Culture Improvement | Energize Performance

Culture Eats Strategy for Breakfast!

March 11, 2022 · by Bob Faw

Aligning Culture and Strategy

Think of a company culture you’ve experienced that inspired you to work at your best. What was that culture like? Come up with at least five words to describe it.

When I do this exercise during workshops and trainings, most people say similar things: high standards, ample resources, employee appreciation, input is valued and so on. These are the basic tenants that motivate people over the long haul.

For people to work hard and do their best you can’t just push them to work hard. You have to create an environment where working hard is fulfilling—a culture where they have some autonomy to make decisions and a chance to feel masterful at a task they enjoy.

You may have heard the phrase, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” It’s true that if you don’t have a healthy culture, then the best-laid strategy will likely fail. But to turn the odds in your favor, make sure your culture supports your strategy.

Strategy and culture are often seen as independent factors but they are completely dependent upon each other. Ignore one at the peril of the other. In reality, 1% of strategy is planning and 99% is daily decisions and actions. Culture effects these daily decisions and actions far more than the plan itself. The most successful companies have a mix of good strategy and supportive culture.

How do you get there? Great question! Here are a few tips:

Begin with your Best DNA. Your Best DNA is what your company excels at, your people have passion for and your customers value about you. Building on your company’s Best DNA is a powerful way to guide culture and strategy goals. Goals should be aligned with your strengths and the best value you add to customers. Your brand is your DNA seen from the outside and should resonate throughout the company and the market.

Involve your team. Together discover where you’re supporting your Best DNA well. Then evaluate where your current culture needs a change to support the strategy better. Collectively work together to figure out how to build a bridge from your current strengths to where you want to be. Use this process to engage your team in the culture and strategy planning. Most people contribute powerfully when they are invited to do so and are given enough information. Support your team in taking healthy risks to adapt and implement strategy quickly and easily. Good decision-making and high employee engagement create a vital cycle of great business results.

Develop culture and strategy simultaneously. Create strategy that builds on the core of your culture, energizing vision and the strengths of your organization. As you progress, redesign systems to enable you to fulfill your vision. Developing your people and enhancing momentum propel both strategy and culture.

Want to learn more about Culture and Strategy?

Watch this short video: on “Culture Eats Strategy for Breakfast”.

Download this free handout.

Book a Culture Workshop, presentation or keynote with Bob.

4 Ideas to Energize Your Culture (And make work life much more fun!)

June 14, 2018 · by Bob Faw

The facts. A recent Gallup poll showed that companies with high employee engagement outperform other companies by 22% in profitability and 21% in productivity. Not only that, but they also see significantly lower turnover (65%), absenteeism (37%), and quality defects (41%) than competing companies.

Why is this? Because engaged employees are Energized employees!

Let me start out by saying that Energizing Culture is my absolute favorite topic. The change that results from Energizing initiatives is tangible (exemplified by the stats above), and witnessing the shift that comes with employee engagement is the reason that I am a Chief Energizing Officer.

Ironically, part of what helps energize a culture is helping people understand the natural negative biases we all have, so that we can counteract them to create an engaged culture.

The Us vs. Them Bias

Even though we are all one company, there is a natural bias that occurs in most organizations, pitting one department or group against another. Marketing versus production, sales against shipping, the list goes on. Whether competing for resources, time, or money, this type of rivalry isn’t healthy for creating a collaborative culture.

Who wins when your employees compete against each other? Your competition!

The Negativity Bias (and Loss Aversion Bias)

So often we see employees who fear change, when in reality it is the fear of uncertainty. Especially if the change is not communicated adequately, employees may wonder, “Why are we making this change? What negative actions will the change bring? How will it change what I currently enjoy about my job?” If we help employees understand these different dynamics, they will be more engaged and can use their knowledge to instead build bridges between teams.

Engaging your culture starts with simple tools, and it’s easier than you think! Try these four practical, yet effective ideas:

Celebrate the heroes. Institute employee recognition, not only by managers, but among colleagues as well. Try printing your company’s core values (or valued team behaviors) on index cards, and handing them out to the team. Then when they see a colleague excelling at one of those values, encourage them to circle the value on the card, write a bit about what they saw, and give it to the employee.

Then at your weekly staff meeting or some other public forum, take a moment to recognize employees who exemplify company values and briefly share these short stories with the team. Afterward, keep these examples visible by creating a Hero Wall where these cards can be posted and seen throughout the year.

This will cultivate your team’s ability to focus on what doeswork. And having recognition from all directions is more effective than the traditional parental model of the leaders motivating the team by themselves. Use peer pressure positively. Give your team the tools and encouragement to help energize one another!

Get team input. If you want people to be energized, get them involved with decision-making. I’m not talking about creating pure consensus around every idea. That just bogs down progress. Instead come up with a clear system that helps people feel like their voices are being heard, but still gives management the authority to make clear and quick decisions. Make sure to follow-up and tell them what ideas are being used, and why they were chosen over other ideas. It helps to start with concepts that are easy to implement, so that people can quickly see you’re serious about their input… before their negativity bias tells them you don’t care about their ideas.

Get rid of rotten apples. Even if a person is the world’s best at performing the duties of a job, they can still be toxic to the culture. If you have employees who are gossiping, putting others down, and constantly on a negative bent about the company, address that behavior with them and give them an improvement plan and timeline. If they don’t improve, help them realize why they don’t fit, and let them go. Ultimately, this type of pruning will help the rest of team feel better and engage more. Comparing an employee’s value to the cost of their bringing others down helps you see that you are likely losing value over all.

Look for what’s right. As a leader, make it a goal to tell at least one person per week what they are doing right. It is easy for leaders to identify what is wrong and what needs to be fixed in an organization, and while this is a necessary part of leadership, it can keep you in a negative mindset. You would be surprised at the transformation that you will have personally as a leader by just looking for what is going right. This action helps leaders become more balanced and more realistic about the team—seeing both the positives and negatives.

Want to Energize your culture? Contact Bob (bob@matchboxgroup.com) to do a culture evaluation. You’ll receive ideas to talk about your culture and jumpstart moving things in the right direction.

Who Wins When Employees Compete Against Each Other?

July 7, 2015 · by Bob Faw

With your colleagues aim for a win-win solution. Find a way to a common goal that benefits you all.

Or at least aim for “coopetiion“. Blend cooperation to help others succeed with enough competition to help you feel that rush of accomplishment.

Be Wise: Balance Optimism with Critical Thinking

February 24, 2015 · by Bob Faw

“Hope without critical thinking leads to naïveté and critical thinking without hope leads to cynicism. To survive, we need both.” Maria Popova

“if you combine those two mental qualities [you achieve] wisdom… The absence of both gets you apathy.” Coert’s Visser

These wise insights capture beautifully what I often teach. What gives us the most power and insight is the right blend of optimism while facing the hard truths as well.

The research by Barbara Fredrickson on the ideal balance of positive to negative communication also supports this. There are no easy answers or beliefs that we can use to make all decisions. We need to take each situation face the hard truth of that situation, then switch a solution focus for ideas. The right balance makes us far better decision makers (and more credible as well).

Popova profoundly states, “Yes, people sometimes do horrible things, and we can speculate about why they do them until we run out of words and sanity. But evil only prevails when we mistake it for the norm. There is so much goodness in the world — all we have to do is remind one another of it, show up for it, and refuse to leave.”

Pouring Happiness – Creating Purpose in Your Work

October 10, 2014 · by Bob Faw

http://youtu.be/gTC5ldteut0

I had the distinct pleasure of seeing Ryan Estis tell this story again yesterday at dynamic NEHRA conference. The hero of this true story, Lily (#LilyEffect), demonstrates powerfully how we can create purpose that fulfills ourselves, wow customers, and create “evangelist customers” who spread the word about us.

I hope you find it as inspiring as I did! Lily’s “Artist” is lit up, and she energizes everyone around her.

Mindfulness: Think and Feel Better

September 7, 2014 · by Bob Faw

Would you like to be calmer in the face of work and family stress?

Would you like to be more content with life as it is, and less affected by the imaginary dangers that play in your mind?

Would you like to make better, more rational decisions?

I’m going to give some of my thoughts, and those of Sam Harris, a renowned philosopher and neuroscientist.

Increasing mindfulness does all three of these things. Mindfulness is being able to calmly face the exaggerated threats our mind creates without fighting, fleeing or freezing. That means to not have to suppress our unwanted urges, run from our own emotions, or deny our own thoughts and feelings. Instead, noticing our thoughts and feelings with equanimity, allowing these urges to “float” by instead of choosing to react to them. Then choosing the “right” action toward what is best for oneself, instead of merely away from momentary discomfort and toward comfort.

I created the ACT Team to give people an easy step in this direction. These represent aspects of our brain that embody certain fearful urges and motivations. Seeing them as somewhat separate allows us some mental distance, and increases the ability to choose “right” action instead of simply react to their promptings. This also allows us to see ourselves as more than our thoughts, our feelings and our urges. In addition, it allows us to influence our own motivations a bit more objectively, instead of be a victim to them.

The fearful urges and motivations we feel in a given moment distort our sense of what is real, creating reactionary “inner movies.” Inner movies are our brain’s guess of what is real combined with our biases, fears and hopes. It plays them out in our minds like a visual, auditory or sensed movie. Most of the time we’re caught up in the inner movies of life, not realizing that they are simply movies, not reality. Mindfulness is being able to look past the movie to see what is really there, with less bias from our fears, hopes and biases. This is what I argue that “enlightenment” truly is—seeing reality more clearly. More mental light is now shining on what is actually happening, and less on the internal distortions. For example, we may have an inner movie that our child is “shaming the family” by choosing career we dislike, when the reality is that she is usually simply being attracted to what she finds interesting and enjoyable. You can see how much unnecessary conflict this kind of inner movie causes for ourselves, and for those around us.

Sam Harris explains mindfulness well in his book “Waking Up”.

He states:

My friend Joseph Goldstein…likens this shift in awareness to the experience of being fully immersed in a film and then suddenly realizing that you are sitting in a theater watching a mere play of light on a wall. Your perception is unchanged, but the spell is broken. Most of us spend every waking moment lost in the movie of our lives. Until we see that an alternative to this enchantment exists, we are entirely at the mercy of appearances…

We crave lasting happiness in the midst of change: Our bodies age, cherished objects break, pleasures fade, relationships fail. Our attachment to the good things in life and our aversion to the bad amount to a denial of these realities, and this inevitably leads to feelings of dissatisfaction. Mindfulness is a technique for achieving equanimity amid the flux, allowing us to simply be aware of the quality of experience in each moment, whether pleasant or unpleasant. This may seem like a recipe for apathy, but it needn’t be. It is actually possible to be mindful—and, therefore, to be at peace with the present moment—even while working to change the world for the better.

(Sam Harris teaches how to achieve mindfulness through various exercises in “Waking Up”. He has audio guides to this kind of mediation on his website. He manages to extract the powerful insights of Buddhist meditation from the mythology, so that it’s relevant to everyone regardless of your beliefs.)

Happiness. Bliss. Serenity. Mental Health. There are many worthwhile goals of mindfulness meditation. A very small segment of people find sitting for days, weeks, months or even years at a time appealing. The goal for most of us though, as Harris describes it, is increasing happiness. Not reaching some magical state of nirvana, enlightenment, etc.

What is the next step you will take to becoming more mindful?

To make better decisions?

To be more content with life as it is, and less affected by the imaginary dangers of your inner movie?

Culture eats strategy for breakfast!

May 20, 2014 · by Bob Faw

I enjoyed being interviewed on the Terri Levin Show about how to make sure that the strategy of your company syncs with your culture. I refer to Best DNA and how being clear about your company’s Best DNA helps you create strategy and culture that support each other.

Energize Brainstorming – for real innovation

February 20, 2014 · by Bob Faw

How can you harness the power of a team’s creativity? Energize Brainstorming is one of the highest rated tools we teach in our Energize Universities. Your brainstorming process must be good to counterbalance the recent research that shows how average brainstorming doesn’t work well. Here I’ll share Energize Brainstorming techniques that galvanize true innovation.

There are a few major factors necessary for a truly innovative brainstorming session.

Energizing atmosphere: The environment, team culture, leadership style and even tone of voice you use should encourage people to speak very freely about ideas, with no fear of being attacked or hearing sarcasm. You want to activate the most creative part of their minds, what we call the Artist. Direct their inner movies to energize creativity in a way that helps them feel safe, have fun, and enjoy exploring wild ideas together.
Clear focus: The group does best with goal clarity. It helps to have a memorable, compelling goal statement that inspires action. They also need to know what criteria the end solution must achieve, and what limits the end solution cannot exceed. Provide the absolutely needed criteria and limitations, but no more than you have to. This allows freedom to explore and create, with a helpful focus. In addition, positive goals release more brain chemicals that provide motivation to create. Paradoxically, clear limits (stated positively) can help people get really creative about how to work within those parameters.
Diverse perspectives: It helps to get representatives (of each stakeholder group in the solution) to be part of creating these important criteria and limitations. This way your goal is strategic in scope, and can dramatically increase the likelihood of coming up with a solution that works well in real life. Sometimes we interview stakeholders about the clear compelling goal ahead of time and bring some of their ideas for the solution, and even on what to change about the criteria and limits. We invite people that have to put the solution into action, and those who will be affected by the solution. The brainstorms can really benefit as well with diverse participants with a potentially helpful perspective to your desired goal. They don’t have to be part of the decision making later, but you can include them just in brainstorming.

More on each of the Energize Brainstorming Guidelines:

Focus on clear goals: Post the goal (compelling goal statement, with the criteria and limitations) where everyone can easily read it during the entire brainstorm. This keeps people brainstorming towards the goal. You can also use this to refresh their minds’ focus periodically.
No critical remarks allowed: Any negativity during the brainstorming can be counterproductive to the energizing atmosphere. If you wish the group would be more specific on an area; instead of telling them not to be so vague, reframe it to tell them where you’d like them to be more specific.
Evaluation comes later: After brainstorming you should only focus on the ideas most likely to work, rather than wasting time critiquing the ones you won’t use anyway. A quick group multi-vote after brainstorming helps cull out the the ideas most likely to be used. Give each person the ability to choose the three ideas she/he thinks will most likely meet the goal (and its criteria and limitations) best. They can check mark on paper, or post dots, etc. Then you can take the top ideas to the next level of decision-making. This prevents wasting time, or lowering morale, by being negative about the low check marked ideas. To make sure people don’t miss a brilliant, but misunderstood idea, give people a chance after the mutli-voting to convince the rest of the team of any lowly checked ideas they think should be in the top idea list.
Start solo: This is very important. Everyone involved should privately list as many ideas as they can before any discussion is started about possible solutions. This will gain far more diverse perspectives. If you brainstorm out loud together, groups tend to stick to the first idea or two, or follow the leaders or experts rather than think for themselves. Once a solo round is over, you can encourage people to add new ideas, build upon previously posted ideas, or add ideas that completely oppose any ideas up there. Multiple rounds often gain more insight and depth.
Quantity is desired: Encourage people to post lots of ideas. That generally loosens up their concerns about only posting their best ideas. A good quantity is more likely to inspire multiple perspectives, and something truly new and useful.
Wild ideas are helpful and encouraged: I often add crazy, silly, and even downright stupid ideas to the first brainstorm round. This encourages people to stretch their thinking, post half-baked ideas, share thoughts from other fields of expertise, etc. Much innovation requires some completely new ideas. Even the bad wild ideas might inspire great wild ideas in future rounds. I actively applaud and praise the crazy ideas to inspire people to post “risky” ideas.
Adding to ideas is okay: People often limit themselves to discrete ideas or stop themselves from duplicating. However, many times an idea already thought of may ignite ideas for an even more sophisticated approach. This is one of the real advantages of multiple rounds of brainstorming.
Facilitator keeps group on task and creative. Ask “What else?”: We like wild ideas, and yet people can go so far astray that the ideas have little value over time. Never criticize the ideas that are off topic, of course. Instead, periodically ask, “What else can we do to achieve ___ goal, that fulfills these criteria ___, and fits within these limits ___.” That refreshes their minds about what the target is. A facilitator should also remind people to stay positive, and that all ideas are welcome should any negativity occur. I do this even when people disparage their own ideas.
Record everything: Ensuring that all ideas are up where everyone can see them helps in many ways. It prevents needless repetition of ideas, it helps people build off of what is there, and it inspires people with new ideas. There are many great ways to do this. The best way I know of at this point is giving everyone index cards and a sharpie marker. Tell each person to write as many ideas as they can that might help achieve the goal (state the full goal with its criteria and limitations); Write only one idea per card–this enables highly “voted’ ideas later to be moved to the top and the others to be moved away. Have people post their own ideas–I use sticky boards made of display boards with repositionable adhesive spray on them.

I hope you find these ideas helpful.

Please post below any other ideas or experiences you’ve had with successful brainstorming.

Bob

Energize Performance

Browsing Category Culture Improvement

Culture Eats Strategy for Breakfast!

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4 Ideas to Energize Your Culture (And make work life much more fun!)

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Who Wins When Employees Compete Against Each Other?

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Be Wise: Balance Optimism with Critical Thinking

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Pouring Happiness – Creating Purpose in Your Work

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Mindfulness: Think and Feel Better

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Culture eats strategy for breakfast!

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Energize Brainstorming – for real innovation

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When You Criticize Someone, You Make It Harder for that Person to Change

Daniel Goleman’s post in Harvard Business Review blog network

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Rebalancing our negativity bias

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