Chad Silverstein reflects on leadership and culture-building, sharing specific, practical rituals he used to engage high performers. He describes taking top performers to lunch monthly (the "10,000 club"), creating an "ABC" advisory board committee that made decisions and amplified employee voices, and intentionally favoring personalized traditions over generic social events to build community and motivation.
Questions this video answers
Once a month.
The "10,000 club."
The ABC committee (advisory board committee).
Chapters
What I love about this is that every leader is so distinctly different. And whatever it is that they're leading and who they're leading requires them to be creative in how they build the culture that they're building. And so I can only speak to my own culture. And I'll tell you a couple things that I did that I think again will hopefully spur you to kind of think about your environment and things that you can do that are a little outside the box. But, you know, I really selfishly made sure that I was making time for people the way that I wanted to do it. So people, you know, wanted to maybe do happy hours to be with, and I didn't like that, so I didn't do that. But what I did was I created traditions by taking all the high performers out to lunch once a month. So if you hit a certain bar at the end of the month and you're in our 10,000 club, then you go out to lunch and we go out and do, you know, the hibachi in front of everybody or we do whatever we do. I would always treat them. And sometimes it would just be something where we just go down the street or sometimes we brought food in. We just basically spent time with them. And I love that because it gave me time to talk to all the high performers, give them some focus and not worry about work and just talk to them and learn more about what they've got going on in their personal lives. I had an ABC committee, an advisory board committee, where I put people in a group and let them make decisions for the company. So I'd give them things that they had to approve or not approve or come up with. And they kind of were speaking for everybody. And again, you know, I, I, I spent a lot of time in there getting to know them and, you know, you know, seeing them fight for things that they want in the company and hearing their why and giving them the megaphone to do that. It's very telling. You can learn a lot about what motivates people and what they're after and why they're after it. So I think, again, finding creative ways to do things with your team to make things more memorable, to kind of, you know, make a big deal of a milestone. And there is something about creating community and creating a culture that has people that are willing to run through walls for you. And hopefully it's genuine, hopefully it's sincere, and hopefully it's a two way street.
