get comfortable where you are or go find an organization that you would love to be a part of where you can make this kind of stuff.
Mike Goldman: Kind of what I thought your answer would be, but I was hoping you had a magic pill, but you don't so.
Brett: I don't have a magic pill. You know, one of the taglines, Mike, for our business that we have decided not to run with that we've considered you know, we say, hey, we try to make the world a better place to work. That's our kind of our tagline. But the secret one underneath is we kind of like to make life lousy for bad bosses.
So, right. So what can we do to tilt the world in the favor of the types of organizations that want to win in business? But they want to do it by building a great workplace. That's our mission. So we're looking for people that have aligned executive teams that already know culture is a secret to their success. When we find that, we can help.
Mike Goldman: Love it. Love it. Such important stuff. This'll be in the show notes, but Brett, where should people go if they want to find out more about you and the company and the culture driver program? Where should they go?
Brett: Yeah, betterculture.com is the main place to go. You know, you can look for me, Brett Hoogeveen. You can find me different places. Reach out to me if you want to. But betterculture.com is our main website.
Mike Goldman: Go there. Awesome stuff. Well, I always say, if you want a great company, you need a great leadership team. Brett, thanks so much for helping us get there today.
Brett: All right. Thanks, Mike, for all the work you're doing as well.