My Thoughts On Work, Culture, and Building My Company | Ep 231
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I'd been in a job where I had a great culture and I looked forward to coming to work every day and I'd been in jobs where I had a terrible culture when I felt like I dreaded work every day and I said if I'm going to start a company I want it to be a place that makes it makes people's lives better and makes them excited to come to work rather than the opposite. I always wanted to have a company with a great culture I did not always have the skill. Culture is a reflection of the person at the top.

So if you want a certain kind of culture, you need to be a certain kind of person that emulates that culture. The culture will never be kinder than the leader. The culture will never be more direct than the leader. The culture will never be harder working than the leader. And so the leader has to emulate the culture. Like you are the source. You have to reinforce the culture. A lot of people feel bad reinforcing something that isn't performance-based. And I realized that

I have to pick apart the little things that don't align with the culture because if I don't draw the line, who does? Culture is built through a thousand details strung together, not any one big thing. Most companies, if somebody got up and said, fuck you all, I hate you, that would go against their culture. And so it's just like, to what degree are things acceptable or not? And that's what culture is. Culture is not stagnant. It exists stagnant.

almost like on it's like a pendulum it swings it goes maybe a little this way then you're like oh it's a little too far i'm going to bring it back this way and the goal is always to get it in the middle but it never remains in the middle it's always slightly moving and so it's fluid it's not something that's going to be the same forever and that's not a bad thing you can make money without having a culture i think building a community building a team i don't think a team can be built without culture

Because a team is a group of individuals that abide by certain principles, a code of conduct and standards, whether the coach is there or not. And so you can have people that work for you and you can have employees. That's not the same as having followers, right?

people who actually adhere to the culture when you're not in the room. Leaders in the company are expected to be the most potent source of culture and of values. And so they need to be the ones to tell everyone what that looks like. So somebody's trying to shift the culture of their organization. There's really three steps, in my opinion, to do that. The first is that you have to reset expectations and take ownership over what currently is the culture. So when I realized that the culture on one of my teams was not good,

I called a meeting and I put together a slide deck and I explained, hey, I fucked up. This isn't the culture I want. It's not the culture I think you guys want. Here's the culture that I want. And here's the culture that's going to get us to where we need to go. So I reset expectations. The next thing I did is I repeated the crap out of myself over and over again on every meeting possible. So I essentially how I did it is I doubled communication.

So I said, okay, we've got one huddle a week we're doing. We're going to do two. And in every huddle, I'm reinforcing that new culture that I already let them know about when I set the expectations. The next thing I'm going to do is I'm going to inform people of consequences if they don't adhere to the new culture. And I'm going to let them know ahead of time. If you don't like this, if you don't like the direction we're going, I respect it. Just let me know. So you let people let you know if they want to opt out.

And then you say, okay, great. Now for everyone else who has agreed to stay, right? We're not holding anybody prisoner. They've all said, yeah, I want to be here. And we say, okay, cool. So here's the new standards I hold you guys to. Here's what happens if we don't. I'm going to let you know. I'm going to work with you on it. But if you can't figure it out in a matter of time, then it means you can't be on the team. And so you have to reset expectations.

reinforce those expectations and inform people of consequences if they don't meet the expectations that they agreed to. And I would say what goes with that is it's never perfect. Nobody ever has a perfect culture where everybody at every point in time acts in alignment with it. Why?

Well, I would say because most companies are not run like the military, right? Which is essentially by authority and it's extreme authority and there's lives at risk there. To expect that one would have a perfect culture is to expect that people can perfectly control themselves at all points in time. If people could have absolute complete control over themselves at every point in time and make the perfect decision at every point in time, they would, but they don't.

And so don't expect perfection. Expect that people learn from their mistakes.