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Brand Reputation: Culture is Credibility

by | Oct 23, 2020 | Team Culture, Video

Where do brand and culture intersect? Ken Meyers, creator of the Smartfood popcorn brand, talked to Meghan Lynch, CEO of Six-Point, and Ruth Lund, President of the Legacy Center, about culture as the credibility backing up your brand reputation.

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Ken Meyers

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Ruth Lund

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Meyers thinks of brand as essentially a promise to the marketplace, to the prospect of constituents, and a company’s culture is the credibility behind that promise. As Ken said, “You can say whatever you want to, but if your company’s activities, behavior, and attitudes run counter to that brand promise, it’s going to be seen, and it’s going to chip away at the credibility behind what you’re trying to get people to believe and follow.”

As companies grow and scale, the transparency that companies experience with their customers acts like rocket fuel. It can propel a company to new heights, or it can blow them to smithereens. It’s next to impossible to hide disconnects between the brand promise and the actions of the people in the company, or the company itself. There are so many ways that customers can share information about their experience with others, and that those experiences can be found by others. If the alignment is there, that clarity and consistency will reinforce customer confidence. If there is misalignment, it will undermine the brand reputation of the company and make it impossible to build brand loyalty and equity.

Meyers also pointed out that the company culture is what is going to set the course for either rapid growth and expansion of a brand or ultimate brand collapse. If you do culture right, you set solid boundaries and guardrails and you stay on the path toward growth. This gives you the best chance of getting people to buy into the promise you make with the brand reputation that you are trying to develop, and the best chance for success.

Culture Evolution: How to Manage Stretch Gaps

by | Oct 23, 2020 | Team Culture, Video

Can you truly change a culture? Ruth Lund of the LEGACY Center and Robert Glazer, bestselling author of Friday Forward, discuss whether or not culture evolution is possible when a company begins to outgrow its core values.

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Robert Glazer

Meghan Lynch

Ruth Lund

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There are times in a business lifecycle when gaps start to appear between where an organization is and where it is headed.

Glazer points out that most organizations know their vision when they start, because oftentimes the founder is trying to do something specific. It’s difficult to truly develop the core values of that organization until you have at least 10 people and you can identify what values your best people reflect.

When it comes to articulating your core values, Glazer says, “They shouldn’t be aspirational and they shouldn’t be table stakes, like integrity or stuff like that. Where, because you wouldn’t hire someone who has integrity. They’re trying, they’re trying to represent that differentiated point of DNA.”

Oftentimes, the core values of an organization do not change as they grow and scale, even when their goals and tactics do. For example, if a company is doubling every two years, the CEO might need to change behaviors, systems, and goals to adapt to that change, but it is likely that the company values will not change. In fact, the company will grow more efficiently if it grows in service of its values instead of around its values.

But every once in a while, there might come a time when the values of a company do need to evolve through a culture evolution.

In those times, organizations will acknowledge the cultural DNA that has served them well, but also identify that they need to expand some of their values in a way that is authentic. This culture evolution will not happen often, but it can be a huge opportunity for next-level growth when there is a readiness in the organization for an authentic values stretch.

Core Values: The Importance of Rewarding Key Behaviors with Robert Glazer

by | Oct 23, 2020 | Team Culture, Video

One of the biggest mistakes that companies make when they are trying to form their culture is to not truly honor the existing essence of the culture (their core values). Robert Glazer, the bestselling author of Elevate, talked to Meghan Lynch, CEO of Six-Point Creative, and Ruth Lund, President of the Legacy Center, about how team culture can’t be forced.

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Robert Glazer

Meghan Lynch

Ruth Lund

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“Core values for an organization cannot be aspirational. They need to be who your best people are. You can’t say this is who we want to be as people. It just doesn’t work,” explained Glazer. 

The best cultures show their behaviors instead of just talking about them. The experience with the company and its people should demonstrate the company’s core values in a way that they can be felt and noticed by anyone who has an interaction with that company. 

Robert compares it to his own experience with his children. “One of my favorite moments as a parent was when I was at a parent-teacher conference for one of my kids. We have five family core values, and she had put four of them to describe him on the form. And so it just felt so great,” said Glazer.

Getting a strong culture is really as simple about rewarding the right behaviors. And you either do that intentionally, or it will start to happen by default. As companies grow and scale, you need to be carefully deciding what behaviors you will praise, because those behaviors will start to become outward signs of what your company’s core values. 

It can be easy to fall into the trap of praising behaviors that might achieve short-term results, but don’t actually reinforce the long-term behaviors that you want to see in your organization. When this happens, you can quickly develop an unhealthy culture. You can start to turn it around by returning to your core values and determining what behaviors would demonstrate these values. Then put in intentional systems to reward these behaviors.

Making Business Decisions: Trust Your Spidey Sense

by | Oct 23, 2020 | Team Culture, Video

We often learn more from failures than we do from successes. Meghan Lynch, CEO of Six-Point and Ruth Lund, President of the Legacy Center, ask Robert Glazer, the bestselling author of Elevate, to talk about making business decisions as he has grown and developed his own skills.

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Robert Glazer

Meghan Lynch

Ruth Lund

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Glazer acknowledged that for both entrepreneurs and visionary leaders, their strength can also be a weakness as they grow and scale their businesses. They are people who tend to see around corners, but sometimes also they can see that something needs to be done, but just wait too long to take action. 

As Glazer put it, “You kind of have this spidey sense radar that you need to deal with something, but it’s just more convenient not to. I’ve never ever had one of those things become easier to deal with. I’ve repeated that mistake a lot and the pain of that now has made me a lot less patient to just dive in and address things sooner. It usually leads to a better outcome.”

Particularly now as companies are being stress tested and issues really come to the surface, leaders are feeling that sense of urgency to not tolerate things when making business decisions, including developing a healthy culture.

Glazer said that as he has spoken with CEOs during the pandemic, it has confirmed that they have used the urgency of the situation to deal with performance issues. “And they all knew they should have done it six months earlier. And in fact, you know, I’ve talked to people on our team or other teams who regret that they got themselves into this high pressure environment with a person that they didn’t want on their team, that they were acting too slow with, and that’s their biggest regret,” Glazer explained.

When organizations participate in intentional cultural development, it helps make business decisions more quickly.

Cultural Leadership: Paint Your Cultural Reality

by | Oct 23, 2020 | Team Culture, Video

While there are some fundamentals of running a company with a good team culture (treating people well, paying them well), there is no one recipe for a culture in terms of the values that drive it. Meghan Lynch, CEO of Six-Point, and Ruth Lund, President of the Legacy Center, ask Robert Glazer, bestselling author of Elevate, to discuss some valuable cultural leadership lessons about what enables teams to survive and thrive under pressure.

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Robert Glazer

Meghan Lynch

Ruth Lund

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A strong culture is truly all about alignment, Glazer says. And by this, he means complete alignment between a company’s mission/vision (what it believes), what its messages are to its employees and customers (what it says), and the behaviors of its employees and leaders (what it does).

In cultural leadership, there should be alignment between what companies think, say and do, and customers should see and feel this.

This consistency comes from an individual and cultural leadership aspect of self-awareness that can answer the question: “Who are you and what do you want?”

The example Robert provides is one of a former college athlete, super competitive CEO. He argues that they should lead with this authenticity and be clear that their organization is about winning, high growth, and rewarding individual performance. The way that this CEO could create a toxic culture would be to fight that and create messages about “teamwork and collaboration” because they think that is what people want to hear, when that is not really what they value.

Glazer draws the parallel between business cultures and colleges. There are 100 great colleges that if you took your child to, they would reject as “too big” or “too city” or for any number of other reasons. It doesn’t mean that college isn’t great. It just means that it is not the right fit for that person. In that world, you don’t see a large university in a downtown setting pretending it is a small liberal arts college. They own their identity.

Ruth points out that in order to build this authenticity, leaders must be very clear about who they are and what drives them. This way, the leaders are set up for success to be able to walk out of the door and be a living example of the culture within the organization and truly lead to it for others.

Team Behaviors in Turbulent Times

by | Oct 23, 2020 | Team Culture, Video

Team behaviors in turbulent times tend to “stress test” team culture, and starkly show the strengths and weaknesses of companies. Robert Glazer, CEO of Acceleration Partners, bestselling author of Elevate, joined Meghan Lynch, CEO of Six-Point, and Ruth Lund, President of the Legacy Center, to discuss what he has seen in his own team culture.

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Robert Glazer

Meghan Lynch

Ruth Lund

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Often many companies have employees who are “on the edge” in terms of their performance and cultural fit. When you apply pressure to the organization, these people “either fling to the outside or stick to the middle,” explains Glazer. They either become great and you just want that person in your bunker or it becomes clear that this person is not a fit at all, and you see that you need to move on from this person quickly.

When things are going great, it’s easier for people to behave in the right ways and align with the culture. When pressure is applied to teams in turbulent times, you tend to see the true colors of both leadership teams and team behaviors.

Glazer referenced his own experience with his team early in the COVID-19 pandemic. When everything was beginning to shut down, he froze everything at Acceleration Partners until it became more clear what the next few months would hold. Glazer explained that during that time period, “ you have some people coming to us and saying, ‘Hey, look, if we end up doing layoffs or anything, please lay me off first or furlough me first. Someone else on my team has a family, but I can withstand this.’ And then you have other people coming and saying, ‘Hey, when are we doing promotions?” 

The extremes in team behaviors was clarifying to him, as it should be to all leaders in times of stress. The takeaway? Make sure you have strong people in your bunker who have your back and will dig even deeper into your core values when times are tough.