I heard a great formula for improving culture last week. Mark Clouse, CEO for Campbell Soup, said, “To improve your culture, you need to first create an attitude and culture of hope, building hope creates a stepping stone to confidence, and confidence helps propel you to accountability.”
Getting the privilege to work with companies all across the country, one of the biggest struggles I find is the ability for owners, CEO’s and upper management to understand the power and the competitive advantage you create when you have great company culture.
Usually when I start working with a new company, one of the first things we unpack is the lack of ownership among the team, the lack of urgency and accountability. The owner usually does not realize that we have unintentionally created an environment of confusion and lack of clarity. Usually this confusion has been created by responses or comments about lack of results, negative customer feedback, loss of profits, or even work ethic, toward team members. What we do not realize is these seeds of fear that “I’m not good enough”, “I’m not doing a good job”, slowly crush our culture, our people and our results.
We need to have a paradigm shift. Our grandmothers always told us we get better results from sugar, than from lemons. How can we adjust our attitude as owners and leaders to inspire our team to use all of their gifts, talents, experience and expertise to help our company to move forward.
There are three things we can begin to try, over the next 30-60 days, to see if we can begin to turn our culture, our team and our results toward amazing!
Mark Clouse suggests:
- Hope. Clarify with your team where you are going as an organization. What you are trying to achieve in the next 12-36 months. Explain how you think they can contribute to obtaining these results and encourage them, and empower them (with guard rails and guidelines) to strive to achieve or exceed the goals for their area. (If the team member is not bought in, not on board, take the 36 hours of pain, and make the change you have been pondering for weeks or months). Give the team member some hope that you think we can do this, as a company, and you think they can help us get there, even if it will be unbelievably difficult.
- Confidence. Once everyone has clarity about where we are going and how they can contribute, encourage them on their journey. Even if it is messy and a little unproductive as we get started, stay the course. Thank them for their efforts. Review things they might be able to change or adjust. Boost their confidence that you are sure they can do it! Review adjust, coach, inspire/ encourage. If you have the right person in the right seat, my experience has shown they can do amazing things. Mark Miller, CTO (Chief Training Officer) for Chick Filet, in his book, “The Heart of Leadership” shares that if we can get the heart of our team, we can get all of them. Gifts, talents, passion, creativity, ownership, urgency, and unbelievable results.
- Accountability. Once they have bought in and are a little inspired about the future, we become much more confident in what we are doing and how we are contributing. We can then become accountable for our results. With clarity, coaching, training, equipping, inspiring, the team member can begin to own their responsibilities and results. It is a pretty amazing thing to be a part of.
It may sound overwhelming, but trust me, the baby steps to culture change can create unbelievable and record setting results. Rember, Mark Clouse reminds us to create Hope that leads to Confidence which can result in Accountability and improvement!