People: Dare To Build An Intentional Culture is the newest book in the ongoing Traction Library, from authors Mark O’Donnell, Kelly Knight, and CJ DuBe’. This book goes into building an intentional culture, and how there isn’t any quick fix to the problem that leaders of an organization may face.
The book begins by listing out the different type of cultures that an organization may have:
- A Happy Accident: A great culture that wasn’t built on purpose. It can’t hope to scale with the business.
- Command and Control: Built on fear of the leader or control team. Transactional and doesn’t last.
- Chaotic Culture: Unproductive, unpredictable, and unhealthy.
All these types of cultures are due to either a lack of intentionality, or intentionally running an organization the wrong way. All these cultures can be thought of as arrows pointing in different directions at the same time. An intentional culture works to get all these arrows pointing in the same direction.
The next chapter gets into the difference between a culture of “Abundance and Love” versus “Scarcity and Fear.” The differences include things like optimism vs pessimism, collaborative vs competitive, gratitude vs entitlement, and more. There are five keys to get toward a heart-centered leadership, and an intentional culture:
- Love is a Verb: It’s not just a feeling; you have to show it in your actions for your organization.
- Greater Good: EOS defines the greater good as the V/TO multiplied with genuine care and concern. A leader must balance this.
- Genuine Care and Concern for People: You must view people relationally and not transactionally.
- Authenticity: Some leaders care naturally and pull it off, while some never do, while some struggle to make it not feel forced.
- Human Creative Power: The best way to harness everyone’s unique ability is to create a personal Core Focus.
The Personal Core Focus takes six steps: Complete your laundry list, categorize your list with delegate and elevate, discover your passion and strengths, create your personal core focus, delegate automate and eliminate, and continuously update. This individual process will help your team members play to their strengths.
The next section digs into the challenges of building structure first. Many leaders will want to start implementing things right away, but there are drawbacks to diving in head-first. The accountability chart is an extremely important tool within EOS. And most importantly, use GWC to fill your roles (gets it, wants it, has the capacity for it). The following chapter is about finding the core of your culture. There’s an EOS exercise to help you find the core values of your company:
- Think of a couple members of your organization you want others to emulate.
- Think about their qualities that make them valuable.
- Choose 3 to 7 characteristics from your full list that you value the most.
- Write them down as statements or phrases that don’t require explanations.
There are several traps that you could fall into when choosing your core values. The first one is choosing a value that is a requirement for working in your industry (for example, safety). Not only are these cliche, they don’t inspire or stand out. The next trap is an Accidental Value, or rather, values that exist without leadership intent. The final common trap is Aspirational, a value that you wish you had but didn’t. Making it a core value without solving the root issue first is simply a band-aid. Finally, this chapter ends off with the importance of giving a good core values speech. Your new core values must be communicated effectively and inspirationally.
After a leadership team delivers this speech, members of the company still may not initially feel like anything will change. That’s why, in the next chapter, the work becomes praising your core values when you see people emulate them. This praise must be public. After a while, if your core values have been correctly chosen, it will have a cascading effect, where team members will encourage one another without the leadership team’s, or even a manager’s help. The next chapter provides all the EOS tools, and how they help build an intentional culture. All of these tools are expanded on in greater detail in other books in the series (of which we have also written reviews, as well as expanded on some in other articles as well), but there are some new useful tools provided as well.
- The People Analyzer: List your team members in one column, and your core values in the other. Assign a +, -, or +/- for how well each member holds these core values. This tool can be a simple way to see if you have the right people.
- Quarterly Conversations: informal, relational, one-on-one meetings. Using the 5-5-5, see what’s working and what isn’t with everyone. Feedback is key.
- The 5-5-5: Core Values, Roles, Rocks.
- Delegate and Elevate: Ignoring when someone is at their capacity or burnt out is bad for the culture.
- Clarity Breaks: Great for a leader to step back from the day-to-day to get the bigger picture.
- Measurables: Watch out for having KPI’s in an unhealthy culture. It creates bad competition
- The 3-strike rule: Discuss an issue with someone, and give them 30 days to correct. If they don’t improve, give another 30 days. Don’t be afraid to say “this might not be the right job for you,” because many might agree or spur on change. If they don’t improve, it’s time for change.
State of The Company: Especially for larger organizations, where a visionary might not be able to meet with everyone, these meetings where everyone can show up is important to get everyone on the same page.
The next chapters get into getting the right people in the right seats. This is a crucial step for changing a culture. You could have the wrong person in the right seat. This means you have a role defined correctly, and the current holder doesn’t have the capacity to carry it out, or doesn’t hold the same values. Or, you could have the right person in the wrong seat. Maybe this simply means someone is due for a promotion. But more often than not, you can find people who hold the values of your company who aren’t playing to their full strengths, and a different role is actually how you’ll get the most value. If someone’s Personal Core Focus lines up with their accountability chart, then they’re in the right seat. Hiring is the next step. With changing cultures, you probably will have to let go of people who are great at their job, but don’t fit the culture. Here’s a good tip, fire fast and hire slow. But the importance of hiring slowly doesn’t matter if you have a bad interview process. You should ask behavioral questions, listen carefully to their questions, try to scare ‘em away and introduce your core values, and don’t have surprises. If someone gets hired, and they’re either surprised by the responsibilities or values, then you didn’t have a great interview process. By the same token, if you hire someone, but are surprised when they don’t fit into your culture, then you should also take a closer look at your hiring process. Assuming you have found the right fit, organic onboarding is also extremely important. It won’t help if the new member only hears about the values from a hiring manager, or the leadership team. To also see it in action with their manager, and new coworkers that they’ll interact more often with, this will further help them integrate into the culture.
As more change starts to happen, your organization will experience turnover. This can be both good and bad. “Good Turnover” is when you let go of the wrong fits at the company. “Bad Turnover” is when you have people who fit the culture and values, were succeeding, and left anyway. Both can happen, and finding patterns can help you decide the best course of action. Is the majority of turnover happening in a specific department? The next key is retention. If people are staying, you have to figure out why. And finally, attraction: as your organization grows, or has more holes to fill, what type of people are wanting to work for you, and why? Having a list and finding patterns can help you figure out if things are lining up with your values, or more change may be necessary.
The final chapter of this book asks the vital question: Do you really want this? Changing a culture can be hard work, lead to potential firing of people who have worked with you for a long time, and many other uncomfortable situations. Some people may read this book and only dip their toe in, and try to implement a couple of the tools, but fail to fully commit. This is fairly common, as visionaries will try to implement things on their own, and as we’ve discussed before, this often won’t work. Or, do you want to fully commit, and try to find an integrator that can help overhaul your culture?
