Lead Culture with Jenni Catron

221 | Building a Splinter-Free Team Culture: Addressing Small Irritations Before They Derail Momentum

• Art of Leadership Network

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What if the minor irritations in your team, like the talent who doesn't play well with others, the leader who lacks emotional intelligence, the values that are constantly ignored, are like splinters in the palm of your hand? This week on the podcast, I share my personal renovation mishap and the parallels I found to the often-overlooked issues that have the potential to derail the momentum of our work.

In this episode of the Lead Culture podcast, we'll draw analogies from a splinter and how it represents the small but significant issues within an organization. I'll take you through the importance of addressing these issues before they create confusion, frustration, and potentially a toxic culture. We'll identify these potential splinters, understand how they make their way into our teams and explore effective ways of extracting them for a healthier, more productive team culture. Listen in and let's work towards building a splinter-free culture.

Culture work is the most important work you can do to maintain the health of your organization, so keep leading well!

Did you know that 4Sight has a comprehensive Culture process to help you assess your current culture, define who you want to be, and build a plan to achieve the culture you desire? One of our certified LeadCulture coaches would love to guide you through the process of unleashing your team and accelerating growth. Schedule a free call to learn more.

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Jenni Catron:

Hey friends, I'm your host, Jenni Catron, and welcome to the Lead Culture podcast, where I coach you to lead yourself well so you can lead others better. My team and I at the 4sight Group are committed to building confident leaders, extraordinary teams and thriving cultures, so each week, we'll take a deep dive into a leadership or culture topic that will give you the tools you need to lead with clarity and confidence and build a thriving team. So today, you guys, I thought that I would share just a little bit of a story. As you know, I kind of find a leadership or culture dynamic in almost every situation that I encounter, like I'm always looking through that lens of what would I need to do as a leader and what's going on in the culture, and so recently I was helping my husband and my dad on a renovation project.

Jenni Catron:

Now we're currently restoring a home that was built in 1900, complete with all the character and the quirks that come with being 123 years old. So this house has challenged us, to say the least, and so I was over there working with them one day, and dad and I were working on reinstalling some of the original baseboard and trim in the home, so we were trying to protect that character like keep all that beautiful old woodwork and restore it, but we needed to make some modifications, especially to one of the pieces that we were replacing Now. Keep in mind, these are beautiful original pieces of pretty elaborately cut wood trim. You can't find it anymore. So, as we're doing this, we're like we can't go just buy a new piece at Home Depot. We actually have to try to preserve and keep the original pieces, so we're doing our best to be super careful with it. And so, as dad and I gently carry a 12-foot piece so it's a pretty long piece of trim, so we're kind of both on each ends of it trying to take it out to the yard where we're going to, saw off a little section that needed to be trimmed and a slight slide along the rough edge of the board quickly embedded a splinter into the palm of my left hand. You know what was coming as soon as I started talking about that right, 123 years old wood and it's in good shape. But, yes, definitely some splinters. And so let's just pause here for a moment and clarify what is probably pretty obvious. While I enjoy the product of restoration, like I love, like this house is actually coming together and it'll be done in a few weeks and it's gonna be beautiful. So I love the product of restoration.

Jenni Catron:

The vast majority of my time is spent using my hands to pound out letters on a keyboard and a little less time pounding nails with a hammer. That's probably no surprise to all of you, right? So, as you can imagine, a tiny little splinter didn't meet much resistance when it encountered the flesh of my palm, right? So here's the scenario, right, like you know, I think I'm being all helpful and you know I'm doing working with my hands and doing this, you know, like just rewarding work, and I'm doing it with my dad and my husband and it's all wonderful. And then all of a sudden, I get a splinter and the whole project comes to a grinding halt. Right, immediately, our project grinds to a halt while I quickly try to extract the splinter before it becomes more deeply embedded, right. So I'm like, oh my gosh, I've gotta get this out of here. I'm totally a wimp, right. Probably a little embarrassing to both my dad and my husband, but that small little splinter completely hijacked the momentum of our work right, for a minute. I had to stop everything and try to address the splinter in my hand. The discomfort and pain were just too much of a distraction for me to focus until I could attend to it right Like, in fact, you know, I kind of didn't tell my dad right off the bat because we're in the middle of like trying to get this piece cut and so we make the adjustments and then I'm like, okay, I gotta stop, I've gotta get the splinter out.

Jenni Catron:

But more than the immediate physical discomfort of the splinter was the understanding because, believe it or not, I was a tomboy growing up. Like I love I still love being outside. Like, put me outside, let me have fresh air, let me explore, let me wander, I'm in my happy place. And that's how I was as a kid. And so I had a lot of splinters as a kid. I cannot tell you the number of times that I would come in from playing outside and I would have splinters in my feet everywhere and my grandmother would have to like get all of those splinters out. And so I understand the like, the long-term effect of a splinter left unattended, right. So more than that immediate physical discomfort of the splinter was the understanding that if I left the splinter unattended, it would get buried even deeper in my skin, making it more difficult to remove and likely possibly create infection. So enough historical experience to know ah, you should probably go ahead and get this thing out of the way right now.

Jenni Catron:

So what does this have to do with culture? What actually has a lot to do with culture? And here's what I was thinking as soon as we finally got that splinter out of my hand. I'm thinking about the fact that one of the common mistakes that I see leaders make is ignoring splinters in their culture. Right Like the little things, the little things that just kind of create a little bit of irritation and you can deal with them. Right Like I could have kept moving on with a splinter in my hand. It would have been a little annoying, but I probably would have gotten a little accustomed to it and could have carried on. And we do the same thing in organizational life. But there are splinters sometimes in our culture that we tend to ignore or just hope will go away, when in actuality they're starting to create infection in the culture. So here's some possible splinters in your culture.

Jenni Catron:

Maybe it's that one really talented loan ranger employee who is exceptional at what they do. Right Like they are extraordinarily talented. They get so much done in the work that they do, but they don't work well with others. Or maybe they do really good work but it's really inconsistent or you can't count on when it's actually gonna get done, and so you kind of tolerate some of their dysfunction because of the end product, right? So we see that all the time. Maybe it's the leader who lacks emotional intelligence and is often demeaning or dismissive of others, right? So maybe you've got a leader on your team, maybe they've been there a really long time. They just lack some emotional intelligence and they're always kind of causing a little bit of. You're kind of going around them to kind of clean up some of the messes, but again, they've been there so long they contribute in other meaningful ways, so you kind of let some of those things just fester.

Jenni Catron:

Maybe there's a value, that is, you've said this is a key value to us as an organization, but you've let it be ignored or you've let some people violate that value, right? Like, we have a value of believing the best, but people are kind of talking bad about each other behind the scenes. Maybe it's bad attitudes or gossip, right, and you've kind of just let some of that slide because, frankly, the energy to address it and have good coaching around it it does take a lot of energy, right. And so those are some ideas of splinters in your culture. Now there's some other ones. There's confusion. Maybe it's that org chart that is out of date or inconsistent or just even non-existent, right, and so people are confused about who does what, and so it's a splinter in your culture because it always creates frustration, right, that bit of confusion just creates frustration. That's a splinter in your culture. So there are so many things like there's the little things where a little lack of clarity here or a little lack of consistency here creates a splinter that, unattended, could start to become a problem for your culture.

Jenni Catron:

Splinters in our team cultures are detrimental to the health of our team, right, while they seem small, their impact eventually becomes quite large, and we typically try to ignore or look past them, subconsciously, hoping they'll go away. I get it, I've done it too, right, like you know where it's just that thing you're like oh, maybe it was just a one-time thing, or maybe they were just having a bad day, or gosh. I know we need to bring clarity to that, but I just don't have the time or energy to do it right. But you can never really ignore the pain that splinters create. Right, like they're gonna be there, they're gonna fester until they're removed. In some cases, you build up a little tolerance and you get some calluses and they mask the problem for a bit longer, but eventually they resurface and they require us to address them and, frankly, they resurface more prominently, more loudly maybe.

Jenni Catron:

So I want you to be as sensitive to splinters as my wimpy hands are. Right Again, these little hands that I've got in front of me, because I can't not talk without using my hands. They're best suited for talking with my hands and typing on my keyboard. So I want you to be as sensitive to splinters as my wimpy hands. This isn't an area that I want you to toughen up as a leader. Right, I want you to be hypersensitive to the splinters in your culture, because, as leaders, we must stay sensitive to the things that can derail our culture. Right, and remember how we define culture. It's who we are at our best, or it's who we are and how we work together to achieve our mission, and so we've got to stay sensitive to the things that can derail that, that can get us off course from being who we are at our best. Splinters in our culture. They're gonna happen right. We're humans. We're not gonna get it right all the time. We're not gonna be in full alignment all the time. We're gonna have our own interpretation. So they're gonna happen, especially when we're moving fast. It's part of the work. But addressing the splinters quickly is what enables us to get back to work as quickly as possible, to get everybody back aligned as quickly as possible, avoiding the long-term pain of infection.

Jenni Catron:

You guys know what it feels like when you're in a toxic culture, an unhealthy culture. You know what the pain of that infection feels like. And so oftentimes those unhealthy cultures start with just little splinters. So I encourage you to consider where might you have some splinters in your culture today? Right, just think about it a little bit. Where are those little things just below the surface that are a bit annoying or uncomfortable or incongruent, and maybe you've tried to ignore them. But you recognize. You know what I've got to give some attention to these things.

Jenni Catron:

Remember your culture is building or eroding every day. It is a living thing, because it's your culture, is comprised of the humans that are a part of your team and it's your job to lead culture to foster health in your organization, and you've got to be the one that's proactive about it. I talk to you about this all the time. The reason why I use the phrase lead culture is because you have a culture, whether you're intentional about it or not, like your culture exists. But if you want to have a healthy, thriving culture where team members are engaged, they're aligned, they're on mission, you've got to lead culture.

Jenni Catron:

So if you need some outside perspective, my team and I at 4sight would love to help you with this. This is what we do. This is how we serve leaders. Our lead culture framework will lead your team through an effective culture change management process. That includes our customized culture survey. So we dig in and we get. We ask questions specific to your culture. We ask questions around our culture hierarchy of needs and we help assess what's the current reality of your culture. Then we work with you to build a clearly defined plan for creating that culture you aspire to. We say this is the North Star, this is who we are at our best. We say, okay, let's build a plan to get you from where you are to where you want to be Now. Sometimes that's not a huge delta. Sometimes that's a big delta between those two things. So we help you define the plan for closing that gap from your actual culture to the culture you aspire to.

Jenni Catron:

Culture change doesn't happen overnight. It is patient, it is persistent work, and so our commitment is to be with you on the journey. So, guys, I want to just reinforce don't leave your culture to chance. Your team is the linchpin between your purpose and your strategy. And the stronger your culture, the more momentum you'll have towards your mission. And that's what we are hoping for is we want to be organizations, we wanna be teams on mission. There is a purpose, there is a mission that drives everything you do, and having a clearly aligned team working with you to achieve that mission, you guys, is one of the greatest joys I've ever experienced.

Jenni Catron:

So if we can help you in any way, email me at podcast at get4sight. com at get4sight G-E-T, the number four, s-i-g-h-t. com, and schedule just a free call to help you assess the best next step that you need to take to lead culture. We would love to help you in that journey. So remember, deal with the splinters. What are the splinters impacting your culture? And take action on addressing those splinters this week. All right, friends, thank you for being with me this week. Let me know what you thought of the episode. Email me at podcast at get4sight. Message us on social media. We're at get4 sight on most of the social channels and I'm at Jenni Catron and I would love to connect with you. I would love to learn what is helping you lead culture, because that is our goal. So keep leading well. Thanks for listening today and we'll see you next time, mighty excited.