Scaling With People
Tired of spinning your startup wheels but never gaining traction? Buckle up, founders and CEOs, because this podcast is your rocket fuel to profitability! Every week, we ignite explosive conversations with bold-faced founders, brainy experts, and even a few out-of-this-world vendors. Get ready to crack the code on growth, master employee engagement, and blast through your scaling goals. We’re talking real-world strategies, actionable tips, and perspectives that’ll make your business do a cosmic dance. So, strap in and prepare for lift-off!
Scaling With People
Culture Is Everyone's Job: Building From The Bottom Up with Brett Hoogeveen
Have you ever wondered why some workplaces thrive while others struggle, despite having similar talent and resources? The secret might be hiding in plain sight – it's your culture, and contrary to popular belief, it's not just HR's responsibility.
In this eye-opening conversation with Brett Hoogeveen, founder of Better Culture, we dive deep into what truly makes workplace environments flourish from the ground up. Brett challenges the conventional wisdom that culture is something managed exclusively from the top, sharing his revolutionary "20 Tenets of Culture" framework that empowers every single employee to actively shape their workplace experience.
You'll discover why "assume positive intent" might be the most transformative mindset shift your team can make, potentially eliminating workplace drama overnight. Brett reveals the surprising truth that "pride" – helping employees feel proud of their company and knowing the company is proud of them – is the metric most strongly correlated with cultural health, yet rarely addressed in leadership programs. For founders scaling their businesses, you'll learn crucial strategies for maintaining your cultural identity beyond your personal influence as you grow.
Perhaps most valuable is Brett's insight on coachability: "The people that are most coachable are people that ask for coaching. They don't just consider it, they're always saying, 'Hey, I'm working on this. What do you think?'" This mindset, he explains, is the foundation for success in any endeavor, professional or personal.
Whether you're a founder trying to scale without losing your company's soul, a manager working to build a more cohesive team, or an employee wanting to contribute more meaningfully to your workplace, this conversation offers practical wisdom you can implement immediately. Ready to transform your workplace culture? Tune in now, and don't miss Brett's generous free Culture Kickstarter Pack, available at betterculture.com/scalingwithpeople.
Welcome to Scaling with People, your weekly playbook for turning chaos into compounding growth. Each week, we go under the hood with battle-tested experts in all areas of business, from marketing to sales, operation, finance and people, plus product and leadership, to unpack the plays, numbers and systems that turn chaos into compounding growth. Learn straight from founders and experts who've done it and continue to do it successfully. There's zero fluff, just moves that you can still immediately. This podcast is brought to you by Guide to HR. Human expertise AI-powered impact. Welcome everyone to today's Skilling with People podcast.
Speaker 1:I'm Guinevere Curie, your host and founder and CEO to Guide to HR. So are you ready to unlock the secrets to a thriving workplace In today's fast-paced world? Scaling your business shouldn't mean sacrificing your culture. But how do you leverage smart automation to build an even stronger team? And what about those subtle or not so subtle behaviors that are actively undermining your hard-earned culture? We're diving deep into the culture killers lurking in today's workspaces and equipping you with strategies to address them head-on. Plus, we'll be exploring the powerful truth of vibrant culture isn't just HR's responsibility.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:I said it, folks, it's not just HR's responsibility, it is everyone's job. So get ready for actionable insights and expert perspectives that will empower you to cultivate a workplace where people flourish. Let's build a better culture together. I'm super excited to have Brett Hogeveen on the call today to talk about culture and to prove that. Hr is not the only ownership. Brett, welcome to the call today and tell your audience all about yourself.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely. Thank you, I'm so excited to be here. Yeah, hr should not be the only person that's trying to pull the rope on culture, right, that's everybody's job. So I'll give you the short version of my background, which is that I started a company about 12 years ago called Mind Culture, because we want to make the world a whole better place to work, and we know that that's good for both businesses and their bottom lines and it's good for people if they work in a place that they enjoy. It creates higher quality businesses and higher quality of life for people. So that's what I do.
Speaker 1:I love that. I mean, if you don't know what you do after you say your company name, we got problems right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, better culture should be pretty self-explanatory.
Speaker 1:So, before we dive in, I got to ask, when you're working with your customers or clients, what has been like the biggest theme that you've seen over the past year or two that a lot of companies are struggling with within their culture?
Speaker 2:Well, I think that one of the biggest issues that I see is people don't make any time for culture. You know, like you said on the introduction, it's not HR's job, it's not your training department's job, it's everybody's job. But when you don't know what you can do consistently to help boost the culture, or how you are contributing to it on a daily basis, when that's not obvious and front and center, people tend to miss it. You know, they just don't understand that you are the culture. The way that you showed up today is your culture, and so I'm a big believer that culture is really it's the attitudes and the behaviors that people come to expect from one another, and so if you want to shift that culture, if you want to improve and create a better place to work, you've got to A identify what those right attitudes and behaviors should be on your team, and then, b you got to influence them, you got to change them, you got to do something about it to bring that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so true, I think you know another way I see culture is is what you can expect from your employer and what they can expect from you and how you work together with each other. It's kind of those guardrails a little bit too right. I agree completely. Yeah, so okay, I got to pick on it right. As an HR professional, I so appreciate you calling out it is not just HR's job, it is everyone's job. I'd love to dive in and understand from your perspective what that means, beyond what you just shared with us.
Speaker 2:Yeah Well, as a speaker and a leadership trainer and a founder of a company myself, the first seven or eight years that I did the work that I do, we worked exclusively with leaders. We were a leadership training company, a culture consulting firm. We did some coaching, but it was always thinking about what does it take to build a better place to work really from the top down right? What do leaders need to do in order to build a great culture? And four or five years ago we said you know what? Is there any reason that we shouldn't have just as clear, just as effective of a playbook for what everybody else can do to build healthier workplace cultures? And so that led to a philosophy, really, of what it looks like to build culture from the bottom up, as well as a product and a set of tools that we've created that help everybody sort of see more clear-eyed what they can do to contribute to a healthy team and healthy culture.
Speaker 1:I love a bottom-up approach because that actually feels more authentic. Genuine people are buying in. So, for our audience today, what would be the first step that they should consider or think about or make a decision on, to help start focusing their attention on more of a bottoms up approach?
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, I'll give you some generic advice, and then I'd love to also share specifically a product that we built and a little bit about it that helps put that into motion, if that works.
Speaker 1:Yeah, please.
Speaker 2:So, generically, I'll restate what I said a second ago, which is, first, know what you want to expect from one another. What are attitudes and behaviors would you love people to show up with in your workplace? And once you have that figured out, then you've got to influence it, then you've got to actually so. Sometimes I pick on people's core values or on, you know, your culture code and I'd like to say, well, what is that? What are those core values actually doing for you? Right, you know? And so when we built a product that we said, what would it look like to build a culture from the bottom up, we identified 20 attitudes and behaviors that we call our 20 tenants of culture not tenants like who lives in a building, but tenants like a principal. And it took us forever to figure out what was the right list of 20. It took us forever to figure out what was the right list of 20. That's really almost a universal set of core values from all of our different clients and businesses that we said if somebody is a star employee, we found out that actually those same 20 things that we ended up with, nothing could make the list if we couldn't also say it's good for somebody just personally to incorporate this more into the way they show up in the workplace. Forget teams and culture, even though that's all I do, but it's good for you, it's good for your career advancement, it's good for your reputation, it's good for your mental health to think about some of these 20 tenets that we built.
Speaker 2:But sorry, I'll go back the core values piece. Right, with our 20 tenets, we assess them with people. We have coaching content, we have discussion guides. We have all these things and I like to say do you do that with your core values? Right, if you have five great core values, my question is do people assess them on them? Do If you have five great core values? My question is do people assess them on them? Do they put growth plans in place? What are you actually doing, now that you've identified those core values, to make them come to life? And most organizations don't really have a plan for how to operationalize those core values.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I love that. Okay, I gotta ask what's your favorite, one or two Of?
Speaker 2:these tenants.
Speaker 1:Of these tenants, yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah well, I'll give you maybe an easy one. I think, of all the work that I've ever done with organizations, my favorite, and it's somewhat I don't know if it's boring, but I think it's so powerful if people actually can embrace it is assume positive intent.
Speaker 1:Oh yes.
Speaker 2:Assume positive intent of your coworkers, right, assume that somebody didn't not you know that the tone in that you know message isn't what you think it was, that it actually is a positive intent. Or that they didn't leave you off an email in person, or that you know they didn't leave you out of the happy hour invite. Just you know, for spite, like assume positive intent, and obviously that's a major bulwark of really a healthy team and cultures that people can assume positive intent. But what I find is, even in my personal life I see friends, family members et cetera, who spend a lot of time in drama because they don't know how to assume positive intent.
Speaker 2:And it really adversely just affects their quality of life. You know when somebody cuts me off in traffic, I just say, oh, they must be in a hurry, you know. I don't say that's a jerk right. I just it's better for me, I don't get upset.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and it's a really healthy mindset and I think you know I've actually been working with a CEO who's, you know, helped me actually incorporate that in my own life and work style as well, and I've actually flipped the script on him a couple of times.
Speaker 2:Well, wait a minute, you should be assuming positive intent.
Speaker 1:Let's look at it from that perspective, right, and there's so many times where, sometimes, when you're reading an email or some you know Slack or Teams or whatever, if you're reading something, a text, you're actually incorporating that through where you are today, right, and you might not realize that you're not in a great place and maybe you've got some news that had nothing to do with what you're reading now, but now your brain is in that mindset and and or maybe the person writing it is not having a good day. And to give, to assume positive intent also allows you to give grace to yourself and to others. And I find that you know most people are going to work because they want to do a good job, they want to show up and do well for themselves, for their team, for their coworkers, the company as well, and so you know, if you can live in that mindset, it really does help actually diffuse some bombs that might be ready to go off. So I love that. That's a good one for sure.
Speaker 2:I completely agree yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, one or two more. Yeah, I love this.
Speaker 2:So another one, that our very first one is be coachable, coachable, coachable. I'm a big believer in continuous improvement, like. I just think that is the secret to almost every level of success in any type of endeavor, whether that's work related or personal. If you're consistent and you're consistently growing and improving, you're going to achieve a certain level of success, right?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I gotta stop you right there and just call that out again For all you CEO and founders out there. This is the key that I have seen working with multiple CEOs and founders If you're not coachable, your company will not be successful. Period. Stop Just like, go work for somebody else Like it's just not going to work. You have to be coachable.
Speaker 2:It often, especially for entrepreneurs, for business owners who have a vision and an idea you know that is going to need to shift. In all likelihood You're going to have to make some pivots, change your business model and you're going to bring on board members or advisors or folks that have the ability to give you good advice, and you've got to want it. There are really three levels of coachability. There's A. There's like resenting it, like I actively resent when someone says, hey, I've got an idea for you, and I actively say you don't see how smart I am, et cetera, like that's the worst level of coachability. Say what do you? You just don't know, you don't see how smart I am, et cetera. Like that's the worst level of coachability.
Speaker 2:The middle level is if somebody gives you some advice, you know you'll listen to it. You may or may not take it, but you'll take it with reasonable grace and kind of consider it. But the people that are most coachable and the people that tend to be most successful again, not just at work but in life are people that ask for coaching. They don't just consider it, they're always saying, hey, I'm working on this. Hey, what do you think? Hey, I want your opinion and if you have that as a consistent mindset throughout your professional career, you're going to go places, that's for sure.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. Yeah, I kind of sometimes I'll frame it as hey, we're all humans, we all have blind spots. Help me see my blind spot, help me learn from that and be able to shed light on it in order for myself to be better. If I'm better, then I make the team better, makes the company better, right and so forth. So yeah, that is very true.
Speaker 2:I just I have to call it out because I think that's my biggest struggle.
Speaker 1:A lot is, founders will come and I'll start working with them and I will tell them things or suggest things or recommend things. And I can see I'm just like I might as well just hit my head against the wall suggest things or recommend things and I can see I'm just like I might as well just hit my head against the wall. It's like, why am I even here? Like, don't, don't hire me. I'll hire my team to execute on things, but don't include me for a strategy thought partner If you're not going to be open to it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:All right, you said one more, let's do one more no-transcript.
Speaker 2:You're on, or the organization has made a decision. You know, we, we. There are three different paths we could go down and everybody has their own opinions. But when we decide to go a direction that we're going to, we're going to pursue a certain path into the marketplace or we're going to, you know, we're going to go a certain direction with our who knows our office, or how we're going to start a bazillion different things. Team players are people that say awesome, I'm all aboard, even if I disagreed with the, you know, even if I had a different opinion. As soon as that decision gets made, it's your job to get on board and to say awesome, not, you know, maybe not the way I would have done it. The opposite of this is somebody that six months later, deep down, is just hoping that blows up so they can say I told you so.
Speaker 1:I told you so.
Speaker 2:That's the worst, right. We want people that say, dang, you know, like? I was all in on that and even if it didn't go well, I was fully committed, because that's what a great team member does, and most of the time at an executive team level. This is something you'll hear a lot at when, when you do executive team coaching is you have to have a team one. Like like all of our divisions, we all compete for resources. But ultimately, when we make a decision and we walk out of the boardroom like we all have to be a hundred percent behind that division, we don't go back to our departments and say, well, I tried, they didn't understand. No, you've got to be behind these decisions If you want to create a cohesive, positive, aligned culture. And that's from your CEO, your VPs all the way down to entry-level folks Like get on board, be excited about the direction the company's going. Be a team player.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I think, for me, what I see, the key in implementing that kind of culture is to create a safe space in regards to hearing people out and letting the disagreements happen. I think you called it out earlier, like you know, being an adult about it in regards to, well, I disagree and here's why you know, obviously people are very passionate and there's things that they're going to be more subject matter experts over, but, you know, just coming to the table very open and accepting of each other and hearing each other's point of views, letting people have that moment to be able to speak their thoughts and truths and then, when the decision is made, you know having that agreement. I actually work with one client who we actually have our written rules of how the executive team is going to work together.
Speaker 1:And that is one of them that we recently added where it was. We will agree to like, but we will disagree. But agree to commit, once decided like it's okay that we disagree and that's really healthy, as long as you create that safe space to allow it to be healthy. Right? It's not, you know, one group of people attacking another group of people or anything like that, but it's, it's a place that you can share your ideas and thoughts, and no bad idea exists.
Speaker 1:It just might not be the right idea for the business at this time.
Speaker 2:No, you are absolutely right. I mean, those two ideas have to go hand in hand. On the highest performing teams, people will speak up when they disagree. They'll be able to have open debate, but when you make a decision, everybody says awesome, cool. I'm glad Thanks for hearing me out, I'm on board. You know you don't hold on to those types of disagreements.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that is so true. So kind of flipping a little bit here. I'd love to talk about. You know so many companies, startups, their goals obviously to scale and grow. As they start to scale from just the founder to a couple people, five to 10 people, it's easy to kind of control and own the culture. You get to the 50 mark, 100 mark, then it starts being okay. How do we make this be scalable without losing our identity? And I'd love to talk to you about scaling culture as a business grows and get your perspective on it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, that reminds me of and I know I've gotten to know your space a little bit in our pre-call chat.
Speaker 2:One of our best early, relatively early clients was a startup company that had raised a significant amount of capital and was growing like crazy and they also had just a phenomenal culture, like you could feel it. You know. They got to maybe 75 employees or so when we started engaging with them and it was just they had, it was just everything that you would dream of in a sort of a tech startup and culture and how fun and youthful and all these things. And when we sat down with their CEO, we kind of said, this is amazing, what you've built here, candidly like why are we here? You know, you have such an amazing culture already. And he said thank you. But he said you know, I don't really know what we did to build it. You know, and as we scale and as I'm, you know, hiring and promoting new managers that are 25 years old that have never led people like I don't know what to tell them to do, we kind of just started this by the force of my personality.
Speaker 2:And so so advice on that note is and what we ended up doing with them is working with their group of leaders and their new leaders to establish a little bit more clarity of thought on, in addition to managing your projects and you know getting, you know budgets and things what does it mean to be a leader? Right, and most a lot, very, very, very, even really big, sophisticated companies don't have uniformity on what does it mean to be a leader in their company, and so we teach forever and ever these seven principles of leadership that helped my father build a five-time number one best place to work and have helped a whole bunch of other companies become best places to work as well. And these seven principles, they're simple things, but when we work with organizations from the top down, you have to have some clarity of thought of what am I actually trying to accomplish as a leader in this organization and how do I make those things come to life every day.
Speaker 1:All right. So I got to ask will you give up at least one of those seven?
Speaker 2:Sure, absolutely. I mean, yeah, the biggest one and the one that nobody teaches or talks about. This is when we do employee engagement surveys and we measure the health of cultures. This one metric is the most tied metric to overall cultural health and very few leadership programs ever talk about it. It is pride.
Speaker 2:So if one of the things that a leader should be doing is helping employees always, always, always feel more proud of their company and know the company is proud of them, okay, so that's one of those seven principles. But yet the appreciation and recognition knowing the company is proud of them that gets talked about a lot, but very seldom do people actually work with leaders and managers to say what could you be doing every day to make sure your people feel more proud of where they work, feel more proud of the company they work for and the people that they work with? Because you show me someone who's really proud of where they work and I'll show you a really happy, engaged, productive employee. But people don't spend enough time actually considering well, what does it take to build a sense of pride and what do I need to actually say and do as a leader to build it?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I never really thought about that perspective, so that's a good one. You're right, I think that's uh, I think that's part of part of the business problem that we have still, like 40, 60, 80 plus years after corporate world has been created, that the leaders. There's not really a lot of proper soft skill training out there to help leaders when they first become leaders and they learn bad habits that are really hard to break 5, 10, 15 years later into their career. We've gotten a lot of different things out there in the world, but depending on orgs if they can afford to actually have people go through it or have training in-house. So that's an interesting perspective on that pride. Huh, I like it. Thanks for sharing.
Speaker 1:Learn to build pride, yeah exactly, and I think that's, like you know, the moment where, like, you're excited or prideful of, like, sharing your story to your friends and family of where you work and what you're doing Right and getting behind the mission of the company too is, I think, another way of being prideful of I'm helping this org do xyz, because this is gonna do abc for whatever right. Um, so yeah, well, as I can't believe it, I feel like we could probably talk for hours on on the culture conversations, and certainly that's what you focus your time and attention on. But as we wrap up today, I'd love to hear from you any other thoughts or tricks or tips you'd like to share with the audience.
Speaker 2:Well, I mentioned just a minute ago that you know, building great cultures, you have to. You have to have the right philosophies and the right behaviors in place, both from the top down and from the bottom up, and I feel like we spent most of our time talking about that bottom up piece, kind of what everybody can do to build a healthier culture, and that aligns with this 20 tenants vision that we've, that we've created. We just launched my favorite giveaway that we've ever built in my business. That's called our Culture Kickstarter Pack, and it is basically every resource we've ever created for two of our most popular tenants that we can give away just totally for free to help either managers or culture champions invest in their team. And so we built like we took all this stuff out of our premium product for two of these tenants and we're giving them away for free because we want people to see what this looks like and how they can put that in motion with their team, and so I would love to be able to give that away.
Speaker 1:Absolutely, that is awesome, and we'll put the link down below in the description. And how else can they get in touch with you?
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, that link is at betterculturecom. Forward slash scaling with people. You can find me on LinkedIn, just Brett Hogeveen. You have to figure out how to spell that Betterculturecom. Those are the best places to find us.
Speaker 1:Awesome, Brett. Well, I definitely enjoyed geeking out with you on culture and I appreciate your time and hopefully, for those listeners, you'll take him up on his offer. I think it's such a great offer to really help kickstart what you'd like to accomplish within your organization and, whether you're a founder or a leader or even an individual looking to become one of those in the future, definitely it's worth a look. Check it out, and until next time, we hope you have a wonderful day and we'll see you on the next podcast. Thanks everyone for joining us.
Speaker 2:Thank you.
Speaker 1:That's a wrap for today's episode of Scaling with People. If you got value from this conversation, do me a favor. Share it with someone building something big, and, hey, I'd love to hear your take. Drop a comment, shoot me a message or start a conversation, and don't forget to subscribe so you never miss the bold, unfiltered strategies we drop every week. I'm Gwenda Raquiri, founder and CEO of Guide to HR, where we help high growth companies scale smart with people, for strategies and AI powered systems that don't just keep up, they lead. If you're building fast and want your HR to move faster, head to guidetohrcom and let's talk and remember scale isn't just about speed, it's about people. Until next time, have a great one.
