If your business were dissolved today, would anybody care?

Your answer to that question is the measure of your culture.

“Culture eats strategy for breakfast” –Peter Drucker

Having a great business is more than making money, it’s about how you treat others, especially those who work for you.

With 70% of employees disengaged in corporate America today because they don’t feel cared about there is ample amount of room to improve.

Join Michael Weisman and I as we talk about principles to develop a great culture your employees will love and not want to leave.

In This Episode:

Stop focusing on pruning the branches of your tree, focus your efforts on preparing the soil so the tree can grow. It’s the difference between focusing on making money or investing in your people.

5 Principles for a Better Culture

1. Competence
2. Consistency
3. Candor
4. Concern
5. Connection

Values are like fingerprints, and we leave them all over those we touch.

One Challenge from Today:

Pause and ask: What is your intention for today? How are you going to show up? How will your values touch the lives of others?

More About Michael Weisman

thehighergroundlife.com

21-Day Growth Challenge: Competence Growth Challenge

mikew@thehighergroundlife.com

More About David Schmidt

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Website redeemingbusinesstoday.com

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Mentioned in this episode:

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David:

[0:01] Culture eats strategy for breakfast. That's a quote by Peter Drucker. And I've seen firsthand that plans are worthless without willing and capable people to carry it out. And so if you want a business to thrive, you have to have a culture that's foundational. And if you do not intentionally design your culture, your values, and how you do business, then an unintended culture will be developed, which may or may not be good. and it's generally not good. And so I brought Michael Wiseman on today from Higher Ground Life Consultancy to discuss the importance of culture and what you can do to upgrade your current business culture. So Michael, welcome. And to start off, tell me a little bit about yourself and how you ended up today helping people establish better cultures in the business.

Michael:

[0:49] Yeah, well, it's great to be with you, David. Thank you for having me on the program today. I love talking about culture in general. I've spent a lot of years of my life studying it from the inside and the outside looking in. And I'll just tell you that my career began many, many years ago. I grew up watching Bewitched on television, if any of your listeners even remember that show. but Darren Stevens was the ad guy and I was so captivated by his ability to be creative. And of course he had a wife that could make anything better. Um, but, uh, that was actually my impetus for advertising. I was always drawn towards storytelling as, as a young kid. And so that was a profession that I just found myself in. And what I didn't realize going in was the, what was the toxicity of the business climate around it you know advertising and marketing tends to be a very transactional business um and it's kind of the what have you done for me lately and so fast forward i spent about 42 years of my life in marketing communications i was a ceo of an advertising firm and we had you know national clients.

Michael:

[2:04] And I got to have a kind of a bird's eye view of corporate culture. You know, I spent much of my time in C-suite executives offices talking about their business. And what I realized is that advertising can only do so much, you know, in terms of moving the fortunes of a company forward. And many, many, many senior executives in organizations look to messaging and marketing as the currency that determines sales growth. And what I found in studying kind of the good, the bad, and the ugly of corporate culture was that that focus, that hypersensitivity and focus on messaging was completely misplaced. And i i saw firsthand so many senior executives ceos cmos name the acronym you want.

Michael:

[3:05] That couldn't understand why they couldn't sustain growth or why one year sales would be up and the next year sales would be down and much of the focus was on messaging well we just need better messaging we need a better advertising campaign what i came to realize um in in being in that environment is that their focus was in the wrong place. You know, I have an old expression. You may have heard it before. If mom and dad are fighting, the kids know, you know? And so I saw that happening inside of, of corporate culture, disengaged employees, unhappiness, no real true north in terms of purpose or vision. I can't tell you how many times I would sit across from a CEO and say, what would happen if your business disappeared tomorrow?

Michael:

[3:54] Would anybody care? And I got that deer in the headlight stare so many times, and I realized that that hyper-focus on messaging and marketing and sales and transactions, that was just the wrong filter. What was really going on in corporate culture, and it's at an all-time hyper low today in terms of trust, was that there was dysfunction going on inside of the relationships that existed inside the business and out. So in the same way the kids know if mom and dad are fighting, employees know if there's discord in senior management. Customers know if there's discord or apathy among the employee groups.

Michael:

[4:38] And so it was this continuing spiral. And I had kind of an epiphany in working with a guy who was close to me in my own business.

Michael:

Michael:

[6:01] And where in the old days, customers or consumers would hold a business accountable if, you know, their product or service didn't meet their expectations. Today, they're holding the leaders of organizations accountable. And now with the proliferation of choice, you know, in the old days, when I grew up, there were three television stations and a couple radio stations. And now there's thousands of media opportunities for all of us. go.

David:

[6:31] Somewhere else yeah go

Michael:

[6:32] There so i don't i don't need your business you need mine but you need to connect with me that's the story that we kept hearing from consumers and customers is treat me like a human being show me that you care about me beyond the transaction and by the way what does your business stand for and are you um creating a positive image in the community uh or are you a drain on the community and self-centered in in nature and so i did a lot of research because i i was uh i was about 30 years into my career at that time started doing some social science research and really began to focus my career i started to exit the day-to-day transactional business that advertising is and i started looking from a different filter and i found my

Michael:

[7:21] conversations beginning to switch when I was sitting across from a leader in an organization. I wasn't talking about their products. I wasn't talking about their services. We used to call that the sea of sameness, right?

Michael:

[7:38] But what do you stand for? Why are you there? Why are you leading this company? Do you have strong relationships internally with your employees? Do they know that you care about them? And you can see corporate cultures that thrive and you can see corporate cultures that struggle. What I had to convince many very jaded CEOs about was that values was the new currency.

David:

[8:08] Right?

Michael:

[8:10] It's not about a transaction. It's not about a one-time sale. It's about will your organization do what it takes to do in interpersonal relationships and earn trust over time? You can't buy it. There's that expression that trust takes decades to build, seconds to lose, and forever to try to rebuild. And there's so many examples of that in corporate America where companies just lost their way. So, um, my, my answer to that was, um, I, I made a determination that I was not going to have the same conversation. I wasn't going to walk in the door as an ad guy, uh, you know, wanting to, you know, shine a light on a bad organization. Um, I wanted to have a different type of conversation. And so I created a, uh, a different model of relationship building built on five principles of what we know it takes to build trust in an interpersonal relationship. I call them the five C's.

David:

[9:16] Okay. Before we get into that, we'll get into that in just a little bit. So you basically went from sales and trying to sell the company. Yeah. To say, we need to focus more on relationships within the company and relationships with the customers.

Michael:

[9:32] Yes, that's exactly right.

David:

[9:33] And then that's landed you in this niche of we're going to build relationships, build trust, and improve the company culture. Yeah.

Michael:

[9:42] And we know, David, there's so much secondary research that's been available for decades now on the direct link between highly trusted organizations and low trust organizations, not just in terms of the feel good that you might expect coming from a good relationship, how you feel in a good relationship. But even for the most jaded, financially driven organization, there's plenty of research that demonstrates that if you have high trust inside your organization, you're going to outperform your competitors financially in shareholder return. So trust is not a nice-to-have. Trust is a must-have, especially now.

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