Episode 268: Fireside Chat - Design a Culture That Breeds Success with Céline Williams (Recast)

Culture really comes from the worst thing that you'll accept in your culture is the thing that defines your culture. So what behaviors are you accepting? What leaders are you allowing to continue to lead in ways that don't align with what you want because they're a good performer or they do something else? That, that worst behavior, that worst thing is going to actually be the defining point of your culture.

So the big question is this: how do small business owners like us grow our leadership, develop our teams, and scale our business in a way that allows us to get our products and services out to the world yet still remain profitable? That is the question, and this podcast will give you the answers. I'm Bradley Hamner, and this is the Club Capital Leadership Podcast. This podcast is brought to you by Autopilot Recruiting. Join over 1,200 State Farm agents in putting your recruiting on autopilot. Any successful insurance agent will tell you how important team is. Finding those rockstar team members doesn't happen when left to chance. It happens through consistent recruiting. You never know when you're going to lose a team member, and the key to an incredible team is constantly searching for the best talent. Autopilot Recruiting is a continuous recruiting service where you'll be assigned a recruiter that has been trained to recruit on your behalf every business day. This recruiter will take over and revamp your career plug, send out assessments, do pre-screen phone interviews, and schedule your in-office interviews. All you need to do is to show up and give a thumbs up or a thumbs down. This ongoing service is extremely affordable and a no-brainer for taking your insurance agency to the next level. Listeners of the Club Capital Leadership Podcast, go to autopilotrecruiting.com and use the code CLUBCAPITAL to get started. Again, autopilotrecruiting.com and use the code CLUBCAPITAL to get started. Welcome to another episode of the Club Capital Leadership Podcast. My name is Bradley Hamner. Great to have you on again today. So Celine Williams is our guest today. She's an international speaker and founder of Revisionary, which is a boutique consulting firm providing executive coaching, leadership development, and cultural services to human-focused businesses around the world. Celine has almost 20 years of experience working with growing organizations to really help them navigate and build leadership capacity. And she is the trusted advisor to leaders and executives in a variety of industries. She's highly sought after for her expertise in accelerating team performance, designing culture, managing transformation, and facilitating effective communication. And in 2020, she actually won the award for Best Culture Design Specialist from Corporate Vision for her body of work. Without further ado, let's get into my conversation with Ms. Celine Williams. Celine, welcome to the Club Capital Leadership Podcast.

Thank you for having me. I'm excited to get a chance to talk to you this morning.

Well, we're excited to have you. So we always start with background and origin story, and I've heard you before. Just give a little bit about your background. So why don't you take people up to present day and how you got to doin' what you do today?

There's sort of 3 main things that I've done beyond education, at least to get where I am today. And that is I started a tutoring company when I was in my early 20s and sold the IP for that when I was about 25. So decided that I would take my extraordinarily valuable at the time degree in English literature and start a tutoring company. So I did that and then I worked in the corporate world in the health informatics space primarily. So in Canada, that's because we have universal healthcare. It's working with government agencies as well as private insurers, as well as technology. So a lot of different sort of touchpoints. I did that for 11 years and then I started my own business and I've been doing— my business is focused on leadership development and culture design, and I've been doing that for about 7 years. There's actually more connection and progression inside of that than I can get into quickly. But those are sort of the 3 main things that actually built on each other to get me to running the business I do now, which is working with people-focused organizations on leadership development, team alignment, high performance, but not in the— we drive the results. We actually help the people be their best self to get to that performance. So it's not the— what we can often think of as performance coaching, which is like, go, go, go, go. We don't do that. No one's inspired by that. No one's motivated by that. It's much more figuring out what works for people and helping them get there as opposed to just driving. And culture design work. So we actually help organizations design the culture that they want for their people and then help them get set up to maintain it and build it and grow it and keep it running. As they grow.

When you say people-focused, so whenever we were having our call a week ago or so and you brought that up, what do you mean? And can you define a people-focused organization?

Yeah, so I think the easiest way to define it is that, I mean, it's so corny to say this, but it's really putting people at the center of the organization. So traditionally, businesses tend to be product or profit-focused. So they focus on let's build the product that's going to give us the best outcomes, it's going to get us the best clients, we're going to have the best features inside of it. And they focus on the things and none of the things exist without the people. So it's really taking it back and saying, okay, we can build the best products, we can make the most money, we can have the best processes. All of those things exist because of people. So if we focus on the people first and we make sure that we are caring for them and taking care of them and meeting them where they're at then they will actually perform better for us. And there's tons of data that backs this up, by the way. This is not as widely adopted as I personally would like it to be because people revert to what they know, which is more traditional. But we know that when organizations come from that people-focused lens, put people first, that the profits and the products and all those things generally come, as opposed to trying to like nail it, hammer round peg, square hole, square peg, round hole, as opposed to the other way around. Yeah.

I heard you mention about aspirational ideas, whether it's core values or we have this culture in our organization of XYZ, but the reality is they're not living that out, right? And I know you've had so many examples of that. So they put things on the wall. They even go on a, maybe a leadership retreat of some sort. And so what I really want to ask you about here is, to define not the person who's doing it for fake, but they're actually truly trying to create the culture that they want in their organization, but it's not there.

Yep.

The leader is attempting to do all of the right things and not just for checking the boxes, although that could be a whole nother conversation for someone trying to look a certain way. So I'm not talking about that person.

Yeah.

I'm talking about, obviously, our audience is insurance agency owners, and they are trying to create the culture in their organization that they want to have. And the things that they're saying are the right things that they're saying, but they're not doing that.

Why is that?

So there's a few things that happen in situations like this. And by just for the record, I love this question because I think it's very tactical and it's actually taking and applying to real-life situations. So I appreciate you doing that because this is what I love getting to talk about. There are a few things that can happen. The first thing is if they're not basing what they want their culture to be on what's actually there, it's never going to take. So, that means doing the work to take a look at what is good and bad about the way things work and how things work in your organization and your team right now. What often happens is we say, "Okay, we want to— even if it's not aspirational, we want to be this way. We want the team to operate in this way." So, they design that without the foundation to get there. So, the first thing I would say is that, You have to do— and this is a lot of the work that we do is we go in and it's not that you have to bring in someone external to this. I want to be really clear, but I'm explaining how we do it, which is why it's effective, which is you go in and you actually take a look at what is really happening. Who's behaving in what way? How are things working? Someone says something. Is that the reality? Right. Culture really comes from the worst thing that you'll accept in your culture is the thing that defines your culture. So, what behaviors are you accepting? What leaders are you allowing to continue to lead in ways that don't align with what you want because they're a good performer or they do something else? That, that worst behavior, that worst thing is going to actually be the defining point of your culture. So, you have to look at the good and the bad. You can't just out of nowhere design something or say, this is how you want it to be if there's no foundation for it. So you have to look, what are you rewarding? What are you allowing to continue to happen? How do people actually communicate? It's great to think that we all communicate in this way. Every company that I've ever worked with says that we do feedback fairly well, if not really well. We know how to give feedback. Zero companies I have ever worked with actually have a good practice around feedback. They'll say, well, we do performance management once a year. That's not a good practice around feedback. They don't know how to give feedback. They don't know how to receive feedback. So, you really have to look at how all of these things operate if you want to be in a position to design a culture that's going to stick and to design ways of working and how— the how of ways of working that is going to work for your company. And we skip over that initial phase. Everyone wants to skip over that initial phase and get into the fun stuff because the fun stuff is like, how do we make this work? What is this going to look like? What does putting it all into action? That's the fun stuff, but it does not stick if you don't do the hard stuff at the beginning.

Yeah. So what I hear you say is almost an analogy of Google Maps. So you got to just say Google Maps is really good at getting you where you want to go, but it has to know two coordinates. Number one, where do you want to be? And then number two, or point A, where are you starting from? Correct?

Yes. Yeah, that's a great analogy. I'm going to steal that and use that in the future because that is it. Great analogy. We don't spend enough time defining where we're starting. It's like saying we're starting in the city of Atlanta. We're in the city of Atlanta and we want to get to Missouri, right? Like Kansas City. We're in the city of Atlanta. We want to get to Kansas City. That is both ends of that, but especially the starting point. Yeah, that's too vague. That's not enough information. There are 100 routes you could take. There are 100 ways you could go wrong. It's just not enough information. So that's actually a really incredible analogy for this.

Depending on where you're starting from, different timelines and resources are required to get you there. To use your example, you're in Toronto, I'm in North Alabama, I'm trying to get to Kansas City. Well, different timelines and resources are required for us both to get to Kansas City. I mean, right? So I totally agree with that. So I have to ask about 2 things you just mentioned on that one question. One brings to mind this concept of Point A. So where are we starting from? And I just have to, in my mind, I was thinking about, I don't know how else to say it, but sometimes the leaders just don't have some good self-awareness. They think it's one thing, but the reality is they don't. And so actually bringing somebody in from the outside is the first time for somebody to be able to call that out and say, that's not at all what's happening, number one, in your organization, but also the way that you are actually operating is not consistent with the way you think that you're operating. So can you just talk about self-awareness? And then kind of part 2 of that question, you mentioned about feedback. So I think feedback, when people hear that, it's one-directional. It's the leader to the team. But there's also feedback is how do you receive it? And there's a great book called Thanks for the Feedback. I don't know if you've ever read that book.

I have.

But I think that both of those are really important is to teach and share with the team how to receive feedback but also being willing to, as the leader, get better at giving feedback. So, can you touch on those two things?

I can. So, I'll start with self-awareness. And you're 100% right. Most people— I wish I could say it was a small percentage, but the truth is that most people don't have as good self-awareness as they think they do. And they don't know what they don't know. So, it's kind of a dangerous combination for a leader because they often think, because I'm a leader, I am very self-aware because it's sort of part and parcel. And we learn about emotional intelligence, et cetera, et cetera. It can correlate. It's not a causation. So those are not always true. And they don't know what they don't know because people aren't giving them that feedback. I'm actually going to tie these two things together a little bit, right? So people aren't giving them the feedback. People aren't telling them. Most people are uncomfortable or hesitant to go to their leader and say, hey, I don't think you're showing up as effectively as you could be for all these reasons. Here's the impact of what happened. What happened in that meeting? Here's the impact it had on the team. People don't do that with their leaders. Very few. It really is a people-centric organization where that is happening naturally and in a flow. And again, few and far between because that's not traditionally part of how we do business. So self-awareness is— it's a challenge and it is a process and it is hard work, and it can be very messy to be in the mucky muck of figuring out what you do well, what you don't do well. And this is really where having an external person come in, whether it's about— so if you're a leader, 360s, I can't emphasize that enough. Have 360s done where you have external people doing them. Don't put it on your HR team because they're— I've seen this happen and they'll never get real honest information, not because there's anything wrong with them, but because people are unsure if it's going to be confidential. So get real 360s done. Yeah.

Yeah. So real question about that. Can you define— so for somebody who's never heard that term before, what a 360 is? And maybe if there's a resource or, you know, there's a lot of different tools out there, one that you're accustomed to. So if nobody's ever heard that, can you define it and then point us to a resource?

Yeah. Leadership 360. 360 doesn't have to be only for leaders. It's basically an assessment or a survey where a leader has a certain number of people. My personal opinion is a minimum of 8, but I'd be ideally more than 10 people that go through an assessment either online or interview format or a combination of both, asking questions about how that person shows up as a leader. And the idea behind it is that the Information is captured anonymously so that it can be rolled together and give the leader real insight into the impact they are having. So the leader takes the assessment for themselves, so you get a sense of how they think they show up, and then people around them take the assessment. Ideally, you want to have the person that they report to taking the assessment. You want to have a minimum of 3 to 5 of their peers taking the assessment. And you want to have 3 to 5 direct reports taking the assessment. And then if you're cross-functional, for example, and there's other parts of the organization that you deal with consistently, you get them involved as well. So the report, whatever the information that comes out of it, gives you that insight. And specifically with the, here's where I think I am, here's where other people perceive me to be. And you can get some really incredible insight out of it. It's just a lot. It's a much easier, if you like, starting point when it's not all on you as the leader to try and figure it out without that insight. So it gives you a lot of insight. A few good resources, a few of the ones that I like, and listen, I will fully own that I'm biased because there's lots that I don't like. So there's ones that I like. The Leadership Circle Profile is one of the best ones out there that I have seen. You do need a certified practitioner to run it, but it's really fulsome and really insightful. And I think that there's a lot of power inside of it. It is web-based only. There's not an interview component. If you want to run your own or create your own, there's a few online programs and systems you can sign up for, get a license and sort of put your own questions in and do it internally if you want to keep it internal to the organization. And then truthfully, the other ones that I know, I haven't been wildly impressed with. So we do custom ones for companies where it's partly online that we create and then partly interview, because that's the only other— I do think there's a ton of value in having someone interview people if you have the appetite for it. Some of the best 360s I've seen are 100% custom, interview-based, interview-focused, and it takes more time, but the insight you get is super, super valuable.

Have you ever thought Wouldn't it be incredible if you had direct access to our expert podcast guests in real time and be able to ask a question specific to your business? Well, now you have the opportunity to do that. After 3 and a half years, we're finally launching a leadership podcast community, and we want you to be a part of it. We're launching this podcast community on June 1st. Go to club.capital/podcast and you'll get all the details. You'll be able to interact with every single one of the podcasts that we record. In real time and ask us questions and be able to ask the guest questions. In addition to that, we're going to have a monthly exclusive Q&A just for our Leadership Podcast listeners. Go to club.capital/podcast. That's club.capital/podcast. And be one of the very first to join. I can't wait to see you in our Leadership Podcast community.

One of the things I think that that actually does is for— I was going to ask you about this, and this is somewhat of a segue— is from hard skills to soft skills. So everything we're talking about soft skills. And I think for so many business owners, I mean, we're really good at numbers and strategy and actually getting down and saying, OK, so this is what we're going to produce. These are widgets we're going to produce, the sales, the policies, whatever. This is how we're going to do it. This is our conversion ratios, our— all of that, right? Lifetime value of the customer, all of the hard skill items. But doing something like that takes something that can be very nuanced and hard to get your hands around it, right? Get your arms around it to be able to say, OK, this is where I actually got to be better. Is there any advice you could give to the leader that's about to go through that for the first time, because I mean, you got to be in a pretty good mental place to hear the feedback that you're going to get from your team. I mean, you're kind of opening yourself up. You got to be, I think, in the right mindset to do that.

So, I mean, I think this is the same advice I would give anyone who is stepping into a place of feedback, right? And I think that this goes to what you were saying earlier as well, which is that we are not taught how to receive feedback. We don't know how to receive feedback. We are taught terribly how to give feedback, generally speaking. So I've been on a rampage for years about we need to change how we give feedback as well. And we need to practice receiving feedback. And this is an example of practicing receiving feedback. If people are being honest with you, you are going to hear things you're not expecting to hear inside of the 360. Even if it's that how they're receiving you and the perception of you is not what you're expecting, you will see things, you will read things, You will hear things that you're not going to be thrilled about. And I think first and foremost, the best advice I would give a leader stepping into this is recognize that their story is their story and their perception. We tend to make it personal and like there's something wrong with us and we need to do a specific thing. We have to go fix it or excuse it or justify it or whatever the case may be. And being really clear that anything you hear is their story and their perception, and it's not about you as who you are as a person. And the more we can remind ourselves of that, the more open to feedback we become. When we receive feedback, whether it's whatever format it comes in, I always advise people to start with understanding and curiosity. Don't try and say like, first of all, I'm going to say this with the— this does not mean get defensively curious, which is when people are like, Well, give me an example of what you're talking about. I need an example to under— don't do that. That's not the type of understanding curiosity that I'm talking about. And I need to call it out because I have seen that happen. But really, when you hear that, genuinely start with understanding and curiosity. Can you tell me more about your experience of me in that situation? Right? Have you seen that happen in other situations? I want to understand what the impact on you was, whatever it is. But starting with understanding and curiosity helps you really recognize and see what their story and experience has been so you can get value out of it because there's always value in it for you, even if you disagree with it. If you're like, "That is— no, I've never heard anyone say anything like that. That's just absolutely not the impact that I think I have or that I've heard before," it's still valuable to hear their story and their perspective to understand where they're coming from. So that you know that not everyone has the singular experience that you think that they have or that you've heard in the past. So it's really that combination of being open and searching for understanding inside of whatever comes up and recognizing that everyone is coming from their own story. So your story— don't try and apply your story as the person receiving feedback to them.

One of my favorite books last year was Chris Voss' Never Split the Difference. And whenever he talks about— you love that book?

I love that. I made all the leaders I worked with a few years ago read it. I sent them all copies and I was like, everyone needs— it's such a great book.

Such a good book. So when he talks about tactical empathy, one of the things I thought was pretty interesting is whenever he really began to define that, and I'm kind of paraphrasing, obviously, but basically he said, like, it's expressing an understanding without actually agreeing with what the person is saying. I mean, obviously, if you put this the situations he had been in, in negotiating with terrorists, is he was able to express an understanding of how that person or those people were feeling without actually being able to say that I agree with that. Because we've got to say this too, is that some of the feedback you may be getting from that 360 is maybe actually off base from them. That may actually not be necessarily true. So it's not even that you necessarily have to agree with that. I think that's great.

Can I just note that That cannot be overemphasized. Understanding does not equate agreement. Those are two distinct things, and we have a perception that if we express understanding, that it means we agree. We have to start tearing that down because it's not the same thing. I love that you brought that up because that's really important. That people keep it in mind that you don't have to agree with someone to wanna understand them at all. And there's also things and times where you can say like, I appreciate you giving me this feedback, but this is not something that I'm focusing on right now, or I'm not in the headspace to receive, whatever the case may be. There's also times where it's okay to say things like that. Those things can come up in 360s where you're like, that's just not a thing I'm working on or spending time on right now. That's OK as well.

I appreciate you saying that too, because then the tendency for the high-performance leader is to get all this feedback and to feel like, OK, now I've got to go work on all 17 of these areas, when the reality is that's not at all the case. All 17 of those areas may not even be areas that you have to focus on. But taking maybe 1 or 2 of those areas and saying, you know, there's a common theme here, and having that willingness to look inward and say, you know what, that probably is something that I need to address and begin to actually work on.

Yeah, absolutely. 100%.

We're beginning to come out of the COVID pandemic. But I bring that up not to have a conversation specifically about the pandemic and quarantines, but more so about the increasing amount of remote workers and just leadership and culture whenever you maybe have some sort of a hybrid system. There are certainly a lot of organizations now that are completely remote. But then I think there's an increasing amount of people that have a hybrid system, right? Some of the people go in, maybe sometimes they go in, they don't go, not every single day, et cetera. Can you just talk about the challenges, but then also the opportunities of creating the culture, or to use your word, culture design, whenever you have a fully remote or hybrid team?

There are definitely unique challenges in, especially with hybrid teams. There are more challenges with hybrid teams than completely remote. It is always easier to design a culture around homogeneity than it is around diversity. So when everyone is in the office or everyone is remote, there is enough same-saminess that you can make something work. When it's hybrid, there's diversity. Diversity is— you get— listen, diversity is brilliant. You get way better results. We know there's 1 million reasons that diversity matters. And it doesn't mean it's easier. And culture design is one of many places where it's not easier, but it's worth it to spend the time doing it. So, I would say that the biggest mistake I see made when it comes to organizations going remote or hybrid and culture is trying to take everything that worked when it was in person and applying it to remote or hybrid. We have to stop doing that. I don't care if it's a meeting. I don't care if it's the schedule of meetings. It does not work to take the same thing, to just try and pull it out of in-person and drop it into remote or hybrid. And so that's the first thing that I always say when it comes to designing culture for remote or hybrid is that if you try and do that, you're going to have so many additional challenges you're not even anticipating because it doesn't work that way. The real question inside of this for me is it depends on the size of the team and the size of the organization. So if you have an organization, if your company, your team, your organization is 50 people, it's still small enough to have individual conversations to understand how different people work, what matters with them, and be able to meet most people partway. If you have an organization of 1,000 people, it is a very different endeavor to design culture for 1,000 hybrid workers and 1,000 hybrid people than it is for 50. So part of it becomes how big is your organization, what really matters, getting very clear on what the values of the organization are, what matters inside of the culture, and what the experience is. And I think it's also— we're never going to replace in-person entirely with virtual. We know that from all the neuroscience behind it, that when we're in person, our brains fire in different ways than they do when we're on video or when we're on voice. It's different. And so, the connection points are deeper. Our brains get lit up in much more excitable ways when we can actually be in person, in physical proximity to people. So, I always suggest that even whether it's hybrid or entirely remote, that part of the touchpoints, at least one touchpoint a year, is also in person in order to enable that. Because those connections then help us manage ourselves and the people around us in the in-between times when we're not in person. Because we have had the experience to say, okay, you know what, I know Bradley well enough, having met him in person, to give him some grace in this way, or to ask this question, or to approach it in this situation. And it gives us a different foundation of how we work together. We get a sense of— so the analogy that I use for culture is always that culture is a sandbox and the company is building the sandbox. They are putting those four edges of the sandbox together and they're responsible for maintaining it and nailing it together and making sure that it's stable and it can hold the sand. Everyone in the company are the kids in the sandbox playing. They can play 85 different things, build a sandcastle, pour some water, bury a friend, whatever the case may be. There's 100 different ways that you can play inside the sandbox. And so in order to enable everyone to play in the sandbox together, you want to have enough information to define it in a way that works for them, that includes everyone inside the sandbox, hybrid, remote, in-office, whatever the case may be, and how you've gathered enough information for them that you have a sense of the types of things they want to play in the sandbox. So, it's not just take one thing, apply it. That doesn't work. It really is a collective. There has to be some understanding. There has to be some collection of information. And then, talking to your people to find out what matters to them because your people, your companies, for some companies, events are super important and they have to be made remote in order for those people to feel valued, right? Sales organizations are often like that. Events matter a ton. Okay, great. Those are not your whole culture, but let's make sure you're working that into what this looks like remotely. For some people, they don't want that. Some companies don't want that. Tech companies are not like, hey, you know what we're going to do? Throw huge remote events. That's not happening. If you have a company of programmers, they don't care about that. But there's something else that they might care about. It's not one size fits all.

I think that what you said to begin with was actually really poignant, is to try to apply the rules of everybody being one way, like everybody in the office. And right now, I think obviously there is a hybrid that's happening because people are starting to get back into the, at least in the States, getting back into the offices. But yet it's not always full-time depending on what part of the country you're in, etc. But I think that what you mentioned there is really important, is that the rules of the game do not apply the way that they used to when everybody was in the office or everybody's fully remote. I think that was really great. Yeah. I want to give you the last 2 questions. I want to kind of paint this picture, because I think there's something that's not talked about a lot. And so the idea of cultural change, and so we kind of had referred to it, and I'm sure a lot of your work is around a leader saying, "Hey, we need to change the culture," and they want to go in and make this change. Well, one thing that's not, I guess I'll just call it culture sustainability. What if that culture, a team, a business has the culture that they want, And they're not even necessarily trying to take it to the next level. They just want to be able to find what are the keys to keeping the culture where it is. So culture sustainability, can you talk about some principles, best practices for that?

I am a broken record because I'm going to say the same thing. I think you need to get the information from your organization, from your people about what it's really like in your culture right now. Good, bad, and ugly, right? What is actually happening? How are people showing up? How are people working? What the realities are. Don't assume that you, as the leader— so culture's like an iceberg. A leader sees the top 1% of what's happening in the culture. They are not aware of 99% of what's actually happening. So it is a trap for leaders to assume that what they see in the culture is actually what's happening or what they want to sustain. So, broken record, you have to start with research. You have to start with collecting information from your people to find out what's really going on. Let's say that you do that and you're like, wow, we still want to sustain these specific things. Then you need to find out what they're doing that is creating those things, which again goes back to talking to your people because there will be things that are happening that you're not aware of that are creating the realities of the experience of the culture.

Right?

Little side meetings, little pockets of things, talk around. There's 1,000 different ways that that can show up. People who are just so— such culture champions that they are out there talking about the culture. You're not even aware of it. They're out there promoting these really important things that are spreading because they're so influential in the organization that you're not even aware of how they're influencing the culture and the benefit that comes from that. So what are they doing that's working? I really truly feel like a broken record all the time with this because it's— you have to get good information. We often run from our own perception or our own information, and that's not good data. So let's get really good information and then figure out what it is specifically that we want to sustain in the culture and what is working right now to get it to where it is. And how can we either do more of that to keep it sustainable or ensure that there's some sort of redundancy inside of it that if one person or one linchpin moves on or changes, the whole thing doesn't fall apart.

That's really good. I think your iceberg analogy, also blind spots and the things that we can't see are the assumptions that we're making. So we're making certain assumptions about how we think the culture is in the office. But to your point, you're saying the majority of what happens in the culture, you actually cannot see, you're not witnessing on a day-to-day basis. Even having that mindset makes us then go through and say, OK, If that's true, if I believe this, and you work with hundreds of thousands of organizations at this point and their teams, if that's true, then we need to intentionally go through and actually figure out what that is.

Yep. Yep. So there's a book called The Four Agreements that you may have read. And one of the Four Agreements is don't make assumptions. And I always say that that needs to be the starting point for all of the work that we do on ourselves, in the world around us, and everything is don't make assumptions. When we make assumptions, we have blinders on no matter what. So I read that book in my 20s, and literally that is the— probably the thing I say more than anything is, I have an assumption, let me ask you about this. So I'll acknowledge it and ask it because I never want to be in the place where I think my lens on something is the only lens or the best lens.

Love that. Is there anything that we didn't touch on that we needed to touch on that you feel is important?

I mean, I would say not specifically. The only thing I would add to all of this is it can feel like a lot of information and it can feel like a lot of work when you hear a conversation like this where you're just like, I don't even know where to start with culture, especially because it's not numbers. It's so much easier to say there's a quantifiable thing that we're going to dive into and this is what it's going to look like. I fully appreciate that. And focusing on culture and leadership and the people side of the business, enables all of that quantifiable stuff to work more efficiently and effectively. And don't get overwhelmed. You don't have to boil the ocean to get started on leadership development or culture design or whatever it is for your organization. And if you have more than 5 people in your organization, this is already something you should be thinking about in some capacity. Again, you don't have to boil the ocean. You don't have to do all of the things. But in some capacity, once you have 5 people, I highly, highly recommend you start thinking about this so you don't end up in a situation where things are out of control and you're having to, quote, fix your company or the people issue that you have. All right.

You ready for the world-famous E9 rapid fire?

I am as ready as I'm ever going to be.

What's the last book that you read?

Where the Crawdads Sing.

What's the book that you would recommend the most to others regarding leadership? Leadership Development and Culture Design.

I was going to say Four Agreements is the book that I hands down recommend the most, but it's not Leadership Development and Culture Design. Right now it's Think Again by Adam Grant, which is really— I would say it's not a formal leadership development book. And then the other one would be Dare to Lead, Brené Brown.

Okay, I have both of those. I actually just got Adam Grant's book. It's sitting on my nightstand. I have not started reading it yet.

It's so good. He is one of my favorite humans on the planet. I think you'll really enjoy it. He's brilliant.

Awesome. What is the most commonly held belief or best practice around culture that you disagree with?

That we have to sit down and write out our vision, mission, and values as the first starting point of anything to do with culture.

What's your favorite tech tool or app that you use every day? You can't say your iPhone.

Evernote is probably the thing that I— oh, or my remote Remarkable 2. If it's a physical tool, it's my Remarkable 2. If it's an app, it's Evernote.

I love Evernote. I have been getting targeted by Remarkable 2 all the time. I have not pulled the trigger on it yet because I stick with my iPad. So we'll have to have a conversation offline about the Remarkable 2. Okay. Who would you most like to sit next to a 10-hour flight, dead or alive, and why?

Adam Grant, hands down. He is my current favorite. I keep telling everybody he's my intellectual crush because the way his brain works is I just can't get enough of it. So Adam Grant.

When you're not working, what do you love to do?

Travel, which is not real right now. I don't have family in North America, so travel's a big one for me, but I love to read. I truly, I love reading in a way that I can spend all of my spare time doing it.

What's the thing that you've learned the most about yourself during the COVID pandemic?

First and foremost, that— so I have ADD, and it is so much worse when I don't have all of the things that I would normally have in place to manage it. So that was a fun realization during COVID And we're still in lockdown here, so ongoing. And then I think the other one is that there were a lot of things that I was doing that I felt obligated to do that I didn't actually enjoy doing, and I haven't felt that obligation, and I don't miss that feeling.

Fill in the blank: 10 years ago, I had no idea this would be so hard.

That— oh, this is so lame— social media. Why does it take so much time?

Last question: what's the best piece of leadership advice you've ever received?

It was trust your instincts, and it was in the context of you lead with your heart and you have that connection to people. You really see people. So trust your instincts.

Love it. Celine, I've enjoyed this conversation. I appreciate the way that you've been able to take something that leadership development and culture and make it into something that people feel like that they actually have the tactical tools to be able to figure out, OK, now here's what I need to do to either improve the culture in my office, in my company, or keep the culture that I have sustaining. So thank you for that. If people want to learn more about you, what you and your team do, how can they get in touch with you?

LinkedIn is probably the easiest way to connect with me, just individually, if you want to just talk to me. And it's Celine Williams on LinkedIn, or our website is revisionary.ca. So it's Visionary with the R-E at the front.

Love it. Celine, thanks for coming on the podcast.

Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure.

That was a great conversation with Céline. Culture, leadership development has been things and topics that have come up a lot on several different episodes. But I really did like the fact that she always kind of brought it back to some core principles. Number 1 is understanding kind of where you're starting from. So it's important to have a vision of where you do want the culture to be, but you got to really first do the work to understand where it is today. I thought the conversation around the 360 reviews is incredibly important. So definitely take a look at Leadership Circle Profile. I'd actually not heard of that, so I'm gonna make sure I do some research on that. I thought the conversation around feedback was fantastic, the importance of having self-awareness. And then whenever she went through and gave the analogies of the iceberg and of the sandbox, but in particular, the iceberg of just, we only see a small percentage and portion of the culture that is actually happening in an organization. We went on to kind of talk after the podcast recording had stopped about just different experiences that we had had and my own experiences of having the cultures that you want to have, but also at times where we did not have the culture that you want to have and just how important it is to really be intentional about seeking out that feedback, bringing in potentially a third party, somebody like Selene. So reach out to her team, go to revisionary.com. We'll make sure we put that in the show notes. And if you have not read, she brought it up twice, haven't read The book, The Four Agreements, highly recommend that book. It is fantastic.

A big shout out to our podcast sponsors, Autopilot Recruiting, Coach B Consulting, and of course, Club Capital. If you want to be able to get more A-players in the pipeline, just begin to get them in the process, but they've been vetted, they've already had certain questions asked, and you can kind of curate the first part of the experience. For most business owners, the hardest part is the beginning part. Because once they're into the flow of your recruiting system, most people know how to be able to pick it up from there. But the sourcing of the candidates, being able to get them through the initial few steps, that's usually the hardest part. It's the one that most business owners don't enjoy the most. So go to autopilotrecruiting.com. For me personally and for the team, the best investments I've been able to make other than in the people themselves is in development. You all know that I personally love personal development and developing of others. And so growth is a huge, just part of who I am for sure. And I know it's the same way for you. If you're listening to this podcast, you're somebody that's a growth-minded person for you, but also for your team. There's really no better way, especially if you're an insurance agency owner, then to give your team consistency.

I will say this.

I heard this recently. I'm going to say this more often. Is recency beats intensity. And I think the same thing is with developing of our team. The consistency or recency of the trainings and the development that they have access to twice a week with Coach P beats, you know, some one big push. You could spend 40 hours a week. It's why Apple spends, I think, 40, 50 minutes every day training to the people in their stores is because of the recency thing. It's not like they do one big push on the front side and, oh, you're trained and you're good. It's about doing it on a regular basis. Well, you've got a lot of hats to wear, and there's probably aspects to the business that you love and do incredibly well, but maybe not every aspect. And so reach out to Coach Pete, go to coachpeteconsulting.com, tell David that you heard about him on the Club Capital Leadership Podcast and give him a test drive. Test driving for you and your team, and you'll get to kind of see their style and how they do things. You get 8 free lessons, and there's no doubt why David has been the fastest growing insurance coach that's out there is because people are really seeing the value. And for what you get for $250 a month is more than 10 times the value of that in an annual basis, especially if you implement. Go to coachpeakconsulting.com. And lastly, Club Capital. Club Capital is— really has the mission that's very similar to my personal mission, which is to be able to help build better business owners. They're doing that in a lot of different ways. One of the obviously core ways that they do that is being able to give business owners access to the mindset, the skill set, the tool set necessary to be able to leverage their financials to be able to make better decisions, to be able to hire more and better people, to have the money to invest in marketing, etc. Go to club.capital, reach out to somebody on the team and see how they can help you today. club.capital. All right everyone, till next episode, lead well.