If you ask anyone who know cars at all, what were the ten most dangerous cars to drive, ever! You are certainly going to hear the Ford Pinto mentioned! In the ten year run of production, there may have been as many as 900 people die in crashes while driving a Pinto. Law suits eventually resulted in Ford stopping production of the pinto and Ford paid out to surviving family members millions of dollars.
In 2014 hundreds of people in Flint, Michigan became sick and possibly as many 130 people died due to bacterial, chemical, or other factors contributed to the water crisis in flint! People have gone to Jail and the law suits are not done.
In just 30 days, 10,000 unvaccinated, non-mask wearing people in Florida died of the delta variant of the Covid-19 virus?
In the work we do with our clients, very little matters unless we know what they truly value. We believe the core values and principles of any organization must be the basis for their vision and mission. In turn, a value and principle driven vision and mission must be the foundation for the expectations leaders have for the behavior and performance of every member of the organization. In many of our client organizations, these values and principles exist but have never been clarified, stated, and used to make certain that every member of the organization is aligned with these values and principles and whether or not they buy into the organization’s vision and mission. Initially, many organizations do not make screening for compatibility with these ideals a part of their recruiting, hiring, onboarding, and training process. But once they realize how doing so can improve the probability of success for each new hire, this becomes part of normal operations for these companies.
When an organization begins to use its values and principles as the filter through which every decision and every action is vetted before moving forward, the organization becomes very intentional in creating the culture it wants. Too many organizations have a Culture by accident. We chose our company name very intentionally. We believe the best and most productive companies have a Culture By Choice! This is our Vision and Mission: to assist all of our client companies in their efforts to attain a Culture By Choice. We have our own values statement; it’s summed up with the word PAIL. We value People, all people, even if we don’t always agree with them! We value Action more than words, even though we understand that words can deeply affect people. We value Integrity in every sense of the word. We value Love and endeavor to spread and share our love on a daily basis, in everything we do.
When any organization operates based on their core values and principles, they have the opportunity to become a Legacy Organization led by Legacy Leaders and they exist within a Legacy Culture. The relationship we have built with our clients, and continue to build with each new client, results in the greatest possible sense of satisfaction for each of us in our company. As we continue to grow, we will need to add new members to our team. It is imperative that each new team member understand our mission, vision, values and principles. This can only happen if we intentionally train each new team member in what we are about, what we expect, and how we conduct ourselves and our business. This is the Legacy we choose to leave. This is the Legacy we want for Culture By Choice.
No company exists unless it provides something somebody else needs or wants. Culture By Choice, or CBC as we’ve become to be known as, initially did a few little projects for a few companies. I contacted an old friend who was President and CEO of a large electrical contractor in Illinois and my partner, Larry, contacted an old friend who was the President and CEO of a Vending Industry Company in Chattanooga, Tennessee. We explained to our respective contacts what we were up to and to our pleasant surprise, they were both interested. So I left my home in Southern Michigan and drove into the Northwest suburbs of Chicago. Larry headed off to Chattanooga from his home in Southern Wisconsin. Within a few months we had our first 2 clients and today, more than 9 years later, even though both of those initial contacts have retired, these 2 companies are still using our services. They have not only survived this most recent pandemic and its associated economic downturn, but they have emerged as thriving businesses.
We’ve added a considerable number of clients beyond these first 2. They are from a variety of industries and from many different regions of the US. They all have one thing in common, leadership in these companies wants to create cultures that promote success for everyone. Not just share holders and top management, but everyone in the organization. This requires more than our Core Advantage Assessments. It requires a commitment to Legacy Leadership. Legacy Leadership is several steps beyond what most people think leadership is. Legacy Leadership looks at the whole of an organization and examines its “collective WHY!” Not just why was this company created but the why that exists when you ask why the reason for creating the company is important, and then ask why that’s important and you keep asking why “that last idea is important” until you can’t go any deeper.
For Culture By Choice, we created our company to help our clients create company cultures that promote success for all. So why is this important? When everyone begins to personally feel success in what they are doing, they will have a greater sense of accomplishment and satisfaction. And why is that important? Greater accomplishment and satisfaction can lead to greater productivity and a more positive outlook. Why is that important? Higher productivity is good for our nation and a more positive outlook is good for out personal wellbeing. So why is that important? When we feel better, we tend to treat others better and when the US prospers we tend to be more generous. We come to our ultimate why: to do our part in creating a better world. We are only one small company but, when we see the progress our client companies are making and see what they are doing to support and take care of their communities, we know we are going in the right direction.
We have so much work yet to do. There are so many needs. We believe that we can impact the entire world by being that little stone, that when thrown into the water, the ripples we create continue to effect others, even though we may have never directly interacted with them. This is truly what it means to be a Legacy Leader. At Culture By Choice, we want to make Legacy Leaders out of everyone. Whether it is a CEO or a delivery person, each person can, and should consider how what they do from moment to moment impacts others in the most positive way possible. The road map for this journey is the values, principles, ethos of the organization. We’ll examine these next time when we dive into part 3 of the Story of Culture By Choice.
In 2009, my partner Larry Hake and I were both wondering what we would do in our fairly recent retirements. Larry retired after more than 36 years in the private sector and I after more than 37 years in the public and not-for- profit sector. We both had our share of experiences that resulted in our belief that too many approached those worlds the wrong way. We believed there was a better way. It’s not a war, even though most people see it that way. Most managers do not want to, nor do they intend to, enslave the masses! Most workers do not want to, nor do they intend to, steal their employers blind? But, perception is the key foundation of each of our own realities and if our perception of others indicates that their intentions are less than honorable, that will be our reality!
We began putting together our idea for our joint adventure by believing we could help people start businesses that began with the best perception of both sides from the very beginning. We thought if we found the right mix of people, we could help them get off to a great start and along with a third individual, Bill Metcalf, we started LBJ Investment Partners. It didn’t take long for us to realize that finding people with positive perceptions about people who were fundamentally different from one another was going to be very difficult. People seemed to be ingrained with a belief system that said different equals bad. We realized that we had to help people recognize the sources of our differences, understand how those differences are not only good but absolutely necessary, and how to best interact and work with the great variety of people we encounter in our lives. To help us move in this direction, Bill introduced us to Zeke Lopez. This was our first step into our business of helping businesses transition from an adversarial relationship between management and workers into businesses characterized by collaboration, cooperation, a learning focus, mutual respect, and a desire to truly understand one another.
Zeke introduced us to axiology, the study of human values, and to the world of what many refer to as “personality assessments.” Zeke did not, nor do we refer to the assessments we use as personality assessments. We also do not refer to the reports our assessments generate as personality profiles. We look at the generated reports from our assessments as windows into the causes of human behavior. Zeke introduced us and trained us in using 3 different assessments. First was the Hartman Values Profile. Second was the DISC Assessment of behavioral tendencies. And third was the Motivators Assessment. We initially gave our clients each of these assessments and reviewed the results with them. It resulted in over 60 pages of interpretation of the results. We quickly saw that saw that this amount of information was overwhelming to our clients and therefore would most likely be useless for them.
Meanwhile, Bill introduced us to a marketing person he had worked with and Cheryl Lohner joined our team. Not long after that Bill decided he was better off back to his old Raving Fans business and LBJ Investment Partners list it’s B and we decided to start doing business as Win the Bigger Game. We continued to struggle with these lengthy reports so I pulled what I believed to be the most critical pieces of information out of the reports to create what we later would call our Core Advantage Report. I did this manually, cutting and pasting pieces of each report to create a more useful, 13 page composite report. It very quickly became evident that this was too labor intensive to be sustainable, so Cheryl volunteered to contact Zeke, from whom we attained access to the assessments, to see if we could get the process automated. Zeke introduced us to Brandon Parker who quickly said, sure we can do that. Together, Cheryl and I pulled all the pieces together and Cheryl got our ideas to Brandon and in a few weeks we had our first iteration of our Core Advantage Report. We are proud to say, it’s the only one like it.
We very soon realized that we had more work than we could handle. As a result, day to day business details were being missed. We needed someone to make sure we didn’t miss the details that might trip us up and keep our business from becoming sustainable. At first we used a young lady who was helping me with a nonprofit venture but she needed more of a full time job than we could offer. At that point, my daughter Kari was thinking about getting back into the work world after having had her second child so we asked her if she was interested in working for us part-time to manage our business. She quickly learned what we were doing and it wasn’t long before she stepped in full time and started taking on clients of her own. The fourth partner in what is now Culture By Choice joined the team. I’ll begin telling part 2 of this story tomorrow.
Too many of us believe that our experiencing joy, love, appreciation, sense of wonder and awe, and every other positive emotional experience depends on others or something out there! That is the basis of our failure to be a more positive person. The seeds of positivity lie within us, not outside us! So how do we tap into the well of positivity that is there? Here are a few ideas for you.
The First step into positivity begins with perspective. Our perspective is a choice. When we look at our world, we can look for the good or the bad. As I write this, I can look out my window and see the weeds in my yard, the dents in my car, the rust on the metal chairs, and the dirt and grime on my driveway. Or, I can look outside and see the beautiful sunshine, the bright blue sky, and all the other beautiful aspects of the world around me! The choice is mine. What I look for in my life can be the gate keeper for my daily experiences. If I only look for what’s wrong, I will primarily find what’s wrong. Seeing beauty when I’m looking for ugly becomes nearly impossible. On the opposite end of the continuum, there exists a world where we can find beauty where others primarily see nothing but disaster and despair.
The Second step into positivity begins with practice. If we have habitually experienced what’s wrong with our world, we will continually look at the world through our negativity experiential perspective. To break out of this we must be intentional and mindful. To practice positivity we must establish a trigger that we can easily recognize and represents a very recognizable experience that says, “Hey, you’re looking at the world through your negativity lens!” As soon as you realize that you are using your negativity lens, choose to look at the same thing while searching for what’s right about this situation? Notice how your feeling changes when you’ve changed your perspective.
The Third step into positivity is to not give up. Being positive when you are a habitual fault finder is hard work. Because, when you try making any change, your natural psychological response is to preserve the status quo. Don’t give up. You are worth it!
For the past few weeks I have had trouble thinking about much other than helping create positive cultures in businesses I care about. At the very same time, these businesses know they need to do this but don’t feel they have the time, expertise, and energy to keep business going while creating this positive culture. That’s precisely why, Larry, Cheryl, Kari, and I created Culture By Choice! We can help businesses do that. True, it’s not an easy task but it is doable. To help businesses take the first step, I am using a positivity survey developed by Dr. Barbara Fredrickson, (author of the book Positivity). It asks organization members to consider their last day at work and rate specific emotional experiences. It is best to do this over several days, as those emotional experiences can vary from day to day, and record an average score for each identified emotional experience.
If you would like to try this out, send me an email (jaynewman@culturebychoice.com) and I will arrange for up to 20 people in your organization to complete the survey. It will take a few conversations to arrange the process but I am willing to help. If you are interested, contact me.
The evidence supporting positivity’s impact on organizational success is overwhelming. In fact, if you find a sustainably successful organization, there is an extremely high probability that analysis will show that the organization has a higher than 3:1 positivity ratio. Any organization that wants to dramatically improve their chances of achieving sustainable success should make their number one priority, “creating a more positive emotion supporting culture.” The starting point is always knowing what the current conditions are. What is your organization’s positivity ratio? What are the key factors that impact your positivity ratio? How can you influence those factors in a positive way? What will you do over the next few weeks to get the ball rolling? Can you do it without assistance? Or will this become one more initiative that fizzles out due to lack of sustained focus?
Have you ever been in a conversation when the person you’re talking to just isn’t hearing what you are saying? And, no matter how many times you explain, they just don’t get it! It’s like talking to a wall or even like you’re speaking Greek and they only speak Korean! My experience is that too much of our conversation these days fall into this communication category. We don’t understand one another. And even when we think we’re speaking the same language, sometimes our experience and expectations have us hearing something entirely different from what the speaker intended for us to hear.
Our emotional preference colors what we hear and what we say. How we hear things and say things always exists within a context. If my context is significantly different from your context, we may use the exact same word to mean very different things. When I say it is important to get a task completed, I may mean that the task is one of a dozen things that need to be done within the next month. You may hear that you should stop everything else and focus on that one task. Emotionally, our sense of urgency can exist on two very different levels. If you are a very task oriented person, and I am a very supportive, people oriented person, our perception of what needs to be done and when it should be done can cause communication difficulties.
How do we stop talking to walls and start communicating more effectively? The key is to stop assuming that others know what you mean when you tell them something. Doing this is actually very easy. We can’t always read other people’s minds but we can always ask questions. If I am a supervisor and I communicate to one of my people a message that I believe needs action from them, simply asking them, after I’ve delivered the message, “What actions do you intend to take based on what I’ve told you?” This question will tell you immediately if you are on the same page. If someone tells you something, and you aren’t certain as to what they are looking for from you, you can simply ask, “what actions would you like to see from me, based on what you have told me?” We need to stop assuming and guessing. This can help us all start speaking the same language!
It’s very easy to recognize the impact of context on privilege when we consider royal families, but the picture gets a bit blurry when we look at ourselves. Since the dawn of human existence, people have been positioning themselves to create an advantage that will improve their chances of survival. Initially, it was strength. It evolved into the ability to acquire resources. Over time, if you manipulated your world better than others, you could put your people in a “higher” position than other people. You might be the king or queen. Others might be your servants or slaves. After centuries, if your people were not deposed, your great, great, great grandchildren may reap the benefits of your strength and cunning without having done anything to earn it.
The royalty example is what spawned the concept of the Great American Experiment. Having been abused by royal privilege, many colonists in North America decided to throw off the bondage of privilege by birthright that was being lorded over them by a king who had not earned his position by any means other than being born into a context very much different than that of the colonists. Today, we are 250 years removed from the events that led to the creation of the USA. But the privilege of context persists. My context is different than that of many others. Perhaps the one aspect of the American context that differs today from many other contexts, is our opportunity to rewrite our context. But even doing a contextual reboot is easier for some than it is for others.
I spent the first 12 years of my life in a 2 bedroom, 800 square foot house in a low income area of Los Angeles County California. It would have been easy to maintain that context for the entirety of my life. But my parents decided that my 2 brothers, 1 sister, and I would need to rewrite our context. Being white, Anglo-Saxon Americans, that was entirely possible. It was hard work, but our world changed dramatically. Many of our neighbors, who were of Mexican heritage, had a much more difficult time. It wasn’t that they didn’t want a rewrite, but because of the color of their skin and their accent, it was easy to remind them where they belonged. I now, at age 70, realize the advantage we had. We could blend into the dominant culture of upper middle class, suburban Midwest culture, and nobody knew our origins. In the mid 1960s very few blacks or Latinos could do that. I accept and acknowledge the fact that I had a privilege many others did not.
If I want to really be a Legacy Leader, I must be able to be fully empathetic of those I would like to lead. I cannot do that unless I accept and acknowledge the context of the lives of others. By asking people to just get over it and get on with the business at hand, prevents me from having true empathy for what they are dealing with. If I can’t help them more effectively deal with their context, their ability to perform will be diminished. If that happens, we all lose! As Kent Roberts used to tell me, all the time, “context is everything!“
For a very long time most people thought great leaders were heroes. The biggest problem with this idea is that when the hero leaves, you are stuck with a need for a new hero and real heroes are rare and very hard to find. All this time the really great leaders have been among us creating extraordinary organizations and when they have left there were leaders just like them, ready to step in and carry on with the task of moving the organization forward while adhering to the values and principles that define how the organization operates. Consider these two examples of organizations and the leaders who took them on their journey.
Bob was loved by his team. Every team member knew that they could count on Bob to rally the troops and charm their customers and the community like no one else could. While Bob was their CEO, the company grew and prospered like never before. Everyone knew what to do because Bob carefully told them what to do and how to do it. Bob was always there. And for ten years the company grew 10 times larger and was transformed from a very good local business to a regional leader in their industry. After 10 years of this frenetic pace Bob was exhausted and faltering. His health was not good and his doctor told him he needed to change or he could drop dead of a stroke or heart attack. Bob told his Board of Directors that he needed to retire because of his health but that he would stay on until his replacement could be found. This he did but the day he left there was a seismic shift in the company and they never regained whatever it was that Bob brought to the company.
At the same time that Bob started at his company, another company carrying on a very similar mission across the country hired Sue as their CEO. Sue’s approach was different from Bob’s. From the very first day Sue spent most of her time listening, caring, and establishing an operational model for everyone to follow. She expected a great deal from everyone in the organization but set the example of how everyone should behave and how hard they should work. She led them through numerous activities that helped them clarify and codify the essential values and principles by which the organization would operate. These guiding values and principles were infused into everything they did and taught to every member of the organization. If someone was hired for any position, part of the interview process included an assessment to determine how closely aligned to these values and principles that new hire was and interview questions were developed to see if the potential hire was capable of operating within their system.
Sue helped her organization grow by more than 10 times its initial size on the day she was hired as CEO in just 8 years. At the company’s annual meeting to kick off year 9, she announced to the entire leadership team that within the next 5 years she would be retiring but that they should not worry one bit because the lines of succession were already established. For these next five years they would begin the transition from her leadership to that of their next CEO, their current COO Ken. Before she even announced that Ken would be taking over, everyone knew it would be Ken. They had noticed that when Ken was hired to replace Art the COO that was there when Sue was hired, they all witnessed that Ken immediately was far more aligned to the company’s values and principles than was Art. And Ken’s way of doing his job was so much more respectful and nurturing than Art ever was. Furthermore, on days when Sue was on vacation or off for some other reason, Ken stepped in and the company never missed a beat. He didn’t do things exactly the way Sue did but it didn’t matter because everything was driven by the same set of values and principles that drove Sue. Everyone knew this transition would be a great one. For the next 5 years, formal lines of succession were created for every critical leadership role in the company. Nothing was left to chance. And on the day of Sue’s retirement, after 13 years at the helm she knew, as she walked out the door, she had nothing to worry about. The company, now a national leader in their industry would continue to grow and prosper because it was guided by a vision based on core values and principles that would keep it on track for as long as the industry existed.
Which of these two leaders do you want to be? Which would you most want to work with? Do you know how to be a Legacy Leader? Could you do it? These questions are critical and every leader should ask them before they spend one more day in their role as a leader. Do yourself a favor and figure it out before you do anything else as a leader. If you want guidance in this, I’d be happy to help. Just ask!
Legacy Leaders set the example rather than make an example. They are exemplary in their behavior and performance rather than finding faults in others that can be punished in order to “make an example” of those who fall short. Being the EXEMPLAR is inspirational while “making an example” is intimidating. Inspired people do the impossible while intimidated people do whatever it takes to keep from being made an example of. So that there is no confusion, when I use the word EXEMPLAR, I mean a person who serves as the ideal model of the expected behavior and performance of the team. Legacy Leaders do not want their team members to embarrass, ridicule, or berate others. They want them to behave and perform in a way that produces the best possible results for their team. People who “make an example of” others are not leaders, they are bullies and despots.
If I want my team members to be extraordinary performers, I must be the EXEMPLAR. I must behave and perform exactly as I expect each member of the team to behave and perform. My team must see me doing exactly what I expect them to do and in the way I expect them to do it! If my behavior and performance is deviant from what I truly want to see in them, expecting any behavior other than the model I provide is lunacy. If my example is pillage and plunder, that is what I will see in my team. If my example is sarcasm and belittling, that is what I will see in my team. But if my example is caring, concern and attention to best practices, I can and should expect nothing less than caring, concern and best practices from my team.
But Legacy Leaders don’t just hope their teams pick up on what they are doing. They make sure their teams are fully aware of what they are doing and why they are doing it. They make sure their teams understand the relationship between their “behaviors and performance” and “the values and principles” of the organization. Nothing is left to chance. It is all by design. Team members cannot be expected to choose wisely if they are not fully aware of what the best choices are. This is why Legacy Leaders choose to be the EXEMPLAR and not to “make an example of.” It’s the difference between showing others what you want rather than showing others examples of what you don’t want. Gandhi is often quoted as saying “Be the Change you want to see!” Legacy Leadership say “Be the Leader you want to see.”
Cheryl Lohner
drjbnewman
Newman’s Legacy Leadership Blog 