How to Build a Cult-like Company Culture | Cameron Herold (Podcast 425)

Recruiting and hiring people that already live the core values. You know, they asked Herb Kelleher from Southwest Airlines, how do you get all your employees to be so happy? He said, we hire happy people. Right? So hire people that already live your core values and then you don't have to train anybody on them. They're already showing up that way.

Welcome to this special mini episode featuring a segment from my recent guest appearance on the I am Charles Schwartz Show. Today we dive into three powerful insights on building a meaningful company culture. First, we discuss the importance of removing negative influences or cultural cancers and infusing positive energy to create momentum. Second, I share how branding everyday elements like naming spaces and using unique acronyms builds a sense of unity and identity. Finally, we explore the vivid vision, a strategy to align your team with a clear, inspiring future. These steps transform a company from a workplace into a dedicated high energy community.

If you're going to build a culture, you have to understand it starts with the first four letters which is cult. And you need to build the cult in your org. What are some of the practical step by steps because we've heard it a thousand times, but getting it directly from someone who's done it. What are the things where we can do it?

Okay, so there's a few things. One is you have to get rid of the right, you have to get rid of the cultural cancers that are inside that are putting the wrong energy into the cult. So we actually trained all of our franchisees in the movie the Secret. We made them watch it twice. We made our franchisees watch it twice. We cannot came out and said, hey, it's a little cheesy, it's a little bit materialistic. But understand quantum mechanics and energy and if we can bring in more of this positive energy, the like attracting like that momentum will, will be created. So that was one, I guess, to get rid of the cultural cancers, understand quantum mechanics. We started to brand everything, right? We had like, the names on our rooms were branded. In fact, I was in a, a client that I coached here 12 years ago in his office in Kelowna, British Columbia the other day. And he was showing me all his boardrooms and they all had names, but there were no names on the glass windows. I'm like, say put the names up, like brand these things so that people remember it and they're reminded of it, like, and then create acronyms, right? So any of the little sayings and the acronyms and the phrases, they become part of the vernacular, part of the way that we do it. We used to call it the 1-800-got- junk way. And every time you brand something, it's kind of like the insiders have secrets and other people don't know what you're talking about. So those branding of things like if I say the Ten Commandments, people, people want to go, oh, what are the Ten Commandments? Right. Even if you're in another religion, you kind of want to know what's inside that religion. Well, that's cult. And then it was all around like making sure that we stirred the Kool Aid, you know, that we didn't focus on results all the time, we didn't focus on metrics all the time. We focused on keeping people happy, keeping people engaged, keeping people having fun. I think those would probably be some of the keys. Culture is not about the perks. It's not the free massages and the free lunches. Those are perks. The other thing that really drives culture, there's three. One is an alignment with a vivid vision. Right. I call it that four or five page description of what your company looks like, acts like and feels like in the future. One of my best selling books ever is called Vivid Vision. And it's how a CEO describes what their company looks like, acts like and feels like three years in the future so that everyone in the company, employees, suppliers, shareholders, accountants, lawyers, they can all see what you can see and they're all going in that same direction. So it's alignment with a vivid vision. Second is alignment with core values. Again, that's firing the people that don't live the core values. Recruiting and hiring people that already live the core values. They asked Herb Kelleher from Southwest Airlines, how do you get all your employees to be so happy? He said, we hire happy people. So hire people that already live your core values and then you don't have to train anybody on them. They're already showing up that way. So it's that obsession about core values, the alignment with core values. The four or the third is the bhag, that big hairy, audacious goal. Right. The crush Adidas or democratize the world's information or democratize air travel or put a computer on every desktop. My BHAG is for vivid visions to replace vision statements worldwide. So that culture is permeated when you have an obsession with that long 20 year stretch. And then the fourth is the core purpose. Right. What's the Simon Sinek kind of why we exist as an organization? Everybody knows Simon Sinek and his book. Start with why. What they don't know is Simon used to sleep on my couch. Simon actually worked at 1-800-got junk in our marketing group for about a year, helping us as a consultant. He was on our board of advisors for a year, five years before he wrote the book Start with why. So we understood this idea with core purpose and how to have it permeate through the organization. My core purpose today is to help entrepreneurs make their dreams happen. It's why I say yes to your show and why I said no to two other podcasts yesterday and today was they're not aligned with entrepreneurs. One was very kind of corporate. One was like government agency stuff. I'm like, yeah, not worth my time. But for me it's a full body F yes. When it's anything to do with helping entrepreneurs. So that's where culture permeates, is an obsession and alignment with that kind of a stuff.

All that is tremendous and I hope everybody's taking notes. One of the things that that goes in as entrepreneurs is this idea that it's, for lack of a better term, it's hustle porn. It's the idea that I'm going to get up at 4 o' clock in the morning, I'm going to work out nine times. I'm going to have 15 meetings. Oh, wait, it's 10 o'. Clock. I need to work out 75 times more. You're clearly at a different place, and you've clearly always been at the different place, even if it's, you know, watching your friends on the golf course do one thing while you're running bags up. How do you teach entrepreneurs or especially CEOs, to say, Listen, there is a balance here. There is a more effective way to execute. How do you get into their head and how do you get them to pivot?

One of my biggest curses or things that hurt me in the world and in business was I was kind of emotionally abused by the school system. For 18 years, from kindergarten until the end of university, I was told to sit still and pay attention and try harder. And if I only focused harder, if I only worked harder, I could be as good as everybody else. And intuitively I knew I'm not wired this way. I don't get it. It's boring. None of this matters. I had a business and I'm only in grade six. Like, this didn't make any sense to me. I kind of started to ignore the work hard mantra, the Protestant work ethic. And what I decided to do is find the cheat sheets. I decided to work smart. I decided to kind of hack the system from a very young Age. I realized that the teacher would tell me what was going to be on the test if I would merely ask them, what should I study on, what should I focus on? I could find prior tests, I could find the actual copy of the test in his office when he was out at lunch. Like, I did lots of stuff to figure out the system, but what I didn't do was be the fly trying to bang my head on the window all day. You know, we've all seen the fly trying to get out the window. And they're going to work hard, they're going to keep banging their head on the window, they're going to work hard, they end up dead on the windowsill. I didn't want to work that hard because I was too busy doing other things. And I also realized there was a door that if I just turned and went out the door, I was free. So I always looked for the shortcut. I always looked for the cheat sheet. And I think that was what made me so successful in franchising was I developed systems that were easily usable by kind of the worst franchisee in the worst market in the worst weather, and they could actually operate that system. So I would dumb down the system. And that's how I see my business too. So I think while so many businesses are, as you put it like that, working hard and doing everything and grinding it out and getting up early, I'm like, pause, think, be strategic. What's going to drive that flywheel? I never do one thing for the purpose of one thing. So I think strategically about working on the critical few things and then how can I get leverage off those few things? And I think most people are so busy working hard that they miss all of those extra opportunities.

You talked about, you know, the Protestant way of doing things, you know, work really, really hard. It talks about the idea of a sibboreth, which is a passcode that they would use in cult. And there's certain symbols that work these passcodes. And the minute you said systems, all of a sudden I was like, oh, thank God he gets it. I've always talked about this for years. Systems will set you free. And people don't understand the difference between a system and a process. They're vastly, vastly different things. When people are going for and they've lived in a culture where they've taught them you're not supposed to hack the system. You know, the idea that you need to know how to walk on water versus let's find where the rocks are so you can go jump to jump. What Are some of the things now where as you get people to understand, yeah, working hard's not going to get me there. I'm never going to get there by working hard. How are the ways that I can hack this system? What are the tools that you've started to use? You know, because everyone heard of OPM and opt other people's time and other people's money, you get that. But what are the things that you can use on a practical level where someone's like, hey, I've been, I've been into hustle porn for so long. I've just been a grinder. I'm burning out. How can I start hacking weight? What are some of the tools you use on a daily basis?

Well, and I know some people are watching and some are listening. The people that are listening can't see me sitting here laughing to myself. The reason I'm laughing is when you said you have to hop from rock to rock. Like, I flash back to a year ago, My wife and I were in Iceland on this crazy eight hour hike and we were way off in the middle of nowhere. We were hiking across a glacial stream. I mean, it was glacial that you could see the glacier. And then we were hiking and it was like 12ft across and we couldn't get our shoes wet, so we had to take our shoes off and hike across 12ft barefoot. And we were going stone to stone. And I was like, this is so effing cold. I was dying. I'm like, sometimes you really got to focus on that system, man, because you miss that system and you're dead. So again, for me, it was about the cheat sheets. I would look to simplify the system. I learned it when I was 20. I bought a franchise at 20 years old of a house painting company called College Pro Painters or I was awarded a franchise and they handed me a 330 page operations manual. Realized that the systems that they put in there were for my benefit. They weren't forcing me to do anything. And yes, if I followed those systems, I'd do more revenue and they'd make more money. But if I did more revenue, I'd make more profit. And I was so scared of failing that I just memorized the system and I did what they did. And then I recognized something that I now called interdependence. That I'm dependent enough that if a system exists, I'll follow up. But I'm independent enough, I'm entrepreneurial enough that if there's no system, I'll figure one out quickly. And I'LL run with it. I try to document. I was coaching a CEO about this the other day on his company. It's about a $50 million company, and I was working with their team on developing some system. And I said, if you can't document a system on a post it note, like a simple like 2 inch by 2 inch post it note, you're not thinking clearly enough, right? You don't need like to process map this thing on a whiteboard for six days, like just knock it out so that the newest employee, who's the least trained employee and the hardest day that they're having at the worst, you know, period of their life can follow a system. And then how can we actually create systems that can remove people from the process? I'll give an example of this. Speeding in virtually everywhere in the world is a terrible system. They have speed limit signs, they have police with cameras, they've got notifications on our cars beeping that we're going too quickly. And then you go to a golf course, you get in a golf cart and you know what you try to do? When you go into the parking lot, the car all of a sudden stops and goes like really, really slow through the parking lot because it's got little RFID chip inside and says, hey, if you're in this zone, you can only go this fast. The perfect system for saving lives on highways and saving car accidents and saving speeding and getting all the police off the road is put in RFID chip in every car. So the car, when it hits a certain speed zone, can only go X speed, period. But everyone wants to rely on people, right? So Michael Gerber, when he wrote the email, said, people don't fail. Systems fail. I always look for the broken system and the missing system. And I'll give you one last story on this. We as leaders often try to blame a person like, why did they do that wrong? Why did they miss this? Why did they screw that up? Or why is this broken? One of my mentors, and I mean a serious mentor who was doing a one hour call with me every month for about two years and then every quarter, a full day in person, I would either go to their office or he would come to my office. He was being groomed as the COO at Starbucks. This was back in 2004. So I'm effectively being groomed by the CO at Starbucks or incoming COO. And he told me a story how when Howard Behar, who was I think the second CEO after Howard Schultz, Howard Behar came in as CEO and Howard Behar called Greg one day and said, Greg, why is the letter B on the sign at 50th or 45th in Wallingford, in Seattle, why is the letter B on that sign not working? And Greg said, I don't care. Howard goes, what do you mean you don't care? Greg said, that's not the leadership question we should be asking. He said the system question we need to ask is what system is missing that would ensure that every letter on every sign at all of our locations is always working. He said, that's a question I'll dig into, but I don't care why one sign has one letter out. And I think that's how we need to approach problems in a company is what system is missing. Now we call it like the first principles, right? Like what system is missing or broken. If we fix that system, it'll never happen again, right? Why is a customer unhappy? Let's fix the customer. No, let's fix the system so that no customer becomes unhappy, right? And I think it's that systems thinking and that's kind of like the fly, you know, what's, what's that? That's just the way I think of things.

And it's very different than most people think. People want to just fix that one problem. They don't want to make systems that are automated to get them out of it.

You've mentioned I have to think that way. I have to think that way because my ADD is so bad. I have 17 of the 18 signs of attention deficit disorder, clinically diagnosed. My ex wife said if I was paying attention during testing, it would have been 18 for 18. I counter my add with a lot of OCD systems. I put these little systems in place to ensure that I don't screw up because I'm not never paying attention or I'm always on go. Simple example of this. I'm in Kelowna, British Columbia, where Dan Martell, a really close friend of mine, lives. We've been friends for like 13 years. He runs a Tuesday morning hike up this mountain that's kind of right behind me. And I always know that if I'm meeting them at 6:30 in the morning, I have to be out the house at 6. I'm probably going to forget my water bottle. So what I do the night before is I put my clothes out for the hike and then I put my water bottle and key beside the door so I can't get out the door without grabbing my water bottle and the key. Without that little system, I have to rely on me and a human isn't as reliable as the system is. People don't fail. Systems fail. So when. When we have a problem, go, great, thanks for showing me of the problem. Thanks for having the confidence to come in and say, we have a problem and no, you're not going to get for it. What's the missing system or broken system that we can fix or put in place to ensure this never happens again? We're good to go, right? And sometimes it could be a hiring system. You could all go all the way back. First principles.