276 | Building Strong Organizations Through Insight and Leadership

In this episode of the Lead Culture Podcast, Jenni Catron discusses the importance of assessing organizational culture through the Lead Culture Framework. She emphasizes the need for leaders to understand their current cultural reality, the role of surveys in gathering feedback, and the significance of building a dedicated culture team. The conversation highlights the vulnerability involved in culture work and the necessity of ongoing assessment to foster a healthy organizational environment.

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Transcript

Jenni Catron (00:03.85)
Hey, leaders, welcome to the Lead Culture Podcast, part of the Art of Leadership Network. I'm your host, Jenny Catron, 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. Well, leaders, today we are in part two of five episodes where I'm talking you through the key parts of the Lead Culture Framework. This is the framework that we use for all of our consulting work and it's what I outline in my upcoming book, Culture Matters. So my hope is I wanna just give you a glimpse into what culture can be.

And I want to equip you to make this your priority in 2025. I absolutely believe culture work is some of the most important work that you can do in your organization because it really is about stewarding your people. And you need a team that is thriving, aligned, unified, healthy, and on mission to help you actually accomplish your mission. So we're going to dive into part two today, but before I get there,

You need to make sure you are registered for the Culture Matters Summit. I'm hosting this event on January 23rd, so if you're watching this or listening to this when it released, you've got just a week or so to get yourself registered for this event. It is a free half-day online virtual event designed to equip you with the strategies and insights needed to make culture your competitive advantage. Join me and other leadership experts

Jenni Catron (02:25.866)
who will share proven strategies from their own culture journeys to help you build an unstoppable team. Leaders, this is your opportunity to move beyond the why of culture and discover how to create clarity and purpose for your team every day. So go to culturematterssummit.com to register. It's free. Go register, go check out all the speaker lineup. We have some amazing speakers.

that are sharing, guys, I've gotten glimpses into all the talks and they're so good. And it will be such a boost of encouragement, support, equipping, just practical tools to help you really lean into this idea of culture. you you You know, too many times when I'm talking to leaders, they don't know where to start or what to do, because it feels a little overwhelming and I've been there. And so this event will really be a very practical next step for you. So go to culturematterssummit.com, register yourself.

share it with your team, invite your team to watch it all together. Like make it a little bit of an event where you take three hours out of your day. I know that's a lot, but your team recognizing that you want to invest in this will have immeasurable returns. So go to culturemattersummit.com to register. Okay, so today we're gonna talk about phase one of the Lead Culture Framework. Last week I set up just kind of the why.

and really the power of culture, like the significance of it and kind of just really sharing the vision for why you need to be paying attention to this work. Well, now I want to get into some more practical nuts and bolts. And we're going to get into phase one, which is the assess phase. The assess phase is all about getting honest about your reality. Well, you have a culture, it's there. Is it the culture you want? What's true about the culture?

You can't map the route to your destination like you might have this vision for what you hope for with your staff. But if you don't know where you are, you're not going to be able to draw the map to help to get you where you want to be. And so today I'm going to get into some more practical nuts and bolts around the assessment phase. But in episode 169, so if you go back a few episodes, I actually started this discussion by giving you an overview of what I call the culture hierarchy of needs, meaning.

Jenni Catron (04:45.054)
there are needs employees have that are really critical to their engagement and to their success within your organization. And so we use that hierarchy of needs as part of our assessment. So if you haven't listened to that episode, go back to that even after, you don't have to listen to them in order necessarily. You can finish this episode, go back to 269 and then kind of catch up on the hierarchy of needs. Because I share the important relationship between clarity and trust.

And this is a crux of everything I'm finding in our culture work is we know that trust is really critical to healthy teams, but clarity is a chief indicator of the health of a culture. And so in episode two 69, we're to walk through that culture hierarchy of needs. We're to talk about the relationship between clarity and trust. And then today I want to focus on some of the practical ways you can assess your culture. Now, some of these are not going to be new to you. Um, you've done surveys.

But I want to give you some insights around how to get good insight into the reality of your culture, because here's the problem leaders. Our culture is never as good as we think it is. Like if you're the head of a team, if you're the head of a department, if you're the head of the organization, what you're experiencing is different from the rest of what the team is experiencing. And so you just need to know that because it's going to take some work for you to get to the truth of your culture.

And you have to be prepared for that, right? It takes just a willingness for us to get honest about what's true, like getting good feedback. Because as much as you want to know what's true about your current culture, it's a vulnerable question, isn't it? Like it's a vulnerable question for us to ask what's true. In many ways, it feels like an indictment on our leadership, right? Because it's like, so goes the leader, so goes the team. We've heard some of those, you know, cliches. So...

Everything rises and falls on leadership, right? So it's like the culture we have is a reflection of our leadership. So it's vulnerable to ask these questions and it's why a lot of leaders don't do it. But it's why I'm hoping you will because as you're willing to do some of the hard things, it gets your team's attention. They're like, she's serious about this. This actually matters.

Jenni Catron (07:06.464)
So it's incredibly discouraging to discover maybe our employees aren't as engaged as we hoped, right? Gosh, that's always discouraging because we want them to be engaged. We want them excited about what we're doing, but we won't know that if we're not willing to actually like dig for the truth of that. So this part of the process, this assessment part is crucial to building the culture you aspire to. Like if we're not honest from the start, we're not going to be able to build the culture we want.

As a leader, have to demonstrate a sincere desire to understand what's true in your culture. And this requires you to lead with emotional intelligence. You hear me say all the time, lead yourself well to lead others better. That's about emotional intelligence. That's about our need to be self-aware of our fears, our frustrations, our insecurities, and then conscious of how those feelings are showing up to the team, right? If you embark on

the assessment phase of the work, wanting to get feedback, but the team can tell you don't want to hear the bad news. You're to be dead in the water. You're not going to get good feedback. If they sense that you're not committed to getting to the truth, they'll hold back. They're like, I don't know. I don't want to get into that. It's equally as vulnerable for the team to give honest feedback about what they're experiencing in the organization. So this, I'm going to be honest, this is a vulnerable process. Like doing culture work is a vulnerable is vulnerable work.

But that's why it's so rewarding. That's why on the other side of it, it matters so much. So you've got to be willing to be vulnerable as the leader going, know I'm going to hear some things I don't necessarily want to hear, but you've also got to set a context in it, an environment for the team to know that it's okay for them to get honest, for them to get vulnerable as well, because both sides are going to have to get honest in order to help us move forward in a healthy way.

So before I make it sound too ominous, however, there are some wonderful things you're going to discover about your culture as well. That's the good news. In addition to maybe some hard truths we need to hear, we're going to find some really great things. Both are going to exist. There's no perfect culture. We're a bunch of messy humans aiming to do really good work together. And there will be both beauty and chaos in the work. It's just part of it. So prepare yourself for that, right? Celebrate what's good and be...

Jenni Catron (09:28.288)
open and receptive to what's not. So assessing your current culture requires a combination of anonymous surveying of the entire team. we want to, and surveys are not anything new to you. I want to give you a couple of thoughts around that though, how to do this well, as well as focus group conversations using the hierarchy of needs as your framework for the assessment. it really comes down to, and there's going to be,

we're not going be able to get into the nuance of all of this. The book will give you more in depth work. If you work with one of our lead culture certified coaches, they're going to even take you even deeper into this work. But at a high level, you're going to want to survey your entire team just to get a pulse. And then you're going to need to assemble what I call the culture team to help you dig in even deeper. So we're going to talk about those two things today. Let's talk first about surveys. In the assessment phase of the lead culture framework,

you're really creating the map of your cultural landscape, right? So each tool in the assessment process is providing a bit more detail to help you understand the terrain. Like what's the terrain that you're operating in? You're on an expedition to find the best of your culture, but you're also going to discover some pitfalls, some obstacles, both offer insight and clues to help you get to your desired destination. So,

We've got to just dig in because these are tools for us to do really good work. An employee engagement survey is one of the tools that you'll use in this phase. And it's the key one. Like it's pretty key to the assessment phase of the work. Now, surveys are a very common tool for getting feedback about your organizational culture. I suspect a good, you've probably done one at some point or another. The question is, are you doing them consistently? Is it a good tool? Lots of questions there.

Lots of resources and there's plenty of opinions about the use of surveys for gauging the health of your team. There's some pros and cons to it. At their best, surveys are a tool to help you acquire valuable feedback from your entire team. So that's what we're aiming for. Valuable feedback from the entire team. Everybody has a voice. That's the important part of a survey. However, they're not perfect.

Jenni Catron (11:41.182)
So I want to look at really quickly, I'm going to give you some pros and cons of surveys because you're already probably thinking of them in your mind. So I want to acknowledge some of your thoughts around this. the pros of surveys, here's some of the pros. They provide an opportunity for every team member to give feedback. So everybody has a voice, like I said. Secondly, they give you comprehensive feedback from throughout the organization and not just the loudest voices. So.

A lot of times the people who get your ear the most are the loudest, the most outgoing, the most, opinionated that doesn't always reflect the truth of the entire experience. so when you do a good anonymous survey, you're getting comprehensive feedback from throughout the entire organization you're hearing from everybody. And they provide data to inform further discussion and discovery. So this is one of the things that I think is really important about surveys.

is they're not an end all be all. They are just a tool, but they start helping get you pointed in the right direction. Now, here some of the cons. If employees are fearful of how leadership will respond, they may not be fully honest in a survey. I see this happen all the time, right? If there's not a lot of trust in the organization, if employees are just afraid of what might happen, if they're afraid of retribution, which is a psychological safety thing that shows up on our hierarchy of needs,

they might not be fully honest and we're going to, that'll cause us to have to do some deeper work. con of surveys is that they often result in more questions than answers. Like, so you'll get some data back and you'll be like, my gosh, I'm so confused about this. that's okay. Cause it, shows you where to keep asking more questions and where to probe for further insight. So sometimes I'm not going to answer every question for you. You're going to actually, it's going to.

force you to have to dig a little deeper. Another con of surveys is that timing might influence results. So they can be influenced by when they're taken. For example, if it's a busy or a stressful season, it's likely to be disproportionately reflected in the results. So I'm not saying you look for the time that the team are the happiest, right? You don't want those extremes, like the extreme great days or the extreme hard seasons.

Jenni Catron (14:06.432)
It's like try to find something that's kind of middle of the road that's not right on the heels of a big transition or a challenging thing, but also not right on the heels of a big win of some sort. Like kind of try to find that middle ground for the time when you take the survey. And then interpretation can be subjective. So it's a tool, got to be smart about using the tool because it's not, it's not the gospel. So, but it's still a very helpful tool and we'll talk more about that. Now,

I want to give you just a little thought that this is kind of a contrarian view I have on surveys. see a common practice for a lot of surveys is to provide benchmarking against other organizations in your industry. And I understand it. We all kind of want to know how we measure up. We're kind of conditioned to do that in everything.

But I think this practice, I don't like this practice because I've seen it become a vanity metric that often becomes more detrimental to your culture. And here's what I mean by this. By seeking to be a top organization among your peers, the goal becomes that designation rather than truly building a healthy culture.

I want you taking a survey because I want you getting good information that's telling you how your team is doing so that then you can take action on that to build a healthier culture. But sometimes when we do some of the tools that are benchmarking us against others and they're great tools, I'm not criticizing them, but I'm criticizing how we use them is what I'm criticizing. In some organizations, this has manifested in pressure on team members to answer the survey.

in a way that they hit their goal of being a top organization rather than answering the survey truthfully. And that's what I want us to avoid. So the pursuit of the status becomes the goal rather than the pursuit of being a healthy team. whatever tool you use, if it has a benchmarking thing, I'm not saying that those tools don't have value. I'm just cautioning you that don't let the desire to rank well among your peers be the driving motivation.

Jenni Catron (16:18.976)
I don't find that helpful or useful personally. My conviction is that every organization needs to benchmark against themselves by creating a survey that evaluates two key things. The core needs of every team member as described in the culture hierarchy of needs. So like just core needs that every team member has, and then customized questions that are designed to assess how effectively you're reflecting the culture you aspire to. So part of what you'll learn through the Lead Culture Framework,

is that we're helping you define the culture that is unique to you. Your culture is who you are and how you work together to achieve your mission. That's my definition of culture. And so when we're working with you, we're saying, hey, who are you and how do you work together to achieve your mission? What is unique and distinct about you, about your team? Because that is the culture that you want to see flourish in your organization. Like the best of that.

is what we want to bring to life. So we want to give language, we want to give clarity to that, and we want to help team members know how to live into that. Well, you need questions that are customized then for what you've defined as important in your organization. And we're going to talk more about that in the next phase of the work because that's the definition phase. So by focusing on what you've defined, you're getting better feedback on how you're doing and measuring up to your standard of success.

not the standards set by others. And so I think it's really, really important how your team works together to achieve your mission is different from another organization, right? And so we've got to measure different things to help get to that result. So here's a couple just best practices to keep in mind as you're surveying. First, choose a survey tool that assesses what's most important to you and then commit to that tool.

Changing tools each year won't allow for the benchmarking that you need to actually see your progress year over year. So you want to get really intentional about that. You want to establish a regular rhythm of surveying. I recommend at least once a year. I think once a year is a pretty good rhythm, but you want to get really consistent with that so you can see year over year, how are we doing? And I recommend engaging a third party so that they conduct the survey, they can compile the results, they can...

Jenni Catron (18:35.424)
help ensure it's anonymous because a lot of times when you're introducing this and you're saying, hey, I want to get honest feedback about how we're doing, like what's the environment, what's the culture of our team, team members will question, it really anonymous? And they're not a hundred percent sure. They're maybe a little uncertain. And so having a third party facilitate that can be really powerful. It just gives your team confidence that their answers are truly anonymous and it increases their trust in the process overall.

And so I want to encourage you find a third party to help facilitate that. If you're curious about the lead culture survey that we use, you can just email me at jennicatron at getforsight.com J-E-N-N-I-C-A-T-R-O-N at getforsight.com. It's G-E-T the number four S-I-G-H-T. And I'd be happy to share more about the survey that we use and how we can help you facilitate that. Okay. Second thing in your assessment. So you're going to, you're going to do a survey.

You're going to get good data. Then you need a team to help you start processing that data together because culture is an ongoing process and not an episodic event. This is not a one shot thing. This is a commitment to saying, Hey, we want a culture operating system. We want a process that we're consistently engaging to help us live into the best of who we are. you need to choose it first, a culture champion, and then you need to build a culture team. So I'm very quickly going to tell you about those two pieces.

of the puzzle because this becomes the team that is really becoming a champion for your culture and really the team that you want to assemble to, to lead through this work. So your culture champion could be you, if you're a more senior leader might be another senior leader, but somebody who has significant influence in the organization who can be the ongoing champion for your culture. This should be someone who's passionate about the work.

and who has been given this responsibility as part of their job profile. This is more than just, again, a one-time thing. This is like part of the work that we want them focused on. It's not a short-term project. Your culture champion ideally should be a part of the executive team. So they really have voice in the biggest decisions that are affecting the entire team. And they're at the table for key decisions.

Jenni Catron (20:53.96)
Depending on the size of your organization, this might be like a chief culture officer or director of people and culture, or it might be just combined with other roles. When I was on staff at a church in Nashville, and this was when I was first mapping out some of the lead culture framework, I was the executive director and it was just one of the core parts of my job description. So it was just a core part of my job description. so the culture teams mandate is to represent.

the entire staff with the goal of servicing and honest assessment of the culture and then to define the preferred future. So you want to get a culture champion and then you want to assess a team. You want to select people not based on role or hierarchy, but rather a group of team members who are committed to partnering with you on the work. You want about eight to 10 people is usually a good group number, right? Small enough to have good rigorous discussion, but big enough.

that they're representing, you know, different, team members from throughout the organization. I don't have time right now to dig into a little more insight into developing that team, but I just want to tell you selection of that team is really, really important. And it's one of the things that I kind of map out in the book that you can kind of dig into to help you identify who do we need to select that will help lead through our culture initiative. So couple of last things, the culture team.

really has four priorities. So you're gonna select people from throughout the organization who reflect the best of your culture. And then they have four priorities in the assessment phase. They're gonna review the data from the survey to just kind of get the picture of what's going on. They're gonna engage in rigorous conversation about what's true of the culture right now. So this team that you've assembled are gonna be thinking through what's important. Like what's our current reality, getting honest. So you need this team to almost be

They start becoming the incubator for what you want to see become true of your entire organization. So we need them to start having those hard conversations of getting honest about our reality. Number three is they need to mind for and commit to honest evaluation. So you don't want everybody just sitting around the table saying we're awesome and you might be really great. Maybe your culture just needs a couple little tweaks, but we need them to get honest about those tweaks and not just pat themselves on the back that everything's awesome. Cause there's again,

Jenni Catron (23:14.376)
No perfect culture. And then number four, they need to determine what additional assessment work is needed. So remember I told you when you do that survey, there's going to be some question marks in there. You're like, I thought, I don't understand this data. I don't understand what they're saying right here. This is what the culture team is going to be talking about together to try to make sense of, Hey, what are we seeing? And how might we dig a little bit more for, what's true in the culture? So.

I just gave you a fast fly over. That's kind of what this is intended to be because I can't do all the deep dive in a podcast episode. But what I'm trying to do is give you a sense of the pieces of the entire framework. So you can begin to see, this is what a culture operating system looks like. And it starts with this assessment phase where you get honest about what's true about our culture. You do that through surveys, you assemble a culture team that starts to dig deeper into that.

So you can go, okay, here's where we are. Like we're building that map. Okay, here's where we are. Here's the terrain. Here's our reality. And now we'll be able to start moving forward into defining what we aspire to. So I hope that got you thinking, maybe you're doing those things. And if so, kudos to you. Like stay consistent with the assessment, like the surveying, the getting the feedback and having mechanisms for hearing how your team is doing. It's incredibly valuable.

to the continued health of your culture. Even if your culture feels great right now, stay consistent with those processes, stay consistent with those rhythms because that helps you keep a pulse and helps you start to get a sense if anything's drifting from what you've aspired to. Now, if you're in a situation where you know your culture's not in a great place, I would just encourage you, it's vulnerable, but it's important. So dive in, do the assessment, because it will be so helpful to you.

Now, if you haven't done it yet, I want to ask you to go pre-order the book culture matters book.com is where you can go find all the details. And in fact, if you pre-order, you're going to get the first three chapters of the book in PDF form. So you can go ahead and dive into this first phase that I just talked about today. It's going to deep dive into, the surveying, how to do that. Well, how to assemble your culture team, how to start taking action with them. So you'll be able to jump right in.

Jenni Catron (25:41.94)
You're going to get the Culture Matters workbook, the Culture Matters Masterclass. You're going to be a part of my Culture Champion Network where it's a team of culture champions who are learning, growing together. And then you're also going to get the recording of our Culture Matters Summit coming up next week. So go pre-order the book, CultureMattersBook.com and get started on this work. You guys, I deeply believe this is the year that we can make culture the priority.

but it just takes our intentionality. make sure you're registered for the Culture Matters Summit at culturematterssummit.com. Go pre-order the book at culturemattersbook.com. That would be so helpful to me. The pre-orders matter. I know I've said this and I promise you there's only a few more weeks before the book launch that I'll keep asking you to do this. I try not to make a lot of asks, but this is one that's really important to me that the more we pre-order, the more publishers know.

That this book matters that people are interested. And so your support early is really, really helpful. So if you would go check that out, if you're interested in bulk orders, like maybe you want to take your whole team through it, just email me Jenny Catron at get4sight.com and we'll give you all the information on bulk orders. But I hope this information was helpful to you today. If you do nothing else and you just listened to this episode and you started to ask your team and get feedback about the reality of your culture. If you start doing.

just a maybe assessment that is not terribly complicated, but you start asking the questions you're gonna take, you're gonna make progress on your culture. So if I can help you in any way, if I can serve you in any way, if I can support you, please reach out and let me know how we can help you lead well and lead others better. Thanks friends, and we will see you next week.