Creating a Culture

One of the many things that makes up the “awesome mantle of leadership” company leaders are responsible for is a company culture. To overly simplify, culture is best demonstrated through the attitudes and emotions that bubble up at the employee level based on how it flows down from the company owners and leadership team. There is plenty of information out today about the importance of culture and employee engagement and the like. It is the flavor of the day in management circles. For the Christian business leader intentionally developing our culture is a powerful way to put feet to our faith. To quote a worn but true cliché, much more is caught than taught. The disciples were often amazed at what Christ said. But it seems what he did was just as impactful, maybe more so.

Since our culture flows out of who we are as leaders, then often changing our culture flows out of who we need to become as leaders. As a starting point for reflection we like the way Bob Chapman, CEO of Barry Wehmiller, breaks it down in his book “Everybody Matters”.

FOUR PILLARS OF CULTURE A) A shared long term vision B) Fostering a people-centric culture C) Developing leaders from within C) Sending people home fulfilled

Asking ourselves some questions in each of these areas gives us the area where we likely need to focus to create the culture we want.

Vision: Do our people know where we are going as a company and how we will get there?

People-centric: When is the last time we asked an employee how they were doing and meant it? Do we really believe everybody matters? Do we see them as means to a financial end or precious son’s and daughters with trials and struggles and hopes and dreams – and with amazing potential infused in them by the God who created them?

Leadership: Does what we do to produce leaders really work? Are we producing leaders who know how to unleash that God given potential our people have? Are we pouring in to a few so we can duplicate ourselves and build a team that does it better without us?

Fulfilled: Have you ever taken a minute to send a note (and maybe a gift card) to a spouse of a loyal employee just to say – your spouse is awesome and does such a good job for us. Intentionally created cultures tend to produce a more enjoyable workplace. They tend to help us retain employees. Along the way they tend to help send the business owner home more fulfilled as well!

vNacelle Consulting- www.vnacelle.com

Ten Common Hiring Mistakes

Hiring the wrong person is one of the biggest mistakes management can make. Here are tips

on what NOT to do.

Not checking references ...is probably the most common mistake. Instead, prepare a list of questions for the candidate to answer, and then ask the same questions of their references. Check references from supervisors, close peers (co-workers), and subordinates if possible.

Hiring who is handy ...is often an easy way, but not always the best way. The “Peter Principle” of promoting a person until they reach a level of incompetence often occurs because that person is known and is convenient but not necessarily the most qualified.

Not defining personality or management style desired ...oftentimes people are hired because they seem to have the right industry experience or job position, but that alone is not sufficient. Validating their experience, management style, character and cultural suitability improve the chances of a good team fit.

Not applying enough resources ...doing a search in-house may produce a few quality candidates but possibly not the best one. Be sure that whoever is conducting the search has the time and budget to do the search well. Adding the search responsibility on top of someone’s already full schedule, may not give the quality of results desired.

Hiring too quickly ...even when recommended by a friend, hiring that candidate can be a mistake. Do not fail to do the proper due diligence on a candidate. Check references thoroughly and verify degrees. Don’t let pressures to fill the job quickly cause long-term mistakes.

Hiring the only candidate ...is hiring from weakness. Ideally, there should be three to four candidates who have the right experience, education, compensation needs, and management style. Out of the group, hopefully two are highly desired and can be attracted. Then select the best one...that is hiring from a position of strength.

Not hiring for future needs ...the company may outgrow the person’s talents. Even when it takes more than the budgeted compensation range to attract the person the company will need within two years, do it. That is better than having to fill the position again.

Failing to court the candidate ...may mean no marriage! The “getting to know you” process should not be just a one-sided two-hour interview. Give the candidate a chance to ask about your organization. Realize you are marketing yourself and your firm to them just as much as they should be to you. Clear your calendar so you can focus on them rather than giving them an impression that they are an interruption in your busy day.

Not taking time for lunch or dinner ... the more casual environment will often show parts of

the candidate’s personality that did not appear during the formal interview.

Making the hiring decision in a vacuum ...may produce unpleasant surprises. If the circumstances permit, allow the selected candidate to meet their peers and subordinates before being hired. Perhaps these people might raise some red flags you want to know about before the person is hired. If not, then at least they are more likely to be supportive of the hiring because their input was sought. Moreover, for the candidate, it gives them a better chance to understand the culture and the quality of the team.

EFFICIENCY SINS

If you are a reader of business literature, especially profiles of people making a good go at a business career, then you’ve also read that these same people likely commit efficiency sins. They don’t see it that way, however, often talking about their ruthless commitment to efficiency as a virtue. Efficiency sins:  Compromising one's current quality of life through time/process management, intending to obtain a future and higher quality of life.

An efficiency sin looks like this:

• Scheduling too tightly. Doing this prevents the business leader from being present in the meeting they are already in. Whatever they are doing, they are already distracted by the next meeting or something that comes even later, or the next e-mail, phone call or task awaiting them, instead of bringing their best attention and mental resources to the moment they are in.

• Wolfing food. Some have even wondered out loud whether a nutritional infusion or diet of nutritionally perfect bars might work better than taking times for meals, let alone a meal they prepare for themselves or their families. Stopping to enjoy food is seen as harmful to the work output to which they aspire.

• Pride in a lack of adequate rest. It is no secret that while it might seem a show of ambition and drive, there are long-term consequences that come from sleep deprivation. Those long-term consequences impede enjoyment and the quality of life being pursued for some years hence by foregoing nourishing and healing rest all along.

• Work first. While doing hard tasks first before easy tasks or pursuing leisure is a good personal discipline, forsaking time with one’s key relationships in order to do the work that keeps multiplying in the wake of success is not. Successful work multiplies opportunity beyond the capacity of any one person to cover it all. In the end, a work first priority that sacrifices participation in family and community ruins one's quality of life and leaves people alone and lonely.

Most people pursuing efficiency sins as if they were virtues have a declared purpose: to gather enough money so they can do what they want…later. And yet, quality of life items are abundant already and all along, surrounding us whether we are efficient or not. In fact, they beg us to stop and enjoy.

• One can enjoy an abundance of inexpensive picnics with their loved ones, rather than working extra hours in order to cover the cost of exclusive dining at a future time.

• Frisbee golf at any number of free or low-cost courses, with family and friends, adds to the quality of life way more than yet one more corporate golf outing. Other outdoor games like croquet can be just as fun.

• Reading a book or journal article on one’s own porch can trigger deeper learning and more personal growth than traveling to yet one more seminar with day long supplemental workshops, or worse, working so hard and furiously that no learning takes place at all. And naps come with them!

As a former Chief Efficiency Sinner myself, deep insight for this came to me when my son and I were kayaking on a public waterway, through a championship golf course. Our kayaks, combined, cost less than one set of green fees. We would enjoy for years what the golfers were spending in hours. I was with my son, they were with business contacts. Insight dawned in that moment.

The point here has nothing to do with expensive green fees or to denigrate the importance of networking. The point is life priorities and whether they are being lived, or are sacrificed in a joy-sucking commitment to efficiency, something I’ve transgressed repeatedly over the course of my own life.

Passion, commitment and drive are needed to succeed in business. And, they need to be pointed to the right ends.

• Understanding success as something other than an amount of money. The quality of one’s relationships, for instance.

• Sleeping well rather than sleeping less.

• Serving customers/clients as human beings—as neighbors we love better than ourselves—more than just landing the next deal.

• Enjoyment of the abundance of all things rather than measuring all things against personal financial success.

• Contributing to others and their flourishing rather than consuming others for our own selfish ends. Measuring our journey by our traveling companions rather than the accumulation of frequent flier miles.

Bigger is not necessarily better. Growth built on the sins of efficiency is like gaining muscle through steroid use. You might be bigger, but also grouchy, aggressive, and sliding toward impotence. It isn’t natural. It certainly isn’t healthy. Even if it brings a win for now, devastating loss will follow eventually.

Stop Trying So Hard. What This Millennial Really Wants From Christian Leaders.

Fog machines. Loud music. Skinny jeans. This is what kids want these days, the pastors were told. In an earnest desire to reach Millennials the historic downtown church in my hometown has been transformed into a hipster’s paradise.  

Sometimes this approach works. More often times, it doesn’t.

I have been studying my generation for ten years, authoring my first book about how the Church can become relevant to Millennials when I was 17. At 27, I have made a career out of generational reconciliation.

I rarely meet an individual who doesn’t want to reach Millennials (although it’s happened). More often, CEOs and parents don’t know where to start. I want to empower you with truths and tools to reach my generation. We need leaders like you to take the first steps in bridging the generation gap at work and in the Church. You will be amazed at how quickly we will meet you half way.

There are three words that Millennials love, and if you embody these principles, they will love you too.

Millennials love authenticity. You’ve heard the adage, “They don’t care what you know until the know that you care.” Even if we don’t agree with you, we will respect you because you are unapologetically yourself and you genuinely care about our wellbeing. Despite this generation’s appreciation for virtual connections, we crave authentic conversations where others can know us.

The second word Millennials love is transparency. I’ve found working with corporate leadership on their Millennial engagement strategies how quickly two people can misinterpret the word why. Many (not all) Boomers hear why and assume the individual asking the question is challenging their authority. They get defensive and begin to reestablish their place as the leader. These managers rarely realize that when a Millennial is asking why we are voicing our interest in being a part of the solution. We ask why to learn about our company culture. We ask why to discover our future at the company. We ask why to learn how you think so we can better work with you, not just for you.

The third word Millennials love is disruption. Before you start to get turned off, let me explain what I mean by disruption. Millennials disrupting an industry does not mean disassembling it or disrespecting those who build it. It means we want to be a part of improving it, growing it an expanding its impact. Millennials disrupt because we want to leave our fingerprints on projects and build a legacy.

There are three options Christian leaders have when it comes to this next generation. You can ignore us. You can tolerate us. Or, you can engage us.

The choice is yours. Leaders who choose to engage us see higher levels of fulfillment and productivity across their entire company, not just Millennials. It’s not about creating a workplace, a church or even a community that is so Millennial friendly that it offends everyone over 35. The features that make it a great place for Millennials are the very same factors every one of us is searching for.

Rather than trying too hard to make yourself hip and relevant for a new generation, try spending more time being authentic, transparent and yes, even a little disruptive.

To get a free copy of a sample social media policy that will help Millennials connect more to your company, click here.

3 Benefits Engaged Millennials Bring To The Workplace

“The greatest danger in times of turbulence is not the turbulence. It’s to act with yesterday’s logic.” – Peter Drucker Many organizations are rethinking, re-imagining, and reinventing the workplace. They are not looking simply to cope with the changing world, but also to be proactive as they anticipate the future. They understand that leaders are learners.

A learning organization is made up of learning individuals. That starts with the right questions:

• How can we improve what we are doing?

• What is the best way to grow our business in a 24/7 nonstop global community?

• How could the changing demographics in our workplace make us faster and better at delivering services and products?

• What needs to be changed in our processes and procedures to make us more viable?

• How do we leverage this new generation in light of our future needs?

Millennials (1981-2001), just surpassed Gen X and Boomers as the largest generation in the U.S workforce, 37 percent, and that will increase to 50 percent by 2020.

Future employees (mostly Millennials), will expect their workplace to reflect certain characteristics.  And proactive organizations see these characteristics as advantages.

Here are 3 benefits organizations are gaining by engaging their Millennial workforce.

1. A move toward “distributed” decision making. In traditional organizations decisions are made by central command because that’s where the information is stored. But today, with the entrance of the internet, there is a pipeline of information available to everyone.  The skills for great decision making need to be diverse, dynamic, and ever-evolving in order to keep up with rapid change.

Distributed decision making happens when leadership rises organically. A chain of command can act like a bottleneck slowing down this highly engaging system.

Proactive organizations encourage two-way dialogue. They understand that a company must support bottom-up-decision-making power because it makes them faster and better.

1. More “premium” time spent on work-related issues. We know there are negative risks to being freed from the 9 to 5 cubicle.  However, companies that are open to the process have a different way of thinking.  It’s a natural tendency for an organization to focus on waning loyalty and excess socializing in the office.

For Millennials, the lines separating work and life are blurred.  It’s all fused together — more of a work-life blend. They just do life, which includes work.  They might well be working at 10pm somewhere away from the office. That becomes premium time.

Some are uncomfortable with this new generation of workers, in part, because of their desire for a more flexible workplace.  Yet upon further investigation, many companies are discovering that a focus on what gets done rather than how and where it gets done is turning out to be a good thing. Companies that see these advantages have developed cultures that allow these two worlds to co-exist.

1. A transformation of traditional feedback to “micro-feedback”. The days of an annual or bi-annual performance review have been replaced by a new and better process called micro-feedback. A person gets instant feedback that’s specific to certain behavior(s) in real time, all the time. It’s usually not lengthy or a rant.  It’s spot on, to the point, and in the style of a Twitter-like response of 144 characters. It’s not only easier to understand, but also possesses a greater probability of being applied.  This also lessens the chance of feedback being taken personally instead of behaviorally.

Successful organizations go deeper than the change on the surface.  They change the way they think.  Rather than resisting the change, their thinking results in a paradigm shift that not only embraces the new reality, but also sharpens their impact.

This readies them to explore exciting opportunities coming their way.  As they engage the new workforce, they also embrace the future.

How is your organization engaging and integrating this new workforce?