Bill Gallagher walks through why what a company says it stands for often doesn't match what employees actually experience. He traces how cultures of expediency form by accident, then shows how traditions, rituals, and daily practices can embed real values instead of just slogans.
Does it ever feel like your business doesn't look like you think it should? It doesn't feel the way you think it should feel? If your business doesn't look or feel or your team looks or feels different than what you think it should look like, it could be there's a mismatch with your company values and a lack or an accidental culture that's emerged. Hi there, I'm Bill Gallagher, Scaling Coach, host of the Scaling Up Business podcast. We've got tools, tips, tricks for you every week and we've got deep dive interviews with experts, gurus and authors in the world of Scaling up, as well as getting real conversations with CEOs around their journey and experience in growing their companies. All that and more@scalingcoach.com at our website or you can find it on iTunes, Stitcher, Spotify, YouTube, et cetera. Wherever you go to go to get your podcast and video content, just look for Scaling Up Business podcast. You'll find us there. Or go to scalingcoach.com so I had a new client some years ago that actually didn't last very long. And it didn't last very long because the CEO represented the company, talked to me all about it, sounded really great, understood their goals. When I went to the business and walked around, there was a profound mismatch to what the company looked like on the outside, in the words of the CEO, and what it looked like in person. There was no connection between the two. And so why is that? How does that happen? Right? The CEO certainly wanted to be the things that he spoke about, and he maybe had started out to be them many years before, but there was now a disconnect. His culture was one of expediency and convenience and so on. And his real in practice values around the company were all that expedience, speed, convenience, like that. There wasn't the same intentional, focused thing and like cutting edge, high end thing that he thought he was and wanted to be. And this became a problem not just in the operations and in the reconciliation of the business, to his mind, the way he described it, but also in their sales process when they're not representing themselves in the world, there is a way that we are and a way that we are not. If you'd like to have your business accurately reflect your vision and your values, your purpose, your brand promises and all of that, you got to build traditions, habits and rituals around these things to ingrain them. Much like little kids used to recite the pledge of Allegiance at the beginning of the day. We want to deeply ingrain these things over time so that you know that those values are real and core and not merely aspirational. That there's an authenticity to the way that you speak about yourself in the world and who you are in the world for others as a company. So it's really simple to start to build, think about all the activities that you do and then we just got to bring in values, purpose, brand promises that kind of thing to everything from when an employee first comes in, is recruited and joins the company, to the day to day operations, the way you interact with your customers, all of that. So a lot of little creative touch points we can build in. We'll call that culture or actions to live by the way that we bring purpose and values to life. We'll include a worksheet in the show notes here and I hope that's useful for you to think about. How do I do that? Think about what culture you belong to. What are the traditions around holidays and major events? What are the family and other kinds of cultural norms that you have? What could you build in the business to make your business more the kind of like a cult that's really aligned to your own values. A cult of your own design. A good call, not the bad cult. Thanks. I hope that's been helpful. My name is Bill Gallagher, scalingcoach.com We'll talk to you again next time.
