Culture Before Process: Why Most Agency Changes Fail

Welcome to the Agent Leader Podcast. This is the podcast for insurance agency leaders to learn, to grow, to develop, and to ultimately become their best version possible. Hi, my name is Brent Kelly. I am your host. Excited today to bring some heat. I'm going to be talking today about why when you have a process First transformation system, meaning that when you wanna make change in your agency, and most agencies that are growth-minded agencies, of course there's changes or transformations you wanna make. Why starting with process or the idea of process, I'll dive in today, is often a method for failure, right? What does that look like? You know, I see this pattern again and again, and it's one of the things that we, we teach in our programs is that, you know, one of the things that makes insurance agency leaders And of course, many insurance agency leaders are producers or former producers. It's a big way maybe they've gotten to their position is they could sell stuff as they are often, not 100%, but often quick start mentality, meaning they, they see things and they do them. And I appreciate and acknowledge that. Well, because I'm one of those as well. Oftentimes I will come up with an idea with no idea how I'm going to execute it, but darn it, it's a great idea. And when I talk to agency leaders, we'll see that time and time again is that here's the new thing that we need to do. I read this, I saw this, I heard this. Let's get this done. The problem is what? There's no follow-through or there's little execution. And here's the big part I'm gonna get in today. There's often very little buy-in from their team. See, it's one thing for you as a leader or even as a leadership team to have a new idea, even if you're very confident that it'll work, it's another thing, not just for you to execute the idea, but for you to be able to get your team to execute the idea. Because that's what great leaders do, right? Leadership, as John Maxwell says so well, leadership is influence, nothing more, nothing less. So as great as your idea or this new thing or this new process may be, If you as a leader and leadership team don't start with culture, the why behind the what, and reinforce that over a period of time, depending on the change or transformation or process that you're wanting to install, you will be met with what? Resistance. Resistance. Even children, right? I've got 5 kids and my youngest is 8 years old. My youngest daughter, even at 8, even though as her parent, I know what's best for her, especially at 8 years old, and I could say, Hey, you need to do this. That will work for a period of time, but even my 8-year-old, and she's pretty sharp, will often say, why, Dad? Why, Dad? Now, she doesn't always have to agree with the why, but I need to have one, and it needs to be substantive. There has to be some method behind the madness. So I want to first of all say this, acknowledge the fact that This is a real issue, and this is not an easy issue for agency leaders because process-first change, it makes sense. Leaders, you, you want clarity. Leaders, you want consistency. You want something tangible to say, this is what we're now doing, or this is how things are going to be. But the process doesn't create belief. Just introducing a process doesn't create belief. Process itself doesn't create ownership, and process doesn't change behavior on its own. Here's something that you may want to write down, or certainly at least consider. Process tells people what to do. Culture determines whether they actually do it. So process will tell people what to do. Culture will determine if they actually do it, which goes back to the idea of ideas without execution are just simply good intentions. So I wanna help kind of frame on this podcast episode today. There is probably some things as an agency leader and leadership team that you want to accomplish, that you want to execute, and the nature is go, go, go, go, get it done now. Let's get it started. Time is money. And my question back to you is, do you want this to last for a week or a month? Or are you looking for true substantial change? Positive change that's rooted, has foundation that you can grow upon, learn from, continue to evolve from. So here's a dynamic of process. And again, some things why process doesn't always work, at least not first. Process demands new behaviors. Something I share with agency leaders all the time, and I share with team members all the time, is that people don't resist change. Now, wait a second, Brent, you just said people do resist change. No, people don't resist change. What do I mean by that? Well, ladies and gentlemen, today we're gonna introduce a new process. We all get $1,000 bonus every day. Would people be excited for that change? Uh-huh. Of course. Right? So people don't resist change. People resist being changed. It's behaviors, it's patterns, because behaviors expose beliefs, and beliefs live where? Live in the culture. And this is where we're going to continue to come back, is that if you don't foster the why, the culture, the importance, the significance, the mission and vision behind it, all these different keywords we could throw out, if we don't spend time really enforcing or reinforcing Or communicating why this matters. And you're never gonna get 100% buy-in with a large team of why it matters, but at least they'll understand the perspective of where you're coming from. And they can ultimately choose, maybe they don't fit in this culture. That's a different question because here's what happens. And, and maybe you've experienced this as a leader. You've got this new idea, this new intention, this thing you wanna do, and what do you get? You get not always direct resistance. I'm not gonna do that. 'Cause most people are respectful enough, especially when you sign their paycheck, to not have to just say, I'm not gonna do that. Now, maybe some will, but you get passive resistance, which is another form of low employee engagement. In fact, recent studies now show, and this is not just the insurance space, this is overall, that employee engagement, the people that are actively engaged, is now less than 30%. Think about that. There's workarounds. Let's just find a different way and they won't know. Yeah, we'll do this, but, right? And that's kind of part of the workaround. And then often as leaders, what this really gets to, and this is a huge thing that I want to share, is that instead of coaching people where you can actually help them get better at a skill or improve the process, which maybe they're not buying into, you're simply chasing. Or policing. So we're not really getting better at it. We're just trying to get by, which I don't think anybody wants. See, the tighter that you grip process in a weak culture, the more ownership and creativity you squeeze out. I'm going to say that again. And I made a note of this. The tighter you grip process in a weak culture, we're now going to do this and now we're going to do this, the more ownership and creativity you squeeze out. Most so-called process things, this system, this process, this idea that we're not executing is simply culture problems in disguise. So let's talk about this. And I wanna be really clear. Culture isn't just your mission statement. A culture isn't just what's on the wall. And maybe you have a mission statement on a wall. In fact, I've seen that where there's a mission statement on a wall and no one knows what it is. But culture, and we talk about this at Sitkins all the time, what is culture? Culture is the language and behaviors that are normal in your agency. What are people saying? What are people doing? And culture answers one critical question for your team. Is it safe and expected to work this way? Is it safe and expected to work this way? Now, there's a lot of things we could talk about this, but safety's a big deal. With culture of a team and performance of a team and the expectations. Like, how often do we see, maybe you have this, that people are doing things they don't really know why. Does this fit into our end goal? Is this okay for me to do? Is this expected? How do I get better? And when there's a lack of clarity around that, performance dwindles and sometimes not maliciously, but passively. So some things I want to share to give you some, hopefully some practical ideas that you can take back again, to start to think about your agency and the culture dynamic around it? 3 things I wanna share. Number 1 is this: shared language. Shared language. Now, I think it's pretty safe to say, right? We can look at a lot of countries in the world. Obviously, United States, we have multiple languages, primarily English, but like in most nations or organizations, there is a shared language. In the insurance space, we know all the acronyms, right? When it comes to insurance stuff, right? There's some shared language around that. Same is true internally with your agency. Before process works, people need a common definition of language. And I can give a number of examples on this, right? I mean, this, this is true with your clients, but true internally. Yeah, we give great service. What does that mean? All right. What does that mean? Are we talking about, and I guess this is true when we get into the process at the end of it, but like, are we talking about delivering a review? Is it called a stewardship report? Is it called a promise agreement. I mean, part of that I hear in agencies, people are using different terms for the same thing. We may seem, we may feel that's not a huge issue, but that's an example of misalignment and not sharing language and not sharing some of these culture things around the shared language. And it's really important. So I guess I would just ask you, and it around, this could be a number of different things, is, you know, do we define success the same way? Is our language unified? Are we repeating the same type of things? Now, there's always gonna be flexibility, right? Humans are humans. But just again, talk about culture is the language and behaviors that are normal. Well, the first thing is what type of language is it? And is it shared language? Now, this is a plug, but it's an important plug. One of the things that we've been very successful in helping agencies do is to help them gather a shared language.. Now, our goal at Sitkins is not to, we're gonna change your culture and change your language, but we do introduce and reinforce certain concepts that become unifiers. I'll give you an example. High performance teams. Before high performance teams, we talk about what? Sales and service talk, or we have a meeting sometimes. Sales and service communication can be defined a number of different ways. Well, let's take that into high performance teams. What they are, why they're important, and how they function. So that's an example of a shared language that everyone's speaking the same language. How did your high-performance team meeting? How is your high-performance team functioning? What can we do to improve our high-performance team? Do you see how that makes a huge difference? What are those things, those shared languages for you and your agency? Number 2, I talked about safety. I'll go back into it. Trust and psychological safety. If people don't feel like speaking up, they won't engage in the process. They'll comply quietly, And they'll resist privately. I learned this, uh, from a mentor of mine years ago. I'll never forget when he shared this, and this is a gentleman, uh, who owned several multimillion-dollar companies, very successful. All that's great. But what he talked about was in one of his earlier days, earlier companies, they were stagnant. They were stuck. They were frustrated. He was frustrated. And he realized they would have these meetings on Monday, their sales meeting. And that no one would speak up. Everyone was quiet. And he realized, why is everyone quiet? Why doesn't everyone share stuff? Why aren't we having this great communication? Well, here's what he came to realize. The problem was him. He said, every time someone would share a mistake or a failure or something that they could improve upon, instead of me trying to listen and understand and then react appropriately, I would jump down their throat. Why are we doing this? Why are you doing that? Let's get better here. That can't happen. That's not acceptable. Now again, every culture's different. I'm not saying you can't be upset or frustrated with people, but think about this. If people don't feel that there's trust or psychological safety to share mistakes or inefficiencies that are happening in the agency, or maybe there's some issues with people on the team, and again, not to be able to talk to leadership in a professional manner, then as I said before, and I'll say it again, I'll read this out. If people don't feel safe speaking up, they won't engage with the process. They will comply. Quietly, just so you go away. Yeah, it's fine. And then they'll resist privately. And that's where we often see gossip and mistrust or a lack of trust come up in an agency. So ask yourself, as an agency, as a department, like, are we creating areas of trust and psychological safety where, again, we don't want to repeat mistakes, but the people are open and safe to be able to share things that we can learn and grow from them? And then number 3, the 3rd area I wanna talk about is anchoring this idea of culture before process is leadership consistency. Now, I've done a number of podcasts and talked about consistency, consistency, consistency, but this is one of the biggest things. And a story I've shared before, I'll share again. We kind of have some fun with this during our trainings with leaders. You know, how many of you had a new idea and you come to your team on Monday or whatever and go, oh my gosh, this is this new thing we're gonna do. And we get super, super excited about it. And we are, we, we're truly excited about this. And then what, a week, 2 weeks, a month later, it dissipates. We don't talk about it again because we're onto the next thing and the next thing, or we forget, or we get busy, or you name it. And the joke of this is that after you do this enough times, that your team will wait till you leave the room as a leader, and they will look around at each other and they'll say something like this. Don't worry, this too shall pass. And they'll go back and do whatever they want, whatever they were doing before. And then we get frustrated. Why aren't they doing that thing? Well, it wasn't reinforced. Now, what I've talked about in consistency before, I'll talk about it again. It's not about more ideas. It's about really truly understanding, identifying, and executing a key idea or ideas, the vital few. And something I say to myself, and I would say to agency leaders, is that if you don't envision yourself or your team doing this a year from now, and I'm just using that as a time example, don't do it. Because you're gonna frustrate yourself. You're gonna frustrate your team. You're gonna frustrate those that you're trying to serve with this new thing that you're trying to do. So, question to think about, a reflection question. Are you as a leader modeling the behaviors the process requires? That's the other thing. Hey, you are all gonna do this. And again, I'm gonna give another example with Sitkins, cuz we see this. I can see this personally. There is a key characteristic that we see of agencies that truly transform and take off that work with us, and some that still struggle a little bit, at least for a while. And one of the things that we see is leadership involvement. If you're gonna ask all your team, I need to train my people, my people are the problem. And again, maybe you're not saying that, but it comes across that way. I'm gonna get you trained and you trained and you trained. Well, what are you doing as a leader? I'm fine. Now, maybe you're busy, maybe it's different stuff. The key characteristic that we see with the highest level performing agencies that are hitting these great numbers, these great results, and they consistently build, is that leaders are not just saying it, they're walking the walk. And theirs may be different, but they're open to coaching too. They're open to feedback as well. They're part of the system. They're asking questions about the training. They're involved. So culture is built when leadership behavior and expectations match. And that goes not just with the team, but for you as leaders involved as well. All right. So let me just share this and I'm going to try to keep this podcast fairly short because I'm beating the drum here, right? But hopefully you're, you're thinking about this in a different way in terms of culture before process, because again, it's just so often I see it. We're going to do this. We're going to do this. We get excited. Then we get frustrated why it doesn't stick. And you've got to sometimes really slow down. Thanks for teaching strategically and understand the impact of the why and culture. But see, process itself isn't the enemy. It's the amplifier. And the thing about this that I wanna share, it's so exciting, is that when you do build a foundation, when you've talked about the why and the culture and the impact, and you say it again and you say it again and you build it again and build it again, all of a sudden the process isn't the enemy. It becomes the amplifier or the multiplier. Right? So just understand it starts with current cultural expectations. What are our standards? The why behind the things we're trying to accomplish or where we're going. And then we embed the process through coaching. How do we help amplify, supplement, improve the process to execute the mission, the standards, our identity? All right. These are things that are all critically, critically important. All right. So here's my wrap-up and some things for you to think about. Before you roll out your next process, your next cool idea, ask yourself this question: does our culture support this behavior or process? Or are we hoping process will fix— again, hear me here— or are we hoping that process will fix what leadership hasn't addressed? I'm going to say that again. Some of you are going to be kind of, kind of rough on some feathers here, right? But that's the question. Before you roll out the next process, ask yourself, does our culture support this behavior or are we hoping process will fix what leadership hasn't addressed yet? Because the best agencies don't install change. They lead alignment. The best agencies, our best version possible agencies, don't install change. They lead alignment. And process simply reinforces, reinforces what culture already supports. Now, if this episode hit home a little bit, now some of you're like, I don't like this guy. That's fine. My mission around this in this podcast is to help you think differently, to help raise standards, to help raise awareness, to find an idea that you you can go and execute to help you and your team grow and develop. See, I believe that leadership is about that one thing, growing and developing your number one asset, which is your people. And there's a lot of steps in it. And as I've said many times, jokingly and truthfully, is that leadership would be really easy if it weren't for the darn people. Haha. Right? So if this episode hits home with you, um, and you keep thinking, you know what, there's more for agency, this alignment idea, this culture piece, this foundational piece, this shared shared a language that I mentioned, right? That I mentioned earlier. So shared language, understanding the trust and psychological safety and having better conversations. And of course, getting consistent around things. None of these things are easy, but they're definitely doable. If any of this is hitting home, love to have a conversation with you and your agency. We are very intentional on who and how we work with agencies. And moving forward, we're only working with 50 private client agencies, those that truly want their best version possible, that want to move from good to even great to, you know what, what does our best version look like? Not about comparing to other agencies. Again, there's plenty of best practices and those are good. They really are. But let's just be really honest with ourselves. What's possible with our agency? Those are the agencies we want to talk to and work with because not just challenge your thinking, we want to provide education, resources, tools, and a community of other like-minded individuals. So again, if that's something you're interested, want to know more, just to see if there's any type of fit whatsoever. There's no pressure. It's just perspective. Go to sitkins.com/bookacall. sitkins.com/bookacall. Thanks for listening. Appreciate it. Always wanna add value to you. If there's things that you wanna hear from us, reach out to our team. We wanna bring more great guests in and have more great conversations. With that, I wish you all the best in your success. Thanks for listening. Hey there, agent leader. Brent Kelly here. Wanna take just a few seconds to remind you that now is the time to create your true best version possible agency. If you go to sitkins.com/bookacall, sitkins.com/bookacall, we'll get to know more about your agency, conduct an agency assessment, and provide your agency with a customized plan to help you avoid some of the pitfalls, frustrations, challenges, and roadblocks to get your agency to true ultimate freedom and become its best version possible. It all starts by going to sitkins.com/bookacall.