Chad Silverstein recounts how he built a healthy company culture by moving from a leader-written mission statement to a team-created vision and core values. He describes practical steps—identifying top performers' traits, involving the team in crafting values, recognizing behaviors (including $1,000 monthly bonuses), scoring employees quarterly, and enforcing cultural fit—and reports outcomes (top workplace awards, stronger recruiting). He emphasizes leader modeling, team buy-in, accountability, and the option for employees to leave toxic cultures.
Questions this video answers
Six months
Five
$1,000 (thousand-dollar bonuses at the end of the month)
Over a decade
Twice
Chapters
This is one of my favorite days because it reminds me of when I used to stand up in front of my entire company and blast out my mission statement that I had posted on my walls. Like every other company that I used to run into, I worked for six months to try to come up with this amazing mission statement. And long story short, I got called out in my company when I was upset with everybody who couldn't tell me what the mission statement was. And one of my employees challenged me and asked me to tell them what it was. And I didn't know it. I couldn't spit it back out. And I was the one who wrote it. And I remember sharing that with Chet, and I remember him saying, you gotta get busy writing out your vision, your opus. And that's when things started to take off, because it is true, you only need a few. And I kind of was the igniter in my company where I took off. I started to alter my vision, and then at the same time, I simultaneously challenged my leaders to do the same thing. And before I knew it, I was walking through my office, and I saw my vision outside my door posted. I saw another one down the hall, a couple others on the other side of the office, maybe a few upstairs. And that was it. That's how it took off in my company. And we were a collection agency. And I could promise you people didn't wake up one day and say, I want to go work at a collection agency. But I can tell you that people were on fire at my company, and they found their labor of love within what they were doing. And they didn't let being a collector or working at a collection agency define them. In fact, we didn't let that define our entire culture. And once we got clear on where we were going as a team, and I let people kind of have their highway, and I didn't tell them my way or the highway. And as long as it was alignment with my vision and not what we call vision collision, we were on fire. We were breaking through ceilings. And when we hired eos, we did an exercise where we painted up, I don't know, five of our highest performers. And we described those people, all the traits that we loved, that we said, if we could duplicate these people, this is what we're looking for. And so then we had this list of values, and they stuck. And, boy, did they stick. We had core values, and we used them. And we didn't just put them on our walls. We held people accountable to them in every which way. We had a core analyzer we use the EOS system and if you don't know what that is, you can look it up on YouTube and I'll put the link maybe down below if I remember. But if you know what I'm talking about, then you know how powerful it is. And when I had buy in from everybody in my and they were part of the process of creating the core values and then we started recognizing and rewarding people, perpetuating those core values. I used to give out thousand dollar bonuses at the end of the month if we were recognizing the people who were exhibiting the core values that we wanted. And then it just perpetuated and then we were looking for more of it and then people were calling it out and we were finding this way of like getting the good ratios in right, of just catching people doing good things and then highlighting them, rewarding them and hiring people for it. And then at the end of every quarter we would do a and we'd analyze everybody and we'd score them. I had a bar that you had to stay above and if you didn't stay above them, you could not stay on my team. You had to be a good culture fit, but you also had to have the capability and the capacity to do the job that you were hired to do. And we would score you and then we would have you score yourself. And then we would have meetings with the leaders and we would have discussions about where these people are when it comes to accountability, which was one of my big ones, responsibility and accountability, owning your problems and your mistakes. When people made excuses and they didn't own up to things they did. Like he didn't last long on my team. I took responsibility for everything and I expected other people to do the same thing. So we knew what our values were as a team. We got clear and then we held people accountable to them. And they weren't just words on the wall. And that led to my team just having a lot more than a few on fire. It caught. We actually were on the top workplace award list for over a decade. We were number one twice. And it was a big deal for us. It helped us recruit more people into our office. People came because they saw us on these best place to work lists. Again, not because we're a collection agency. And I think there's something powerful about having a healthy culture. I think at the root a leader has to have a desire to want to build a healthy culture. They have to lead by example, model the way, all that good stuff. But I think the secret, the nuance was doing it with your team. You know, sitting in your office as a leader and coming up with your core values and then going out and spitting it out and expecting everyone to adopt them, that doesn't work. Do the exercise with your team and then you'll get buy in and then highlight people and recognize them and have other people doing it so that you're not the only one hearing it just from you is going to be a problem. If you're a leader, you got to get buy in and that's what building the culture is all about, you know. So do you work in a healthy culture? Do you run a healthy culture? If not, you can change, you can do things to make it work towards that. And if you're not working in one, you can quit. And if you work at a place where it's the opposite and it's a toxic culture, then you're just, you're just delaying the inevitable anyways. So you should really put some thought into how long you're going to stay there.
