These are big things and again, like you said, you think about this stuff.
This is what your training and background is.
But there are different personality types when it comes to entrepreneurs, aren’t there?
And I think I’m more of the visionary.
You’re definitely more of an integrator role, right?
I’m definitely that visionary role.
I’ve got this great idea, I’ve got another great idea.
All I do is have great ideas, but then I never take the time to map it all out and pull it together.
The two of us would probably work really well together.
That’s what the compliment means.
You’re my Steve Jobs.
Exactly, exactly that.
I just need someone like yourself to be able to help with that.
I think that a lot of natural entrepreneurs are that sort of person who is a visionary thinker.
I think that your skill set is really important and unique, but a lot of people don’t actually have that.
So culture, I think, is quite interesting because, like we just said, I think our roles and strengths and weaknesses complement each other.
I think that’s what you need in a company.
You need different people in different roles playing to their strengths for a start.
Which doesn’t always happen because if you’re a small business, you kind of throw people into different roles, which is where the friction happens.
And I think people talk about culture, which is ridiculous.
But I just think, from your perspective doing what you do, what would you say good company culture is?
And how do people get it?
Yeah, so I’ll start by saying that most companies see culture as something separated from an HR function.
Separated from everything else.
Something that you have to pay attention to.
You’re looking at operations and then you’re looking at culture.
It’s completely misleading.
Because this is the thing.
I think an easy way to think about it is that businesses are micro-societies.
You’re literally pulling people from any kind of background, hopefully.
Well, yeah, that’s another conversation.
We’ll talk about that.
But you know, people from all kinds of backgrounds, diverse types of people, and you put them in an environment where everybody is focused almost on the same goals and the same projects.
So what happens is, inevitably, you have an emergent culture.
A culture that is naturally emerging because people in a place create culture.
That’s what culture is.
It’s something that people make together.
So what I think the responsibility of an organization is, is to create a psychologically safe place.
Forget the benefits, the perks, the carrots and sticks stuff.
That’s literally fluff.
What any company has to focus on is creating a psychologically safe place.
What does that mean?
It means people are empowered and feel safe to be themselves 100% at work.
Why is that important?
Well, first of all, morally it’s important because we should be at a point where people are not scared of being themselves.
Whether you’re queer, whether you like makeup, whether you don’t like makeup, whether you have a certain hairstyle.
You shouldn’t be afraid.
Because how does that affect your work in a negative way?
If anything, all the research that we have has actually shown that when people feel safe at work, they are more creative.
They’re more positive.
They’re more proactive.
They are nicer to other people.
They are more open-minded toward people who are different from them.
So this is the type of environment.
And this is something I’m taking from the events industry.
This is something I definitely did not learn from the hospitality industry.
This is something I learned through the events industry because it’s the most multicultural industry where I’ve ever worked.
Apart from management boards, but that’s another conversation.
That’s what I really realized.
With such small budgets as well, and so many difficulties that come with building events.
I specialized in outdoor festivals.
So we’re talking about mud, rain, and all sorts of wild scenarios that you’ll never be ready for.
People are shocked when I tell them what a typical day for me was at work.
But that made me realize that any team I ever led or was part of, the thing that glued us together was that we all felt safe around each other.
We knew that we could all contribute ideas.
We knew that even though I was leading a team, you could speak your mind and tell me that you thought it was better to do it a different way than what I proposed.
That kind of thing makes a team flexible, creative, proactive, and energized.
So that is the single principle of a healthy culture.
And it’s something that has been gotten wrong over the years because the way we build our businesses still follows the 70s corporate models.
Which is reflective of the society that we’ve been building until now.
It’s elitist, patriarchal, discriminatory, and racist.
And these things are true.
That’s why they’ve been leaking into businesses because we’ve not been paying attention to that.
So when people say, “Businesses shouldn’t be involved in politics,” it’s like, sure, you can carry on pretending that this stuff is not important.
Then you’re going to have 60% turnover rates.
You’re going to lose so much money because people constantly leave you for better companies.
The newer generations are not going to work for you.
If you want to lead in 2024, then this is the time to step it up.
You don’t need a lot of money to create a safe place.
You don’t need to be a big business to create a safe place.
You don’t need to have a big team to create a safe place.
And that trickles down to how you treat your clients, how your clients feel with you, and how public opinion feels about you.
There are so many advantages apart from it being the morally right thing to do.
I think if you look at companies that have creative teams, like Pixar and movie companies, they actually have non-hierarchical approaches.
They’re famous for collaborative approaches.
There are reasons for that.
And that’s why they make millions and millions because they have the best teams.
And it’s the same thing if you look at the military.
A lot of people say, “Look at the Navy SEALs.”
But the Navy SEALs have the same principle.
Every person on the team is a leader.
Every person supports each other.
Everybody plays to their strengths.
And everybody can step in to solve the problem.
That’s why they’re tactical teams.
And yeah, it’s just a smarter way to do business.
It is.
And actually, I love your example of the Navy SEALs because a lot of people would criticize them.
They say they’re dictatorship-like and the equivalent of a toxic work environment.
Like, “You must do these hours and you must do that.”
But like you said, at the end of the day, their motto is “Never leave a man behind.”
They have each other’s backs in literal life-and-death situations.
And they’re consensual.
Remember that.
It’s consensual.
They’re going into the job knowing exactly what they’re signing up for.
Exactly.
But they’re actually happy to sacrifice their life for another comrade.
That is real culture.
How many people are even willing to work late for another colleague these days?
They’re not.
These people are willing to give up their lives for each other.
They’re willing to do anything for one another.
And like you said, they respect each other.
They all have different roles on the team.
They have specialist roles as well.
And they put people in those specialist positions.
One person isn’t trying to do everything.
You don’t see a sniper on the roof also running around the battlefield trying to do everything else.
People see who they are, put them in the best positions, and let them work together.
They’ve got each other’s backs.
If someone is down, they’re picking it up straight away.
They’re not saying, “Well, that’s his job.”
They cover for each other.
But that’s what we do in jobs.
It’s ridiculous.
But it’s because people are detached from their work.
They don’t feel safe.
They don’t feel appreciated.
And they don’t feel that they’re contributing.
Even when I hear all these billionaires saying people are lazy today, I’m like, I spent 10 years working for other people.
The amount of times I really tried to bring a contribution and was just stopped.
Even though I brought data, proof, and other people who would back up what I wanted to do.
I analyzed the risks.
I made the entire plan.
I’m a planner, right?
And I was never given a proper opportunity to take risks and grow things.
To the detriment of those companies.
There were departments where, when I left, they completely collapsed because they didn’t know how to run them or evolve them.
And they didn’t listen to me.
So this is the thing.
The Navy SEALs need a specific type of training and have a specific type of culture.
But when you sign up for it, you know exactly what you’re signing up for.
I think a lot of people get into a job thinking something different.
There’s something called the psychological contract in organizational psychology.
Essentially, it’s the set of unwritten rules and expectations that you have from an employer.
Sometimes we don’t even realize it, but we expect to be treated with respect at work.
But then, you know better than me, on the first day at work you have your first microaggression, second microaggression, third microaggression.
Then your boss is upset with you for something that wasn’t your fault.
And all of this starts coming at you.
You’re feeling like, where do I have space to be myself, bring a positive contribution, and bond with other people?
If you’re being treated like a robot, obviously people don’t want to be there for each other.
And they start what people call quiet quitting.
I hate that term.
I’m more about detaching from the workplace.
I mean, if you’re not valued for anything, why would you continue to put effort into it?
That’s the thing.
And I’ve noticed, and I was definitely guilty of it for a while, by accident, that you don’t give enough credit where it’s due.
If you hire people and they do a good job, you’re sort of like, “Okay, good job.”
But you don’t fully acknowledge that they’ve done a good job.
Then if they do something wrong, you’re quick to point it out.
So what that does is only highlight the bad things they’ve done.
They don’t feel appreciated for all the great things they’ve done.
A lot of bosses go into a job thinking, “Well, I’m paying them to do that.
Why do I need to congratulate them for doing it?”
They say, “That’s their job.”
But then if they don’t do their job, they’re quick to berate them.
And I think that’s the problem.
There are a lot of people who believe that and don’t realize how demeaning and demoralizing that is.
For example, you said you work with creative agencies.
I’ve been running a creative agency for over 10 years.
If a client did the same thing to me and said, “Well, you’re hired to do this piece of branding work.
You’ve done it and it’s great, but I’m not going to say that because that’s what I’m paying you for.
But the moment you do something wrong, I’m going to have a go at you.”
I’d be like, don’t treat me like that.
You wouldn’t want to work with that client anymore.
Yet people do it to their employees all the time and don’t realize they’re doing it.
Where do you think this comes from?
I feel like some people are doing it and don’t realize they’re doing it.
They don’t mean to.
There is a very good book you should read if you haven’t already.
It’s called Multipliers by Liz Wiseman.
It’s on my bookshelf and hasn’t been read.
You should.
It’s very interesting.
She argues that leaders who create other leaders are called multipliers.
Leaders who aren’t quite there yet are called diminishers.
But in the latest version of the book, she added a chapter called The Accidental Diminishers.
And that’s what I think most people are.
Because we were brought up in a culture that has berated us.
At school, if we got good grades, okay.
But if we got bad grades, that was a problem.
We learn to see mistakes as something to be ashamed of.
Something to avoid.
When actually, I would suggest that mistakes are part of the creative process.
Obviously, calculated risks and calculated mistakes.
You don’t want to destroy a company.
But I think cultures definitely need to build space for people to make mistakes and help each other fix them.
It shouldn’t be up to the leader to say, “You did this wrong.”
If the goal is clear and the team hasn’t managed to get there, the conversation should be, “What do you need next time to reach that goal?”
“How can we help you as a team?”
“How can I help you as a leader?”
Rather than, “You messed this up.”
They already know they messed it up.
Why do you need a parent-child relationship?
You don’t need that.
Liz Wiseman speaks about this a lot in her book.
I think it’s definitely a cultural issue.
The way we were brought up and the experiences we’ve had in workplaces have often been psychologically unsafe.
It’s a mixture of that and the fact that a lot of business consultants are not trained in modern culture techniques or DEI.
I’ve even seen some of my clients, when they were ready to hire a fractional operations manager, have that operations manager start making suggestions about culture.
Things like, “You should have a three-strikes policy.
If someone makes three mistakes, you fire them.”
And I was like, don’t listen to these people.
Use them for operations.
Do not listen to them about culture.
One challenge I have is that I really want to do more work in culture.
But there is not enough understanding yet of how important it is.
So I slip good culture practices into everything I teach my founders.
For example, when I teach them how to build an onboarding process, or even before that, the hiring process, I teach them things like focusing on the skill set.
Don’t focus on whether they have a degree or don’t have a degree.
From the start, I teach them that when it comes to projects, you need to be very clear on the goals.
You need to be very clear on what support is available and where the resources are.
Then you need to get out of the way and let people do their thing.
Even when teaching leadership, it’s my way of addressing culture early.
Because the earlier you get it right, the better.
When a company is too big, transformational culture change, if done well, takes years.
It’s something I want to do later down the road.
But I don’t think there is enough understanding and awareness yet of the importance of it.
And I think that’s something the newer generations are going to change massively.
Massively.
