How to truly understand your workplace culture by collecting the right data | #83

So welcome once again to the Connected Leadership podcast by Zentano and to part two of this Voices of Leadership episode with my guest, Matt Robinson from CultureNav. Hi Matt, good to you back again.

Hi Dave, good to be back.

So in part one last week, we talked about how you got into the whole topic of looking at culture as part of your career. We talked about actually what is workplace culture and just give the listeners a brief, simple definition of what culture is.

simple definition of culture. Yeah. So

Yeah.

because it means so many things to so many people and there's so many academic models and so much kind of work gone into it, generally simplify it down to something like this. culture is how things get done around here. It's it's that simple.

I love that. it's not anything as simple. I love. So yeah, how things get done around here. That's a really good way of looking at culture. We also talked about traditionally how this stuff has been measured in terms of engagement surveys. We've talked about maybe how culture is tried to be created through things like employee benefit programs. We've talked about the role that values play in creating culture and how that's often not done very well.

And I think we also talked about whose responsibility is it for culture. And I think you made a really good point, actually, which is probably worth you making again. Whose responsibility is it to get workplace culture right?

Yeah, that's a great question. So it's it's everybody's cul culture is everybody's job. So historically, people look to leadership and kind of point fingers and go, the culture's bad because or the culture's good because but actually culture is everybody's job. If you're part if you're employed in a business, how you go about that day to day, how you behave, what you say, what you do, you're you're creating culture because people are experiencing that. So it's everybody's job.

Yeah, I think that's really important to say, isn't it? Which doesn't let anybody using a senior leadership position off the hook because it has to start with them. My experience is it doesn't always start with them. And that's really important

Mm-hmm.

that it does. Yeah, but you're right, actually, yeah, we cannot just say in our businesses, the reason it's crap to work here is because of the senior leaders. That's not how it works at all, is it? And I think you made that point really clear.

Not at all. Not at all.

Okay, so let's talk about, I mean, we were talking about your career and some of your career experiences. So I guess before we talk about what CultureNav does and how we actually, how you measure workplace culture, how did you even get to work in this business called CultureNav, Matt? What was your sort of journey from your previous roles into that?

So to keep it short, because it's quite a long one, that 20 year odd plus year career in kind of brand brand development, at least half of that was spent in in the employee employee communications space, internal communications

Right.

and employee communications via employee benefits and via employee branding. And so it was kind of natural confluence really that I kind of started to mutate more towards mutate, move towards

Okay.

move more towards strategy than kind of delivery of stuff, if that makes sense.

Yeah, okay, yeah.

And so it's it's in that, where really a kind of set up an agency which was it was employer branding, but it was employer branding based on truth and purpose. So

OK, yeah.

it was an effort to try and redress, I guess, what I'd seen over ten plus, fifteen plus years of I suppose polishing things and and false promises.

Mmm.

This was

more kind of, well, we're not we're not going to polish the thing. Yeah, sure. The things will look fabulous. They will they will be of a very high standard. But actually, this is about defining the purpose of a business. So rather than going, what's your culture? it's this, brilliant. Here's a website for your careers. It's more going into that organization on a consulting basis and

Yeah.

understanding what makes them unique. What's their culture, so to speak, and how do you articulate that culture? So that's what that kind of part of the career was.

in so doing that was purchased by a a big RPO recruitment out outsourcing company and

Yeah.

as a to taken in-house so that could then be developed for their customers and as a proposition to get more customers. So like an in-house culture consultancy, if you like, for them.

Yeah, yeah.

in doing that, I met with my now colleagues.

who came in with their platform at the time, which was an employee well-being platform. And it was it was great. It was like a light bulb on off what I was trying to do with culture, they were doing with employee wellbeing. They were understanding, they were getting underneath the surface of it. They

Okay.

built a digital platform that did that. I didn't have a digital platform, I was I was doing consultancy. And it was a meeting of minds. It was kind of well with what you're doing and what I'm doing, this makes absolute sense. Why don't we just put these things together?

And use the methodology of understanding and getting under the surface and the inquiry of of the stuff that I'm doing and let's go do that. And so CultureNav was was born from that. yeah, I've been doing well culture

well

nav now for the last three years, and prior to that, two or three years doing the doing the employer brand consultancy piece, and then obviously fifteen odd years in employer branding and in internal communications.

Yeah.

So we talked last time about, you know, how culture isn't often measured accurately, isn't really measuring reality. And we talked about, how do we then for create what I think you call decision intelligence, the intelligence about how culture works in our business, where we can make some really sensible decisions based on some factual objective stuff. So.

To better do that, what does culture and nav do differently that other people don't do?

So it's a very interesting one. We whilst we have culture now well, culture in our name, we are obviously we're measuring culture, but we're actually measuring a lot more than culture. We're

Okay.

we're we're capturing the dynam the behavioral dynamics, the organizational behaviors and the dynamics of an organization. And culture is huge part of that. But we're going about that in ways which is it's like a multi-threaded way of gathering the data that we need to be able to do that. So where

Okay.

where traditionally you'd see

you know employee engagement surveys let's say I mean they're getting a bit of the battering in this in in this session but yeah but

They are, aren't they? They are.

right rightly so. So employee engagement surveys would be sent out and you know people would would tick list them and that would be it'd be done once a year and you get a report saying is your engagement. We kind of looked at that and went well that's if you're getting you're getting a snapshot once a year that's biased because it's tick list and people can't be bothered with it because it's getting in the way of their working day, how do we go about getting the data that we need? So we

We kind of we we employ many methods. The standard ways we go about this is we will do a survey. As

Yeah.

much as as as much as surveys as much as surveys are maligned, they are they're useful. But our survey is very different. It's not a forty question tick list. It's an

Okay.

eleven question survey that's been designed with a it's sp it's specifically designed to get people

Thinking about culture and themselves in relation to culture. And the first couple of questions are kind of tickless, you're yes, no, one to five, whatever. That's interspersed with qualitative questions that kept them thinking about this. So it's 11 questions long. The survey, this is our standard survey, we have many, but this is a standard one. Takes about five or six minutes to complete. But because of the way it's been designed, we get so much depth of information from that simple survey.

That it gives us a benchmark and that it tells us where to look next, essentially, within the organization. So we've got a mix

Yeah. Right, okay.

of quantitative data and qualitative data out of that survey. that can that can be reported back to leadership in terms of look, the his initial findings. yeah, okay, employee engagement was 80%, but that means that's great, that 80% of your people told us stuff. This is what we need to go investigate. We then we then go deeper. So what follows the survey.

is one to ones. We will do face to face and remote one-to-ones. So we will books

Okay.

we'll book sessions with leaders, managers, new entrants, everybody across the organisation at every section to get a good cross section. We don't want to speak with everybody in the organization because that's that's not possible in some organizations. So it's specifically targeted so we get a from from a data perspective, so we get a high confidence that the data is accurate.

Okay.

So we'll talk

to leaders, we'll talk to leaders, we will and it we will ask them similar question sets. They're semi-structured, so it's like an interview, but not quite like an interview.

Mm-hmm.

we'll ask them certain questions and we will get to the bottom of their experience and how they experience culture. And that happens across the board. those one-to-ones are fantastic. They usually run sort of 30 to 40 minutes. people tell us when they come out the back of them they feel like therapy sessions.

Yeah.

because it's a safe space for people to for people to offload. It's confidential, it's anonymous, we don't report back names, we don't report back roles. but what we do do is we analyze all that data, get down to those cultural factors, those cultural pillars that are driving that. So the one the one to ones are critical. They're they're exceptionally good. We also have it's got it's got a fabulous name. Asynchronous video interviews. Them yeah,

What? Sorry.

yeah, asynchronous, there must be a better name for them.

Yes. Okay.

we'll call them we'll call them a video questionnaire, but what they

are, essentially it's a one a video one-to-one, but it's broken down into per question. So where we would sit down with somebody in a one-to-one and have 40 minutes, the the asynchronous video allows us to break that one-to-one into questions. So a person can answer one question on a day, forget it, forget about it for a week, come back, answer two or three more questions another day, forget about it for a week or two, come back. And so we gather data over time with that, but we get

Okay, yeah.

A very similar depth of qualitative insight from that than we do to one-to-ones.

Okay.

and what that allows us to do, that allows us to get that qualitative insight at scale. So that's open to everybody. Everybody can take part in those. You can access them, you know, as as and when, and you can jump in and out of them. And you can you can respond to that. You can film your response, you can give an audio response, you can type your response. we most people will type. We've had a couple of videos back, which is great. That that in and of itself.

tells story about engagement. If somebody is is willing to video themselves responding to a video, that person potentially, depending on what they say, is is highly, highly engaged, whether it's positive or negative, can't say. but yeah, so there's the the ones ones, the asynchronous videos, we also run, and these get my line too, we will also run consistent pulse single question delivered into an email inbox, one question a week.

It's a highly targeted question and it's a yes, no, one to five answer. So people aren't overloaded by surveys all the time. It's kind of you you get the pulse, you you click it, you forget about it, you'll get the survey. We usually survey quarterly, so it's not overfacing people. And we will normally align that survey with what the organization already has in place. If they already have a survey in place that's duplicating the work, we'll either combine it or we will ask different questions.

'Cause what we don't want is people get over you survey overwhelming sort thing. We don't want people getting overwhelmed by surveys. And so those really are our four four main main ways of going about it. So the the weekly pulse, the short survey, the one to ones and the let's call them video questionnaires.

Yeah, so in terms of getting a depth of information, I can see how you'd get an awful lot more from that than you would from, as you said, the standard way of doing it, which might be to send out an employee engagement survey or whatever it might be once a year, twice a year, whatever it might be. So, okay, so you've got this absolute depth of information and data. What next?

Yeah, what next? so the the amount of data we generate is enormous. And as much as we like to have it semi structured, it's not. It's unstructured data. So it's it's it's qualitative insight. Yes, there's some numbers, but it's qualitative insight. We have built a system based on academic culture models, plus we we have I'll see Chris Goldby's a PhD in research and analysis, and we've built a system

That helps us analyze at speed culture. So where we've been doing this manually as consultancy, we bought those skills in and we've digitized them. So we use, we do use AI, but we only use AI to speed up the process. So

Okay.

and it's inter funnily enough, we've had a couple of conversations with a couple of conversations with prospective clients where the c the objection has come up and it's well aren't you just taking data and slapping it into Chat GPT and giving us a report back.

You

And it's kind like, no. Well what what's stopping us doing that? There's nothing stopping you doing that. You you go ahead and do that. We'll give you the data. You go ahead and do that and see what you get back. So what we've built is a system that actually only uses AI just to speed things up. It it it allows us to do the data analysis at scale. Once we've got that all analyzed and worked out, we then report back. And the report is a very detailed report. There's a lot of data in it, but it leads with

goals and targets and the so what? That's the important part. You have to lead with you've told us your goals and as an as a leader, you've told us your goals and targets are these. This is your culture. Is your culture going to get you to achieve those goals and targets in the time frames you've set them? Yes, no, what's the gap? Where's the differences? What do you need to do to change the culture to achieve those goals and targets? And that's what the that's what the system outputs. There's a load of other stuff in there as well.

Dare I say there's some softer HR stuff in there too. you know, HR people need some love at the same time. so there is some HR stuff in there too. It's not it's more people metrics than it is anything else, but it's a very detailed report that allows leaders to actually see what the culture is, more importantly, see how that culture is driving performance and see the risk to their goals and targets.

Yeah, and as you said in the first episode that we did together, that you've got to get down to those uncomfortable truths, haven't you? And I guess this is what your process is doing, isn't it? So you have this combination of qualitative and quantitative data. You're focusing not just on collecting survey data, but having some real conversations with some real people. I'm guessing from the way that you go about it, there's a cross-sectional sampling across different teams and different levels of the business.

Does it identify, I think in the first episode you talked about having microcultures within an organization which creates things like psilomentality. Does it identify those microcultures? I'm guessing it probably does.

It absolutely does. That that was one of the first things that came out when we were kind of testing the system. It we've developed the system over years. So kind of the AI piece, because AI is is you know, is it's not because it's big, but because it helps very targeted, has only sped things up. So this has been developed over years, and yes, so it will report back on a leader to a leader, yeah, the culture of the organization is this, but they can then go down to a team's level and

Hmm.

see at a team's level, what's the culture at the team's level? How is it affecting that team?

How how's the team performing because of it? What what are the challenges of that particular team based on their cultural context? So per team, a leader can see that you know, can can even compare side by side teams in terms of their culture. And it's it's an eye-opener when we drop that on a leader. They'll kind of be like, All right, the culture, it it's it it's scored, it scored a certain thing. That's great, that sounds great. They'll jump into the team section and then they can see that you know, a bunch, a bunch of their teams are green, some are orange, but

One is red.

Yeah.

And it's that red, it's that red team that always gets attention, as you rightly so, right? Gets gets the attention. And the leader will jump on it and go, Well, what well, why are they red? But you can jump in at teams level to their the team's report. So you can see exactly what's going on. But more importantly than what's going on actually is the action plans that come out the side of it. How do you fix it? And and

Yeah.

that's that's built into the system in terms of recommendations of how do you overcome this stuff.

And it's not big culture projects. It's not, all right, well, you have to employ a consultant and you have to it's more it's a behaviours and habits way of coming at it. So what can individuals do in a team daily? Change a habit, small habit, that

Yeah.

will then have a big impact on their teammates. And what would what can they do as a team that can change the culture that will influence other cultures and so on? So in a nutshell, kind of that's where the report is at.

We'll come on to that some of that what can you practically do in a minute? just going I love this so you have this report which is a thematic analysis if you like we're just finding truth it's finding patterns of behavior and patterns of habits but what you probably also uncover through all this is is the cultural blockers the things that are stopping that business achieving what it wants to achieve so you've got some clear evidence-based cultural insight from doing this what are the biggest issues therefore that you uncover

what tends to show up most often in your experience.

always, always, always. It it's important to say that the overall report, because every data every data cycle, we will

Yeah.

uncover fifty, sixty, seventy, eighty challenges around culture.

Okay, right.

You can't really feed that back, realistically feed that back to a leadership team and say, right, in the next ninety days you have to work on these sixty things, it's not gonna happen. So

No. No.

we've built a we've built a system that ranks in triages against impact eff effort and impact. And so

Right.

what we will report

Back at top three things, the the three most urgent and important things that that

Right.

leadership team can work on to improve that score, that culture, that team. And so

Okay.

the three biggest things communication. Every single t yeah, every single time. It's it i

Surprise, surprise. Right.

if it's not number one, it's number two every single time. and it's it's hard not to crack because if you feed back to a leadership team.

They say, well, well, what's the biggest block at communication? Well, let's fix it. How do you fix something as big as communication? It's it's such a huge thing to go about. So again, what what we do, we come at that from the small incremental gains piece. So how do you change habits? How do you change how do you change what you say? How do you say how do you change what you notice? Had all these

Hmm.

kinds of things that have have a ripple effect on communication. Second biggest one is managers.

Yeah.

and it's it's

It's prevalent pretty much I think in every I I assume making big big statements here. It's prevalent I is I think in most, if not many businesses, is the accidental manager. So these are people who are fabulous at their job. They're absolute rock stars. They've killed it. And because of that, they've been promoted. They've been promoted up and up and up and up, got got to the highest point they can in their particular role. And what's next? Well, next is management.

And what will happen is as a retention play, those people will get promoted to manager. They get the salary, they get the per they get all that stuff that goes with it. The problem there is that a lot of the time, the path from being a for being a fantastic salesperson to being a manager of a sales team, it's a completely different skill set.

It is,

You you're not selling anymore, you're managing people, you're managing, you know, it's like herding cats, you're managing a sales team, which is di you will know, really difficult to manage.

Well, I

made that transition and it as say, it's a completely different, know, from being a professional salesperson for a living to being a sales manager, completely different. Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah.

And we found that i in many organizations the pathway, the training, the support isn't there. So that transition is on on Thursday, you were top salesperson. On Friday,

Yeah.

you're managing that team. Off you go. And because of that, because those people aren't equipped, they're just not equipped to manage. They do the best. You know, they try their hardest. They're good people and they're trying

Mmm.

their hardest, but they they don't have the skills. They don't have the skills in place. They haven't had the training to manage

And so what we see there is that then communication breaks down, then you start to get silos, then you start to get people kind of starting to get a bit annoyed with things that aren't working in that team and the efficiency of that those teams tend to kind of fall off. So that's the second biggest one is accidental managers.

I would say also as an extra point about that, because I totally agree with everything you said there in terms of people getting to a point where they're now leading a team and they haven't really been fully prepared for that. In my experience, it wasn't just about having the knowledge and the skill set to do it. It's also about mindset as well. And you have to adopt a different mindset from being a technical expert in something to being a leader of a team. And how do we help people get the mindset in the right place to be able to do that job and do it highly effectively?

the mindset element sometimes gets forgotten. We'll just give them some training on how to coach people, how to have a difficult conversation, all of which is really important. But if there's a mindset blocker, and that could be a confidence issue, it could be an imposter syndrome issue or something like that, that has to be addressed.

Absolutely does. And and

Yeah.

you're right, it doesn't get factored in, it doesn't get considered. The

No.

training's there, the support's there, and then when it fails, the question is, well, you've had the training, you've had the support, you've had X amount of time and role. What w w what's wrong?

Yeah.

But if the if the mindset isn't if the mind says isn't there, if they're still thinking, I I I'm a salesperson, I'm a salesperson, I'm a salesperson, and not actually this is a different thing.

It's never gonna take and it's always gonna it's always gonna kind of falter.

So you've got communication breakdown, accidental managers, number three.

Mm-hmm.

You

Heh.

c you could you're you could argue this is cultural, but it it mm salary.

Okay,

Yeah, a salary could could be number one.

It could it could be number one. But it it always it nearly always comes up in terms of a lot of people nowadays are doing a lot more work in work. So stress is high, resources are stretched, things that I mean but there's so much change now, right? So AI

Yeah.

is a good example. Everybody's rushing for AI. let's adopt AI without thinking about how that how that's gonna be done. That impacts people. The people that have to work with AI have to

understand how to work with AI to make it

Mm-hmm.

work. And so that's extra work on top of what they're already doing. Commercial pressures being what they are, you know, it it's it's it's pretty tough. And with those people being stretched, people being asked to do a lot more and role like unofficial role shift. There's a lot of that we've seen.

Hmm.

you know, people doing one job but actually taking responsibilities from on from another job or actually doing two jobs in one without the official recognition, salary

Hmm.

nearly always comes up. It's kind of like, well, you know, I'm

doing this, then doing that. I've also been asked to do this stuff and I'm working really hard at it at it all and finding it difficult but I'm not I'm not getting the salary. I'm not being recognised for the work. Recognition and salary, I would probably say, are

Okay.

probably probably number three. But salary nearly always comes up in terms of, well, I'm doing more. I'm taking more responsibility on, but I'm not being paid for that. Why am I not being paid for the extra work? So there's a lot of that.

Okay, that's interesting. That wasn't one of the top three things I thought you were going to say. I'd imagine you might say trust and psychological safety might be a big issue in culture. guess that comes...

Yeah, they they

are. They are. They absolutely are. They do they make top three? I guess in in those organizations where culture is a problem, I don't want to use the word toxic because you know, it but I've just used the word toxic. yeah. So in in

But you just have, yeah, so let's go with it.

yeah, in in th in those organizations where where there's real challenges, there's real trouble,

Yeah. Yeah.

psychological safety is always up there. But for the most part it

always make top three.

Okay.

We we do always report back on it though. It's always important because the context of the data we get and the context of the report itself has to exist in that psychological safety space in terms of were people truthful with us with what they were saying. Did they trust us enough to open up and tell us the actual the actual detail of what's happening to them? And in most cases, yes, we we you know we see fairly high psychological safety. There's organizations that don't have high psychological safety.

And again, it's not it's not necessarily organizational organization wide. It's at a teams level. You know, some people

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

some people don't want to talk to their manager about something because they don't trust their manager, and some people don't want to go to HR because it's a personal so the psychological safety is high. It doesn't always crack top three though.

No, no, that makes sense as well. And I guess the other thing about this in terms of you, the blockers that you're finding as well, another blocker could be, we're a fast growing, fast paced business and we're just, growth of the business is outstripping the ability for the culture to keep up. I guess that's also an issue, isn't it?

Yeah, that in in really fast growth businesses, yes, we see this. It's it's it's almost where we've seen it, it folds a pattern and it and it's almost like you know, like a a speed boat will create a deep wake.

Yeah.

It's a bit like that, and the thing is flying along the surface, this business is flying along in terms of growth and it's grow, grow, grow, expand, expand, expand, but then the the the hole it leaves isn't being filled with the structure or the operational rigour or the stuff they're needed to support the growth. And so

That's where we see big cultural challenges because organizations will grow, they'll kind of bloom and drop and bloom and drop and I I can't quite remember the threshold. I think I can't remember the study either, but I I think it's between 120, you can go from 120 to 150 people. But breaking that barrier, unless you have those structures in place, unless you're filling that wake with the things that enable you to grow further, then you'll always kind of bounce between the 120 and the 150. That's where kind of attrition hiring

and churn become become a bit of an issue when culture isn't right.

Yeah, I was going to say, to use your analogy of speeding along in a speedboat leaving this massive weight behind, because one of the problems is are people falling off the back of the boat as you're doing it as well? And you might not be losing people off the back of the boat that you want to be losing, quite frankly, let alone have you given them something so they can get back on the boat with you. It's interesting, isn't it?

Yeah, well th

the the boat will not stop, that's the problem. You know? Yeah. So

No, no, exactly. Yeah.

yeah, we we we've seen we've seen that. We've seen that in in extremely high growth businesses, yes, that's the case. People do fall off the back. sometimes sometimes they're pushed. Sometimes sometimes it's

Yeah.

regrettable, but you know, it's it's definitely a challenge for high growth businesses. Yeah.

Yeah, but assuming a business has got all the right people, sat in the right jobs, you don't want to be losing any of those people just because you're going so fast, but your culture isn't keeping up with that growth. You have to try and marry the two together, don't you?

You absolutely do. It's it's difficult to do. I mean that the

Yeah.

Trying to kind of scale culture alongside scaling a business or growing a business is it requires a lot of effort, it requires a lot of time, it requires a lot of focus, and it requires a an exceptionally good, not HR person, it requires an exceptionally good people and culture person at the top.

Okay.

Okay. Interesting. Yeah. And how often do you see that?

Well again, more often more often than you'd think. a good one,

Okay, that's good.

a good one maybe not necessarily so. But in those organizations where we have seen really good people and culture people and culture people they are really they're accelerating the kind of the structure behind the boat. They're putting the right things in place quickly that actually overcome the challenges and so it enables that growth to continue, but continue well and then get beyond the hundred and fifty people because they're doing the things they need to do.

Rather than running around doing engagement engagement surveys again, engagement surveys and all the kind of stuff that HR type I'm giving HR a hard time. But in terms of the the stuff that gets done that is doesn't really have an impact versus somebody actually having an impact, where you've got a good people and culture person, that impact happens is what we've seen.

What sort of size business in your experience have got someone in a dedicated role just doing that? Because I guess when you're really small, haven't got the sheer number of bodies or even the affordability to have someone just focusing on that. But where does that generally kick in and start to help out?

So we've seen it at kind of again at hundred and twenty people is about is about the point at which that becomes necessary. it's kind of underneath that you can get away with a lot of stuff.

Mm-hmm.

and people do, but it's it's something about that hundred and twenty people. There's there's something about that barrier to get over and onward. You need the things in place. So it's about hundred hundred to a hundred and twenty people.

So it's interesting, any businesses that are listening to this that say, we've already got 120 people or more, we're in that larger SME space, or if we're in a corporation, obviously you will have much more than that. Have you got somebody dedicated to people and culture? If not, could that be part of your problem? Have you done a really thorough job in understanding your culture, let alone having someone who can fix it for you as well? Yeah.

Yeah.

One one of the common pitfalls in that I guess is as soon as you say the words people and culture,

Hmm.

people automatically think HR.

Yeah, yeah.

And and and pe people and culture is it it's not HR. It's a it's a different function. There's similar there's similarities and there's a bit of overlap, but it is a very different function to procedural HR.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely right. Yeah. So let's talk about, you alluded earlier on to how do we start to fix culture? How do we start to make some of the changes that are gonna get the dial going in the right direction? And I think you said you can make some relatively small changes that make a big impact. So what works? Now when we're trying to improve this, what works?

So that's that's kind of how long is a piece of string question. So

I thought it might be, I thought, well, Matt's the expert, let's give it a go.

what what works is is the ink is the small incremental things at a personal and teams level. That's

Okay.

where that's where we see the biggest impact. if we can get people to behave differently to how they were behaving before, and we're not talking huge behavioural shifts, we're talking little course corrections.

So a really, a really small example might be so heroics get called out, right? If you've got a salesperson who's killing it, it'll be like, brilliant, well done, yeah, you know, th there's a big fanfare potentially made about that person and how well they've they've done. The person who turns up and consistently does the numbers, but quietly gets on with the numbers, doesn't always get called out or noticed or recognised. So

No.

a really small behaviour, it's the tiniest behaviour change in the world would be for the manager of that team.

Go and have a little chat with that person who is consistently there and consistently doing the numbers, and just give them a little kind of I've noticed, you know, your consistency is fabulous. Well done, brilliant. Give them a bit of a call out, and it's the smallest

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm.

change in behavior. It might seem obvious, but people don't do it because they don't notice. So it's

No. No.

these tiny little micro changes, I guess, I guess you could call them at

Mm.

the individual level and the team's level that affect the change.

it's you need that you need that really good people and culture person in place to be able to strategize the change and the forward change. Without that, you're kind of affected change and hoping organically that's gonna work. That people and culture person can come in, see where it's working and support the change and support support how it goes forward. So it's not it's not about it's not about big culture projects. You know, a lot of people when you kind of talk about transformation and change will think, right, it's a six month

500 grand project. No, it's not. It's it's the small stuff that you can do that that affects the change. But that actually works at both ends of the of the chain. It works at the top and it works at the bottom. And that's kind of that's where we come at it. So for leaders, it's about helping them understand how they're behaving, what they're doing, that's affecting everybody else. Bit of a context shift. But for everybody else, it's that kind of personal that what what can you do what can you do do differently today that you didn't do yesterday that will overcome that challenge that you had?

And so that's kind of one of the biggest things that we see coming at it from the top and the bottom. And they kind of

Yeah.

they sort they sort of meet in the middle, and in the middle is where you find that people and culture person, funnily enough.

Okay.

one of the biggest things, the one of the biggest fixes is checking, I suppose, how clear is communication.

Yeah. Yeah.

So yeah, so c communication is a massive thing, right? And and it's always

Cheers.

like I said, it's always a top three, it's one or two.

And one of the simplest fixes for that is just to check that it's clear. So if somebody if there if there's a communication out to the business, you just need a couple of checks in terms of right, this this is what we said we'd do. What do you understand by that? What how does that affect you and your role? What what are you gonna do based on this communication? Great, you understand it, fabulous. It's like simple checks about clarity.

Yeah.

Was that clear? No, it wasn't clear. Brilliant. Let's let's make it clear so you can actually do your job.

Yeah.

So

it's it's that's one of the simplest changes. And again, it's it's it's a grand statement. It's the you can't apply this to everybody, but it's it's the management, it's the managers who have to really do that work. Just check that they're clear on what they're being told and that they're very, very clear on what their team are being told in terms of can you can you return on brief, basically.

I guess it's a chicken and egg...

approach this, isn't there? if you, like you said, we have a lot in our businesses, a lot of accidental leaders, accidental managers who are good people with good intentions, who have been put into these roles, haven't really been fully prepared and trained for them. So yes, some of this stuff is relatively small incremental steps, but it does, for some of it, does depend on having the skillset and the mindset to do it. So we therefore need to be able to train them to be able to do this. So, you know,

which comes first, do we train them to make sure that they can do it or do we try and get them to do it without the training and then we'll do the training some point later on? I guess we've got to think of this in a very holistic way, haven't we? How are we going to make these shifts? So it's common sense to me, for example, to say, go and make sure that people in your team are getting regular feedback, not just the ones that are being successful, but everybody. And that should be part of my role as a leader. But what happens if...

I haven't got the skills to give really high quality feedback or I've got a mindset blocker for doing it. And the mindset blocker could be, I'm too busy. I'm so operationally stretched. I haven't got time for this. Do you see what I mean? I mean, this is where I said the chicken egg thing comes in.

Yeah. So this this is this is where we'll see we'll we will see the repeating patterns in the data and in

Yep.

the report in the reporting and that's when it escalates. So if something is let let's say that's happened and that team is let's say they were green, next report they're amber, next report they're red, next report they're red. This escalates up to the point where it's like, well, th this team say they're doing the things, but it's it's not landing. Why? Well, let's investigate specifically why. It turns out the manager hasn't

Doesn't have the skills or the mindset to be able to do this. Well, let's

Okay, yeah.

let's get them let's get them sorted out. How do we do that? Well, let's figure it out. and this is and I keep stressing this, this is the importance of having a really, really good people and culture person because

Right.

they are there to see those gaps. Lead leadership may not see those gaps that far away from kind of you know the top table, but

Mm-hmm.

a people and culture person will see those gaps and is there to enable that person to overcome those hurdles. So

They can perform.

Yeah. And also I guess accountability at all levels is really important in this, isn't it? So we talked about that in the first episode as well. Actually, do we have something in place where we drive accountability? Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah,

absolutely that. And I suppose it's the feedback loop, isn't it, in terms of yes, we report we report back to the leadership team. But there's an onus on the leadership team to tell everybody in the organisation what what's gone on in terms of this is what this is what's been found. This is a version of the report. You were good enough to give up your time to fill in a pulse a take take a pulse over a couple of weeks, you were good enough to kind of complete a survey.

You had a chat with somebody or you took you took a video questionnaire. That's your time out of work whilst you're working to do that. Well, here's something back to you. That's the accountability piece in terms of reporting. Here you go. This is what we found. This is the truth. This is what you told us. And it keeps it keeps leadership accountable because everybody else knows now what's being what's being reported back to leadership and what leadership have to work on to be able to improve those things going forward. But also what everybody else has to work on.

To keep those things going forward. Hence it's that top down, bottom up piece. And that's where the accountability comes in, is the reporting back.

Yeah, and that level of transparency isn't always there clearly, is it? And I think you're right, that transparency is a really good thing then, because there's effectively no hiding place then. You've uncovered the uncomfortable truths, you've actually communicated the uncomfortable truths, and not just the bad stuff, but all the stuff that's working as well, because it's important to get balance in all of this as well. But ultimately,

Yeah. Yeah, hugely.

yeah, but ultimately there's gonna be some stuff that needs to change, and I think that, as you said,

the more transparent and open and accountable we are for that stuff, the better we're going to actually make some progress, aren't we?

Yeah, yeah for sure, for sure. And it's

Hmm.

it's it's interesting what you just said there, Dave. yeah, so this this isn't a witch hunt. You

No.

know, we're not we're not looking for the bad. What we're looking for is the truth. And

Yes.

if the truth is overwhelmingly positive and fantastic, well that's a huge win. Do more. Do more of that stuff. Get put put your focus where it's where things are are absolutely flying.

But also on the other side of that, where things aren't flying and people are challenged, well maybe tackle those things too. But it's it's not a witch hunt. It's definitely the this is good, do more. This is not good, tackle it. And the stuff in the middle, improve to get better.

In your experience, when clients get this level of data and they take your advice, yes, we need to communicate this, this is what we found, do they also communicate effectively why it's important? Because you know what human beings are like, if you just tell them what without the why, there's a bit of a void that you've left, which they will fill and they often won't fill it with something which is accurate or real. This is where conspiracy theories and all sorts of other things crop up in a business, isn't it?

Yeah.

So I guess when we're communicating this, we have to be very clear about not just what it is that's good, what needs to change, but more importantly, tie that to why. And tie that back,

Well, a hundred percent.

like you said, tie it back to the purpose of the business, which I don't think many businesses communicate that particularly well in my experience.

I'd I'd agree, I'd agree with you one hundred percent on that. and yes, it is it it it is about that. Yeah.

Yeah.

Okay. So we talked about high growth organizations and culture inside. Why is culture so important in those fast growing businesses then? And we've got, have a few, despite the world and the way it is at the moment, we do have some very high growth businesses in our country at the moment.

So objectively good culture attracts the right candidates. It has a fair, unbiased recruitment process that gets the right candidates for the right job at the right time in the right place. It has onboarding on the other side that gets those candidates up to speed as quickly as possible and embedded in the culture and hires culture ad or culture fit rather than culture not fit people. So that's that's just the recruitment.

Does the benefit just to the recruitment side? You'll you'll attract more of the right candidates faster. Your recruitment process will be quicker, therefore less expensive. Onboarding will get people up to speed quicker, therefore, time time to time to productivity is shorter. You've got that whole piece. Once they're in place, culture then helps them, a good culture helps them thrive. Not just turn up, do a job, go home, but thrive, find purpose in that organization, in that job. If you've

If you find per was it Victor Frankel said, if you can find purpose, you can enjoy anything. And I think

Mmm.

it's it's that that if you give somebody purpose, if you find somebody that fits with your values, which are evidenced and lived, by the way, if you find someone that can do that and you're recruiting lots of those types of people, and they're in your organization, it accelerates things. People go above and beyond, peop people will be b will be better at their jobs, the culture will be positive, the mindset will be different inside the organisation.

The psychology of the organization will be different because it's filled ideally with people who are aligned. So the culture will do that on the far side of it and outside of the organization, really good culture actually has huge impact on customers too, on CX, customer experience. So

Yeah.

I I forget the statistic, but I think it's something like a five percent increase in customer experience perception.

will bring a 95% increase in revenue, which is crazy. So if your

Wow.

cult yeah, if your culture is, I need to I need to verify that stat, but I think that's

Yeah.

the right stat. so if your culture is fantastic, your customers experience that, they will come back to you. I'm in B2B I'm talking about, you know, B2C is slightly different. So they will they will come back and they will be loyal and they will stay with you. And it's those customers, it's those retained customers really where you can kind of land and expand.

But word spreads, you know, customers talk to each other, people know people. So if you've got this fantastic culture and this amazing customer experience that cut as a result of it, it just generates more income. It generates generates more revenue because it then generates more customers because they're drawn to that business. I mean, that's probably over

Yeah, absolutely.

that's probably overstating it somewhat. It's not it's not magnetic, but good culture has compound benefit from the point of attracting the right candidate.

right through the the the entire business to maximising revenue with customers.

guess what you're also saying in those fast growing businesses we also need to make sure that we are consciously designing that culture during the expansion. If we leave it to chance or we assume it's okay rather than actively managing it we could hit some roadblocks very very quickly and then we're going you know two steps forward and four steps backwards kind of thing.

Yeah, yeah, exactly that. It's so organic culture where it is just left up to chance. You maybe you've got a leadership team who are really positive, great mindset, talismanic, they're brilliant, everybody loves them. That's great. That'll that will carry a business so far. But

I guess not not curating the culture in the right way. As in what's good about that? What can you take from that and install through the rest of the business? Just going, the culture's great, the leadership are brilliant, everything's fantastic here. Through that organic culture, there's always gaps. There's always gaps. That's that's when you start to see a little bit of dissent because some people might not agree that leadership the leadership team are great, or you know, so unless you're intentionally designing culture, and there w there are ways to do that.

sitting down and planning out, well, what do you want the culture of this organization to actually be? Beyond

Yeah.

beyond beyond three words on a wall, you know, real beyond values that live in a PowerPoint, PowerPoint stack in HR somewhere, what do you want this culture to be? And ab above and beyond that, what do you want to get from it? Because culture will drive performance. So if you design

Yeah. Yeah.

if you design and maintain and curate the culture the right way, it will drive performance.

Yeah, yeah, and I think that helps all your individual leaders in the business as well, because we often ask leaders, what is the ripple that you're trying to create inside your business? Now, what is the contribution you're trying to make? Which often

Mm-hmm.

they can't actually answer very easily without a degree of thought. But we should, as leaders, we should all be understanding this is what this business stands for. This is the purpose behind it. These are the values that we actually use to deliver that purpose. Yeah, well, no matter what sector you're in.

Therefore, how do I as an individual leader create that positive ripple that's going to make all that come to life? And we have to be able to understand that and do the hard work. And maybe that's where your people and culture person comes in to make that really, really clear.

Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah, th the rip rip great word ripple because that's exactly what it is. It ripples through.

Yeah, so do bad leaders as well as good leaders as well. So if you have leaders

Yeah. Yeah.

that aren't doing the job the right way, or even worse case scenario, purposely doing it the wrong way, that will create negative ripples that have very wide-ranging consequences out into your client bank as well, not just internally. But on

Course, yeah, of course. What

the positive side, it works the other way as well, doesn't it? Yeah.

It does. Yeah, it absolutely

does. And it's important. I think I think where where leadership teams are concerned and culture's concerned and kind of designing this stuff. I I think I think there's a

Coaching is important because

Absolutely.

as a leader you're really busy, right? You're really and you so you've had your report, you know the culture needs work, you've got your you've got your action plan in terms of habits, you know, behaviors, you think, great, right, set. I know we know what we need to do. Then the next thing comes along, and you're like, right, I'm onto this now, I must do this. Coaches keep leadership teams accountable and help them achieve those goals. And without that coaching,

without helping those leaders actually curate a culture, it often doesn't achieve what it's meant to achieve. In fact, most most in on my experience, most times that culture that stated we want it to be this because of that won't get there because the leadership team don't have that support in place of the coaching in terms of that support.

You mean the external coaching that coming in helping, do you mean? Or do mean also

Yeah.

internally?

In internally, but more so external, because the the external view is it it it can be objective. Internal internal coaching isn't always objective. External coaching can be. And where culture is concerned, where you're looking at a culture objectively and go, right, there's a score to it, this is where we need to move it to, that objective view is extremely important.

Yeah, and I think you're right. mean, Rich and I have had this conversation with our clients, you because we're obviously both professionally qualified coaches. Our stance is not to go into a business thinking we know it all and tell them how to run their business. That's not what we're there for. What we're there for is to go in and listen to them, understand where they're trying to get, and then hold them to account to actually go and deliver it. And that's what they want us to do and do it in a very human-centred way.

Yeah, no, that doesn't mean soft by the way that means, you we're

No, no, no.

supporting them. Yes, but we're also crucially holding them to account on the things that they say they're going to do. And I think people value that they if you do if you get that right as an external person going in and supporting people do value that they do value that and we can go in with without those sort of preconceived ideas because we're not part we're not part of the day to day of that culture.

Yeah, I'd I'd say that's critical. I'd I'd say that's one of the biggest missing pieces full stop in in culture as such is allowing or I suppose affording leadership teams to be accountable, but accountable

Hmm.

in a positive way. And not a positive let's you know, everything's great, let's all have a party kind of way, but in that as you've just said, that human way. That's

Yeah,

absolutely critical.

that's, Rich and I are very clear about that, is that we're going in and we have to operate in a very human-centred way. These are, generally speaking, are good people. They don't need fixing, but they've

Yeah, no.

sometimes got really big challenges that they want some help. Sometimes it might just be they want us to be a sounding board. Can I just empty my mind and talk to you about this? They don't necessarily even want you to try and help them fix it. They just want someone to listen, maybe ask a few questions.

shift a bit of perspective but actually that's really valuable because they find it hard to find someone they can do that in the business with.

Yeah, it's it's it's very difficult to be objective if it's your business. You know,

It is, yeah.

you you you're in it all the time, you're of it. It it's in it's in it, it's in you and of you, and it's your business. It's very, very, very difficult. I don't know anyone so far that I've met, and I certainly can't take a step back inside their own business and be absolutely objective. There's always going to be a level of involvement and emotional bias and everything else. So that external view and that accountability piece for me.

Is absolutely critical when it comes to when it comes to culture as well, you know, because it's easy to kind of drop a big culture bomb and this is the biggest thing you've got, you've got to you've got to tackle this and leaders jump on it because it's a big thing, but that might not be the right thing.

Mmm.

So that objectivity is actually, well, okay, culturally that might be important, but do you know what? Actually, this is a bigger issue. And the report, the reports that we do and and kind of the diagnostics that we do will raise those issues. But I feel

leaders need a bit of direction in terms of well what to work on and when, how. We talk like we'll help with how, but that's where that's where the coaching comes in. What what what you're working on? How you working

Yeah.

on it? When it when are you going to get this done? How how you're going about that? What support you need? That is critical.

Yeah, so what I'm picking out from the way that you go in and after you produce this really detailed, really insightful report, which is full of the actual uncomfortable truths and all the stuff that maybe traditional things don't uncover. And then in terms of actually, you're making it clear, there's no quick fixes here. What we're trying to do is find some incremental behavioural changes that you input in small steps. Yeah, so small consistent improvements.

yeah.

Allied to that, we need to do some clarity checks in communication. Are we communicating the right things? Are we doing it consistently? Are we, with that transparency in communication, therefore holding people to account to deliver at all levels? And for the senior people particularly, are we where it's needed, bringing somebody in from outside who can support us and hold us to account and ask us the difficult questions that we need to be asked? Yeah.

Yeah. It takes

it takes brave leaders to do that though.

It does, yeah, it does, yeah. And I'm making it sound like it's simple and it really isn't simple, I get that.

No, it's not.

No, but it does take brave leaders. But then I would argue that the world we're in now in terms of running a business, it's not an easy thing to do to run any business, whether it's big or small. And sometimes you have to be brave. I don't see enough bravery. One of the things I've said on the podcast previously is that I don't see enough people being brave and tackling the difficult stuff. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

It's I suppose without and again it's actually talks to the the whole purpose of culture, right? The difficult stuff seems seems insurmountable if you don't know what it if if you assume what it is and you don't actually get to the bottom of what it actually is. So if you're sat there thinking, I've got problem A, God, it's it's really, really big, you might get unless you investigate it and get to the bottom of it and understand where it's coming from and why, you can't tackle it.

No.

But if

you do get to the bottom of it, you'll find that that problem might not be as big as you thought it might be. It might might

Absolutely right.

might might be bigger. But it also might not be as difficult to fix. But kind of sitting there going, I know I've got a problem, but I'm too busy is not that's not the way to go about it.

No, I think we all know probably intuitively if we have this really big problem we need to solve, we probably know deep down that if we do actually take the time to solve it, some of the other slightly less important problems that we have will actually go away as well. But it's the big thing we have to go and tackle, but that's the thing that's big and scary and is potentially going to use all of our time. So we kind of, I'll just park it till tomorrow. I'll just do this other stuff. No, actually, and when it comes to culture, that's not really a strategy.

Let's leave it till later. No, we need to do... Yeah.

No, no. Yeah, le leave

it till leave it leave it till later is w is where is where the the like I say said earlier, is where the biggest voice is and the people with the most charisma, that's where they rule the roost and that's where culture can get really difficult.

Yeah. So I think we're coming to the end of this discussion then, Matt. So in terms of the two discussions we've had both last week and this week, if there's one or two messages that leaders should take away from what you've said and from our conversation, what would you want those messages to be?

I think well th rather than messages, I think there's something they elite leaders can practically do themselves without without any time or any kind of overhead to establ to sort of put finger in the air. And the first thing is go and talk to ten people. Not a long conversation, just go and talk to ten people about the values of the business.

Okay.

Just ask them very simple but it's a simple conversation, doesn't it? You know, it's off the cuff conversation about the values of the business. I'm not

What are they? What you think of them? But the questions are, well how how do they impact you? How do how do the values change or drive what you do? How do you what do you understand of them? And go talk to ten people and see what comes back from talking to ten people. If you've got a three hundred person business, okay, it's a tiny sample or your three hundred plus. But it will still be an indicator in terms of a sample of ten people. If they can't articulate how values are driving behaviours, you've got a bit of a values problem.

And that's one of the biggest things because you know people do believe kind of culture sort of falls out of values when it's it's not necessarily the case. But so that that's one of the things I I'd say people can do, and it doesn't take long to go and talk to ten people. the other part is be brave. Must be brave, be willing. It's the mindset piece, be willing to look at culture as something other than soft and fluffy and nice to have HR stuff. It's not

It drives performance. It's the glue that holds businesses together. And unless you are unless it's strong glue, things are going to fall off. So you have to be brave and be pre be prepared to face the uncomfortable truth. Because for every uncomfortable truth, there's a very comfortable truth. So they do balance each other out, but you must be brave. So I'd say to leaders, do do those two things. Just go and talk to 10 people and be brave about the feedback.

think that's a great, great pearls of wisdom to take away from this conversation, Matt. So thank you. Thank you for your time, Matt, in these discussions we've had. Thank you for sharing some of your thought-provoking insight. I think it's really welcome. And if people want to find out more about you and the work that culture and I were doing, where do they find you?

Yeah, so we're obviously culture nav, so that's b cultural.co dot uk. yeah, you c you can email me if you have if anybody listening or watching this has a question, you can email me directly. Matt A D at culturnav.co dot uk.

And you're also on LinkedIn as well, aren't you? If people want to follow you. Yeah.

I am on LinkedIn. Yeah, you can

yeah, you can yeah, you can follow me you can find me on LinkedIn. I'm there. Just look up CultureNab and I will be there.

Yeah. Brilliant. Matt, thank you so much for your time. Really, really appreciate it.

Well I really appreciate you having me. It's been it's been my an absolute pleasure. Thank you.

You're welcome. And for anybody listening, leadership isn't just about delivering results. It's about creating the conditions in which people can consistently perform and grow and thrive. And increasingly, organizations need cultures that help people feel confident enough to make decisions, to experiment and innovate, to challenge each other respectfully, to collaborate, to admit mistakes, and to keep on learning.

We talked about this at the beginning. Confidence isn't merely an individual skill that people can develop. It's something that culture can nurture or suppress if we get it wrong. What stands out for me in this conversation is how often organizations make mistakes in terms of stuff that's signaled for actual substance underneath. It's easy to believe culture is working, as Matt said for his time, especially when the metrics look good. But as Matt highlights, the real question isn't what you think it's happening.

It's what's happening day to day under the surface. And leadership today requires the courage to go and find out that truth. And I think, Matt, you've made that absolutely clear. There's a saying, isn't there, culture eats strategy for breakfast. So my question is, who's checking the menu? And on that cheesy note, thank

Great question.

you, Matt. Thank you to everybody for listening. And we'll be back again next week. Thank you.

Thank you.