[Music] welcome everyone i'm really excited to have you um david excited to have you and jennifer sponsoring welcome to beyond the comfort zone live it's a show that helps you step out of your comfort zone into a place of growth and learning um for those of us joining for the first time um i'm aviva walmer and i'm a vistage chair here in atlanta i lead a group of incredibly driven and ambitious ceos who want to accelerate towards their goals faster our peer group is a mastermind of ceos who come together regularly to share ideas and experiences and support one another knowing that together they're going to achieve more than they would on their own no matter how many years of experience a leader has the reality is their knowledge is limited to their own experiences and they don't know what they don't know so they haven't had a chance to be exposed to it yet which is why a pure environment is so great because it gives opportunities to see the unknown and be more proactive and make better decisions today i am honored to have david friedman of high performing culture as my guest david is a highly sought after and top-ranked vistage speaker on the topic of culture he's written two books one of which is on culture in a remote workplace a hot topic these days and he's helped hundreds of companies throughout north america implement his culture-wise operating system but i have to say the reason i asked david to speak today isn't because of all of his awards and all of his recognition he's got a ton of that um it's because i've seen the impact that his work and company has had on businesses including my own before becoming a vistage chair i was ceo of a steel service center and i was a member of a vistage group when i joined my group i was really impressed by several of the members cultures i was attracted to what they were doing it had concrete ways to create a culture that honestly i strive to have in my own business and so i started emulating modeling implementing some of the things that i saw them doing and later i was to find out that about a year or two before i joined vistage there was this speaker david friedman who did a workshop for my group and a lot of the things that i was attracted to that they were doing came from david and his workshop so that couple of hour workshop basically had these companies change the way they worked to improve their cultures and create a culture that really attracted talent and retain talent so i had to get to know this person for myself and i went and attended his annual conference so the reason that i am having david speak today isn't because of all the things i shared before but it's because of the impact that i have seen culture wise have on so many business already to this day and i'm looking forward to giving you guys a glimpse into some of those insights um also i want to give a shout out to jennifer i'm gonna totally mess up your last name but uh montselanico or montalanaco i'm gonna get it right eventually and her company and sparedy for sponsoring this event and for spreading the word um for anyone that wants to meet with myself one-on-one david one-on-one or jennifer um in the chat i have already put contact info for all of us so you have that access to that um i'm going to start by just asking david some questions but i'd love you guys to participate as well please stay on mute and put your questions in chat and i will start to throw them out to david um as appropriate as he's sharing his story with us so please put your questions in chat um david before we get on to how to create an intentional culture that attracts retains talent can you tell everybody a little bit about how high-performing culture came to life sure yeah it's an interesting story uh ava so my background i come from the from philadelphia southern new jersey just outside of philadelphia and i spent 27 years as the ceo of a was an employee benefits consulting company and i grew that company from two people to a little bit over 100 people and during the years that we were growing that company it was a very successful company we were seven or eight times named one of the best places to work in the philadelphia region we were five or six times named one of the fastest growing companies we won leadership awards and service awards all kinds of things but the foundation of everything that we did i mean everything all of our success was based on the culture that we had built in that company and as the ceo of the company i did a lot of things in a very intentional way to make that happen well i eventually sold my company to a large publicly held multi-billion dollar company and uh i retired from that industry and i was too young to be retired i was even younger than i am now and i was too young to be retired but i wasn't sure what i was going to do next and whenever people heard me speak about the things that we were doing in our company they'd say you know that's really interesting you should write a book about that and so i knew sooner or later i would do that so back in 2011 i wrote my first book which was a book called fundamentally different and it was a leadership book about the things i had learned and it talked to so many other people and i wrote that book i'm always very honest about this aviva i wrote that book as a as a closure step as a way of kind of wrapping up my career in a nice bow and putting it behind me so i could go on and do something totally and completely different and well i didn't know it wasn't going to quite work it didn't work very well didn't quite work out that way what ended up happening actually is vistage what aviva was talking about so i had a former client of my old company in southern new jersey who happened to be in a vista group and he called me one day after reading my book and he said you know that's a really interesting book you should come speak to our vistage group and i of course said what's a vistage group i don't know what i never heard of this and he explained to me what vistage was and he hooked me up with the chair somebody like aviva and um and the chair screened me to make sure i wasn't some sort of a crackpot because vista's chairs want to make sure they bring in good speakers and so he screened me and invited me to come and speak to their group and i was just going to do that one talk that was that was my only talk but what happens is if you do a good job the word spreads and i started getting emails from the vistage headquarters saying will you go to atlanta and boston and chicago and i thought well i'm not doing anything else i guess so and so i did the next month i actually went to chicago and a guy came up to me after my talk and he said you know that was really interesting could i hire you to help me do what you just talked about in my company and i thought well shoot i'm retired i mean what i would do with the guy but i'll figure something out and i did and so here i am you know seven eight years later actually i was in i was just saying before we start i was in boston yesterday where i did my 576th vistas talk in the last eight years that's a lot of books a lot of talks 576 of them and uh and since that time i've spoken to all these vistage groups i have worked with more than 400 companies in all different industries i've i've written two other books i've built the whole system around this but it all comes from the experience that i had as the ceo of my company so that everything that i teach comes from my personal experience so i'm not one of those you know sometimes there are consultants who might be smart but they've never really done this everything i teach i did in my company that's where i created it and so i have the privilege of being able to share it with so many people and you know much as you described so many people say it's just it's been transformational for their companies and so for me it's a privilege to be able to share what i've learned well it's a privilege for us to get to hear some of it today so thank you my pleasure um you know i love your perspective because you are very intentional about culture but most companies are not they don't spend so much time or thought on it why should a company be intentional about their culture yeah that's a good question avena you know i i think it really starts with recognizing that the culture in any organization i don't care whether it's the companies that people on this call may be a part of or leaving perhaps or whether we're talking about a sports team or a family or a church group or a synagogue or anything else the culture in any group of people has an enormous influence over every single thing that happens in the company or in the in that group and so there's a an example that i sometimes use in my talks and i talk about i live in this town called moorestown new jersey just outside of philadelphia and the high school in my town has always been known for one particular sport it's the sport of a women's lacrosse lacrosse is very big in my area of the country more so than other parts and the women's lacrosse team in my town for as many years as i can remember i'm going back 25 or 30 years every year they're ranked in the top like five or ten teams in the country and and i always like to talk about them because i find publix high school sports dynasty dynasties to be a really interesting group of teams to study and if you're wondering where i'm going this story i'm going to tie this back to the answer to aviva's question so the public high school sports diocese are fascinating because they have two dynamics that make them really unusual the first is that in a public high school for the most part you can't recruit you're just stuck with whoever lives in your town so think about that in the context of a company imagine if anybody who came to your company knocked on your door and said okay i want to be hired you had to take them how hard would that be to build a great company that's what public schools do secondly in school environments remember too you're turning over your roster every year as kids are graduating so think about that again in the context of our companies imagine if anybody who we who came to our door and said i want to be hired you had to take them and you turned over most of your company every year two or three how hard would that be to build a great company yet that's a public high school sports dynasty and so if you think well what are they doing how are they making that happen what they're doing is they've created cultures they've created levels of expectation that affect people and so i sometimes will say it this way that if you picture the people in your organization most of them will exist on a very typical bell curve like most things on one end of the spectrum if you picture your people typically i find about five to ten percent of those people are people that i like to call rock stars these are the people you could put these people anywhere doesn't matter where you put them they're going to be fantastic because it's just who they are and on the other end of the spectrum you've got five or ten percent of your people who will stink no matter where you put them but in between you got about 80 percent of your people who are going to go with the flow you put those people in a high-performing environment they will look around consciously and unconsciously and they'll figure out i guess i guess that's what people expect here and they'll raise their level of play to match what they see going on around them and you take the same people exact same people with whatever their skills or talent or abilities put those people in a low performing environment they're going to sink to the level of the people around them because the environment has that much influence so to answer your question more directly aviva what what that suggests to me is if we understand that our culture affects everything about how people perform is that something we're just going to leave to chance and just hope that somehow that's going to magically work out on its own i wouldn't want to do that i'd want to make sure that as a leader if i had some way that i could systematically create the kind of environment that would cause my people to elevate their game that would seem like a pretty smart thing to do and so in your opinion culture really drives performance and resolves personalization perhaps everything i mean think of it this way if you're a leader of a company and you think about all the different things you could work on to improve your company i don't know that there's i don't know that there's more than that there's there's one let's put it this way i don't know that there's one thing you could do that would touch more parts of your company than working on your culture because it affects your ability to recruit the kind of people you want and everybody's struggling to get people right now we all know that we can talk more about that yeah it affects your ability your ability to retain the people you want it affects how well people collaborate or do they work in silos it affects whether they deliver fantastic service to the customers or not it affects whether they're innovative it affects how productive there affects just about everything so you think about if i'm a leader what could be more important for me to improve my company than to be working on my culture i mean it's that obvious which is why you invest your life in it yeah and yet it's so striking that no most people don't do it even though it's that obvious we did get a question uh someone's curious what your definition of culture is yeah my definite culture it's a great question because if you know what we're talking about it's pretty hard to sink our teeth into it so my definition of culture is it's really the set of behaviors that define how people operate in a given context and when i say that this are two parts to that definition the first is this idea that it's a set of behaviors so it's not all the lofty things that we say are important it's what people actually do the way they operate in a given environment and i say in a given context because the same people perform differently in different places like picture you know you've got you are different when you are with your friends from high school or college than you are with your co-workers potentially or your softball team or you're a church or whatever that you it's not and that's not being two-faced it's just that the people we're with affects how we do things so the the to me the culture is the set of behaviors that govern how people operate in a given context okay so it's all about behaviors at the end of the day all about behaviors all about behaviors okay getting some very good questions coming in and i will make sure to be addressing them as we keep going um so in an overall context and then we can talk about remote and attracting talent retaining and more specific um can you give us some insight on how you become intentional about behaviors and cultures how do you set the stage you want yeah so before i do that i want to mention one other thing that i think is useful for people to keep in mind as it relates to your question earlier of why does this matter and and then i'll go more directly to that question so i was thinking about this the other day i was um [Music] i was tr i do a lot of traveling and i was in cleveland and i was cleveland's one of those airports i don't know if anybody's on this call from cleveland but they're one of those airports like many atlanta being one of them where when you get when you get out of the airport you have to take a shuttle bus over to the rental car center of course in atlanta you just have that the the non-peopled version of that the the transit system but you so you take the shuttle bus over to the the car rental place and i got on the shuttle bus recently and the the driver the guy was amazing this guy was really enthusiastic and he was friendly and he was helpful and he's telling jokes and he's helping people with their back guy was amazing and i saw that and what i thought about is i thought is it just lucky that i happen to get the guy who happens to be like that or is that the way they do business and the question for those of us on this call is if you think about your company if i if i call your company is it luck that sometimes i get somebody who just happens to be wonderful or is that the way you do business in companies that have that focus on their culture that's the way we do business there's a systematic way that we operate and it doesn't matter who you call or who you deal with you're going to get this amazingly consistent incredible experience because that's the culture there in other companies it's just luck so one of the questions that just came in is who sets those behaviors so in an intentional culture where does that come from yeah so what let's let's go right there and then we'll talk about how do you do it so so the who this is a place where i think it's very important understand that ultimately it is a leader's responsibility to be the one to set the organization's culture now that doesn't mean other people can't be involved in this but ultimately this is a leadership function it's one of the most important functions of a leader to establish this is where we're going and this is what we're about i had a um i mean one more piece to a brief story about this but i um i say that it's a leader's responsibility and i say that ultimately it's the leader but the leader should also include the senior leadership team and but i'm going to be very careful in the language i use for this so notice how i say this we should include if i'm the ceo i should include my senior leadership team for their contribution to my thinking notice how i said that for their contribution to my thinking in other words i'm going to include my senior leadership team not to make them feel good i'm going to include them because they're smart because these are really smart people and think about it i hope so and their their ideas could influence mine but at the end of the day this isn't a majority vote it's not a consensus it's not let's make sure everybody on the team gets a little of what they'd like to see it's what i as the ceo i have has a vision of my company and but i'm influenced by the really smart people on my team a quick little side story about this so a a month or so ago i had the good fortune of spending some time with horst schulze who was the founder and ceo of ritz carlton for many years some many people may know his name and he lives in atlanta we're outside of atlanta um and and i'll tell the story later but i patterned so much of what i learned after things i learned from ritz carlton so this girl has been very influential for me but i had a chance to spend several hours with horse over dinner just the two of us and i picked his brain a little bit about how he created some of the things that they did at ritz carlton and he said to me something i thought was very interesting he said to me in his view the ceo of a company has two major responsibilities the two most important responsibilities he said the first responsibility of a leader is to set the vision for the organization if you're the ceo it's your job to step where are we going what where are we heading here he said the second thing is that it's the responsibility of the leader or the ceo in particular to set the standards for the company you know this is the way we do things around here this is what's important to us and it's his or her job to do that and so i think this is very significantly a leadership function and i would tell you that it's a mistake that i witness in so many companies that in so many companies i think one of the biggest mistakes people make about this is over collaborating about the the design of the culture they that they'll go through an uh an exercise where they'll get all the employees involved everybody will put post-it notes on the walls and the wordsmith and they'll try to decide what the culture is and i think it's a terrible mistake because i think that ultimately it is a design function we are designing the extraordinary company we're trying to build we're not designing around all the employees we happen to have on october 28th of 2021 and what they would like to see we're designing around the leaders vision of the company they're trying to build and as a one last comment about this the reason by the way that in my observation many companies over collaborate about this is actually a good reason it's just that there's a fault in the logic the reason that they over collaborate is typically to get greater buy-in and engagement on the part of the workforce and that's a really important goal to get buy-in engagement the mistake in the thinking is that the only or best way to accomplish that is by getting everybody to be an author of it we actually get amazing involvement and engagement and buy-in by how it gets rolled out into the organization and everybody participates and they get all excited they love it and they didn't have to author it so the goal of engagement and buy-in is a worthy goal and an important goal it's just that they don't need to be the author of it in order to do that so from my perspective long-winded answer but from my perspective this is a leadership function it's the leader's responsibility to offer the culture of the organization so i think i'd be getting ahead of myself if i asked you how you get that engagement through rollout since we haven't talked about the behavior so let's take a step back and let's dive into okay behaviors leaders supposed to set them how does a leader decide what they are how does they how do they define this very ambiguous thing to actually set this culture for their team yeah that's a great question so when we talk about how to define the culture i make a very important language distinction between two different ideas and this is going to sound at first maybe picky or just semantics but i'm going to show you why it's more than semantics it's a really important issue so i make a big deal about the difference between what i call or many companies call core values and what i call behaviors when i use that language behaviors so let me describe what that difference is and why is this important so a core of value today is typically an abstract concept so examples of values are things like quality integrity loyalty respect teamwork service innovation these are ideas concepts a behavior in contrast is an action it's something i can see people doing so give you some examples of behaviors some of the behaviors i teach in my company are things like honor commitments that's something you actually do practice blameless problem solving get clear on expectations do what's best for the customer these are actions that people do so a value is an abstract idea a behavior is an action in parts of speech i sometimes think of it almost like like a value is a noun and a behavior is a verb it's a thing versus an action now the reason this is important and not just semantics is that the problem with the way most companies craft their typical core values is that they're so broad and they're so abstract that they mean too many different things to different people and they become hard to operationalize i was talking to a client the other day or a prospect actually now a client the other day and there was a company that was really passionate about their culture and the ceo told me we got three core values that we talk about all the time and their three core values were love trust and respect and they're very important to this guy and they talk about him a lot the problem is what do those words mean what does that look like in action it means a lot of different things to different people what you mean by respect may be very different from what i mean by respect so to simply say we value love trust and respect great but how do i operationalize it like that it means too many different things to different people so i gotta ask because i wouldn't bet that if i had people raise their hands almost everybody in this call has values somewhere on their website or their wall um are you saying we should get rid of values all together and just move to behaviors um good question maybe so here's what i would say um and this is a little controversial because everybody is so tied to their core values but here's what i would say if we're starting if i were starting from scratch so the answer to that question is different depending upon where our starting point is so if i were starting a company and okay i got nothing i'm trying to decide what i want my culture to be i just go straight to the behaviors so in my company i do not talk about any set of core values it doesn't mean i don't value anything it's just i don't know what the utility is in me articulating them what i need to have is i need to know what i want my people to do i need to articulate those behaviors i give those behaviors by the way a name it's just my nomenclature i call them fundamentals because they're fundamental to success so i in my company we practice our fundamentals and i don't talk about any particular core values i don't need to this is what we want our culture to be now having said that to your point if we were to ask everybody in this call to raise their hand probably all of them at some point have defined a set of core values before and so when i teach people about the concept of behavior since the light bulb goes off and they get it then they always worry oh well what do i do about that stuff we've been talking about for the last five years i can't possibly say i listen to aviva's you know her linkedin live and that friedman guy said we should scrap the values we're going to bag all that i can't do that so now what do i do so here's the easiest solution this is what i've done many many times if you're an organization and you already have a set of core values that you've been promoting that you've been talking about that are on your walls what i suggest you do is just temporarily just for a moment put them off to the side and i want to be clear i'm not suggesting the values are stupid just that they don't bring the clarity that we need so what i suggest you do is you park them on the side just for a minute and allow yourselves the intellectual freedom to just think about without any limits at all what are the behaviors that are important to us and then when we message it to the organization the way we would message it to the organization is we say you know those five core values we've always talked about that are on our walls and they're in our performance reviews and we've always you know promote promoted these well those are really important here but what do those values mean on a day-to-day basis well this set of behaviors over here is how we live to our values now i want to be really clear here we don't try to do any kind of a mapping exercise where we don't try to say well these three behaviors equal value one and these four equal value two we just say the way you live to the core values we've always talked about is by practicing these behaviors as a set that this set of value of behaviors is how we live to the set of values and when we do that it allows us to really start focusing on our behaviors without having to to eliminate or abandon everything that we've always talked about that you can present this the behaviors as a deepening or an extension of whatever legacy work may already exist in your company and that's the easiest way to tie those concepts together okay so there's probably people shaking their heads on this one that makes sense i get it these behaviors make sense how do i go about defining behaviors as a leader of my organization what does that exercise look like yeah so the exercise looks like this the first thing you do is you get your leadership team together and you start to do a little bit of brainstorming and you ask yourself some questions and so here are some here's some some good questions that are are good to kind of start the brain going to get that brainstorming happening i think about what are the things that you as a leader say if we could just get our people to do these things more consistently oh man watch out we'd be amazing what are those things what are the things that as a leader drive you crazy every one of us as leaders have things that when we see them going on in our companies we just want to pull our hair out that's what happened to me and um and so we just you know they drive us crazy well what's the opposite of that thing if it drives you nuts you got some energy about that what's the opposite of that if they weren't doing that thing that drives you nuts what would they be doing instead what are things that you as a leader go on rants about oh there goes aviva she's not one of her kicks again you know you wouldn't rant they wouldn't you wouldn't be ranting about if it wasn't important that's why you're ranting about it here's one of my favorite questions this is a real good one think about typically in every department of our company we usually have one or more people in each area of our company who we wish we could clone the people you say boy if i could get three more guys like that guy or two more women like that woman we would be amazing picture your very best people what do they do that makes you want to clone them well you should see she always does okay that's probably a pretty good list of behaviors sometimes you know it helps to if you picture real people it helps you to think of them instead of just trying to have this abstract exercise in your brain the reason by the way that this is such an important thing is that that we've got to be able to visualize and explain to people what we want them to be doing so the more clearly we could describe that the easier it is to teach and coach and guide and give people feedback about this stuff the whole reason that this behavioral thing is such an important issue is that again driving a culture is mostly about teaching and if we're going to teach our people what we want and coach them the clearer we are about that the better it is extraordinarily difficult any of you who are on this call think about if you've ever tried to coach somebody about their values that's really hard you're not do showing enough love right now what the heck is that i don't know what i'm doing but i can say i can say very clearly whether they're honoring their commitments or not i could talk all day long about what i see them doing or not doing and give them coaching and help and support and feedback on so it's really hard to coach people about values it's easy to coach them about behaviors and that's what i'm trying to get done now you know the question i think on everybody's mind to probably join the session today talent is a problem right it's so hard to find people there's this great resignation everybody's talking about so how do these behaviors help somebody a company attract talent or retain talent yeah you know it is a big issue and everywhere i go i hear people so fr it's interesting as i talk to all these vistage groups i'm speaking to a lot of ceos and what i consistently hear from people is business is booming we're doing we're we're selling more we've ever sold and we got two problems one is supply chain issues which is not our topic today but everybody's struggling with that and the other is i can't find anybody to hire let alone good people i can't find anybody to hire you know we we hired 10 people but we need 50. and everybody's struggling with that so it's really hard so when we think about how are we going to find the people we want and i think anytime we're talking about hiring we have to talk about retention at the same time because obviously i gotta keep the people i have if i lose somebody and we're in this environment where it's hard to find workers i'm really up a creek so i got to make sure i'm not losing people that i got right now that i want to keep and i also got to find new people well when you look at so what what are the reasons what are the reasons that people choose to go work somewhere or choose to leave somewhere almost always very high on the list of every survey you look at is the culture of the organization that when we've got the right kind of culture we're attracting people who want to work in that kind of environment when they've got a choice i mean it's a it's a an employee market more than as an employer market they get the choice to say where do i want to work if i want to work and and if they're going to choose they're going to choose a place that they feel connected to that they feel like you know is a culture that they want to be a part of and so to the extent that we've built the kind of culture that is great it's going to attract people to want to come to work for us versus competitors and it's going to help us to keep it it's interesting you mentioned earlier aviva that you would come to one of our annual summits that we do so we do this annual conference that brings together companies that are really passionate about culture to share best practices and learn from each other so we just had last week was our annual summit in philadelphia and uh you should have been there but um the next year next year it'll be filled november 2nd to 4th for anybody that's putting it on your calendar um but anyway one of the things we did during the summit is we had a a panel discussion among people who are working on their culture we took five companies we put them in the front of the room and we specifically focused on this issue so what are you doing to attract and retain people and most and more significantly how are you using your culture to do that and it was fascinating to hear these companies talk about it and first of all all of them are using their fundamentals in the recruiting process and in the interview process so first of all in the recruiting process they're telling their people about their culture they're sharing their fundamentals and while many companies may talk about their core values there's no substance behind it when these when candidates see how serious we are about our culture and the way in which we practice it and work on it and we haven't even talked that much about how to work on it but when they see how how serious and committed we are to our culture they say wow that's not like everybody else that just has their core values on the website this sounds different it's the kind of company i'm interested in secondly when we're interviewing people we're asking interview questions around the fundamentals around the behaviors so that we can ascertain is this person really the kind of person who's going to be a fit in this kind of culture it was interesting that in that panel discussion quite a few people gave specific stories and examples of candidates that they hired who told them that you know what you know what the reason was that i came to work here your culture that's what's that that told me that's why i wanted to work here and each of them had plenty of stories about that so it is a tough labor market and so we got to have some way of standing at it and by the way if we're not feature featuring our culture and our fundamentals on our websites and other places how would candidates know that we're the kind of place they want to work you know we have to have we got to raise the flag and say hey you know let me tell you about our culture with some real substance some meat behind it not just again oh we got some core values on our website but let me really show you what our culture is and how we work on it it needs to be prominent enough so that employee who's scanning possible employers and looking at websites and other things gets to yours whoa those people are different that sounds pretty i might want to work there if we're not telling them about that how would they know so here's a scary question for you in this environment yeah people need talent so bad they're trying to grab it right and left i mean my recycling hasn't been picked up in two weeks because they just don't have people i saw a really funny thing on linkedin but i think it was very serious it was a sign on dunkin donuts door and it said please be patient and if you can't be patient fill out an application that's right that's the death of the environment we're in right now it's not hey i need and i'm having a hard time finding one or two people we're really struggling so in an environment where we're really struggling how do you hold up to these behaviors and not just take random people off the street and actually maintain your culture it's a fair question and and i don't want to underestimate how hard that is it's tough and so a couple things i'd say so first of all i'm going to make the general statement that we will never build the kind of organization we want to have assuming we want to have a great organization we will never build the kind of organization we want to have bringing in people who are not a good fit not going to happen i don't care how desperate we are if we bring in people who are going to be a lousy fit we will undermine everything we're doing yes we may be able to fill a slot but we'll fill a slot fill the slot with a jerk with a lousy attitude who's going to do a poor job and is going to can i say piss off on linkedin going to piss off all of our all of our our potential customers that's not going to do us much good so we've got to be rigorous as hard as that is it takes a lot of leadership discipline you know in the face of that real world challenge it's nice to say in the theoretical world oh you should only hire really good people but in the real world where we're faced with this challenge like you said today it takes a lot of leadership discipline to avoid the mistake of just filling a spot because it's empty you know sometimes i say it this way sometimes it feels like we as employers are comparing this particular candidate who's in front of us to an empty chair compared to an empty chair the guy looked darn good but is he or she really what we needed well maybe not it takes it's hard it takes a lot of discipline to avoid that mistake but we're not going to build the kind of company we're trying to if we do that now i want to add a little bit of of um nuance to what i just said and the nuance is that i have described cultural fit in somewhat black and white ways and the world's not black and white it's really gray so it really isn't that some people are good fit and others aren't a good fit there's a range of degree of fit so if i were to if we were to create an arbitrary scale let's say one to ten and on one end of the spectrum one is that person is a horrendous fit for what we're trying to hire in from a cultural standpoint and on the other end of the spectrum a 10 is oh my god how did i ever get so lucky to find them people are not usually one or ten they're somewhere in between the two and and so in to be realistic about it in in times in there are two situations in which we may compromise a little one is when it's freaking desperate to hire anybody okay in those kinds of circumstances i might be willing to hire a six and a half where in previous times i might not settle for anything less than a seven and a half but if i hire a three i'm going to screw up my company so there might be a little more flex today than maybe but there's still a limit to we're not bringing in people that aren't going to be a good fit the second time in which or way in which we may have a little more flexibility in that nuance is there are some roles that are more difficult to hire than others so i think about give a good example in my first company i had a woman who was she was a telemarketer her job all day long was to make cold calls to prospects and get turned down all day long as she tries to set po appointments for our sales team that is a miserable job you can't be a normal human being and do that all day and so okay i could live with a little more there in that role than in a different role that you know what i could hire somebody like that or replace somebody like that so okay i'm gonna live with a little more now that doesn't mean anything goes that doesn't mean she could be a lousy fit but okay on that one to 10 scale maybe i go a little further down the line for a position that's really hard to find than in a position that's easy to find but there's still a limit to that if i bring in people they're going to be a lousy fit i will undermine my company and what i'll be left with is great i got a lot of people but at a lousy company that doesn't perform very well so it's hard but it takes a lot of discipline and it's a it's a terrible mistake if we bring those people in you know it's interesting um in in talks that i do we sometimes talk about getting rid of some of the lousy fits and and i do this thing where i'll ask ceos typically or senior leaders you know how many of you have ever fired one of those people that was like a high performer but a really lousy fit and almost everybody in the room will raise their hand say yeah i've done that and then i asked them so when you did that what did everybody else say and practically in unison you know what they say thank god we were wondering when you're just oh god i'm just waiting way too long we've all had this and then i asked them then i asked them this question i asked the ceo so what did you say to yourself after you got rid of them and almost in unison they say i should have done this a long time ago you know what took me so long we all know this so why if i know that why am i going to bring somebody in who i'm going to be saying about that that about later ugh but we get tempted by that desperation so it does again i don't want to minimize how hard that is but it takes a lot of leadership discipline to avoid making that mistake yeah it's it's a hard call especially i can only imagine an environment like this um a little bit while ago you mentioned customers um and i've actually got a couple questions about that coming over about how culture ties into kind of the customer experience and extends out can you talk a little bit about how do you share these behaviors downstream um so that your customers feel your culture yeah so when we talk about you know everything i talk about as we've been reviewing is learning to be more systematic more intentional more purposeful about creating the kind of culture that we want i organized the steps that it takes to do that around a framework that i wrote about in my books called the eight step framework eight different things if you do these eight things this is how you systematically create a culture in an organization and while all of the eight steps are important at the end of the day there's really two steps that drive probably 80 or 90 percent of the impact like if you do these two things you're going to be really successful and if you don't do these two things you just won't get very far those two things are first what we've just been talking about and that is how do i define more clearly exactly what i want the culture to be and that's defining those behaviors that i call fundamentals the second step is really how you operationalize this how do you get it downstream is to use your phrase to to all the people and we do that through a concept very simple concept but very powerful that i call creating rituals so a ritual to me is a behavior that you do over and over and over again until it becomes baked in it becomes second nature so simple examples of rituals we get up in the morning we brush our teeth you hopefully you you know you go to a ball game we do the national anthem when i was a kid in school we used to say the pledge of allegiance some people before a meal they say a prayer these are routines they're just rituals the reason that rituals are so critical to success is that most people and most organizations aren't very good at sticking with things we come up with all kinds of wonderful ideas whether it's personally you know the the new year's resolution for the diet or the exercise program or whether it's the program at work that we're really excited about and then life gets in the way and we get busy and it falls by the wayside when something becomes a ritual it's not hard to do it's just part of the way we do things so the way we use that simple concept is we take those behaviors those fundamentals as i call them and it gets rolled out to people in interactive sessions and then we begin to focus on one of these fundamentals every week through a series of rituals i'll give you an example in just a second so week number one everybody in the whole company all week long is thinking about working on and focusing on practicing fundamental number one the week after that everybody's on number two and the week after that three and four and so on and we just keep cycling through them over and over and over and over again so an example of a ritual in my company and every one of our clients the first agenda item on every meeting that we have whether it's a zoom meeting or an in-person meeting a leadership meeting a customer if we have a meeting going on in our company this week every single one of those meetings the first agenda item of that meeting is the fundamental of the week and we spend the first three to five minutes talking about it what does it mean how do we practice it what could we do that did it just come up with a customer yesterday and we spent three to five minutes and then we move on we don't want to take over the meeting but just a few minutes just to clarify for a second you said you do this in customer meetings as well yeah absolutely yeah it's very powerful when you deal with the customer meaning the customer starts to say wow if they're that serious about their culture i'll bet they're pretty serious about how they're going to deliver the services that you know i'm buying from them it has a huge impact on customers so think about in in any of your companies that are on this call imagine if ev think of all the all the meetings that go on in your company in a given week in all different places and all different people and imagine if in every single one of those meetings people were talking about your fundamental the week think about all the teaching that would go on all the awareness that would be raised and if you do that this week and next week everybody's doing that on fundamental number two and the week after that three and four and five and six and so on and we keep cycling through them over and over and over and over and over again sooner or later these behaviors start to become internalized they just become the way we do things around here and that's really the essence of the concept that you know if there are other rituals companies practice but the idea is if we can define in really clear terms the behaviors that you say as a leader drive success in your organization and then we can create this i call it a structured systematic way to teach those behaviors to people over and over and over and over and over again those behaviors are going to become internalized in people and that's how you get people living to that culture now that eight-step framework that i referred to includes things like what we were just talking about how do you hire people who are going to be a good fit how do you integrate them into the company after you've hired them how do you coach them how do you create accountability there's other things but the core of it is this really really simple idea that if we define in really clear terms those behaviors that are going to drive success and then we create this systematic way to teach those behaviors they're going to start to live in our people and that works just as well remotely as it does in person now how many fundamentals do people companies typically have oh this always surprises people so i am asking it yes i know i know so i'm gonna i have to explain this to people so you know this is another of these places that i depart from conventional wisdom but you'll understand when i explain it so i've done this process that i've been describing with more than 400 different companies and many others have read my books and done it on their own but in the 400 that i have experienced with believe it or not the least number of behaviors that i've seen in those 400 is 18. the most that's the only one i've ever seen less than 20. the most i've ever seen is 40 and the sweet spot seems to end up somewhere in the 25 to 30 area i have 30 in my company the the the reason that most of this sounds kind of crazy to people and i always say the number doesn't really matter and i'll explain why in just a second but the conventional wisdom for why most people will tell you hey you shouldn't have any more than like four to six things because you know that's not people are never going to be able to remember more than that and you're right they're not but here's the question i always ask people what's our goal is our goal to have something that our people can recite or is our goal to have our people live the behaviors that drive success in our company i think it's the latter and there's more than four or five behaviors that drive success i often say to people if you looked at mine i have a little card with mine on it and we have 30 30 fundamentals i say to people if you were to look at my 30 fundamentals and you say i only want to have five i would ask which 25 of those do you not want to be teaching you'd end up struggling i'm not gonna you're gonna you don't want to teach people to honor commitments you don't want to teach them to practice blameless problem solving i mean there's so many things that you don't want to leave out the reason ultimately that the number doesn't matter is that think about how we're using them whether you have 4 or 11 or 17 or 29 we're only taking them one at a time anyway and we're going to keep cycling through them over and over and over and over again so it doesn't really matter how many we have outside of something silly if there were 362 we'd never get back to the beginning but outside of something silly it doesn't really remember and we're not going up to any of our people saying aviva can you recite number 11 no i don't need anybody to recite anything i just know if we take one at a time and we focus on it really intently work at it and then we cycle through them over and over and over and over again they're going to become internalized in our people that's why the number doesn't really matter but 25 to 30 is what is most common and i'll tell you just as a side comment that virtually every client i've ever worked with started the process saying i don't want to have any more than like five you understand this isn't going to work for me and none of them are saying that today so i totally get people's concern about that conventional wisdom and they're done that my executive team was like are you kidding me five right five um we ended up having 20 fundamentals of the pacesetter way so um but it does you are right it just becomes innate in your everyday the language just becomes a common terminology almost like a definition book and guide um i think people it's hard to imagine that because you think oh you have to memorize it to get there but living it you know just becomes ingrained so it does um i can speak to that from experience but i remember that battle which is why i asked the question yes it's a fair question um so we've talked about um you know you mentioned so this works just as well in remote um i'm curious can you go into that a little more um a lot of people are in a remote hybrid workforce right now how do you ritualize and create that environment um yeah so the first thing i'd say david is that there was a dynamic that happens in companies before the pandemic and then i'll tie that back to how the pandemic has applies to this so if you picture this those of you that are working companies when a company is smaller and it's got it's just starting and maybe it's got 5 or 10 or 15 or 20 people to a degree as leaders we don't have to be it would be better if we were but we don't have to be as systematic about our culture because we were all together and everybody was if i'm the leader everybody was around me every day and they saw me and they watched my example and even by osmosis they just kind of picked up the vibe the way that we do things around here and that was kind of good enough to get the job done but as a company grows and it goes from 15 or 20 people to maybe 50 people or 100 or 200 or maybe it has multiple locations or maybe it makes an acquisition or two all of a sudden they're not all seeing me as the leader anymore my my reach isn't far enough to touch all of those people and so if i don't have some more systematic way to draw create and drive my culture i'm at significant risk of losing it all as we start to expand well the pandemic kind of forced that dynamic on everybody because whether you were small medium or large all of a sudden your people weren't around anymore they're all working from home and so if you were relying primarily on physical proximity as the primary way in which you are driving culture good luck because that's not going to work anymore so we have to have the the pandemic forced us to be more those that are successful at least force people to need to be more systematic have a more a greater method for driving their culture instead of just hoping people are going to pick it up by osmosis and so the the system that that i teach and talk about is actually just as effective whether you're working remotely or not my company my current company this is my second company it's been remote from the beginning so forget the pandemic we've always been remote might be all over the place and we practice our culture in the same ways that everybody else does so we have our fundamental the week we practice it every week every week the message goes out around it every meeting we have on zoom we start with our fundamental the week we have a mobile app that i use and many of our clients use and on my mobile app a weekly message goes out at the beginning of the week about this week's fundamental and a lesson about it and people comment on it or like it so i've got my people engaging with each other over the act talking about the fundamental of the week on the app every day i get a push notification with a quick tip which is a reminder of some insight related to this week's fundamental so every single day i and all of my team on our phone are getting a reminder oh that's a good thought yeah that reminds me of something about our fundamental so i'm constantly engaged with it on our phone there's videos and teaching points and all kinds of ways so all of the things that people do when they're together we can do that stuff more remotely awesome so being systematic in and of itself basically yes um we are very tight on time at this point i am respectful of everybody's time here um i do want to ask you one last question before i close out and something i ask everybody on the show um what is something you would like to try in business or in life that's outside your comfort zone that you haven't yet that's an interesting question well i'll tell you right off what it's not then i'll tell you what it is so what it's not is it sure as heck isn't like jumping out of a freaking airplane i have no need to do that but that's so much fun oh damn believe me i have no need to do that in my life if when i die if i haven't jumped out of an airplane that'll be perfectly okay so there's no need for that in my life um you know what i'd like to learn i'd like to learn how to sing i think i'm a really lousy singer and and music brings so much joy to people and i'm so i'm almost i'm embarrassed about how bad i am and i'd like to learn to be better if it's possible um but it's way outside my comfort zone that's awesome i love it that is a very unique answer once i've gotten well everybody there you have it um one gotta help him learn to sing um you got just a smidge of all great things that david has to share about culture about talent a remote workforce if you're interested in talking to him more or myself or also jennifer i'm going to put everybody's info back in chat um the recording of this will also be sent out to everybody so you'll get a replay of this and be able to watch it over and i just want to thank you david for joining me today it is such an honor to have you as a guest on my show always my pleasure ava thank you to everyone who's here attending and all the questions you asked and until next time on beyond the comfort zone i want to encourage everybody here not just david um but to try something new outside of your comfort zone because it's where growth occurs and honestly life begins so thank you everybody i really appreciate you being here thanks aviva awesome conversation thank you aviva thank you david you're very welcome that was great [Music]