Cultural Transformation

Speaker 1: 0:00

Hello everybody, I'm Scott Tadlin. I'm with Strategic Sales Solutions. Welcome to the Executives Edge.

Speaker 2: 0:07

Welcome to the Executives Edge podcast. Discover what gives today's most successful executives their unique edge and propel your business to new heights.

Speaker 1: 0:19

With me I've got John Bernardovich. He is the CEO of Willery and that's in Akron, ohio, and they support HR and payroll the whole community there. And I also have Dave Feiner. He's a certified EOS implementer and EOS being the entrepreneurial operating system, and we are all going to talk about cultural transformation and, if I may just start it off, and Dave, why is transforming culture important in a small and medium-sized business?

Speaker 3: 0:53

So you asked me this question first and you're going to get an answer that might surprise you. But for the most part, scott, I find that what people call cultural transformation is actually cultural rejuvenation, and that part is important because often what has occurred in an organization is that there was a wonderful culture based upon some behaviors that actually were virtuous behaviors, and it's gotten a bit ambiguous because the organization has tolerated behaviors that were outside of those boundaries. So the thing that often people call cultural transformation is actually removing some of those behaviors that are not consistent with the behaviors that were there at the very beginning.

Speaker 1: 1:41

Great, that's awesome.

Speaker 2: 2:00

Okay, great, that's awesome. And, John, why is it important? It is that, as a CEO, it makes your job exponentially easier when you have a culture that is productive and it's healthy and you have alignment within your leadership group and your shareholders and your stakeholders. I think, to echo off of Dave's sentiment about reinvigorating rejuvenation versus transformation, what I found with the clients that I work with is, primarily, they have a lack of clarity and a lack of alignment, and the simplest place for me to look every single time is whoever is at the top of the org chart and, more often than not, if that person is not willing to go through either a transformation or rejuvenation or whatever word we want to use, and accepts the culture for what it is, or, worst case, they blame others for why the culture is the way that this show.

Speaker 2: 3:03

If you have a culture issue, I would highly recommend that you stop listening to this podcast.

Speaker 2: 3:08

You look in the mirror and figure out what is the reason why that's happening, and my best guess is it's you, and I don't mean to point my finger at you because I don't know who you are, because I'm on a podcast right now, but anytime I look at this like coach speak and I'll end with this on this particular topic is if you hear really high level coaches that are successful and professional or college or even high school athletics. When their team wins, they deflect all the great recognition to their players and when they lose, they take all the responsibility for the loss. And I don't know if if you recently saw this in some of the march madness, I saw some very high profile coaches blaming their players for the fact that they lost in the first round and I found it fascinating that that was what their culture is and, at the end of the day, if you own a business, everything that goes on on inside of it is your responsibility and, most importantly, the culture.

Speaker 3: 4:07

Yep, john man do I love that answer.

Speaker 1: 4:09

Yeah, good answer. Can I add on to that? Absolutely, add on, dave.

Speaker 3: 4:14

So this is the beautiful thing. In particular, it struck me at the beginning of what John was saying. In any organization, you cannot predict all the stuff that people are going to have to deal with. There's going to be uncertainty, there's going to be issues that come up and people have to make decisions not knowing what to do. When that culture is strong. I'm going to use John for an example. If he's the CEO of the company, what those people are doing is what John would do if he was in that situation. That's right, exactly. And they know what John would do because the culture is that strong. People understand the behaviors that are the virtuous behaviors of the organization and they emanate from John and the leadership team Exactly.

Speaker 2: 4:59

And that goes back, dave, to what I mentioned earlier. That's why it makes the CEO's job so much easier is that they don't have to be there to do that. To me, the optimal point as a CEO of a company or a founder is that my business doesn't need me to be a part of the business. What a beautiful thing to be a benefactor of a great founder, founder, and as a CEO, you ultimately want to put yourself out of work and sit on the sidelines doing whatever it is that you need to be doing while your employees, your leadership team and everyone else runs your business that hopefully does good in the community treats people right and many years ago I've heard speed of the team, speed of the leader, and sure, I work with a lot of small to medium-sized businesses.

Speaker 2: 5:45

Yeah, no, I think that's very true.

Speaker 1: 5:48

Sorry.

Speaker 2: 5:49

No, I think that's very true, scott.

Speaker 2: 5:50

I think it's one of those things that you just again. You can't look any further than your CEO. I just was on a call with a marketing consultant of mine and was talking about a client of theirs that has a very bad culture. A client of theirs that has a very bad culture, and if I needed a test case for a really horrible culture, and I said you know, what I really would like to do is have a conversation with the CEO and make sure that they realize the impact that they're having on people and their lives, and people hopefully, care a lot about their work. We maybe blame people for not caring about their work as much as they used to, and that maybe makes us a little bit old school, but if your people aren't caring about the work that they're doing inside of your organization, don't blame them for it. Look at yourself as a CEO, look at the processes, look at the structure of your business. As soon as you start blaming other people, you all of a sudden aren't getting to the root cause of the issue.

Speaker 1: 6:43

So a question for both of you. You're trying to implement change, forming a good culture within your own organizations. How do you deal with resistance to change from the employees that don't really want to hop on the bus?

Speaker 3: 6:57

What to do when the employees don't want to hop on the bus? Is that the question?

Speaker 1: 7:02

Yeah, kind of blipped out here Hop on the bus, is that the question? Yeah, kind of blipped out here as a owner and EOS implementer and kind of bring change into an organization how do you handle the people that are resistant to change?

Speaker 3: 7:16

Well, we refer to those as people issues and you have to address them, and normally what you have is a set of core values that represent the definition of what that culture is, what those behaviors look like, and so that you could actually see them in action every day and you can recognize and reward on the basis of them. So the individuals who are not going to be on board are going to be individuals who do not consistently exhibit those behaviors, and that's a conversation that you need to have with them when you create clarity around those behaviors.

Speaker 3: 7:52

It simplifies things for people, and there's nothing wrong with the people who are not on board. It's just they subscribe to a different set of behaviors and often the behaviors that they have are the same behaviors that they have outside of work, and if you're trying to get them to behave a different way when they're in the business environment, that's going to put a lot of stress on them.

Speaker 2: 8:18

I love that word you used, dave Simple.

Speaker 2: 8:20

Simple is clear, simple is memorable.

Speaker 2: 8:23

Simple is clear, simple is memorable, and it's one of those key words as a business owner that you want to make things as simple as you possibly can.

Speaker 2: 8:30

I think one of the really cool things about a world-class culture one that's healthy and aligned and clear is that you're spending far more time recognizing people for living by your culture than you are firing people that don't fit your culture.

Speaker 2: 8:51

And I think, if you have the right culture inside your organization, it's organic throughout the entire process from a marketing perspective, how you treat customers when you're attracting new talent inside of your business, when you're interviewing them, and I think, if you have a consistent methodology to recognize people for when they're doing their culture at a high level, we within our firm, on a consistent basis, every single week, recognize people when they are living by what we call the Willery way, which are our five core values, and we give them a chance to recognize other team members, and we socialize that recognition on a weekly town hall meeting that we have inside of our firm. I think the worst case scenario in all that is that you don't have clarity around what your culture is how you define those values, as Dave said, and then you don't deal with issues that exist inside of your business. You just sweep it under the rug and assume it might just go away.

Speaker 2: 9:43

And unfortunately, it's not going away. It's just building up exponentially. I think of it as I thought of what was underneath my bed as a seven-year-old kid, when I was scared out of my mind when I went to sleep that there's some monster underneath there. Well, I think you're building a monster inside of your business if you don't deal with cultural issues and you don't address employee issues head on.

Speaker 1: 10:05

Oh yes.

Speaker 3: 10:06

I've seen some monsters.

Speaker 2: 10:09

And there's a saying in business, as we all know you coach them up or coach them out. I would tell you that if you have a continued issue with an employee, you need to address it, like Dave said, and you need to put care and concern around that individual and get to know what's really going on. They may be ill, they may be dealing with something really bad at home, they may not like their job, they may be in the wrong seat on the bus, so to speak. And I think the more that you attack those issues and I think a lot of people don't run toward conflict and they avoid it to the best of their ability so, as a result, cultures can turn into, as we've used, a set of bad monsters monsters underneath my seven-year-old mindset of what my bed looked like and I was just scared to hell at some point to go to bed, which was a really bad spot. And finally, my mom had me deal with the monsters.

Speaker 2: 10:59

We looked underneath the bed. There was no one there. There were some dust bunnies, for sure, underneath there. We had some fun and cleaning up my bed. I remember that vividly. But you got it. You got to deal with it. You got to deal with it. It's great.

Speaker 1: 11:11

Basically, it's great analogy. Exactly so, dave. How do you ensure alignment between cultural values and business objectives?

Speaker 3: 11:24

So the business objectives are achieved through the cultural values, because you're talking about a group of individuals whose behaviors have the set of virtuous stuff. They know how to show up in certain circumstances. You know when this happens, this is the way I'm going to behave, and that is irrespective of what the business objectives are. The business objectives are achieved through those behaviors.

Speaker 1: 12:00

Got it.

Speaker 2: 12:01

I think they're one in the same. Scott, to Dave's point, I think they're A and B. They're your right hand, left hand. In that regard. You can't have one without the other.

Speaker 2: 12:11

And I think there should be, again, alignment to those business objectives, to the core values you have and the team members that you have in your business that are going to try to achieve those. If you don't have alignment around all those things, you're not really being strategic. In my perspective, and I think sometimes that's hard. What does strategic mean?

Speaker 2: 12:31

I've had that conversation with a lot of people a lot of different times and I know in the EOS model there's a way to develop strategy and there's a process for all that I try to simplify it as much as I can. That says what issues do I have in my business, what opportunities do I have that I need to leverage? So what issues I need to attack, what opportunities do I need to leverage? And how are we differentiating ourselves from our competition and how do we want people to feel when they interact with our business, our employees, our customers, our suppliers, our vendors, friends of the family, so to speak. And to me, getting all that, getting synergy around that, can really create that harmony that an orchestra is looking for. When you've got all types of different people playing all types of instruments, and when it's done the right way, it sounds beautiful. And when it's done the wrong way, oh my gosh, how quickly can we get out of that orchestra pit to not hear that ugly, terrible music.

Speaker 1: 13:27

And John, I have encountered quite often when I walk into small businesses where the quotas for salespeople or their objectives are too high. They're unattainable. They should be aggressive yet attainable. They should be aggressive yet attainable. And when they're not attainable, that just puts a real bad shadow over the people who know they can't make the money because they're not hitting the levels that management thinks they should and that's what causes a lot of turnover. And really what you need to do is just develop the compensation plans and the objectives for the salespeople to be aggressive yet attainable. And if it's a new compensation plan, visit it every quarter and just make sure one party or the other is not being taken advantage of and bring that up front as a salesperson signing a compensation plan that we will review it. It could go either way. So just there can be a big impact on culture if objectives are just way out of line.

Speaker 3: 14:24

Do you want to do a little riff on that specific example you just used?

Speaker 1: 14:28

Yeah, what do you mean by?

Speaker 3: 14:30

riff. So, for example, a compensation scheme and quotas for salespeople in an organization that have been set too high, where they're unobtainable which core value is either being supported or being violated by that decision to set that compensation scheme and those quotas in place? That's a good question to ask when that condition exists, because often it's just a mistake. You've taken your best shot at it and it's not working, for whatever reason. How do we resolve that issue? Your core values actually guide you in determining how you resolve that.

Speaker 1: 15:15

Yeah, and it's just. In my opinion, it's just having empathy for everybody and understanding. Now, a lot of times these things are not intentional that the objectives are too high because you could be launching a brand new vertical. It could be a startup. High because you could be launching a brand new vertical, it could be a startup and you really don't have the history to build data to really show you what seasonality is. It's not a good, educated guess, but maybe that does violate a cultural norm in the first place. If you left it in place, that would be a problem if it's not revisited. But when it is revisited, the salesperson, the owner, the general manager, whoever is going to really show that they care for their employees and they want them to make money, and changing it would make all the difference in the world, showing empathy and understanding that these guys are burdened by certain behaviors and if you incent those behaviors in a compensation plan, you could be very successful in both parts.

Speaker 3: 16:18

When Well, let's use the example I'm sorry, just to finish on that when you've made a mistake. Okay, this is a powerful way to reinforce the core values and the culture in the organization is when a leader makes a decision and that decision turns out to be wrong and they own it.

Speaker 2: 16:36

Yes, Yep, exactly, and the impact is. The impact is tremendous. It goes back to that coach speak. When you lose the game, superbowl or whatever it is, the high school regional finals and the coach says that's on me, it's a huge's on me, there's a reason why they're doing that and I hope they truly believe it. I hope it's just not coach speak and they're just not saying it.

Speaker 2: 16:58

I will go one step further. Maybe getting into the part of the business that people don't like to talk about is profitability and top line revenue and those aspects. I just look at sales quota. In your example, scott, of one that says if you're launching a new product, as you gave an example of a lot of times, business owners will put in additional expenses that then they have to recoup based upon top line revenue or reduction of gross excuse me, of your cost of goods sold, so you get the right gross profitability inside of your company.

Speaker 2: 17:33

And I think all too often organizations are thinking about that now, mid March, april, may and not really looking at it in November and October and proper planning, even preferably in the summer the summer of this year, we should be looking at 2025 and how are our expenses going to come out, because, at the end of the day, that's how quotas, in my opinion, are set. We have these set number of expenses, we have this gross margin calculation that gets us a number. We then have to create this level of revenue and they fictitiously come up with that number and say oh, I think, scott, you can sell a million, and Dave, you can sell 1.2, and John, you're going to sell 800,000. That's how we're going to make this work, as opposed to really evaluating your talent, understanding what they're capable of, realizing that if you're launching a new product, there's going to be a lot of nuance to that, a lot of skin, knees and experiences that maybe don't go exactly. As you start that off, and I think we just fictitiously put our finger in the air and hope that we got it right, versus really thoroughly evaluating what our expenses are that are fixed and how capable is our team to produce the level of results that we need?

Speaker 2: 18:46

And then, last but not least, if collaboration or alignment or caring are part of your core values or some flavor of that, why not talk to the salesperson before the new year starts and ask them to build a business plan around what's your level of productivity? You think you can produce this year and how are you going to go about doing that and what are the specific tactics you're going to take? And if you had to set your own quota, what would it be? And have that dialogue, as opposed to, in a lot of cases, this top-down management that happens and I set the quota for the business and you have to hit it salesperson. To me, that's not the kind of culture new age culture that I think a lot of employees are looking for.

Speaker 1: 19:31

Quite frankly, that is the right attitude, John. You got any openings, by the way. I mean, it sounds like you've got a great culture going. We're trying to scale top end, but yeah that's where a lot of our expenses are.

Speaker 2: 19:44

I, as the owner, have to take some concessions as we reinvest in the business and we've modeled all that out quite frankly, and I'm blessed to have a leadership team that cares as much even maybe more about the profitability of the business, because they're educated on it, they understand it, they know the good and bad of a healthy P&L and a well-balanced balance sheet, and that part is profoundly important. Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 1: 20:12

And yeah, I'm going to bring up the gross margin and expenses. I have seen some business owners that will throw a lot of different expenses at reducing the revenue to get to margin, but expenses that are out of control, that the salespeople have no influence over. That can be a real deal breaker. When it comes to culture too, Because there may be a variable expense that goes up and down and they may make less money for selling the same amount of revenue just based off of that expense. So it's really important to consider that.

Speaker 1: 20:48

As you said, as you evaluate expenses and when we talk to the employees at the end of the year, I do the same thing Before I was doing what I'm doing now, working in bigger corporations. I do it top down and it bottoms up, and it's always interesting the bottoms up coming from the salespeople what do you need to survive? What do you think you can do? It always comes in that I can't make it a certain 100, but it usually comes across much higher than the actual quota. That is coming from top down and and then you work with them to try to hit those objectives. Don't have two objectives, but just make sure that, uh, that somewhere in there there's alignment and a lot of input from the sales people. Dave, as you're going into your businesses, do you talk compensation much and would you believe that it does affect some of the core values of companies? So?

Speaker 3: 21:45

compensation of employees definitely comes up as an issue. So compensation of employees definitely comes up as an issue. It is a reflection of the core imagined that the compensation is unfair. That is going to get in the way of whatever it is that you're trying to create in terms of a culture.

Speaker 2: 22:25

Got it. No-transcript, educated questions, I hope, about the comp plan and they're going to realize it's generally unrealistic for me to hit it. Guess what's going to happen CEO is going to be stuck with no sales team and your comp plan is going to get exposed and people are going to quit and not be a part of your organization. I think it's. I think it's part and parcel, it's. It's all integrated to one another and I think the culture the topic that we're discussing is is. You mentioned the word empathy.

Speaker 2: 23:26

I talk about the word collaboration and alignment a lot. Are we aligned on what your quota is for this year and are we aligned on what you believe you need to do and how I can support you as a CEO or issues because when, when they're not doing the things that they committed to, it's easier to have that crucial conversation or create accountability to them as opposed to. I know, as a CEO, I set your quota too high and you're not producing at the level that I think you should, and the reason why is you're not making a hundred cold calls a day. You're only making 50 in order. In order to hit your quota, you got to make 100 cold calls a day and it can't be fictitious, it can't be made up, it can't be done in a non-collaborative way. Top down can happen, but I think groundswell and collaboration and hearing from your customer in this case, your employees and hearing from your customer in this case, your employees on what's realistic, that's part of a culture that allows you, as a CEO, to have an easier job.

Speaker 1: 24:53

And that easier job is based upon a lot of upfront work, core values and cultural rollout. If right now we've been talking compensation plans and how that affects, but is there any other key measure that you can see that might be affected by the bad culture or just core values in general?

Speaker 2: 25:06

I'll give you a few.

Speaker 2: 25:06

Turnover is a huge one If your turnover rate and ratio is way out of whack compared to what your industry is that's a major indication of your culture being off If you're also, your time to fill is kind of a dirty metric in the HR space.

Speaker 2: 25:21

I study this stuff all the time I've been in the staffing business for 20 plus years. Time to fill is kind of a dirty word. But are you having a really difficult time attracting talent inside of your business? Is it not going as expected? And the other key part of that, in my opinion, that's really critical is how much Are you investing in your, in your, in your, in your supervisors or your, your frontline workers to help them become better at their job and create opportunities for them that they can get inside of your business? That's the, that's the investment and employee development and whatnot, if you, if you look at those, those are just a few that are that are, at least in my opinion, great indications of how healthy a culture is. There's a number of others, but we only have a finite amount of time on the show and I'm sure Dave has a couple other thoughts.

Speaker 3: 26:17

Well, turnover is a big one. Oh yeah, and here's the thing and we're talking about culture, employment in organizations, sort of the stand. The basis of employment is convenience. People work in an organization in many cases because it's convenient to work there. They get paid a certain amount of money, you know it fits their lifestyle. They get to go home and have a nice weekend. You know there's a level of security. The problem with convenience-based employment is it does not take much of an improvement in convenience for people to leave. What keeps people working in your organization is a powerful culture, because what you're doing is you're creating meaning for people in their lives. The work actually creates meaning for them and that is a powerful thing. That's going to keep people employed with your organization and they are not going to leave for an improvement in convenience when what they're giving up is getting meaning in their life through their work.

Speaker 1: 27:26

Well said.

Speaker 3: 27:26

Mr Feigner as a little hierarchy of needs. Yeah, so I give an amen to that, dave Feidner.

Speaker 2: 27:30

As will the hierarchy of needs. Yeah, Give an amen to that, Dave. I'm all about that, One of the cool things. I wrote a book that got launched last year and it's called HR Like a Boss Blessed. It was published by SHRM.

Speaker 2: 27:41

Shrm Books the largest HR association in the world and the number one thing I pulled out of writing 70-some thousand words. Well, I actually wrote a hundred thousand words and 30,000 of them were just got awful and couldn't put them in a book. That was. That was one of the benefits of writing a book. I realized how many bad ideas I actually had.

Speaker 2: 27:58

But one of the ideas that stuck with me was purpose, and I'm hoping my next book is called purpose, purpose. Purpose, cause I look at purpose to a business like location to real estate. It is the most important thing that you have inside of your company A clearly defined purpose. I encourage it to be four words or less. It's your organization's aspirational, why You'll never achieve it, and it's something that you're looking to try to do better, to better your community. And the reason it came up to me as I was writing my book.

Speaker 2: 28:28

I saw a number of very high profile CEOs Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos and Warren Buffett spending the majority of the latter half of their professional career, giving away all the money that they earned in the first half of their career. And I think about what would the impact be on the world right now if Bill Gates had cared about the purpose he's aligned with right now when he first started Microsoft, as opposed to 25 to 30 years later. My guess is I know vaccinations in third world countries are a major hotbed for him my guess is that issue in the world may be solved at this time. And I have this funny bit that I share, and maybe, dave, no offense and I think I feel like I'm offending CEOs on this, this podcast, and I am one, so I guess I can do that but most CEOs are unemployable. They don't want to work for someone else, they don't want to work in a traditional job. They don't want to, they don't want to have a boss that becomes a challenge. And number two, they can be selfish people and they're highly motivated by money. They want to make money and I want to do it my way. And it's interesting to see the ones that end up having success and having that epiphany at some point, maybe halfway through their professional career that I was wrong and that the reason why I started my business and where I'm at today is that I want to do good in the world and business is my platform to do that.

Speaker 2: 30:02

And I think a lot of CEOs maybe get so focused on bottom line results, which don't get me wrong, that is important.

Speaker 2: 30:12

But if we looked at the greater good, the bigger picture, and how you as a business owner can impact your community and attack social issues that exist, how you can make your employees feel at work, imagine if you were an employer, that your people wanted to come to work and they enjoyed the work they did and it brought meaning to them. As David said, think about how much easier it would be to recruit people into your business, opposed to looking at the systemic issues that are causing that profit loss statement to either yield the result it does or it's not. And really carefully examining it and to me I love Maya Angela's quote it's not about what you say, it's not about what you do, it's about how you make people feel. And I try to live my life like that every single day at work, at home, when I'm playing golf, when I'm out with buddies or I'm teaching my kids tennis, which I'm terrible at. But that's really important to me, that purpose inside of a business. It's paramount.

Speaker 1: 31:18

Exactly. Oh yeah, john, you've said a CEO needs to look in the mirror when it comes to culture, because it really is established at the top. I sent Steve to the team speed of the leader. Dave, how do you handle when you go into a small and medium-sized business when it's truly obvious that the leader of the company is setting a bad precedent? They've got bad culture. It all starts with him or her. How do you deal with that? How do you tell a CEO their baby's ugly, dave?

Speaker 3: 31:54

You're speaking, something I have recently had to deal with exactly this issue. Okay, I love that.

Speaker 3: 32:00

In the case of that particular leader. I went in and I sat down with him. I looked him in the eye, I told him exactly that. But I also spoke from my own personal experience, because what I saw him doing was something that I had done myself and I had suffered the consequences. So I spoke from experience with him. Now, as it turned out, he didn't change his behavior and I'm no longer working with him, but that was a very, very recent experience.

Speaker 2: 32:34

My guess is Dave. For you I don't know the exact situation but unless that client changed, my assumption is you probably didn't want to work with them of your business are one that say, if they're going to mistreat employees, if they're going to not align to the EOS model that you have and the structure and discipline that's there, and they're unwilling to do it, even though they're willing to pay you a lot of money, I'm guessing your core value was you had to have that conversation because it was part of your decision-making process if you're going to continue to serve that client. Is that true or is that how you felt?

Speaker 3: 33:12

So the companies I work with tend to be purpose-driven and ambitious. So when you lose sight of the purpose, when you can no longer see it and feel it and you have, as we had in this particular instance, a clear set of core values, but they were being violated every single day by the person at the top, what the culture was defaulting to was one of cynicism, and it just started to feel very icky you lose sight of what the good is that was actually there, because this other stuff is going on and turnover was becoming rampant, so you can't at one. You have to be able to walk the talk, and the leader at the top has to be a strong parent for the organization. They have to have that set of core values, they have to repeat them, often using rituals, and then the most important thing is, they have to walk the talk and they have to be willing to own it when they don't.

Speaker 2: 34:19

Yeah, Willing and able and important management skills. I think I'll just add to what Dave shared on that. You asked the question of how do you have that conversation when the CEO is the core issue with a bad culture or air quote in your terms, their baby's ugly. And to me, I think in Dave's case, having empathy, having been there and done that, hopefully put him in a better position to have the discussion To me, ultimately, I want to get to the root cause of what's causing that CEO to act that way and more often than not a lot of CEOs don't want to deal with that. They have to do with their parents, may have to do with their upbringing, may have to do with a bad boss they had at one point and they have suppressed that so far down that they don't want to deal with that and they, quite frankly, don't know how to act any different than the way that they're acting. And I don't know, dave, maybe you feel like at times you're as much a psychologist as you are an EOS coach and I think if you don't get at the root cause issues which really have probably very little to do with work and the skillset that a person has as a CEO, it just has to do with the issues that exist. For you to perpetuate that for an incredibly long time, there's gotta be something a little bit off, in my opinion, and if you're not willing to address those things, then you're making other people's lives miserable, which is one of the main reasons why I wrote my book.

Speaker 2: 35:45

Is this data point that's out there that Gartner puts every single year that shows employee engagement hovering between 33 to 31%, and then it'll change by one point. Gartner will make this big deal. I keep saying to myself still, 70% of people are not engaged at. You want to know why people don't like going to work? They don't feel engaged there, they don't feel their employer cares about them, and it's a terrible recipe, in my opinion, and it has to change. And I know you started off this conversation, scott, with this idea of cultural transformation. Is it rejuvenation, is it a reinvigoration? To me, it needs to be disrupted. However, it needs to be disrupted, and every organization can improve in some form or fashion. Just the ones that are the worst are the ones that we're talking about right now and are the ripest for that kind of change.

Speaker 3: 36:58

Well, one thing that I've seen with leaders and you have to give them a bit of space on this it is very, very difficult for them to be truly objective about what's going on in their own organization. There's a famous Kurt Gödel quote quote uh, mathematician philosopher from the early 20th century that you can't be both part of a system and understand it at the same time. So the job of an outsider like john or myself coming into an organization is to help shine the spotlight of attention on that thing that they cannot see because they're part of it.

Speaker 1: 37:39

Yeah, exactly. Hey the question. John, you mentioned your book earlier. Did you repeat the title and just a little background on it? Because I would very much like to take a look at it based off of the conversation we have. Sounds like you really have embraced culture. You've got a good family to come up with. What's your book called? Again, yeah, thanks Scott. It's like you really have embraced culture. You've got a good running company.

Speaker 2: 37:59

What's your book called again yeah, thanks, scott. It's called HR Like a Boss and it's described as your guide to amazingly awesome HR. I'll go to one key point of it, chapter 14. I call it the money chapter, and I've studied EOS. I've studied scaling up, I studied a bunch of different business operating systems and I was told when I wrote my book that HR professionals which is really who it's written for but also business leaders that are trying to connect their people to the purpose of their business, which is really my definition of HR it's the money.

Speaker 2: 38:32

Chapter 14 is treating your job or your department like your own business. Is treating your job or your department like your own business the two tenets of doing something like a boss, hr in this case, you got to love what you do. You got to take ownership, which aligns really well to what we talked about earlier. But inside of that business plan, I have five main tenets you have to have a purposeful commitment. You got to be people centric. You have to produce on a consistent basis, you have to have process continuity and you have to understand the profitable characteristics of human resources in leveraging people and their talents, as opposed to looking at it like a bane of your existence, which, if you talk to CEOs, if they have their number one complaint, more times than not it's their employees, and I'd love to find a way to change that. One CEO and one business at a time.

Speaker 1: 39:35

Great. I appreciate that. I will definitely look into that. Hr like a boss. Appreciate it. Dave Gino Wickman. Eos in general has come out with a lot of wonderful books, started with Traction I mean. They're all very effective. I have read them all. In your opinion, what has most impacted on the culture? I know all of them do address culture, but what are your thoughts on the books themselves, the one that really stands out the most for you? Probably a loaded question, sorry.

Speaker 3: 40:13

Well, each of the books was for a different purpose. Yeah right, each of the books was for a different purpose, yeah right, and so it was interesting because I was with Gino on Tuesday incidentally I'll do my plug he launched this book on Tuesday in Birmingham Shine. And so the books actually cover the whole spectrum of the journey of entrepreneurism, and the most popular, the one that's sold the most, is obviously Traction, because Traction is the operating system for the company. But the other books are other aspects of that journey. Entrepreneurial Leap is for the individuals considering being an entrepreneur, rocket fuel is the visionary, integrator, dynamic. And then you have traction, but then you also have how to be a great boss. And then later on, you have EOS life, which is literally about living your ideal life. And now you have Shine Okay, which is a whole different level of being. So each of the books is designed for a completely different purpose.

Speaker 1: 41:26

And I'm not as familiar with Shine. Is that out in Polish now, or will that be?

Speaker 3: 41:31

available soon, officially released yesterday actually. So we did the event in Birmingham on Tuesday, did a workshop it's Gino with Rob Dubé, his co-author. We did a workshop with about 70 people on Tuesday.

Speaker 1: 41:47

It was a wonderful event mentioned the job of a CEO should be to delegate work themselves, basically out of a job at an hour, and let the company run efficiently. And that's exactly what the book is. Just set up the organization so you can live the EOS life. That's a good correlation there.

Speaker 3: 42:13

Yeah, so the person at the top has to start living it first, because if they don't, they're holding up everybody else from living it, and they're they're. They're modeling a behavior that they're the rest of the organization is going to model, right exactly?

Speaker 1: 42:28

well, guys? Um, I know we're about ready to wrap it up. We're coming very close to the end of our time. Any parting words on, uh, what you guys are taking maybe like this, practices, or just any in general. Any parting words on cultural?

Speaker 3: 42:43

transformation other than implementing eos in your business. Yeah, there you go.

Speaker 2: 42:48

That's a very good one that is and hiring dave, if you do in that order.

Speaker 2: 42:59

I'd give two things real quick, other than obviously you know leveraging the system and hiring a consultant like Dave to do it. And I think you gave a great perspective of sometimes you're too close to the business to see the challenges or issues that exist and more often than not those are right at the center of it you as the CEO. But I'll go back to that point I made earlier. I think all too often we, whenever and I know EOS has a great job of, I think it's IDS, you call it If you have issues inside of your business, there's a whole process to attacking and reviewing those, and I think that is important. But I think all too often we don't take advantage of the unique opportunities that exist inside of a business. That's the strengths that we have and how do we amplify and lever those more?

Speaker 2: 43:46

I think the squeaky wheel gets the oil. It's kind of that classic if you go to a restaurant you hate and get bad service, you'll tell four times as many people as you will a restaurant that you like and you love the owner and I think just that negative viewpoint of it. I would encourage you to flip it around, not by saying in some form or fashion. You shouldn't address your issues, but give equality to them, meaning attack the issues, amplify the opportunities and the strengths. That's a key part of it. And the last thing I'll say is look yourself in the mirror. If you have an issue in your business or you have an opportunity you're not levering. My guess is it has to do with the CEO.

Speaker 3: 44:24

Appreciate that, dave, any parting words, sir, thank you for having me. I really appreciated having this conversation with both of you, scott and John.

Speaker 1: 44:34

It's a great conversation. I love the topic and I'm excited to learn a lot.