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CULTIVATE THE CULTURE

If you want a great party, invite great people.

—MARCUS BUCKINGHAM

Bestselling author of First, Break All the Rules
(Episode #305, The Learning Leader Show)

THE ESSENCE OF CULTURE

Culture is an intangible, hard-to-define term, especially within a business. Do an informal poll of your colleagues, and you will probably get as many definitions as the number of people you asked. In my experience, culture is the combined essence of the people in the organization. Culture is not the Ping-Pong tables, or the color of the walls, or free snacks. It’s the collective energy of the people on the team, in the organization, and within the business. The way we actually interact—the social system—results from the culture created by the people in it. And unsurprisingly, the leader is vital in setting the culture.

The origin of the word comes from the Latin cultura, which means “cultivate” and “care.”¹ It’s also derived from the Latin word colere, which means “to tend or protect.” But culture means more than the etymology of the word. As anthropologist Clifford Geertz describes it in his book The Interpretation of Cultures, culture is easily confused with social systems. We need to understand them both to fully grasp what we mean when we talk about culture in an organization:

Culture is the fabric of meaning in terms of which human beings interpret their experience and guide their action; social structure is the form that action takes, the actually existing network of social relations. Culture and social structure are then but different abstractions from the same phenomena. The one considers social action in respect to its meaning for those who carry it out, the other considers it in terms of its contribution to the functioning of some social system.²

Whether you’ve been paying attention to it or not, the culture of your team is being built day in and day out. Hopefully, the work of building your culture is intentional, but guess what? Whether it is the product of thoughtful design or mindless inertia, your results will flow from the culture you build. “The culture precedes positive results,” writes Bill Walsh, legendary coach of the San Francisco 49ers and one of the greatest teachers in coaching history. “It doesn’t get tacked on as an afterthought on your way to the victory stand. Champions behave like champions before they’re champions: they have a winning standard of performance before they are winners.”³

According to Daniel Coyle, author of The Culture Code, a great culture is something that can be taught, despite the fact that we tend to think of it as fixed.⁴ We get culture from the people around us. Anthropologist Roy D’Andrade agrees:

A good part of what any person knows is learned from other people. The teaching by others can be formal or informal, intended or unintended, and the learning can occur through observation or by being taught rules. However accomplished, the result is a body of learnings, called culture, transmitted from one generation to the next.⁵

It takes work to create an esprit de corps defined by a feeling of pride, fellowship, and common loyalty shared by its members. The responsibility for doing that work lies with the leader whose name is at the top of the “daily call sheet.” In the movie business, the “daily call sheet” is the term used for the schedule of shots set out for the day’s filming. That schedule informs the various actors when they need to be present on set for their scenes. When you’re the lead in the movie, your scenes do the heavy lifting of the movie’s story, so your shots are usually done first each day. Early in his career, actor John Krasinski received some advice from the legendary Robin Williams about the responsibilities of being “#1 on the call sheet.” Krasinski shared the story with Scott Feinberg, host of The Hollywood Reporter’s podcast, Awards Chatter.

“One day he said to me, ‘I think you’re going to go far in this business, so the only thing I’ll tell you is: one day, you’re going to be #1 on the call sheet. Just know that’s not a luxury. It’s a responsibility, and that your job is to carry a set. So, you have to be the most energetic, you have to be the nicest, you have to be the kindest. Take responsibility. That is such an honor. And don’t ever forget it.’” According to Krasinski, Williams didn’t just preach about the lead’s responsibility. He modeled it. “We were down in Jamaica shooting a scene and he said, ‘You know, for instance, today the air-conditioning went out. But I’m not going to say I’m hot. Because if I’m hot, then the entire crew is hot and then we all sort of go downhill.’”⁶

A great example of how to build and sustain an excellent culture comes from Garry Ridge, CEO of WD-40. Through his time leading a one-product company, he’s never laid off an employee, and his employee retention rate is three times the national average. A global employee opinion survey revealed that a remarkable 93.1 percent of employees at WD-40 are engaged, with 96 percent of them demonstrating trust in their supervisors. “The employees must feel they are in a trusted environment and among people who want them to succeed. We put the responsibility of the employee development on the leader,” Garry told me.⁷

A big piece of WD-40’s culture is the honest vulnerability of its leader. For Garry, the three most important words he learned through his time growing at WD-40 were, “I don’t know.” “As the leader, if you accept the fact that you will not know everything and surround yourself with a competent team and empower them to share their knowledge, it can create that magical culture we are looking for. I always listen with the intent of being influenced.” He listens with an open mind, empowering his team to know that they can make a difference and have an impact on the business. In Garry’s words, “I never lose. I either win or learn. At WD-40, we don’t make mistakes. We have learning moments, and my big learning moment was, micromanagement was not scalable. And if we want to take this very beautiful blue and yellow can with a red top to the world, we had to build a culture based around a very clear ‘why’ do we exist, a set of values that set people free, and some strategic drivers that were easy to understand. And that’s what we did. And now through the work of great people, we went from a market cap of $250 million, to now $1.6 billion.”⁸

Garry proves that, in a competitive, tough market, being a people first leader was not only possible, but was the optimal way to operate. He was faced with challenging financials and refused to solve problems through layoffs. He innovated his way to prosperity and vowed to have ‘at least one more employee’ after going through the tough times. His mantra is “I’m not here to mark your paper, I’m here to help you get an A. I do not build failure into the mentoring of employees. Instead, I create a culture that encourages knowledge sharing and nonstop learning. The employees must feel they are in a trusted environment and among people who want them to succeed. We put the responsibility of the employee development on the leader.” He did not assume that people were disposable assets to be shed in tough times.

EARNING THE RIGHT TO LEAD

In his video outlining the “secrets to great public speaking,” TED curator Chris Anderson describes an idea as information encoded in a person’s brain by a pattern of interconnected neurons.⁹ The process of sharing ideas is a process of recreating that same pattern in the minds of your audience. To do that effectively, Anderson argues, you must do some work up front. “Before you can start building things inside the minds of your audience, you have to get their permission to welcome you in.”¹⁰ Speaking coach Lance Salyers tells his clients, “You have to earn the right to get inside your audience’s heads. When they give you permission to do so, we call that ‘paying attention.’”

The same is true for leading others.

Being “the boss” is not enough to command the attention and buy-in of the people you lead. Before you can start partnering with the members of your team to build the culture you want, you have to start by earning their respect. According to Inc. magazine, 86 percent of employees believe their productivity increases when they like their boss. The problem, however, is that three out of four employees identify dealing with their boss as the worst part of their jobs.¹¹

One of the things I am most proud of about my experience playing quarterback at all levels was the effort I put into earning the respect of my teammates. As the first ever freshman to be named the starting quarterback for the varsity team at Centerville High School, I experienced at a young age the challenge of being the new leader of an experienced team. To do that, I was focused on showing up early, working incredibly hard, saying few words, being generous in sharing credit and always willing to accept the blame. Once I had built a year’s worth of a track record, then I began to grow into my role as a more vocal leader. Heading into my sophomore year, coaches Bob Gregg and Ron Ullery told me it was time for me to “find my voice.” “It’s time,” they told me, “you’ve proven yourself on the field. You’ve produced. Now you need to lead with your play and your voice.”

I took that same approach to earning the respect of my teammates when I headed off to college. Two days after my last game as a Centerville Elk, I committed to attend Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. I called assistant coach Ron Johnson at Miami and said, “I want to move to Oxford the day after I graduate high school and work out with the returning players.” At the time, this was not something that incoming freshmen did.

“Are you sure? Don’t you want to enjoy your last summer before college?” Coach Johnson sounded incredulous at the thought.

“No, I have goals, and I will not reach those goals working out on my own away from my future teammates. I want to be with them.” (By the way, now this is very common, as almost all incoming freshman athletes are expected to be on campus immediately after they finish high school). My pitch worked: the coach agreed and connected me with some teammates with whom I could stay.

The day after I graduated from high school, my dad and younger brother drove me to Oxford. With mist in all our eyes, we said our goodbyes outside what was, even then, a dirty college house. I was now “in college,” and would be sleeping on a spare mattress in the bedroom of two of my new teammates. I made this sacrifice because I had two primary goals during that summer that I thought would help me achieve my ultimate goal of becoming the starting quarterback at Miami. First, I wanted to earn respect with my work and not my words. I wanted to show my future teammates that I would be at every workout, working as hard as I possibly could right alongside them to get ready for the upcoming season. Second, I wanted to learn all of their names.

As a leader, you need to be able to look the people you lead in the eye and say the most beautiful word in the world to them: their name. And this is what I did. By the end of the summer, I had achieved those goals. I had built genuine friendships with my new teammates and had earned their respect as the only freshman who left his hometown two and a half months early to endure the hot days of summer work with them.

THE ELEMENTS OF RESPECT

Greg Meredith is the owner and president of Lee Plastic, a full-service plastic injection molding company in southwest Ohio. He is also a friend and colleague (LexisNexis & Brixey & Meyer). Greg and I have spent many brainstorming sessions discussing what it means to be an excellent leader, including the fundamental topic of how to earn respect. In mapping out a list of the keys to earning respect, Greg and I defined respect as regarding someone with high esteem because he or she has been deemed worthy. Over the course of time, we settled on the following seven keys:

   Demonstrate competence. You possess the necessary and critical skills required to lead in your organizational context.

   Exhibit conviction. You display assurance that the chosen course of action will lead to positive results.

   Set high standards. You aim high, both for yourself and your team.

   Listen to your team. You listen to feedback and you incorporate that feedback appropriately.

   Work hard. You put in the time and effort necessary to get the job done.

   Do the difficult. You do the hard things, like holding people accountable, confronting bad behavior, and staying true to your values even when it hurts.

   Be consistent. Your words, actions, decisions, and investments are in alignment.

RESPECT DEFINED

In 1940, then Lieutenant Colonel Eisenhower was a career Army officer with a good but unspectacular record. By the end of 1943, however, Eisenhower had ascended to the role of supreme allied commander in Europe, having been promoted through the ranks of colonel, brigadier general, major general, lieutenant general, and general in less than four years. He became a two-term president of the United States.

What drove this unprecedented rise? Eisenhower earned the respect of his commanders, his troops, and ultimately the citizens of the United States.

Demonstrate competence. Eisenhower excelled in the Louisiana maneuvers, a prewar exercise undertaken by more than 400,000 troops. This exercise revealed his talent for strategic planning and earned him an assignment in DC to work on US war plans. From there he had several critical assignments in support of the war efforts. This led to Eisenhower commanding the allied troops that invaded North Africa in Operation Torch, which earned him the right to command the invasions of Sicily and Italy, which in turn positioned him to be the supreme allied commander responsible for the D-Day invasion of Normandy. At each step along the way, Eisenhower proved his competence.

Exhibit conviction. Eisenhower consistently exhibited the confidence of his convictions and his chosen course of action. This confidence was on display when he frequently fought for contrarian positions. In 1920, he published an article “advocating that the Army make better use of tanks to prevent a repetition of the static and destructive trench warfare of World War I. But army authorities considered Eisenhower insubordinate rather than visionary and threatened him with a court-martial if he again challenged official views on infantry warfare.”¹² In 1945, when President Truman was considering using the atomic bomb on Japan, Eisenhower took the dissenting view that it was unnecessary and threatened the goodwill that the United States had built up around the world.

Set high standards. Eisenhower’s son David, also a career military man, eventually quit playing bridge with his father because he was such a demanding partner. Keeping up with Eisenhower was a challenge because of the high standards he set for himself and those around him. He had a high capacity for strategy and operations, and he worked to ensure that those around him met his standards.

Listen to the team. As supreme allied commander, Eisenhower had to deal with some of the strongest personalities in world history. British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, American Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry Truman, Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin, and a host of other military and civilian leaders were constantly seeking an audience with him. Eisenhower was able to listen to their concerns, balance their competing interests, and incorporate the most relevant feedback to deliver victory.

Work hard. Eisenhower’s parents worked hard to feed and clothe their family of seven boys. In addition to the daily chores each brother was assigned, all of the Eisenhower boys found ways to earn extra money to help support the family. Young Dwight worked various jobs, from selling vegetables and his mother’s hot tamales door-to-door, to laboring as a farmhand and working for several years at the Belle Springs Creamery. He managed these jobs while earning good grades in school and participating in sports and community activities, and this work ethic prepared him for military and presidential greatness.

Do the difficult. “Eisenhower had to take an unpopular step when he relieved his old friend George Patton as military governor of Bavaria because of the general’s violation of orders against using former Nazis in government positions.”¹³ Eisenhower didn’t shrink from making a tough call.

Be consistent. As president, the former army general was anything but a warmonger. In fact, Eisenhower worked tirelessly to create and ensure peace. He created an armistice that ended the Korean War and consistently deescalated rising Cold War tensions with the Soviet Union. His actions and decisions as president were consistently in the direction of building an enduring peace.

If you’ve done the work to earn the respect of your team, you will then be in a position to start building a culture you want to have. It’s so important to have your team’s partnership and buy-in on this effort. No matter how capable a leader you are in theory, you can’t build a team or organizational culture by yourself.

While there are undoubtedly many different components to building a healthy, performing culture, there are three in particular that I value the most: trust, vulnerability, and ownership. When a work environment is set up with these three elements at its core, it creates a group of people who feel they can excel and take responsibility for the outcome of their endeavors.

TRUST

Trust is the foundation for everything you will do with your team. Yes, you will have to earn it, but it doesn’t stop there. Equally important, and maybe even harder to do: you will have to learn to trust your team members. When you attain a leadership position, you are likely facing one of two challenges: you are either stepping into a position that some of your teammates wanted and competed for, or you are coming into a completely new team that doesn’t know you well.

In the first scenario, how you’ve acted leading up to your promotion to a leadership position is very telling. If you’ve been a trustworthy coworker, it’s a fair assumption that you will be able to gain the trust of your teammates quickly. Even assuming some of your team members are harboring feelings of resentment or envy, hopefully, you’ve earned their respect as a colleague.

Regardless of your entry point, as the new manager you will have to build trust and overcome the skepticism that’s resulted from previous bad experiences. It’s not unlike dating; when you start dating someone who has just come out of a bad relationship, you have an uphill battle to climb because that person will be less willing to trust someone new.

It’s not just you. According to a 2016 survey, one in three employees don’t trust their employer.¹⁴ Stop and think about that for a second. No matter how good the play is that the coach calls in from the sideline, if three or four of the eleven players on the field don’t trust the coach’s judgment, that play is going to lose almost every time. The reasons for this widespread lack of trust in company management are both obvious and under the surface. According to management consultant Sue Bingham:

Employees who don’t trust their managers usually point to big-picture, obvious things: Their superiors skate the edges of ethical behavior, hide information, take credit for others’ hard work, or flat-out deceive people. . . .

Less-obvious causes of distrust tend to originate from the traditional environments in which leaders have been mentored than from specific behaviors of well-meaning managers. For example, traditional leadership training often focused on rule enforcement, which is akin to parent-child communication and not how trustworthy adults function. Today, leaders in high-performance workplaces don’t write policies around the few bad apples; instead, they expect people to act in the best interests of the company and one another.¹⁵

Although Bingham doesn’t mention Richard Branson by name in her Harvard Business Review article, what she describes is the leadership philosophy by which he runs his Virgin companies. “I think you should treat your people in the same way that you treat your family. You should have policies that follow through with that,” Branson told Stephen Dubner on the Freakonomics podcast.¹⁶ If team members want flexible work arrangements or the opportunity to work from home or abroad, give it to them, Branson argued. “People will give everything back if you give them the flexibility and treat them like adults.” When Dubner asked how policies of flexibility lead to loyalty and productive results, Branson replied simply, “Because they feel trusted.”¹⁷ That said, depending on the work, sometimes it makes sense for the entire team to be in the office every day. Use your best judgment.

From the TED stage in 2011, retired four-star general Stanley McChrystal shared the story of failing during a command training operation at the Ft. Irwin National Training Center located in California’s Mojave Desert. During the exercise, the company under McChrystal’s command got “wiped out—I mean wiped out immediately. The enemy didn’t break a sweat doing it.”¹⁸ As he was preparing to get verbally ambushed by his battalion commander as part of the after-action review, McChrystal was surprised instead. His battalion commander said, “Stanley, I thought you did great.” And in that one sentence, he lifted McChrystal back up and taught him that “leaders can let you fail, and yet not let you be a failure.” For McChrystal, “a leader isn’t good because they’re right. They’re good because they’re willing to learn and to trust.”¹⁹ When I got to interview General McChrystal and ask him about the accelerating nature of trust among people and teams, here’s how he answered:²⁰

Trust decreases transaction costs. . . . That’s true in every organization. In the Pentagon, for example, it’s full of really good people trying to get a good outcome. . . . A simple action can sometimes be just frighteningly painful. And the problem is, there’s no evil person in this. They’re just all trying to make sure they do due diligence. The problem is, you do due diligence long enough, and the opportunity passes, or the risk has already come and bitten you. So you’ve got to have this balance between how much risk you accept, and then how do you mitigate some of that. And some of that is in the trust. You develop trust bonds between people.

As a new manager, I worked hard to lead with trust, even though taking this approach meant opening myself up to getting burned from time to time. I have chosen not to be skeptical about whether people are lying to me. I live my life believing in the good in people because I think it’s a healthier way to be. If I get burned, this creates problems, of course, and I deal with them when they arise. But I will rarely go into a relationship skeptical of someone’s intentions.

Anabel Jensen, founding president of SixSeconds.org, said, “We can’t be nonjudgmental. Our brains are wired to continuously make judgments. What we can do is notice the assumptions we’re making, and reopen the case by staying curious.”²¹ Stephen M. R. Covey, author of The Speed of Trust, takes it a step further: “Given our brain’s innate tendency to make assumptions, why not start with positive intent?” He goes on to say, “If we learn to assume positive intent as a start in any interaction, we’ll see the world in a different light. I learned this from Indra Nooyi, the CEO of PepsiCo, one of the great leaders I’ve met. She said, the single greatest learning in her life was something she learned from her father, and that is this: to always assume positive intent.”²²

Is there risk involved in assuming positive intent or leading with trust? Absolutely, there is. But Covey writes, “If we don’t trust people, how will we engage them, innovate, create, inspire, be a team? You can trust too much and get burned, but you can also not trust enough, and you wouldn’t see the possibilities.”²³

VULNERABILITY

“Vulnerability sounds like truth and feels like courage,” says researcher and author Brené Brown. “Truth and courage aren’t always comfortable, but they’re never weakness.” Neither, then, is vulnerability.

Kat Cole, former president of Cinnabon and now the chief operating officer of Cinnabon’s parent company, Focus Brands, is a wonderful example of this. After having the privilege of recording great conversations with over 300 top leaders and performers, my conversation with Kat remains among my favorites. During our talk, Kat explained how she quickly built trust by sharing vulnerabilities every time she went to a new country to open a restaurant:

I think because I had to start traveling at such a young age and leading teams that I had never met, you learn the real trick to building trust. The real trick to building trust is giving trust, and one of the surest signs of giving trust is being vulnerable and telling people about yourself and being willing to be judged. And I had to do that because I had to get to know people quickly, which meant I had to let them get to know me. And so I learned, I literally evolved over time, that when I go into a place and a team I’ve never met and I tell them my story, all of a sudden, I’m not just the boss coming in to lead the training, to lead the opening; I’m Kat, who grew up in a single-parent home, who dropped out of college, and who has worked really hard for what she has. And that’s a totally different filter through which to view someone. And so I had to do it by necessity to build trust.²⁴

Connecting with your team requires vulnerability because, as Jayson Gaignard says, “Relationships move at the speed of vulnerability.” Vulnerability is about connection. People connect more with those who are open and willing to share where they’re weak. I experienced this firsthand with one of my favorite bosses, Dustyn Kim. She was never scared to tell us the full truth even if it made her look weak or emotional. It made me want to follow her. It made me want to do a good job for her because of her willingness to be so open and honest by sharing her real feelings and thoughts. Among her many assets as a leader, Dustyn’s willingness to be vulnerable was, in my mind, her leadership superpower.

I try to practice this in both my leadership life and my podcast interviewing work. If I want someone to tell me their life story, I must be willing to open up about mine. For example, early in the life of my podcast, I was interviewing Brady Quinn. Brady is best known as the former star quarterback at the University of Notre Dame, first round draft pick of the Cleveland Browns, and now football broadcaster.

Leading with vulnerability, I shared a story about my failures when I played quarterback. It was a 90-second story that unwittingly changed the dynamic of the conversation. Because I was willing to go to a place where we could talk about things that are uncomfortable, I made it OK for him to go there. And then he shared one of the most emotional and impactful quotes I had heard in years. He said, “Broadcasting a game from the TV booth (instead of being on the field playing) was like watching the love of my life marry another guy.”²⁵

As the leader, we must work to create a safe place for our team members to share truth. In order to gain trust, we must give trust, and the quickest way to build trust is to share your own vulnerabilities. The key to making it OK to be vulnerable is establishing an environment of “psychological safety.” Dr. Amy Edmondson, a professor at Harvard Business School, defines psychological safety as “a climate in which people are comfortable being (and expressing) themselves.”²⁶ Edmondson’s research has illustrated the correlation between psychological safety and the better outcomes of quality improvements, behavioral learning, and increased productivity. An internal study conducted by Google found that teams with high rates of psychological safety were better than other teams at implementing diverse ideas and driving high performance.²⁷ They were also more likely to stay with the company. To give you added incentive, think of building a culture of vulnerability this way: by improving the way your teammates see their work environment, you would realize a significant reduction in turnover and in safety incidents, and an increase in productivity.

To build an environment of psychological safety, Jake Herwa, subject matter expert at Gallup, recommends asking yourself these four questions:

   “What can we count on each other for?

   “What is our team’s purpose?

   “What is the reputation we aspire to have?

   “What do we need to do differently to achieve that reputation and fulfill our purpose?”²⁸

OWNERSHIP

Creating a sense of empowerment in your team members is vital to the success of the team overall. It isn’t just a fluffy buzzword that has little effect on the bottom line. A recent study found that disengaged workers had 37 percent higher absenteeism, 60 percent more errors, 18 percent lower productivity, 16 percent lower profitability, and 65 percent lower share price over time, among other negative results.²⁹

It’s very simple: people don’t feel ownership if you tell them what to do. According to Gallup, only three in ten US workers strongly agree that at work, their opinions seem to count.³⁰ Retired United States Navy Captain David Marquet explains why this matters from his experience commanding the nuclear missile submarine USS Santa Fe. When Marquet took command of the Santa Fe, it was the worst-performing boat in the submarine fleet by multiple measures: performance ratings, crew reenlistment rates, and the number of officers who graduated to their own command positions. By the time Marquet handed the Santa Fe over to a new commander, it was the top-rated submarine in the US Navy.

According to Marquet, the key to this turnaround was in changing the way the Santa Fe operated from a “knowing and telling” organization to a “knowing and asking” organization.³¹ If you’re the kind of manager who tells your team what to do from the position that you know everything that’s necessary and you know the right way to do it, you’ve created a “knowing and telling” culture. On the other hand, if you create a “knowing and asking” organization, you might know the answer and the direction you prefer your team takes, but you let your team discover that for themselves through dialog and encouraging questions. Instead of telling your team what to do, you give them the opportunity to figure it out on their own.

Think back to the last time you worked for an organization where you were told what to do and exactly how to do it every day. Did you feel any ownership in the work or in the outcome? Probably not. The most successful teams are made of people who have ownership over their decisions and their actions.

Empowering your team means that you’re able to give them responsibilities and let them run with them, and then help them learn and grow from the experience after. And it isn’t just the hard or unpleasant work that you need to learn to hand off to your team, but the plum assignments as well. In 2010, researchers found that leaders who were not only considered fair but also self-sacrificing inspired employees to be more loyal and committed themselves.³² When employees feel loyalty, they are far more likely to be friendly and helpful toward other employees, which creates a self-reinforcing cycle. When leaders show they are willing to sacrifice themselves for the benefit of the team, employees are more productive and view their leader as effective and charismatic. While empowerment is the idea, effective delegation is the tactical way to realize the idea.

If you’re used to being an individual contributor, the idea of delegation may feel counterintuitive. Empowering someone else to do the work is difficult if you feel they won’t do it as well as you can. And often, they can’t—at least not initially. However, your goal is to scale your team, your business, and your group beyond you. It won’t ever scale beyond you if you never give your team the opportunity to rise to the challenge, to fail, and to learn. They may do it on a level that is not nearly as high as yours at first, but that gives you the opportunity to provide a critical feedback loop that will lead to improvement.

Additionally, it’s important to empower high-potential people to lead training and coaching sessions. When I saw high-potential leaders, I made a habit of pulling them in to train newer team members. I gave them the opportunity to do the coaching and teaching, and then gave them feedback afterward.

Occasionally, I also selected teammates to lead group trainings and meetings. I might select the topic, but it was up to them to create the agenda and method of teaching. This created ownership among the team and primed them to become managers themselves, if that’s what they wanted. Instead of relying on the leader to answer questions, are you empowering team members to make the decision and move on, within their project, within their assigned delegated task?

Ultimately, good delegation means eliminating bottlenecks and increasing the speed of growth of your team. In his bestselling book One Mission, former Navy SEAL Chris Fussell explains that on the battlefield, your team will be slow if they constantly have to radio back to their superiors asking for permission or direction.³³ Speed is crucial, whether it is on the battlefield or in the marketplace. Decentralized command and empowerment (empowering your team to make decisions without you) are imperative to your long-term success.

Tips for Delegation

   Start with an in-person conversation if you’re in the same office. If not, set up a video conference.

   Schedule regular checkpoints and follow-ups throughout the project.

   Keep those meetings and make yourself available for guidance and feedback.

   Establish the best communication tool for questions that arise (email, team messaging apps like Slack, etc.)

   Set an end date/accomplishment point for the project.

   Hold an after-action review to give feedback.

   Document the after-action review.

Documentation of the framework is a critical aspect to ensure all team members know your thoughts and expectations for a task. This becomes vital if you find yourself having to put your team member on a performance improvement plan down the road. If they didn’t complete the task or accomplish the goal, this will become part of their review. Whether it’s positive, average, or negative feedback, it should never come as a surprise, so write it down. (Take it from someone who learned this the hard way. I initially didn’t document those conversations, and it came back to bite me when human resources wanted my documentation to back up a firing decision.)

Managing your team is similar to parenting in that your goal is to teach your team so well that they eventually don’t need you. A great example of this comes from Mike Krzyzewski, the head basketball coach at Duke University. I asked Steve Wojciechowski, one of his former players (and assistant coaches), why Coach K’s assistant coaches routinely become great head coaches.³⁴ Krzyzewski is known for turning out great assistants who go on to lead their own successful teams. Wojciechowski said that Krzyzewski is the best delegator he’d ever seen. “He gives us specific parts of the game plan and we have 100 percent ownership over it—leading up to the game, in the game, and after the game,” he said. Krzyzewski coaches his assistants afterward and helps them grow. The combination of trust and ownership leads these assistants to become head coaches in a short amount of time. That’s the mark of a phenomenal leader: creating more leaders.

COMPETITION AS CULTURE

When I entered the business world as a sales representative, our culture was extremely competitive. The sales organization “stack rankings” were posted daily for all to see. The transparency of seeing each person’s individual performance vs. their goals served to pit everyone against each other to drive revenue for the company. This is a fairly normal, even typically encouraged approach for a sales organization to take. It was all about competing with one another, posting the biggest numbers, being the best on the team. In fact, with that dynamic at work, you could hardly call it a team at all. We had little interest in working together or helping one another if it meant someone else got better numbers.

Competition can breed excellence, and I’m no stranger to intense competition. I may have performed well in that environment, but I could see the toll it took on people, and I knew it wasn’t the kind of environment I wanted to be in long-term. Some went overboard in their enthusiasm to beat their teammates. I vividly remember one sales rep who was trying to close a big deal that would vault him to number one on the stack rankings. He was so excited when he got the deal that was equal to three months of his quota that he yelled and celebrated his success in his cubicle—but he was the only one celebrating. Nobody else was happy about him getting the deal.

I know it seems odd to think that nobody on his team was happy for his success, but that was the competitive nature of the culture and the environment. There was a zero-sum set up, meaning if he won, I (and everyone else) lost. Nobody else on the team benefited from his success. This created a “taking” culture in which there was very little knowledge sharing. When someone had success, they usually kept the insights into how they’d succeeded to themselves.

As much as it embarrasses me to admit, I played a role in perpetuating this environment because I saw no advantage to being a team player. Looking back, I believe some of this stemmed from my experience in college competing with Ben Roethlisberger to be the starting quarterback at Miami University. That was a zero-sum dynamic as well. If he won (which he ultimately did), I lost. He got to play, and as a result, I did not. No matter who you are and how good you think you are, there can only be one quarterback on the field taking the snap.

I learned as I matured and had the good fortune of excellent mentors (both in person and through books) that there was a better way. After realizing how frustrated I was by the big deal scored by my teammate, the lessons of those mentors snapped into place. I realized that there were other ways to get individuals to perform at their best. I decided that when I got to lead my own team in the future, I would create a different culture for that team to thrive in. With an eye toward that future vision of being a team leader, I started behaving differently right then as a teammate. I volunteered to mentor others, help teach them what I’d learned, and share best practices that contributed to my success. I wanted to foster a good working environment from within and create an ever-expanding ripple effect outward to the rest of the organization.

Choosing a Different Culture

When I eventually became the manager of the team, I set out to create a culture in which everyone could thrive and feel supported. The culture I wanted to build would be sustainable and enjoyable, and the team members would feel as if they were actually on a team, instead of just a group of individuals who were trying to beat each other.

I’ve played on winning teams, and I’ve played on losing teams. I’ve played for good coaches and for bad coaches. The best teams I’ve ever been on, whether it’s in business or sports, are those in which the players cared deeply for one another, rooted for each other’s success, and held each other accountable. In addition to talent and work ethic, the camaraderie of the teams I played on was the greatest determining factor of our success. I wanted to instill that kind of camaraderie into my work environment and my team. The best teams I’ve ever been part of had members that were empowered to lead by the coaches (or the bosses). These teams were player-led teams in which each person was held accountable for their performance by their peers, not just the boss or coach.

The change had to start with the people on the team: the who. When I stepped into my first manager role, our team had three open positions out of 15 sales territories. Running a sales team at 80 percent capacity can be devastating because of the lack of sales in the open territories, but I viewed it as an opportunity to bring in new people to start reshaping the culture, people who had high integrity and great attitudes to go with their ability to perform. My first two hires were grinders, very hardworking people who made up for any lack of talent in their willingness to persevere and improve on a daily basis. They were also teachers, and they took a lot of time to help the people around them. They were family-oriented individuals who demonstrated the same care to their teammates as they did to their families. They quickly became team leaders; they were involved in hiring, training, and building the culture.

The team formed a unique identity from within, and members exhibited pride in being on the team. The team chose a name—Team Hawk—and we hired a designer to create our very own logo, a hawk with a rusty sword. The rusty sword symbolized that our team was full of grit; we were grinders and willing to do what was necessary to succeed. It took on a life of its own after our leaders upheld and amplified our message. In meetings and at company outings, there were often speeches given by the leaders telling the origin story of our team, why it was unique and special, and what it took to be a part of it.

It was with this spirit of team pride and genuine support for each other that we created a “Stanley Cup” trophy using coffee cans and aluminum foil. This oversized trophy was passed along to the top performing rep each month. The winner got their name and picture added to The Cup, which sat on their desk. At the end of each month, we celebrated the cup winner as a team. There was genuine excitement for a first-time cup winner and healthy, happy competition. One of the most gratifying achievements as a leader was seeing the genuine emotions team members had for one another even as they competed with each other. This all started with the who, the people of the team, and their willingness to be givers and to truly uphold the values that we’d created. This is why the hiring process is vital to the long-term success of a team. All these small but important gestures drove the culture forward. (The team members are still good friends to this day.)

From then on, everyone that we brought on to the team contributed to its culture. Naturally, there were those who didn’t like this change and didn’t appreciate the new direction of the team. That was OK; they just weren’t the right fit any longer, and they eventually left for new opportunities. For a while, the team’s turnover increased because of the change in the cultural dynamic, but the end result was a group of people who all bought in and did their part to maintain a healthy, supportive, performing culture.

To foster the bond of trust and vulnerability within the members of our team, we needed to build actual relationships with each other beyond just being work colleagues. That meant I needed to be more intentional about our team gatherings and trainings. I found that when people got to know each other and learned about each other’s families, personalities, and interests, they tended to communicate better with each other, feel more compassion for one other, and experience an increased desire to see everyone succeed. We traveled to Cincinnati Reds games together in a rented bus. We went to the horse track together, we saw movies together, and we did community service together. These activities built camaraderie among teammates. When you know someone on a personal level, outside of working together, you are better able to relate to them as your teammate instead of as your competition.

Ultimately, you want everyone to recognize that the team’s culture is their culture, and that they each have a responsibility to maintain that culture through the choices they make, the behaviors they adopt, and by speaking up when others aren’t doing the same. In my conversation with General Stanley McChrystal, he told the story of a young soldier in a unique battalion in the Army Rangers regiment who embodied this principle:³⁵

This unit was unlike any I’d been in before. It was very interesting. It was a very strict chain of command, in terms of rank and whatnot. But the standards of the organization were even more powerful than the rank structure. . . . I got there as a new captain, and I think I had been there just a couple of days. And a specialist—an E-4, a corporal equivalent, who is four to five ranks below me—came up to me and corrected me. I think I had my hands in my pockets or something like that. And he walked up to me and said, “Sir, we don’t do that here.”

I never would’ve seen that in another kind of unit. One, because people would’ve just been too intimidated to do it. But, on the other hand, what we had there was a culture that said, “The standards apply to everyone, and everyone is responsible for making sure everyone else follows the standards.” And so, this young specialist was absolutely right. I remember I was embarrassed when he did it, but I also said, “Guess what? I will never do that again because I’m gonna live to the standards that we all have here.” I think that “truth to power” creates a place . . . not only where people feel comfortable doing it, but they feel like they have to do it.

We Want Givers

Adam Grant’s book Give and Take introduced me to the research showing why givers (those who like to give more than they get) end up being more successful than takers (those who like to get more than they give) or matchers (those who maintain a balance of give and take, or quid pro quo) over the course of their careers. Grant’s book also explored why a team full of givers would create the ideal environment for high performance and job satisfaction, thus making it a place where people would love to come to work. Givers are focused more on the success of the group rather than just the self. This mentality inspires trust in the motives of each person and creates an environment where there is an ample amount of best practice sharing without fear of exploitation (a taker stealing credit) or retaliation (when takers immediately criticize any idea that is not their own). How do we promote a giving culture? Highlight and reward giving behavior; set the standard by modeling the behavior with your actions. Be giving to other leaders in the organization outside of your team. Make it easy for people to give. It’s all about environment design and reducing the friction for the behavior that will be most helpful. Initially set low bars for success and shine a bright light on the giving behavior. Make takers feel like it’s time to make a change or time to leave.

Another major component I focused on was celebrating wins both big and small. Although I didn’t think much about doing this when I first started out in my career, I had to learn to do it on a regular basis, both for myself and for my team. Celebrating wins became a big part of what we did as a team. I sent celebration emails to the team about an employee’s big win, and then I would ask that individual to share how he or she did it. This not only gave that person credit and public applause, but it put them in a position to teach what they had learned from the process. If another teammate can take something from their success and use it in their own work, then it becomes a win for everyone. It was a telltale sign if a team member didn’t like the emails; it usually meant they weren’t up for the challenge of playing for a team. Gone were the days of employees celebrating alone in their cubicles.

We also celebrated when we met our team objectives. We set a team goal every month, and when we hit it, we would have a party. It’s healthy to take time to celebrate. Teresa Amabile from Harvard Business School conducted studies on the effect of tracking small wins in performance. Teresa and her research team analyzed nearly 12,000 diary entries from 238 employees across seven companies. They found that tracking small achievements increased motivation by boosting self-confidence.³⁶

If you and your team are just grinding forever, you’ll quickly lose sight of the point—not to mention you’ll see a higher likelihood of burnout in your employees. Toxic work environments affect more than just your confidence. Not only does this impact performance and job attendance, but poor health amounts to higher costs for both the employer and the employee. If you can develop a group of people who are genuinely happy for each other’s success, trust goes up, the team becomes more cohesive, and job satisfaction improves.

PERCEPTION RULES

One of the interesting things that changes when you become a manager is the perception others have of you. This is particularly important if you have been promoted within your current company; more so if you’ve been selected to lead the team that you were once a member of. The instant that you become the manager, you are viewed differently than how you were as an individual contributor, whether you want to be or not. To build your new team’s culture effectively, you cannot ignore this reality.

I am a person who craves feedback—the more specific, the better. When I say something that someone disagrees with, I want them to tell me so and I want to know why. I’ve understood these moments as opportunities to improve myself for as long as I can remember. When I became a new manager, I took for granted that my team would know this remained true about me and that they would continue to act accordingly. I was wrong.

Once, in a team meeting, I shared what I thought about an idea that had come up during the discussion. I gave my feedback and then asked my team, “What do you think? Is there a better way to do this, or should we go this route?” I asked with absolute sincerity. My team looked at me . . . and nodded. “Yeah, that is good,” they said. I thought nothing of it, and we concluded the meeting.

Later in the day, a member of the team I was particularly close with came to me privately and said, “We have a problem. There are a few people on the team who were not happy with that meeting.” “What are you talking about?” I responded. “I asked for their thoughts, and nobody said anything.” I genuinely didn’t see how these two facts—the team’s silence in the meeting and their unhappiness with it—could both be true at the same time.

“Ryan, not everyone feels comfortable disagreeing with you. You are their boss.” I was shocked. Why would they not feel comfortable disagreeing with me? I openly talked about my desire for a collaborative environment in which my team could share their true beliefs. And yet, it wasn’t happening. As I thought more about what I was being told, I realized my oversight. I had done a poor job of understanding the situation from their vantage point. It turns out that the people on the team who did not feel comfortable speaking up had come from other jobs at which doing so always brought negative consequences. So they kept quiet, not wanting to risk history repeating itself.

Clearly, I needed to do better at considering each person’s perception, understanding why they felt that way, and acting accordingly. It was a tough lesson to learn early on, but it forced me to get better. Don’t assume you have the culture you want. Don’t assume that everyone immediately feels comfortable disagreeing with their boss, even if you are explicitly inviting them to do so. People usually have reasons for behaving the way they do. It’s your job as their leader to understand those reasons and respond in the most effective way possible to move forward as a team.

PUTTING THESE IDEAS INTO ACTION

Here are three practical suggestions for a new manager to begin building the kind of team culture you’ve read about in this chapter.

Get to know your team. It is imperative that you spend time with each person on your team. If your group is spread over a wide geography, this can be a daunting task. Know this before accepting the job. Your intention for these initial meetings is to listen, to learn, and to get to know each member of your team on a personal level. This happens in formal and informal settings. Meet in business/office settings where you discuss their work: what they do, how they do it, why they do it, their history, their ideas/thoughts on the future, etc. But make sure to also meet over a few meals at which there is no work talk. Get to know them as a person: their family life, their hobbies, what they are interested in.

Let your people get to know you. Be willing to share about yourself. The biggest fear associated with having a new manager is uncertainty. Help alleviate that fear by opening up and sharing more about yourself, your philosophy, your family, your history. Getting to know your team and having them get to know you takes time, effort, and careful thought. It is worth it. Your team will not care about your business philosophy or strategy if they don’t care about you. And they won’t care about it if they don’t know that you care about them as human beings.

Always see people as people. Do not use phrases like “human capital,” “head count,” or “FTEs” (full-time employees) when talking about the people who work for you. Each one is a person who has a name. Never forget that as you progress up the management chain and you lead more and more people. It seems both simple and even silly to many in management positions, but the importance of this rule can’t be overstated.

DEALING WITH RESISTANCE

Building a lasting, excellent culture depends on your ability to create an environment where people are willing to be vulnerable and to trust one another. When you empower your team and trust them to execute and learn from their mistakes, you create an environment in which it’s OK to try something new, fail, learn, and move forward. As the manager, though, it’s also your job to convince your boss and the broader organization to give you and your team the space to operate that way.

I know how easy it can be to decide that your hands are tied and there’s nothing you can do. While it’s difficult, great managers work to create their own culture within the business. It’s critical that you think of your team as your business and take responsibility for what’s going on inside of it, even as you must operate as an accountable piece of a larger organization. You can’t control what happens outside of your team, but you are directly in control within your own sphere. Dr. Henry Cloud, author of several bestselling books and adviser to numerous CEOs, once told me, “You can’t put your team in a bubble. You can’t let a bad boss make you a bad manager. You can’t use that as an excuse.”³⁷

If employees must check with dozens of people to make one small change, they will give up before they’ve even started. It seems easier to do nothing at all. Loosening your grip on your team can alleviate this, but what if it’s you who are dealing with this from your superiors? As you set out to build your team’s culture, you might experience the slow-moving effects of bureaucracy when it comes to making changes, or your boss might flat-out disagree with the culture you want to create. What do you do then?

It’s important to be aware of perception. If you’re dealing with an insecure boss who may feel threatened by you and your team’s culture, be aware of this and adjust accordingly. As author Robert Greene told me, “You must never outshine the master.”³⁸ Your job is to help your boss. Your job is to make his or her life easier. If you are known as someone who causes headaches or issues for your boss, you will only make yourself unhappy as a result of a rocky relationship. Or worse: you may find yourself unemployed.

During an interview with Liz Wiseman, bestselling author of Rookie Smarts and Multipliers, I asked her that very question.³⁹ She talks extensively about being a multiplier instead of a diminisher, so I asked her what happens if your boss is a detractor and a diminisher. She said that she likes to think about how they got that way in the first place. It helps her become more empathetic because it makes her realize that they likely had some tough situation in their life that led them to behave the way that they do.

Beyond empathetic understanding, strategic thinking and communication will be required. A great manager understands that her role as the leader of the team is to sell her team’s ideas internally about why her team operates in the manner in which it does. This can buy the team greater freedom and empowerment, with less micromanagement from above. That doesn’t mean you sacrifice integrity by trying to hide what you’re doing or flattering your boss to curry favor. The best way I’ve found to make this work is to focus on helping my boss see how my way of leading my team will ultimately help make her life easier and make her performance look good to her boss.

One of your jobs as the leader is to communicate exactly what you’re doing and why you’re doing it with your manager. Make certain your boss has vivid clarity on your leadership style, and why that mode of operation is leading to high performance. And show your gratitude. Tell your boss, “Thank you for your continued guidance, feedback, and willingness to create an environment for my team to be successful.” Give your boss credit.