277 | Unlocking the Power of Culture in Leadership

In this episode of the Lead Culture Podcast, Jenni Catron discusses the importance of defining organizational culture as a critical component of effective leadership. She introduces the Lead Culture framework, emphasizing the need for clarity in mission, values, and team dynamics. The conversation explores how leaders can assess and define their culture to foster engagement and create thriving teams. Key themes include the significance of clarity, the culture hierarchy of needs, and the necessity of intentionality in building a strong organizational culture.

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Transcript

Jenni Catron (00:02.744)
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 committed 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, friends, today we are in part three of five episodes of the podcast where I'm literally talking you through the key parts of the Lead Culture framework that I outline in my upcoming book, Culture Matters. Now, I hope you're not getting tired about hearing about the book, but I am not getting tired about telling you about it because I truly believe that this framework

will help you build the operating system that stewards your people. That's the goal. So my hope with these episodes is to give you a glimpse into what culture can be and equip you to make this your priority in 2025. I absolutely believe that culture is the linchpin between your purpose and your strategy. You need a team of people. You need a culture that fosters great engagement.

and really helps your team grow, thrive and be unstoppable. So we're gonna get into part three today, but before I do, wanna dig it. wanna, before we do, I wanna remind you about the Culture Matters Summit. If you're listening to this in real time, you've got a couple of days left to get signed up for the Culture Matters Summit, which is on January 23rd.

Jenni Catron (02:23.621)
And you're going to join 3,000 culture-focused leaders for a half-day high-impact virtual event to equip you with the strategies and insights needed to really make culture your competitive advantage. So join me and some amazing leadership experts who will share proven strategies from their own culture journeys to help you build an unstoppable team. 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 here's all you need to do. Go to culturematterssummit.com to register. It's free to register. You can upgrade to the all access pass. And so if maybe you're listening to this after January 23rd, you can still go to culturematterssummit.com to get the all access pass. So you can get the replay access to everything. You guys, the content is so good.

and the leaders that are sharing are phenomenal. So make sure you check that out. For now, let's get into this third episode of five. And in this one, we're going to talk about the second phase of the framework. going to talk about the define phase of the framework. So there's five phases to the lead culture framework. We assess, define, build, equip, and commit. And so today I want to talk about defining the culture we aspire to.

So most leaders have kind of a vague idea of what great culture looks like. They observe it, in teams at their, in their best moments. And so you see it in somebody else and then you're kind of tempted to mimic those practices rather than do the work to uncover what is most unique about your team. see this happen time and time again. I can't tell you the number of times where people have taken the values that I've created for one team and tried to just replicate those for their team. Well, it doesn't work.

because it's not true to your team. It's not unique and specific to your team. Remember, I've talked about culture is the clarity of who you are and how you work together to achieve your mission. And so that definition gives us insight into how we need to think about culture and how we need to define our culture for our organizations. Culture.

Jenni Catron (04:42.71)
is clarity of who you are and how you work together to achieve your mission. So there are three key parts of that definition, who you are, how you work together to achieve your mission. So those three things provide the roadmap for defining the culture you aspire to. And so we're gonna kind of start with the end in mind, mission, right? Who you are and how you work together is ultimately to serve the purpose of achieving your mission. We are not a social club.

We are a team on a mission. So everything we're defining when we talk about culture is in service to the mission. Your team would not exist if there wasn't a mission for you to accomplish. So in order to rally a team to achieve a mission, they need to know and understand what that mission is. And then they need to know how to behave in a way that helps make that mission happen. Again, culture is clarity of who we are. What's our, like,

Who are we? Why are we here? What's the purpose? And then how do we work together to achieve that end? And so your mission is critical to defining your culture. Now, odds are you have a mission statement. It's likely written on a wall or buried in the employee handbook. Take it out, dust it off, and confirm your commitment to it. Is it right? Does it reflect the purpose of the organization today? Right? Somebody well-intentioned wrote it.

however many years ago, and is it still like, does it still give you that sense of enthusiasm, excitement of yes, this is why we're here? Does the clarity you've created around who you are and how you work together align with the defined mission, right? So you're gonna have a little bit of a sense of your culture, is it aligned to that mission? So if the mission doesn't feel right, what needs to change?

Does it need a refresh? Clarity is the chief indicator of the health of your culture. So if the mission feels unclear, your culture will struggle. So you want to start there. Is the mission right? Right? Do we have the mission dialed in? And then you want to move on to the who you are component of the culture definition, who we are and how we work together to achieve that mission. There are things that make your team and your organization unique and distinct.

Jenni Catron (07:06.411)
Your corporate identity, so to speak, is a combination of your founder's personality, like what was important to them, how did they lead, what kind of flowed out of them, your founder's personality, your history, just the history that has shaped your organization, the experiences also that have shaped your organization.

And the uniqueness's of the team members assembled to do the work right now. There's a unique group of people assembled right now. And there's some distinctives about that. Maybe some unique gifts and perspectives and ways that they contribute to making the mission happen in this season. So you want to ask yourself and, and, or that culture team that you've assembled, you want to say, what is unique or distinct about our organization? Right? Here's our mission. We've got that now. What's unique or distinct about us?

Sure, there's another business across town similar to yours, but why do people choose to work with you? Right? Somebody else might do the same thing that you do, but there's a distinctiveness to how you do it. What is that? And can you articulate it? You might know it instinctively, or you might need to spend some time really thinking this through. In fact, what happens often is that we kind of subconsciously know it.

But then when we're forced to articulate it, helps us put language to it. And that's what you need to do. You need to get very specific about who you are. There are plenty of other organizations that do what you do, but none of them are you. And so you want to be intentional to say, okay, who are we? How do we define that? And so that's the next part of the definition phase is making sure your mission is clear and then getting some language around what is distinctive about your organization.

So that helps you get the first part of that culture definition, clarity of who we are. You get that one like locked in, and then you move on to how we work together. And there's a lot here. So today's gonna be, again, this whole series is a bit of a flyover, but I'm hoping it starts to help you identify, where are the places we need to give some attention to? And that's gonna be true in this second part, the how we work together, because frankly, it's nearly everything we do in organizational life is framing

Jenni Catron (09:21.869)
how we work together. And so the culture hierarchy of needs, y'all might have heard me talk about this in past episodes. I've talked about the culture hierarchy of needs, which if you remember Maslow's hierarchy of needs, human needs, Maslow's hierarchy was like the things we need to flourish as humans. Well, the same thing exists for us as an organizations is that there's a culture hierarchy of needs. There are things we need as employees

to help us flourish inside of the organization. So using that culture hierarchy of needs, it gives us the roadmap for defining how we work together. So in the assessment phase, the survey you did helped address where gaps might exist in some of these different stages. You might remember in the assessment phase, part of like the foresight assessment, if you use our assessment, the foresight assessment,

assesses those five levels of the culture hierarchy of needs. And so we naturally start to see the gaps by using an assessment tool. And so now it's time to further understand and define what do we need to provide to foster engagement at all levels for all employees. So you're asking questions like, what is it like to be a part of our team? How do we work together? Like these are just great questions to kind of ask your team at large.

What is it like to be a part of the team here? How do we work together? What's particularly helpful is asking a new employee about their experience with the organization. Like if you can get them to feel comfortable enough, to be honest, you can get some really helpful insight from a new employee because they've got fresh eyes. They're like, why do we do that? Or, Hey, I noticed, you know what, everybody shows up late to meetings all the time. That's just how we work here. Or.

I noticed that we don't document everything, anything. We just all talk about it. Or I noticed that we're hyper vigilant to have agendas for every meetings and, clear expectations for who's doing what by when. Right. That's the, how you work together. So you can find some really interesting things just by asking, asking the team at large, but particularly asking new team members. If you can get a new employee to be brutally honest about what they experience.

Jenni Catron (11:38.292)
you'll glean some absolutely helpful information because the challenge leaders, the challenge for us is that one, we hold greater responsibility for how we do things here. So it's harder to admit when it's not great. Like we've kind of shaped it. Like we're kind of responsible. So it's hard to admit if it's not fantastic or if we've got some bad behavior. And two, this is the culture we know and we're comfortable with it. Even if it's a little dysfunctional, if you're a leader and you have

disproportionate influence on the culture. Like the culture that you have, you, you're comfortable with it to some degree. And so we don't know sometimes that it could be better because we've just gotten comfortable. So how do we work together is a really important question and really powerful question to ask. answering it is what begins to set the foundation for unlocking your culture. You, you need to both have assessed, you know,

where are we, and then you need to define, this is how we work together. And then you're defining both the reality and the aspiration. So, the organizational clarity level of the hierarchy of needs is where we really start to unlock the how we work together component. And so, as you seek to define your culture, this level of the hierarchy,

provides an important guide for what needs to be defined, right? As you dig into this, you start to recognize, here's where the gaps are. Here's where, we're missing, team members are missing some information. One of the deeper beliefs I have is that clarity is the chief indicator of the health of a culture. So this is why that organizational clarity level, it's the second level of the hierarchy. If you've listened to some of the past episodes and you've remembered me talking about the hierarchy.

clarity, organizational clarity is the second level of the hierarchy and 66 % of people who have taken our simple survey that's on our website at go get foresight.com. There's a simple free survey you can take. 66 % of you have identified organizational clarity as the hindrance to your culture. So this is the biggie. Anytime I'm speaking with teams or working through this, this is the juggernaut. This is the one that has the most significant impact and it's because again,

Jenni Catron (14:00.077)
Clarity is the chief indicator of the health of a culture. So show me a team that understands the vision, has a strategy for achieving it, can articulate the values that guide how you work together, has a structure for how you work together, understands their specific roles and responsibility for executing toward the mission. And I'm confident you'll see a team where every member is thrived and engaging, thriving and engaging.

When those things are true, when that clarity exists, you will see thriving and engaged teams. And again, here's the challenge. If you're the leader, one of my hard truths, my tough truths for leaders is that our culture isn't as good as we think it is. For all the reasons that I've named already, and for this one too, that if you're the leader, these elements of organizational clarity likely feel clear to you.

Right. Because you know the mission and vision because you labored over creating it. You understand the strategy because even if it's just instinctive to you, again, it's one of the things you've spent time and energy, focused on. You know what you value, whether those are defined values for the organization or not, you know, what's important to you. You know, generally what everybody does because you hired them. And so.

For us as leaders, we have to recognize that these things are not as clear to the rest of the staff as they feel to us. So we undervalue and we underestimate their impact because we don't perceive them as a need. And that's what I want you to be really conscious of as you hear this, is that you might tend to be dismissive of this being a need for your team because you're like, well, that's clear. I know what everybody does. I know their role and their responsibility.

vision and our strategy. And I promise you, it's not as clear to the rest of the team as it is for you. So we often don't understand the confusion that a lack of clarity creates throughout the organization. And I want you to just kind of sit with that, maybe ask a few questions of a couple of team members to kind of test for if that's true. Don't try to like argue it away, like actually listen for, Hey, what feels confusing? Like, are there some things that feel confusing to you and just see what comes up.

Jenni Catron (16:20.311)
Clarity at this stage will be the game changer in building a culture that's aligned and working effectively to achieve the mission. So this definition phase is really, really important. In fact, when I'm working with organizations, we'll usually do a year long engagement and the definition phase is the longest part. We will spend several months just on the definition. We spend a couple of months on assessment because that takes some time. And then we spend another like four months, four to six months on the definition phase.

and then we move on to the rest of the phases, building, equipping, and committing. Because actually doing the work of defining your culture is first, really, really important, and secondly, it takes some effort. It takes some effort to find the language that really defines who we are and how we work together. So here's a few things in the organizational clarity bucket. And I'm just gonna give you them kind of as a short list because we don't have time to...

dig deep into all of them. can get the book and you can dig deep into all of it. But I want you to just think through, I've got six things here that I'm going to reference and I want you to think through, Hey, how are we doing on our clarity around each of these? And if one of them, one or two of them, you recognize, okay, we lack some clarity there. That's where I would focus first. So, the first one is your, your mission. And we talked about that early in the episode of

that mission, is it clear and is it compelling? I've got some other ways, I've got some direction for how to just work on your mission and make sure it's clear and compelling and concise and all those things that make for a really good mission. Make sure that's true. Your vision, your mission is your why, your vision is your what, what are we aiming for? It's the target on the horizon. And so do we have a well-crafted vision and does everybody know and understand it? Do we have values?

that define that how we work together coupled with beliefs and behaviors and stories and sticky statements. Like do we have values that are more than just a few statements on a wall but really internalized organizationally? If not, there's a whole chapter in the book that helps you unpack that. How about your org structure? Do you have one? Question number one. And then secondly, is it correct? Because a lot of us have org charts but then we haven't updated them and things have changed or.

Jenni Catron (18:41.58)
Technically we put so-and-so reports here, but they actually don't. And so my first test when I'm working with an organization is if you send me your org chart and then you have to give me all the disclaimers, your org chart's not right. You need to actually do some work on it. And so, that's a big place. Like sometimes we don't like it because it feels like hierarchy and bureaucracy, but I promise it's just clarity. A good org chart helps everybody understand their place on the team, that their role is mission critical, that their role helps serve the strategy of the organization.

to achieve the mission. So org charts are super valuable. Episodes 148 and 149, if you go back through the podcast, episodes 148 and 149, I take you on a deep dive in designing your org chart. So your org chart. Number five is role profiles that everybody has a job description with clear responsibilities. So again, jobs shift and change, especially if there's been org chart changes.

Are you keeping their role profiles and their responsibilities up to date? And are those clear and understood? And there's a shared understanding between you and your team members. And then the sixth one is, we have performance plans with goals for every employee so that they know, here's what I need to do. I know my functional job with my role profile, but do I have an actual performance plans and goals that are for a set

amount of time, whether it be six months or a year long. like six months performance plans and goals, just because things shift and change so quickly. So do you have a performance plan for that employee that they know, here's what I'm working towards. Here's how I win. Here's how I succeed. And my goals are tied to the vision and the mission of the organization. When those things are clear, it gives employees confidence to contribute. And that's what I want you to hear, because this is the thing that unlocks great teams.

is the more clarity they have, the more confidently they contribute. And that's what we want, right? We want teams that are growing, thriving, and truly unstoppable. And we've got to give them clarity to equip them to do that. And we do that by defining who we are and how we work together. So I gave you a lot to think about the definition phase. Like I said, it's a big one. There's a lot going on in this one. there's several chapters in the book dedicated to the definition phase. So

Jenni Catron (21:06.925)
This probably got your wheels turning. You probably identified a couple of things that you're like, okay, yep, we need some clarity there. want to encourage you make a plan to address those things because you will see engagement go up as you increase clarity. And then with that clarity, you're also building trust. So friends, that's another little snippet of the lead culture framework. So much in this framework that I feel like is so critical to helping unlock.

your team. So I hope you're finding it valuable. I'd love to hear what you think. so make sure you message me at podcast at get foresight.com. It's a great way to just let me know, Hey, what's working. What questions do you have? How can we serve you better and make sure, please, please, please, would you go pre-order the book? Like I'm, I'm even willing to beg simply because early, early orders of the book help publishers know that this book.

People are interested in this book and it helps them make sure they get stocked and available. So if you would go pre-order at culture matters book.com and, you can actually go pre-order from whatever, retailer you like, go order it wherever you like, then go to culture matters book.com and you can put in your order information and download all the freebies. So you'll get the first three chapters of the book in PDF. So can go ahead and jump in. You'll get.

the culture matters workbook, the culture matters masterclass, be a part of our culture champion network of a bunch of leaders who are excited to keep learning and growing together. And then you'll also get access to the culture matters summit. So go check all of that out at culture matters book.com. If you want bulk orders, just email me at Jenny Catron at get foresight.com J E N N I C A T R O N.

at get foresight, G E T the number four S I G H T.com, Jenny Katrin at get foresight.com. Let me know if you want to do a bulk order and we can get copies for your entire team. But friends, more importantly, I hope you're taking some of this info and starting to put it to work because any effort you give, you will see results. Like any intentionality you put into the health of your team, you're going to see results from.

Jenni Catron (23:20.575)
And so I want to hear your stories. Email me at podcast at getforsight.com. Let me know what's working and what impact you're seeing with your team as we work together to create, to really reinforce that culture matters. All right, friends have an amazing week and I will see you next time.