Truly Great Culture – Values Are at the Core

Good morning, everybody. Dennis Engelbrecht, Digging Deeper.

Today, the third in the series of trying to create that truly great culture. And again, this spring, we had the opportunity to
witness a couple of companies that just had lights out cultures. And so, trying to figure out how everyone can have a
culture like that, trying to come up with the right characteristics and the right things you can do.

So, one of the things I noticed in these really great cultures is the way they had of reinforcing values. And one of the
companies in particular, had these annual awards that they did for everybody. And in COVID, of course, this was a little
bit more difficult because we're not having all of our company gatherings and things where they normally would present
these awards. So, they ended up, of course, doing them by Zoom or whatever technology they were using. And they
actually had plaques at the job site, and they handed these out at the job site, and it might've been even more impactful
than even when they did it at a company meeting.

But I was really struck by first of all, this award system they had. They named their awards, one for each of their core
values. So each year somebody who most represented each of their core values got this plaque, and then got on this, if
you don't mind the term, wall of fame, that these were the folks that really represented the company values. I thought,
what a great way of reinforcing your values. And I just thought, in and of itself, what a great culture builder.

I think in a lot of ways we oftentimes call that catching people doing right. Right? And I think building a great culture,
you've always got to catch people doing right. And it shouldn't just be in the annual awards, but I thought the annual
awards were a great thing, but it should really be every day. If you think of what you can do as a leader on a daily basis to
reinforce your culture, catch somebody doing something right, and tell them so. And tell them, thanks, thanks for doing
this.

You don't want to advertise everything, but sometimes you also want to advertise in a certain way that we caught
somebody doing right, so other people understand that, yeah, this is what you want to do. They went the extra mile to
take care of a customer or they went the extra mile to solve a problem. But those sorts of things, if you can catch people
doing right, that will spread throughout the organization and help build that great culture.

And finally, a few weeks ago in our four things newsletter, we wrote about clarity and it's incumbent upon leaders to
create clarity. And one of the things you want to have great clarity around is your company values. All right. So, recently
at a company and we're going to be working this summer to establish those values for them, because they never have
gotten around to creating that clarity. I suspect that they hold their values very deep. And once we identify them, it'll be
a pretty simple process.

But really, you do need to provide clarity to your organization, what it is that you do stand for and what you don't stand
for, or even stand against. And if you create that clarity, it helps everybody in the organization to self-police, if you will. So
many decisions in construction are made as you go down through the organization and you want them to be made as you
go down through the organization, but people need a filter with which to make those decisions.

And if you create clarity around the company, values of what's right, what's wrong, what's within acceptable range and
not in an acceptable range, people will have more clarity, be able to make more decisions and better decisions at a lower
level in your organization. And that'll really build your values and help you create the culture that you want. So, think
about this, as a leader to establish that truly great culture, part of it is clarity around your values and then reinforcing
those values really on a daily, weekly, monthly, annual basis in every way you can.

Again, Dennis Engelbrecht, Digging Deeper.