269 | Jenni Getting Clear on Culture

In this episode of the Lead Culture Podcast, Jenni Catron stresses the importance of having a culture plan in place for organizations. She encourages leaders to assess their current culture honestly and introduces the Culture Hierarchy of Needs, a framework for improving team dynamics. Key themes include the necessity of organizational clarity, psychological safety, and fostering meaningful connections among team members to create a thriving, fulfilling culture.

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Transcript

Jenni Catron (00:02.736)
Well, hey, leaders, welcome to the Lead Culture Podcast, part of the Art of Leadership Network. I'm your host, Jenny Catrin, CEO of the 4Sight Group. We're a company dedicated to helping leaders develop thriving teams. Each week, I'll be your guide as we explore practical strategies to equip you with the tools you need to lead with clarity, confidence, and build unstoppable momentum.

in your organization. My mission is to be your trusted coach, empowering you to master the art of self leadership so you'll learn to lead yourself well so you can lead others better. Each week we take a deep dive on a leadership or a culture topic. You'll hear stories from amazing guests and leaders like you who are committed to leading well. So let's dive in and keep learning on this leadership journey together. Friends, today I am holding, if you're watching on YouTube, you can see this, I am holding an advanced copy of Culture Matters, which is so fun. It's always fun when you start to see the book in print. And I know we all read a lot digitally or some of you are audible folks, but there's just nothing quite like seeing your book actually start to show up in print. So this was super fun.

I had the privilege last week of doing a podcast episode for the Maxwell Leadership Executive Podcast. So that'll be coming soon. We'll tell you about that when that comes out. But Maxwell Publishing is my publishing partner. And so they had advanced reader copies, which was so fun. And so it's getting real. We have a lot going on, a lot of great opportunities for you guys to connect more around the content of this book, because I am on a mission to help every leader understand the importance of having a culture plan, of recognizing that you need a plan for investing in the health of your team. Just like you have a plan for your strategy, just like you've invested time in defining your mission and vision, you need to invest time in having a culture plan. You don't want to leave culture to chance. You don't want to react to culture when it is not healthy. You want to proactively

Jenni Catron (02:28.528)
build the culture that you want, build the kind of environment that great team members wanna be a part of. And so that is my commitment. That's what I'm gonna be focusing a lot of time and energy on, is helping you do that in the coming year. So really fun, the Culture Matters book, we're starting to see it in print. Today, I want to talk through getting clear on your culture. And I wanna share just a bit of a story with you.

I was working with a leader that I've known for quite some time and he started the conversation with these words. He said, I don't know what's wrong, but we need help. You ever been there? you, like, I don't know quite what's wrong, but I know I need help. I know that I am beyond my capability as a leader right now. And I think all of us to some degree have been in that space at some point, right? We're like, okay, I am in over my head. I need help.

And so those were the words that my friend Steve told me when we connected. said, he's the founder, Steve's the founder of an influential nonprofit organization. They have a ton of impact around the globe. I had worked with Steve and his team on and off for like seven years. So like, know their team pretty well. They bring me in at least about once a year. And so we're well connected. I was super familiar with their work and with the culture of their team. What I also know is that Steve's a great leader with a great team, but something was off and he knew he needed help diagnosing it, right? And all of us can probably relate to that. Like you're going along, everything's going well. You've got a great team, it's great people, but something's just off. I remember that stage very vividly for me about maybe 15 years ago and one of the organizations that I was a part of it and honestly was the team that I was working with when I got really deliberate about trying to figure out how do you intentionally build culture. Because something was off and I couldn't quite name it. But anyway, back to Steve. He and his team, had shifted some strategies that resulted in pretty sizable changes throughout the organization. Not uncommon. Every once in a while, we know as leaders, we have to do that. And his team was feeling the pressure, right? Like they had made some pretty big changes and everybody just felt the weight of it.

Jenni Catron (04:45.542)
One thing I know about Steve is that he's trustworthy. Like he is deeply committed to the mission of their organization. He loves his team. Like he's a leader that actually has a lot of heart and he really deeply loves his team. He sincerely wants everyone to thrive. And the challenge was they weren't, right? Like they weren't thriving. You know, it was just kind of tense. was a little bit of, everybody's a little frustrated, a little bit discouraged. And so Steve needed help assessing what exactly was going on in their culture.

Now, again, many of us as leaders can relate to that. We have those moments in our journey where we know something is off and we just don't know quite how to diagnose it. So here's what we've got to do. We've got to be willing to get honest, get honest about our reality because you can't map the route to your destination if you don't know where you are. Like all of us have these grand ideas of where we want to go, particularly around the culture we aspire to, the team we want to build.

And yet we've got to be honest about where you are. Your dream as a leader is to have a team of people on mission with you. I'm going to assume that about you. There's nothing better than winning with great people, right? There's nothing better than achieving a great goal with a team of people that you love working with. But our reality is that we wake up every day worrying about the hard conversations we need to have, the challenging personality that keeps testing your patience, or the wonderfully sweet person who is grossly incompetent.

We've all had those on our team as well. We tend to have this vague idea of what great culture looks like, but we're often at a loss for how to actually get there, right? I was working with a team this week and everybody knows what they aspire to, but we're like, how do you even get there? Like, what do you even do? Like it feels so overwhelming. And so the starting point for building an extraordinary culture is assessing where you currently are. Like you've just got to get honest about your reality, good, bad, ugly, indifferent, whatever it might be, you need to get honest about the reality of your culture. And the difficult thing for most leaders to understand is that your culture is rarely as good as you think it is. Now that's a hard truth to hear, but I find it to be true over and over again that our culture, when we're in more senior leadership seats, the culture's never quite as good as we think, right?

Jenni Catron (07:10.52)
it's harder for us to hear the reality of what's happening throughout the organization. And the primary reason is that you hold more influence on the experience in your organization, right? Like what your day-to-day experience, you have a lot more control over than the rest of the team do. If you don't like something, you have more agency to change it. So too often, leaders are dismissive of cultural undercurrents because we don't feel the effects of them.

They might not be, we might not be actually experiencing some of the cultural undercurrents that aren't healthy until it's almost too late. So the best thing you can do for you and your team is to be willing to get honest about what's true. And it takes a lot of work actually as leaders to dig for and mine for what the reality is in our culture. So as you make a commitment to assess your culture, you'll find some things that surprise you in a pleasant way, right? Like here's the good news.

There are going to be some good things as you dig in and try to assess where your current culture is, you'll have some pleasant surprises and you'll find some things that disappoint you, right? Both of those things are going to be true. And this is where I want you to lead yourself well, right? Where you have to have the self-awareness, the emotional regulation to go, okay, I need to be honest about this. I need to accept it. Be incredibly self-aware of your reactions and your responses to what you discover within your organization. Put on that curiosity hat. I love to talk about that of like, put on your curiosity hat and develop a sincere desire to understand what's true about your culture today. Again, a lot of times I see leaders kind of dismissive. They kind of want to excuse things away until it gets so bad. They've had such tremendous turnover. They have such disengaged employees that they recognize that they now they really have to pay attention.

And now it's a lot more work to move your culture back to health. So an honest starting point is essential. And I want to give you some tools to make a healthy evaluation of the state of your culture. So today we're going to talk just about kind of at a high level about some of the tools you can start using to help you get a healthy evaluation of your culture. So with Steve's team, I started my work by interviewing various team members to just get their perspectives and insights. So objective third party.

Jenni Catron (09:33.146)
who they knew and have trust with to just start asking some questions, putting on my curiosity hat and saying, hey, tell me more about what the experience is like. What I quickly discovered were the typical culture busting behaviors that plague many teams, confusion, chaos, suspicion, competition, some mistrust, right? And so as I talked to each team member,

They still had hope, right? Like, so they weren't a lost cause. This was a team that was like, I still believe in who we can be. I still have hope. I want to believe the best overall. But their day to day interactions were tense and it was a lot to do with the confusion and some clarity that they needed. And that tension was just growing, right? It was just kind of building and snowballing. It was clear that without some course correction, the connection and camaraderie that used to be a hallmark of this team would be lost.

And I want you to pay attention to that because I think that's true of a lot of the teams that I work with is that there's a high degree, there's a season where there's a high degree of connection and camaraderie. And so you think your culture is fantastic and it's probably really good, but there's some cultural undercurrents that are happening. And all of a sudden it feels like this connection and camaraderie are gone. And you're wondering what in the world has happened. Well, there's usually some things below the surface. There's usually some, clarity pieces that are not getting addressed, and they're kind of growing and eventually eclipse that connection and camaraderie that we thought was just a given, right? So to begin our work, we needed clarity. Now, there's a tool that we use in the Lead Culture Framework called the Culture Hierarchy of Needs. You probably remember from a psychology class learning about Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs is a motivational theory in psychology comprising a five tier model of human needs, often depicted as hierarchical levels within a pyramid. So if you can envision just kind of a pyramid structure, Maslow had hierarchy, had a hierarchy of needs in that pyramid structure. And from the bottom of the hierarchy upwards, the needs were or are in Maslow's hierarchy, physiological, meaning food and clothing, like those are just your basic needs, safety, love and belonging, esteem and self-actualization.

Jenni Catron (11:54.316)
Maslow's belief was that needs lower down in the hierarchy must be satisfied before individuals can attend to needs higher up, right? And so again, you've probably bumped into this, seen this at some point, but the basic premise is like our basic needs have to be met before we can have deeper levels of flourishing. So similar to Maslow's hierarchy, there's a hierarchy of employee needs that impact the culture of your team. And so I call it the culture hierarchy of needs.

Very simple, but you get the concept. Like Maslow's hierarchy, there are five needs that impact a team member's ability to grow with your organization and positively contribute to the health of your culture. So to truly build an extraordinary culture, attending to these five needs is essential. And so when we talk about the Lead Culture Framework, the first phase of our framework is assessing. Like we've got to assess what's true. We talked about that at the beginning of the episode.

And so the hierarchy of needs helps you start to assess your current culture. So what I want you to do, I'm going to give you a pretty quick overview of the five levels of the hierarchy, the culture hierarchy of needs today. And I want you to listen to how I describe every level. And I want you to think about which one of these levels is the weakest for your team, because that's going to help you do just a quick assessment of, where might we need to focus? Where does our culture need some attention so that our team can more deeply engaged so we can create a culture that is really engaging people. So again, in brief, I'm gonna talk about these five levels of the hierarchy and then I want you to just kind of consider which one of these do we need to give some attention to? So the first level of the hierarchy is basic needs. It's about an employee's need to succeed in, it's what an employee needs to succeed in the organization at a very basic level.

Every new employee is reduced to baseline needs when they take a new job or assume a new role. So whether it's they're new to the company or they have a new role, I can't talk today, they have basic needs. And there are two key categories of needs, what they need to do their work and why they need to do the work. So what they need and why they need it. Essentially, they need to be equipped with the practical tools and information for their role.

Jenni Catron (14:17.466)
and they need to understand the purpose for it. So this level of the hierarchy is about equipping employees with the basic tools they need to know how to effectively contribute to the organization. That includes things like clarity of purpose. They need to understand the organization's mission and vision. They need fair compensation just so that they're not thinking about making enough money all the time. They're just like, have a fair compensation for the job that I'm doing. They need basic tools. Like it could be computers, software, understanding how to use all of the tech equipment, whether it be printers or whatever you have in your office, the codes to get into stuff, they just need all of that information. And they need to be onboarded to culture and systems, right? So they need to understand how we do things here. We'll come back to that. You'll hear more about that or you'll read more about it in the Cultures Matter book about the onboarding systems you need to create that help reinforce good culture. But that's a basic needs level of the hierarchy. Like people need those basic things to know, here's how I show up, here's how I contribute. The second level of the hierarchy is arguably the most critical level of the culture hierarchy. It's organizational clarity. This level of the hierarchy is the single greatest differentiator between extraordinary teams and mediocre teams.

Organizational clarity means that I understand what is expected of me. How everybody wants to know what's expected of them as an employee, right? I have clarity of my place in the organization. My role and responsibilities are clear. So I know how to show up. I know how to contribute. This stage answers the question, who are we and how do we work together to achieve our mission? When leaders explain these core essentials, they provide organizational clarity, and team members can be secure in their role and their place on the team. They just know how to succeed. So this level of the hierarchy involves providing clarity for shared goals, clarity of organizational structure, clarity for defined roles and responsibilities, clarity of the values and behaviors that define success for the team. So there's a lot that is on us as leaders to make sure team members have what they need to succeed. That's really what's happening in these first two levels of the hierarchy.

Jenni Catron (16:38.192)
We're making sure they have the basic tools. Then we're making sure that they are really equipped with the structure, their role, their responsibility, our values. They know what to do. That's the next piece. The third level of the hierarchy is psychological safety, which is about employees feeling emotionally secure when they are at work. Like they feel comfortable. They feel like they can show up fully.

It's really a fancy phrase for trust if we just simplify it. Employees will feel empowered when they are part of an environment where they feel trusted and respected. That's what we all want, right? Like we want to be a part of teams where we feel trusted and respected. So we have to create an environment that sets the stage for that. This is why these first two levels of the hierarchy are so critical because we as employers need to give them the why, the tools they need and what they need to be doing so that they can more confidently contribute. This is why this level of the hierarchy sits at the third level, because there are things we need to make sure we're equipping team members with that starts to set the stage for trust. Psychological safety gives team members the confidence to contribute wholeheartedly. Organizational psychologist Adam Grant explained psychological safety this way. He says, it's not a matter of relaxing standards, making people comfortable, being nice and agreeable or giving unconditional praise. Psychological safety is fostering a climate of respect, trust, and openness in which people can raise concerns and suggestions without fear of reprisal. And so we're not just trying to make it easy. Sometimes we hear that word psychological safety and we feel like everybody just needs like a buffer and like, you we have to treat everybody with kid gloves. That's not what he's saying. We're creating culture where we have that clarity. We've clarified.

This is why we do what we do. Here's the tools you need to do the job. Here's the structure. Here's the roles. Here's the responsibility. Here's your goals. Here's our values. You're setting the stage for expectation. And then when that happens, there's a measure of trust and respect that starts to get created within the culture and within the system. And so that fosters trust, respect, openness, because I have such confidence in how I need to show up that I can more confidently contribute.

Jenni Catron (19:00.432)
So it builds upon the first two needs in that if I have the tools I need to do my job and I've been provided clarity for what to do and how to do it, I'm prepared to better engage with my team. In order to find synergy and alignment, team members need to build trust and respect for one another, be self-aware and others aware, and feel like they can actively bring their best work. This is what's happening at that mid-level of the hierarchy. And then we move to the next level, which is connection.

Now, one of our greatest needs as humans is just a sense of belonging, right? Like we want to know we're a part of something meaningful. We're wired for community. We're designed to do life with others. It's really the functional definition of the team, two or more people working together to achieve a goal, right? That's what we're trying to accomplish. And research tells us that employees don't quit jobs, they quit people. So if employees have their basic needs met, they have clarity in their work, and they feel comfortable to actively contribute, that's the first three levels of the hierarchy, they will naturally build connections with their coworkers. So when we're addressing this need, team members want to be together, right? They want to be together. As leaders, we foster this and we protect this need of culture by ensuring that we have organizational rhythms that allow for connection and that we create a culture of mutual commitment and accountability. So there's a lot in there. We get to get to that later in another phase of the lead culture framework. That's a lot about the leadership development and making sure our leaders, our people managers are helping create cultures of mutual commitment and accountability. Because when they are, the connection happens. So it's important that we don't create false harmony or toxic positivity. We've all seen that. But that we lean into the principles of healthy relationships or candor honesty and integrity drive our interactions with one another, right? That is what we're aspiring to. And so the values we defined in stage two must be consistently lived out for level four to be realized, right? So these levels of the hierarchy are building on one another. And then finally, we get to the final level, which is personal fulfillment. And this one is really an outcome. We can't force anyone to find personal fulfillment in their work.

Jenni Catron (21:22.544)
but you can create an environment that fosters it by attending to the first four needs and thereby setting the stage for this one to be achieved as well, right? So if we are intentional as leaders to set the stage in those first four levels of the hierarchy, we are very likely to have very fulfilled employees in our organization. When team members are fulfilled, this is the fun part, when team members are personally fulfilled, they are fully utilizing their gifts with a team that they love doing work that is fulfilling. And the best part of this is that when team members are operating at this level, they are actively reproducing this in others. This is where culture begins to get caught again. You may have heard me talk about in other episodes that we expect culture to just be caught, but in actuality, culture also needs to be taught. So we move from just kind of hoping culture gets caught to being more deliberate to culture being taught. And then what happens as we're more deliberately teaching culture, it's also being caught because every leader at every level is living into the culture we've defined. When an organization's culture achieves the culture hierarchy of needs, employees are less likely to be among the 85 % of employees considering a job change because they have found purpose and meaning in their work, right? 85 % of employees are considering a job change. So this is less likely to happen when we are focused on fulfilling the hierarchy of needs. The hierarchy provides a roadmap for assessing your organizational culture and understanding these fundamental needs and being purposeful to meet them will give you the clarity you need to achieve the culture you want. And so I want you to just think about those levels of the hierarchy today. This is part of the assessment phase of the Lead Culture Framework. If you haven't quite picked up on it, guys, I'm kind of giving you some like snippets of the book.

So you can get a jumpstart on this work, right? That there is so much opportunity for you to start working on your culture. And so I'm giving you some starting points. So this is part of the assessment phase. Think through that hierarchy, rate yourself one to five. How are we doing on each level of the hierarchy? That might be a conversation. Again, share this episode with your team, maybe your executive team, your leadership team, and rate yourselves on.

Jenni Catron (23:47.622)
the levels of the hierarchy. How are we doing? Where do we have gaps? And it will start giving you clues as to where to focus. Now, I wanna encourage you that the Culture Matters book is available for pre-sale. So if you go to culturemattersbook.com, you can find all kinds of great information there about all the bonuses. So we have a ton of bonuses for you if you pre-order the book. Again, you've heard me say it before, pre-orders are really a big deal.

So if you think there's any chance that you're gonna get the book or you're gonna get it for your entire team, would you go ahead and pre-order it for me? Like that would be a game changer. If you pre-order the book, you can pre-order it on any, so go to Amazon or Barnes and Noble, like wherever you like to buy books, go pre-order it and then go to culturemattersbook.com and about midway through that page, there is a three steps you can fill out. And if you do number two and you plug in your information, and your order number, it's gonna unlock a bunch of bonuses. So here's what you'll get once you pre-order, you will get the first three chapters of the book in PDF form. So you can get to work immediately on working on your culture because you're gonna have the first phase of the work, the assessment phase that I'm talking about that I gave you a little snippet of today. You're gonna get that whole process in those first three chapters of the book. So you'll have that to get a jumpstart on the work. You're also gonna get a workbook that goes along with it.

You're going to get a master class where I'm teaching you even more in depth the assessment phase of the work. You're going to be a part of our culture champion network where you can connect with other culture leaders who are just wanting to learn and grow together. And then you're also going to get the recording of the culture matters summit that's happening in January. So you'll get that recording at after that event. So guys, I would love for you to go preorder the book.

I don't ask a lot on the podcast, but this is one that I would really, really appreciate if you would go pre-order. Again, share this episode with some of your leadership team and make a commitment to make 2025 the year that your culture thrives. That's the opportunity and that's what I want to help you do. So I am so grateful that you value the sacred work of leadership. This is what it's all about, right? People are the point. This is the work that we get to do and it's really meaningful and it really matters.

Jenni Catron (26:11.578)
So friends, want you to keep leading well and come back and join me next week.