Will It Hold: Contradiction Is Your Culture - LinkedIn Live

All right, here's what I want you to consider before we get into today's LinkedIn Live. And here, here's the thought. I don't believe most companies have a culture problem. I believe most companies have a truth problem. And that ties into today's session of your contradiction is actually your culture. Now, what do I mean by all of this? And let's face it, today's conversation might get a little bit spicy because of some of the views that I have on this whole idea of culture and where 99% of the organizations get it wrong, focus on the wrong things, and end up exacerbating the problem of quote unquote culture as opposed to solving for the root cause. We deal with symptoms. We bring in beanbag chairs to improve our culture. We bring in ping pong tables to improve our culture. We give half days off to improve our culture. Nothing's wrong with any of those. But are we really dealing with the truth of what's going on and what actually creates and defines the culture in your organization and in mine? Because this applies to me just as it applies to you. You know, we— In our industry, we love to talk about culture itself. We put values up on the wall. I have no values up on the wall here, by the way. I used to, but those have been taken down. We add them to our websites. We repeat them in town halls. We talk about them all the time. And they're a great piece of paper. But they very rarely mean anything more to what's on that piece of paper. You know, we can say our team members come first. We can say that accountability is the key. We can say that we empower our team. All those sexy words. Words that everybody uses today to describe what they want for their culture. But here's the issue. When you look at really what's happening, when you look at is there a contradiction to what we talk about, we see the top producer being allowed to act like a jerk because nobody shuts him down. Nobody has a conversation. Leaders don't have that recovery conversation that needs to happen. We talk about empowerment and autonomy, but nobody has the right or the approval to make a frickin' decision. And we wonder why there's a challenge with how we create, how we define, and how we develop cultures. See, these things are not actually culture. It's not the poster, it's not the values that are up on the wall, it's not even the CEO's speech. Our contradiction is what creates and defines our culture. Let me, let me tell you where that comes from because this isn't an accident, this terminology. A little over a year ago, I was working with an organization. The CEO had approached me and said, "Look, we got a great organization. We're ridiculously profitable." They're a manufacturing organization. "But we've got some challenges. We have a great culture. We have great values. They're up on the wall. I bring them up in every single executive meeting." Every executive team meeting and every town hall, I talk about our culture and our values that support that culture. But something seems a little bit off. This is the context and how he presented it to me. And for about 8 months, I spent a lot of time with this organization. And what I came to conclude very quickly is that the values meant nothing. Let me say that again. The values in this organization meant nothing. They talked about integrity, and the CEO himself was creating all kinds of side deals with employees and so on, doing things he really shouldn't have been doing. They talk about quality, where the really, the only thing that was important to him is making sure they ship out the product so that he can put it on his balance sheet and focus on EBITDA, because that's what he needed to report. To the owners. And after going through this after a while with him, I said to him in one of our conversations, as we were talking about what defines culture and what their culture actually is like, I said to him, you know, your contradiction defines your culture, not what you have on the wall. In fact, the fact that you're talking so emphatically about all these values that are up on the wall and then doing something that's exactly the opposite creates an even more divisive culture. There were groups that couldn't work with each other. Almost everybody was afraid of working with him, for him, and bringing anything up because there was execution around retaliation when somebody questioned him. It was the contradiction that created the culture. Now, I know you're going to say my organization's nothing like that. That's an extreme example. It is. But it supports the hypothesis that our contradiction, yours and your organization, mine and my organization, is what creates our culture. Now before we continue on, if this is a topic that is near and dear to your heart and you have some comments, feel free to put them in if you're watching it on LinkedIn Live right now. I've got a screen up here where I can see any of your chat messages. If you're worried about putting it in social and you want to text me directly, my number will pop up on the screen. My cell, which is right here, is 734-837-8500. And it'll buzz and I'll pay attention to it as much as I can. I'll try to, to do some dual focusing multitasking here as well. One of the things I've realized, and this is an industry thing, think about it from an HR perspective, a third-party consultant perspective, is we have this tendency to treat culture like a branding exercise more so than anything else. You know, we focus so much on picking the words that define our culture. Again, launching the values, putting them on our wall, putting them on our website. Running a survey, an engagement survey to test culture. And then we get a score in our engagement survey. We're at 90% engagement. Here's the reality. I hate to tell you, it means nothing. Culture isn't defined or isn't created by what we say or declare. It's actually built by what we do. Do. And in fact, the difference between those two things creates an even bigger issue in most organizations. And again, I'm talking about this for you, but also I'm putting myself in the exact same bucket. And I'm going to give you some examples where I was the contradiction, because I want you, if you're a leader, to think about it. We generally don't do these things intentionally. That story that I told you, the really real story, that's an extreme example of this. Is not usually what happens. What usually happens is we do some drifting. We have the right intention, but our execution on some of this is wrong. And when we're under pressure, this is when it becomes an even bigger deal. For example, integrity is really easy to adhere to until the pressure is on. Quality is really easy to adhere to until we've got to get that shipment out in order to bill it, because the only thing that we're measured against is revenue, is income, is even all things that are exceptionally important. But it starts to take away from what really creates a culture in every single organization. Again, yours and mine. And these values, let's face it, that we put up on our walls that we get all excited about, and some of them are really, really good. If that value doesn't cost you anything to maintain, if that value is something that all of a sudden disappears when the pressure is on, it's your contradiction that creates your culture that we have to continue to focus on. And here's the other piece around culture. We, we try to solve it and I'll get more into detail in defining it here in just a second, but we try to solve it by bringing good people into our organization. And we want to always bring in good people. You do and I do to our organizations. But good people do not fix bad systems. Bad systems unfortunately swallow up most good people. And this ties directly to how culture is perceived by the individuals. And the other thing that we've got to understand, this is not just a CEO thing, right? We've got to be clear about this. It can be a CEO thing. It might be somewhere else throughout the organization. The CEO can talk about the values and live the values. But if the leaders in between the CEO and rest of the people are doing something opposite of those stated values, that creates the same problem because people are watching the contradiction. The contradiction has greater impact. You're going to hear me say this over and over and over and over today. The contradiction has greater impact than all the really great things that you do, all the really great employee perks that you provide, all the great words that you use like empowerment and decision-making and all that. Those are fantastic. But what people actually see, experience, and have to fit themselves into is actually the real culture within your organization. Now let's define this, right? Because I ask this all the time in all the speaking that I do and all of the installations I do around leaders and so on. The question always comes up, you know, how do you define culture? And you get things like how people feel about an organization. Well, that changes with the wind, right? I could wake up this morning on the wrong side of the bed, get surveyed, I'm pissed off about everything. So of course, that engagement survey that day is going to be completely wrong, right? So it's not about how people feel. There's an influence. For sure. But let's think about this for a second, right? Culture is very clearly the actual behavior within the organization that people feel is expected, that people see is rewarded, that people see is actually protected, and what people see is tolerated. Now, write it down. Let me say it one more time. Culture is actually the pattern of behavior that people in your organization believe is expected. They see that it is rewarded. They see that it is actually protected. And they see that it is tolerated. That is your real culture. That is my real culture. And that's a def— working definition that we've got to pay attention to because it matters on what we do. If we don't see culture as that, we'll continue to create a culture that unfortunately is probably not what we want. Now, I've seen organizations that unintentionally have created some of the best cultures because they don't tolerate things, because there's a consistency in recovery and correcting things, because there's very clear standards that they hold to. Everybody sees that they hold to the standards. Everybody sees that they don't tolerate— everybody sees that they don't tolerate the high performer being a jackass. Because they're a high performer and allowing them to do that. Because that says a heck of a lot more when the leader just allows it to happen, is either afraid of the conversation, afraid of losing the individual. That's what creates the culture. And I know this, a lot of people don't want to hear this. But what we've got to understand is that most leaders in most organizations they have a tendency to focus on what they encourage, which is important. We've got to pay attention to what it is that we encourage. But what we really have to need to understand is we should be looking at ourselves as leaders all the time. What— in what are we excusing? What can are we kicking down the road that now sets the example, that now sets the tone of what we're going to tolerate, Who's going to be protected? Because that determines our culture. Culture isn't only created by what we do, it's created by what leaders allow other people to keep doing. I use the term, it's on social media all the time, I'm constantly posting about it, about tolerance. And I get a lot of flak for this. So let me explain what I mean by tolerance, because when we as leaders tolerate things, we're actually hurting our culture. If we have a clearly defined standard, a standard of behaviors, a standard of results, and we tolerate for whatever reason somebody not having those behaviors, somebody not achieving those results on a consistent basis, we tolerate them, that becomes the new standard. The new standard determines what our culture actually is, not what we hope it to be. Again, not the values on the wall, but we have to understand that perspective, that what we tolerate determines our standard, and that standard determines what the culture will actually be like. I use this example a ton. If you think about— if you know anybody who's ever been a Navy SEAL, I've had the opportunity to actually kind of, let's call it play with a number of retired Navy SEALs where they would take us as civilians and teach us the most basic things the SEALs had to go through. And of course, we were dying on the vine, right? It's just what they have to go through is incredibly, incredibly important. But think about this for a second. The culture within a SEAL team is one that's clearly focused on the mission, one that's clearly focused on the win. And everything that they do supports that. If they were to tolerate members of the SEAL team not actually holding their own weight, not making their own decisions, not bringing things to the table when they need to, and it affects the winning and the team, what would that say about the leader of that SEAL team? What would it say about the culture? That culture would no longer be this buttoned up, organization that either goes and kills or retrieves, but is generally very successful at it, there would be more mistakes. There would be more, unfortunately, loss of life as a result of that. That's why it's so important that we do not tolerate people that do not meet the standard. I'm not saying we fire those individuals. We'll talk about that here in just a second. But we have to understand that clarity in what's expected and then holding to what's expected determines what our culture is going to be. On the flip side, as I've already said, tolerance of people that actually don't achieve that, that's ultimately creating our culture. There's a model that I use to kind of walk people through how all of this connects. And it's all under the auspices of the term guide, don't drive. If you've seen anything of mine, you've seen it connected to this idea of guide, don't drive. And when we think about tolerance, it's in that what we call the performance model of guide, don't drive. The first step is winning, knowing exactly in the organization what winning is, because this goes directly to culture. The example that I gave you early on that I opened up with is the CEO who was talked about the values but lived exactly the opposite of it. I mean, it was a real mess. And one of the other challenges, once I started working with the organization, is if I were to ask 10 people what winning actually means in the organization, I got 10 completely different answers. And they weren't even close answers. They were all over the board. Now think about that. If each department, if each person in each department views in your organization or in my organization what winning is completely different, The culture is going to be a very self-serving culture. It's not going to be the team environment that we all want to create because there's no common winning. There's no common guardrails around winning. So winning is the first thing. Winning is so important because it determines our identity as individuals and our identity shows up in behavior, which is the third piece. So it's winning. Its identity, its behavior. And our behaviors, or the behaviors within our organization that ultimately create the culture in our organization, are defined by what we tolerate in our organizations. Because tolerance actually reveals the real standard. So if up on the wall it says integrity, but as a leader we allowed somebody to say they did something and get away with it when they didn't do it, we are showing that the tolerance is okay, that the standard really isn't integrity, and that determines exactly what our culture is. Tolerance reveals our real standard, and that real standard determines how we operate within the organization. That's the true definition of what creates our cultures. And sometimes it's tough for us to think about it that way because we want to have all of the fun stuff. What we call here at Qualigence our dog days, where we take out the grill and everybody brings something in and we have hot dogs, hamburgers, and hang out with— and those things are incredibly important, but they will never overshadow the contradictions that we come up with every single day. Now, how do you know if you have contradiction in your organization? Whether you're a leader, whether you're not, whether you're a team member. But I want you to think about it from what a team member experiences truly in your organization. And I got 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, or 8 questions that are a good way to be, but you gotta be honest about this. If you're a leader, man, you have got to be honest. How do I have contradiction? And the answer is yes. There's not a single organization on this planet that does not actually have some level of contradiction. It's a matter of how much do we have and what are we gonna do about it? But here's some questions that ask yourself. Number 1, You say people are your greatest asset, but development is the first budget you cut. Does that sound familiar in your organization? Because your contradiction creates your culture. Number 2, you say you want ownership, but every single decision requires multiple levels of approval. This one gets people because every time I bring this up, I get a bunch of hands that go up. That's our organization. That's what's going on. Then we wonder why we don't have ownership within our organization because our contradiction says we don't really want you to have ownership because we sucked it away and we took it as far away from you as possible and you got to get 18 signatures to buy a 12-cent pen. That is a contradiction that tells the story that people experience. Number 3, you say accountability matters, but production, meaning results, primarily revenue, protects people from consequences. They can act like a jackass as long as they're actually producing results. I've seen this in my own organization. I've seen this in every single organization that I've ever been within, and almost from every CEO in the last 30 years that I've had a conversation with, there's an example of that somewhere. That's creating the culture that says it's okay to act like a jackass as long as you're producing. That's what we have to be careful about. Next one. You say you value honesty, but the person who tells the truth gets labeled as negative. Look, I'm not proud of this. I've done this. I've actually done that where I encourage people to always be honest with me. And then— and if you're a leader, let's face it, most of us have been in this situation. And then somebody on the team has the that has the guts to come to you with that honesty and say, "Here's what I'm seeing is wrong." And then all of a sudden we shut it down and we get defensive. Does that happen in your organization? And what is that telling your team through their experience about what's expected, what's tolerated, what the real standard is that determines your culture? You say leaders should develop people, but you promote the person who solves everything themselves. Again, I use myself as an example in a lot of this. I have done that exact thing where I've taken that best producer who is a problem solver. In fact, that person still is here within my group of organizations. And that person has been in different roles throughout the last decade or so. But it's the initial one was, well, they're really good at X, so I'm going to promote them. And they weren't really good at certain things as a result of that. So the development of their people never happened and dependency for a while was what was created. And so we had to address that. So does that happen in your organization? You say customer experience matters, but the only thing you reward is speed, volume, and cost reduction. Give you an example. A bank that I was actually working with, and still am working with, They focused on the relationship, just like every community bank does. We focus on the relationship, we focus on the relationship, we focus on the relationship, because that's what we are as community bankers, we're relationship-driven people. But I asked them to share with me the compensation programs, not just for their lenders, for the retail branch and some of their other leaders. And there was nothing, not a single thing that measured anything that has to do with relationship. It had nothing but is how much more revenue did we produce? How much more fee income did we produce? How much more lending did we bring in? Now, you can make the argument that some of that is based on the relationship. Yes, I completely get it. But everything talked about everything else but the relationship. So as we looked and determined a drift audit within the organization, what did we find was their number one problem that permeated throughout the entire bank? Lack of relationships. They talked about it. It was their number one value. It's on their website even today, as it is with many community banks. But it was their contradiction of that that created the true culture. And people were focused on number one thing only, that next dollar that they could drive, because that's the only thing that was measured outside of talking about relationships are everything. Couple others, just think about, are these in your organization? And if they are and people are experiencing this, that's what's actually creating your culture. That's what's creating my culture. You say mistakes are how people learn, but the first honest mistake gets punished. Any of us that have been a leader have probably done that. Last one, you say collaboration matters, but your incentives only reward individuals. They're all individual measurements. They have no team measurements. And then we focus on, well, we're collaborative. Well, you're not. It's your contradiction that creates your culture. So I want you to think about it if you're a leader for a second. And if you're not a leader, I want you to still think about it in your organization. If you're watching this live online, put it in the comments. Uh, would love to see it. Or again, text me. At 734-837-8500. Based on our behavior as leaders, based on what you've experienced from your leaders if you're not currently leading, what truth have you learned or what truth has your team learned around what they're not willing to tell you? Now, this is a hard— this takes self-reflection, right? What is your team not willing to tell you What do you feel if you're not leading a team that you can't go tell somebody else? Because there's usually a contradiction involved here. We want you to tell us, we want you to share your thoughts with us. But something has happened, some behavior has occurred, whether we shut down that honesty, whether, you know, it's, what's the saying? Don't kill the messenger. But we killed the messenger. That's the behavior that creates the contradiction that determines our true culture. Culture is not a feeling. Culture is based on observation of specific behaviors, including tolerances, including what we tolerate in other people. The actual behaviors that we as leaders show consistently is what determines the culture in every one of our organizations. I said this earlier. I want this quote or this saying to resonate with you because this culture thing is such a big issue because it's all about how do we make our team feel good. Your team doesn't want to feel good. I'm saying that half cheekily, right? You get that. Your team wants to understand that you're consistent in your behaviors, that what they view you doing, what they view you tolerating, what they view as the standard is something that they can live with, is something that they can support, is something that they can do to impact and influence. But here's, here's what I want us to get through our heads. The louder you declare a value that you don't defend, the less people are going to trust you. The louder you create a value that you don't defend because you're tolerating somebody not defending it, You're tolerating somebody breaking the rules, but they keep producing. The less people will trust you. And trust obviously heavily influences the culture or the lack thereof because it changes people's behaviors. You can measure behaviors in an organization to determine what real engagement is. A engagement survey around how people feel is something completely different. You've got to be able to measure the actual behaviors. Where contradiction exists, where contradiction needs to be removed, if you want to change the culture in your organization, that's where you have to look first. It's not the pizza party. Do those things, but don't expect them to address these contradictions. Now, let me make this personal because somebody's going to look at this and say, hey, you're talking at me. I've already given you a couple of examples of myself, but I'm gonna give you another one of the examples where I got this wrong, right? The term contradiction is your culture came from the story, the true story that I shared at the opening of this, right? This particular CEO that I was dealing with. But I've created plenty of contradictions myself. Many of them, none of them I'm proud of, but many of them were what I would call doozies. Back many years ago, If you've gone through any of our installations or courses, you may have heard part of this story before, but I'm going to put it into a different context. Years ago, I actually had a COO who did exactly what I said I wanted, right? Gathered evidence when coming to me with a different decision than I would have made, got the team involved in buy-in, all the things we want some of our leaders to be able to do. The problem is when my COO brought that to me, it was going exactly against the decision that I had already made in my head. I hadn't shared that decision with my CEO— COO, but I had already made a specific decision in my head and I wanted to get the organization behind my decision. And in retrospect, this decision wasn't wrong. And I kept telling my leaders, I want you to think independently. I want you to take ownership of decisions like this. I want people to actually challenge me. And then one of them did. And in all honesty, I didn't like it back then, right? They brought it up to me. This person brought it up to me. In fact, I didn't just disagree with this person, I ended up firing this person. Now, think of the culture that that would have created because this was a pretty public scene. Anybody who's been around here knows who I'm talking about. Again, I'm not proud of this, but it's a learning experience to understand how our decisions impact the culture. I kept saying, I wrote this down, right? I want people who can think independently. What leader doesn't want people I said I wanted people that can think independently. I said I wanted people that took ownership. What leader doesn't want people who actually take ownership? I said I wanted people that would challenge me and the things that we've always done a certain way. And then I get somebody to do it and I fire them. What message does that send? What does that create within the culture? Obviously distrust, which completely changes behavior. And you could see it in the results thereafter because I created that culture through what I tolerated in myself. My contradiction of what I said I wanted and what I actually did created a culture of fear, created a— all those things that we don't want to admit as a leader, it actually created. Now, it took me 5 or 6 years to get to a point after that where I realized the stupidity the stupid mistake that I had made and the impact that that decision, that was the big one, had had on the actual culture. Now, there's a lot of little things that I consistently did too, right? We want to try to not have all those things. But I want you to think about that story, real story, the learning I got from that in your own context. Where have you said you wanted independent thinkers, and then you shut them down. Most of us have experienced something like that. Where did you say you wanted people to bring ideas and challenge yours? You already had your mind made up. You kind of listened to them, but it was going in one ear and out the other ear, and they know it. And then you wonder why they're quiet all the time. Why has the culture created this group of quiet people? It's not usually the people, it's what they have been trained to experience because that's the culture, because that's what we reinforced. As the actual leaders. Now in that situation, wasn't an alignment problem. It was actually a control problem. And that contradicted what I said that I wanted. And that's what created the real culture. Not the culture I wanted, not the culture people wanted, but what the culture people experienced through the tolerance, through the contradiction, through the specific behaviors. And through that, I created an environment, a culture where I wanted people to speak up and they wouldn't say a damn thing. That's the impact our contradictions have. Now, I can give you 1,000 stories, but it's best when you've actually lived it and you can explain it. I just think it's better. Again, I started with somebody else. And I see this on an ongoing basis, not to that extreme, not to the extreme that maybe I created some years ago. But what we have to understand about people, and this gets into engagement and what they do as a result of the culture, is that behavior itself follows the path of least resistance in an organization. It doesn't follow what's stated on the wall. The behaviors follow the path of least resistance or perceived sacrifice in an organization. So if they think they're going to get shut down, do you think they're going to bring it to you? Even though as a leader you say, you're saying, I want transparency, I want ideas, but every time somebody brings you idea, you find fault in that idea. It's one thing about questioning to understand, there's a whole nother thing about questioning to find fault because your idea is actually better. Now, a lot of people are gonna say, "Hey, you're just blaming leaders for the culture that's created in our organization." Yep. I'll say it again. Somebody's gonna say, "You're just blaming leaders for the culture in the organization." Absolutely, I am doing that because we're the ones who create the environment that train our teams to be the way they are. Now, can you have a bad apple that comes in? Absolutely. But remember, we create the system in which people operate. And if that system is not true, it creates many, many contradictions. It lowers tolerance, or it increases tolerance and lowers the standard. That's what we're doing. That's the environment and the system that good people come into, and then all of a sudden, now they're quiet. They didn't come in that way, but they've adapted to the system because they've seen that system over and over and over. Through our contradictions as leaders. Now, you may have inherited a team that had that environment. Now you're trying to undo it. Don't worry as much about the pizza parties and all those other things. If it makes sense, do that. Focus on what contradictions continue to happen because at that point, even the little ones that you may have, they're really sensitive to and they should be really sensitive to. Now this plays into our perspective about our people as leaders too. And this damages our culture. It's continuing the trend from our contradiction to our tolerance to our standards. But ask yourself a question for a second. If you're leading people, if you used to lead people, what have you, or you might even experience this on the flip side if you're the one reporting to somebody. But how many people as a leader have you considered incapable when it was actually your behavior that trained them to depend on you? This is a cultural thing. Let me, let me ask the question again, and I want you to really think this through and be honest with yourself. How many people have you or I called as leaders incapable when it was actually our behaviors that trained them to depend on us or somebody else. Because A, we made all the decisions. B, we talked about empowerment, but every decision they made, they made, we had to double-check. That every time they made a decision that was not the decision we would have made, we call it a mistake instead of thinking about it as a different approach. If you're honest with yourself, the vast majority of leaders have created that in their culture where people are rendered incapable because we've trained them through our behaviors, through what we do tolerate and don't tolerate, and the standard that we've set to be dependent on you which dramatically impacts culture. Culture is affected by behaviors. Behaviors are determined by what people see, by what people experience. Leaders determine what people see and what people experience. And it's our contradiction that actually creates our culture. Now, I can give you a gazillion examples that are unintentional. There's a deadline that's set for something. It's when a project is due, when a piece has to be shipped out, whatever the case is. And let's say that deadline is missed. You've experienced this in your organization, whether your services, whether you're a product, it doesn't really matter. Even in our businesses, we've experienced that, right? A deadline's missed. The leader withholds a certain amount of information. The customer starts to complain. The commitment to the customer is quietly abandoned. High performer gets involved, solves the problem, doesn't get anybody else involved. Think of what I'm describing. Think of all the contradictions in what I just described. The incident that I just described, it's late, the leader withholds information, The incident matters itself, but it's the response to the incident that determines the culture. It's the behavior as the response to the incident. If that situation happens and the leader doesn't help those involved recover from that situation back to the clearly defined standard, the standard is lowered. The culture experiences it. The people see it. The people experience it. The people start to mimic it because it's the path of least resistance. It's the path of least pressure. And that starts to determine even more so or solidifies the culture that you have. Now, this isn't all about beating people over the head and say, we're not tolerating any deviance from what our standard is. That's not even possible. It's not even possible on a Navy SEAL team. It doesn't happen. Now, their mistakes can cost lives. Luckily, us in the business world, it generally doesn't do that. Maybe if you're a doctor or something along those lines, but mistakes generally don't cause lives. They're recoverable. And this is different than accountability. When companies talk about their culture of accountability, And I start to ask questions about it. Unfortunately, it's not a culture of accountability in most cases, it's a culture of compliance. People don't want to be called out. They're afraid to actually make a mistake, which limits the company because they don't try new things. They don't have new ideas that are coming up and so forth. We've got to recover. We don't punish. Well, what's the difference between the two? At some point you have to punish. Let's face it, it's the real life. But what we don't do is we make things personal. And unfortunately, this behavior impacts our culture in a very negative way. Somebody makes a mistake, we go up to them and say, "Why'd you do that? What are you going to do to fix it?" Or, "Here's what I want you to do to fix it." And we walk away. And then we get compliance. But what we're not getting is true recovery. In that example I just gave you, accountability does not feel good. In our organizations, if you want to create a culture where it's not okay to fail, people don't want to fail, but people know it's not the end of the world, so they're willing to take a risk, they're willing to kind of step out of the box, so to speak. It's not about beating them over the head, it's about recovery. It's not about going directly to that difficult conversation, which we have been teaching in our organizations for years. What we do is go back and make it non-personal. What was the standard that was missed? It didn't get sent out on time. Okay, do you see that the standard was missed? I do. What are you going to do to make sure that the standard isn't missed again? How am I gonna know you've actually done it? It's a very different conversation than, You screwed up, why did you do it? Here's what I want you to do to fix it. That's compliance. Recovery creates a completely different environment because of the behaviors that determines a completely different culture. A culture where mistakes are not ignored. A culture where people realize the bar is hard. Think of the Navy SEALs. A culture where people want to do their best because we've created the environment that rewards the best. But it also helps people recover back to the best when they drift, and they will. Accountability the way it's taught today, you gotta write 'em up. I was in a meeting yesterday. I asked the leader, what are you gonna do when that person doesn't do when you want them to do? 'Cause at some point that's going to happen. Oh, I'm gonna write 'em up. That's not recovery, that's threatening, that creates a culture of fear. We want to create a culture of recovery. Take the person out of it. What is the clearly defined standard? We need to know what winning actually looks like. Do they see that they've drifted from that standard? What are they choosing to do to ensure they meet the standard, and how will they inform me, if I'm their leader, of how— of when they've actually done that? That's recovery. Now you're creating an environment where people want to give their best, which is a very different culture than an environment where people give their best because they're afraid of messing up. And it creates tension, it creates nervousness, and that permeates throughout the entire culture because they see the behaviors that actually support it, primarily in what their leaders do, don't do, the response, and what people actually get away with. All right. A lot of information in 44 minutes. I try to keep these to a little bit less than that. But here's kind of the endgame on this whole thing. You got to audit your own organization. If you're a leader, you have got to start asking yourself some very hard questions. And you've got to be honest. If you want to change your culture, if you want to improve your culture, and I hope that we all do. Number 1 question, write this down. What do we claim matters? It might be your values on the wall, but what are all the things in all of your meetings and all of your town halls and all the emails that you send out to the team? What do you claim actually matters? That's question 1. That's easy. Here's the things we claim that matters. Honesty, integrity, taking care of our customer at any cost. Our people actually matter. That, Sure, we can write all those things down, similar things to what I would try to write down. But here's the second question. What happens to that thing we said matters when defending it becomes expensive? It may not be expensive from a dollar amount, but it might be expensive because I need to have a recovery conversation. So the second question that ties back to what you write down in that first one. What happens when defending it becomes expensive? Do we tolerate not doing that thing? Is that value more of a suggestion? Is that thing we say we want as part of our culture a great idea, but when pressure hits, it goes off the rails? And number 3, this is for every one of you as a leader. It's for me as a leader. Where are you personally teaching people not to believe in your organization? Where are you personally having contradictions with the best of intentions sometimes? But if you look at what you said and what you did, hey, you know what? We don't allow jerks here. And that top producer keeps producing but treats everybody like crap, and you keep allowing it. Your contradiction creates your culture. I want that to get through to your head. Now, let me close with this. First of all, if you have any thoughts on this, again, put it into the post. Thank you for the invite to be on one of your LinkedIn Lives, so on. I'd be happy to do it. We can chat afterwards. Thank you for that. This is a— it's something near and dear to my heart because I have done it wrong so many times and I have seen other leaders do it wrong so many times. But I've also seen what happens when we adjust and our contradiction no longer impacts our culture in a negative way because we have less contradictions. Don't add more values to your organization. Go through those 3 questions I gave you and write down what you're already talking about. And then write down where you're not actually supporting that, because that determines the impact. If you really, really, really want to be honest with yourself and you want to get a pulse from your organization, don't do an engagement survey. It's— there's no value in them because you can't act on them. Do what's called more of an assessment of observable behaviors because that's the thing you can truly measure that ties directly into quote unquote engagement. We're gonna make one of those available, a limited one available at no cost. We'll put it up on one of our websites and we'll send out a LinkedIn in the next week or so. We're building the platform to be able to do that. But it takes guts to do this because you gotta send it to people throughout your organization or your team. And you'll get a sense of where the drift is actually happening and where the contradiction is actually occurring. I'm going to do it here. I would expect some of you would want to do it with your teams or your organizations. And we'll make it available. It's not the longer in-depth one that we have. There's a different cost structure there, but it's based upon the same principles. And that's why we're going to make it for free. Ask those 3 questions. Take this actual observable behavior assessment. And then determine a plan. What are you going to do personally to make sure that the contradiction is no longer there? Because that has the biggest impact on your culture. Now, I know I may have pissed off some people in my view on some of these things, but the tried and true definitions of culture that are out there around this, it's what people feel. Well, kind of. It's actually what people experience and are trained. And we need to not deal with the symptom, feelings. What we need to do is deal with the root cause that's— that they observe, they see, because that's how you ultimately change the feelings. So let's get to the, to the heart of this thing, right? Your contradiction is your culture. My contradiction is my culture. And that's what I want you to take away from this today. But all of it is addressable once we identify the 800-pound gorilla in the room. If you're watching this live, Thank you for being part of this. This is a weekly series that I do almost every week, Thursdays at 11:00 AM Eastern time. The name of the series or the name of this videocast is Will It Hold? Because I look at everything through that lens, right? Our contradiction creates our culture. And if we're gonna solve it, we've gotta ask ourselves the questions in the way we're solving it. Will it hold? Hold. Hopefully this has been good for you. Thank you so much for doing this. Thank you for the comments around the value you get out of this. That's why I do this. I give it away for free because I want it to impact others. And to be honest with you, I don't want people to make the same stupid mistakes that I've made throughout my career. I heard enough people doing that. You don't need to do the same. So let's be real about it. Thank you for joining. I will see you next Thursday. 11:00 AM Eastern time. Probably by Monday, I'll put out what am I gonna talk about. They're all gonna be spicy topics. They're all gonna be kind of this format. I would encourage you, be part of it, make comments, call us, send me an inbox, I don't care, or an inmail, I don't care, so that you can be part of the conversation. And if you wanna debate something, please do. I'm always open to asking questions to understand a different person's perspective, that is different from mine. It's based on my experience. See you guys next week.