IAM2337 – Building a Strong Company Culture for Organizational Success

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Transcription:

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Intro 00:01

Are you ready to hear business stories and learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and level up your business from awesome CEOs, entrepreneurs, and founders without listening to a long, long, long interview?

If so, you've come to the right place. Gresh values your time and is ready to share with you the valuable info you're in search of. This is the I AM CEO Podcast.

Gresham Harkless 00:29

Hello, hello, hello. This is Gresh here and wanted to do a little bit of a quicker video. This is a special episode around one of the themes.

One of the themes is that creating culture doesn't just happen. I think so many times as leaders, what we do is we get so obsessed with this buzzword of culture and the ethos and what are we doing as an organization?

And I think it's insanely important because that culture and ethos, it happens beyond sometimes the leaders or the leaders even within an organization.

What are you doing to try to create that opportunity to see those things happen?

But I think because it's so harder to kind of hold and understand, it becomes really harder for people, especially leaders to be able to understand how to ultimately create that.

But I think one of the biggest things that I wanted to kind of hammer home during this episode is just understand that it doesn't just happen. It's not something that just emerges.

Although, even if you aren't being strategic or aware of that, it can just happen in the way that you don't want it to happen.

But it's not just happening, just like it just showed up, like culture just happened and showed up in your doorstep. It's something that you're doing on a daily basis that is leading to that culture.

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So even as we as leaders start to go through this process of looking at like where our organization is, what has happened to our organization, and how that is evolved or not evolved in the way that we wanted it to be, we have to look at the actions and steps that we take.

And even as you're trying to make pivots and changes within your culture, you have to look at those things that you did, and sometimes even more powerfully, the things that you did not do that led to where you ultimately are as a culture.

But I think one of the things that I really want to hammer home and to let you all know is that as you start to evaluate your culture, you see where it is, and you see what changes or opportunities there might be there, know that wherever you are didn't just happen.

It didn't just occur. It was something as a leader, as an organization, foundational principles, or maybe in the lack thereof of those things, or the direction that led you towards where you are.

For me, I am a huge ideas person. I love kind of just thinking about new ideas, thinking about how to solve those problems, and looking at what that looks like.

But what I started to realize, like even me internally as a team, it gets to be very overwhelming.

So that didn't just happen, it was just because I had so many different ideas and I wanted to tackle the world and do all these things that it started to muddy a lot of the things that we were ultimately doing.

So what I wanted to do was to take a step back and really start to simplify a lot of those things.

And that is definitely related to the culture that we have because it creates a lot of confusion, creates not a lot of clarity around what's happening, how those things are processing into everything that is within the organization, the way they're communicating with clients and customers, the way you're communicating internally with other team members.

When there is that confusion, it makes it a lot harder. I'm a big sports person, so anytime you look at sports, you start to realize that the people that excel the best are usually knowing exactly what their job is.

The New England Patriots, when they were really winning all the games and really crushing everybody to some degree, they had this culture, this ethos within an organization.

And one of the phrases you heard all the time was do your job. And when you think of do your job, you're really thinking of understanding exactly what it is that you're supposed to do and executing on that.

But I think what happens sometimes in organizations, especially if there's shift changes and there's pivots, you start to not understand ultimately what your job is or it starts to evolve.

So that's where as a leader, you have to really simplify those things, make it a lot easier for people to be successful and allow them the understanding of what they're doing and how they can execute on those things.

So I think it's one of the exciting things that you get to do as a leader, start to clarify that and help people to understand what the job is that they're doing.

And when you're able to do that, then you're able to increase your likelihood of success, because every time somebody comes in virtually or literally through the door, they know exactly what they need to do to be successful.

And when you're able to have that clarity, it's going to help you as a leader, help you to simplify the things that you're doing and go on from there.

But one of the really big things as far as simplification of culture that I want to make sure that I highlight is that you have the opportunity as a leader to set the stage for that culture.

And that's why I say so many times when we wondering are wondering what the culture is within an organization.

We don't realize that we are setting that on a daily basis, the things that we're doing, things that we're not doing.

And when you understand and kind of kind of tap into that the power that you have, because the actions that you take can lead to the culture that you ultimately want.

So very big idea from the 7 habits of highly effective people is really beginning with the end in mind.

And when you begin with the end in mind ultimately where you want to be. You know what your culture is that you want to kind of create, and then you work backwards from there and figure out how you can do that on a regular basis.

One of the things that I'm really working on is simplification of the things that we're doing as a team.

And I think when you're able to simplify those things, that ends up being part of the culture that you're doing, because when you make things so complex.

And I think that's one of the interesting things around business and entrepreneurship is that when you're trying to solve complex problems, you often will solve them from a complex perspective.

But when you're able to kind of take a step back, create space, as we've talked about, you're able to look at what's happening and simplify everything that's happening so that you can execute in the best way that's possible.

And that does not become something that sometimes happening overnight. Like Steve Jobs has a famous quote where he says you have to work at simplicity.

You have to work at being able to kind of refine the things that you're doing. It doesn't become easy. It's actually easier to have complexity, it becomes harder to get to simplicity.

So as a leader, what you want to do is make sure that you are tapping into that simplicity.

How can you help people to do their job as quickly and accurately as possible? And that ends up becoming a part of your culture.

So you have to ask yourself first and foremost, what do you think your culture is? If you as a leader feel like it's one thing, and then you talk to an employee or a team member, or even a partner, a strategic partner, you ask them what your culture is.

And they don't really showcase that, then, or don't really explain exactly what that is, or it's not in alignment, then all of a sudden you realize that maybe you have something that is a problem.

What are your core principles? What are the foundational elements? What do all those things look like?

And I think when you don't start to refine that, it doesn't allow you the chance and the opportunity to really be able to create that really strong culture in the way that you see fit.

So with that being said again, just understand those things don't just happen. You can definitely take steps in order to emphasize that, and especially as leaders, you often have to repeat it again and again and again and again and again.

So once you understand that, once you understand ultimately where you want to go, what you want your culture to look like, start to take the steps in order to implement that.

And sometimes that is just overall simplifying the things that you need to do or the people need to do on their team so that that can happen.

So that's my kind of take for today. This is Gresh signing out. Remember, take an active role in implementing your culture, take an active role in understanding your culture and you can see some phenomenal things not happen overnight, but it can happen over a period of time.

Outro 08:06

Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO Podcast powered by CBNation and Blue16Media. Tune in next time and visit us at iamceo.co. I AM CEO is not just a phrase. It's a community.

Check out the latest and greatest apps, books, and habits to level up your business as CEOhacks.co. This has been the I AM CEO Podcast with Gresham Harkless Jr. Thank you for listening.

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