Well, hello friends. Welcome back to the Vanderblumen Leadership Podcast. So good to be back with you this fall and a chance for me to introduce you to a whole lot of my friends, one of whom, David Friedman, has graciously agreed to be with us today to talk about culture. David, thanks for joining us today. Really appreciate you making the time.
SPEAKER_01Always love to talk about this, William. Glad to be with you.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Yeah. Well, I I have learned over the many, many years I've been doing this now. This podcast is it's it's 10 years, it's over 10 years old now. I mean, that's that's kind of OG. Um but the people I think everyone knows they don't, and people that I think no one knows everybody does. So I just try to assume nothing and would love for you to tell our listeners a little bit about who you are and how you ended up doing what you're doing.
SPEAKER_01Sure. So my story, I I come at this from a very organic place. I I live in the Philadelphia area and I spent 27 years building, of all things, it was an employee benefits consulting company. And I grew it from a couple people to well over a hundred people, and it was a very successful company, but all of the success we had, I mean all of it, was based on the culture that we built in that company. And as the CEO of the company, I just figured out, it was just my own experience, my own intuition. I figured out a lot, uh I know it's similar to your story, about how to build culture. And I eventually sold the company to a large multi-billion dollar publicly held company, retired from that industry, and I was frankly too young to be retired, and I wasn't sure what I was going to do next, but I ended up writing my first of several books about the things that we did in that company that made us a success. My first book was called Fundamentally Different. And I wrote that book. I always tell people, William, honestly, I wrote that book as a closure step, as a way of wrapping up my career in ice bow. I could put it behind me, go do something totally and completely different. And little did I know what was going to happen was people read the book and they got a lot of value from it. And it led to people asking me to speak about which I had written. And as people heard me speak, some of them said, Hey, that's pretty important. Could I, that's interesting, could I hire you to help me do that? And next thing I knew, I was in career number two. And so over the last 10 or so years, I've done literally more than a thousand workshops on that material. I've written two other books, I've built another company. We've worked with over 800 organizations implementing this method. So it comes from my organic experience as the CEO of my own company, but I've taught it to 10 to 20,000 leaders around the world.
SPEAKER_00So many leaders that I've interviewed where they've invented a widget or they've come up with an idea. You know, it wasn't like they went to the mountaintop and figured out, oh, this is such a good idea, let's do it. I mean, you know, uh, my friend Craig Grishel, who he has what, 950 million locations now or something like Life Church is literally over 40 locations now. They were sort of the first one to really take this model of multi-site for churches and and make it run. And Craig is a genius, um, but he didn't come up with it because he's a genius. His wife went into labor on a Saturday night and had a baby and was like, Don't you dare go preach. Uh there's a much longer, funnier story of that. So they just popped in a video and you know, Craig laughs and says, I think we had more baptisms that Sunday than any other. Um, and I would say and then they they fell into something that became an idea. Um I had the same thing happen with uh uh we we were studying succession because so many churches that have a pastor that leaves, the next guy doesn't do well. Well, why is that? We wanted to so we did a research project, and that research project was very selfish to teach me how to do a research. Um, it ended up being a book, and then you write a book, and all of a sudden everybody says, Can you come do succession consulting?
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Well, I guess we figured need to figure out how to do that. And now 10 years later we've done thousands and thousands. So it's amazing to see how many good ideas actually are not, I'm gonna go to the mountain and come up with an idea, but I'm gonna live my life and observe what's worked and what happened, and then try and share that with others. Yes, and I think that's a that's a key lesson for listeners out there right now. I might be a pastor starting the fall trying to come up with a new idea, might be a business leader. Like, don't go to the mountain. Look back at what's been happening and take in what has been working and how can you take that and help others, right?
SPEAKER_01Well, you know, to your point, when I think about the the system that I teach, there's a framework that I call the eight-step framework, eight different things that this is how you systematically create a culture. I didn't have an eight-step framework. I, to your point, I looked back at, well, what did I do? Well, I guess I did this and I did this. Oh, huh, seems like there's eight things I did. And that became the eight-step framework that I teach now. But that was a reflection upon what I had been doing intuitively, and I just organized it, you know, in a way that would be more accessible. And to your point as well, when I first started talking about this and writing about it, I don't know, it's pretty obvious stuff to me. It didn't seem like a big deal, but I watched how people responded to it, like your preacher story. I watched how people responded to it and was like, wow, everybody thinks this is really powerful. I don't know, it's just stuff I made up. And and but I began to appreciate that just from people's responses, that actually this is pretty powerful stuff and pretty impactful.
SPEAKER_00When did you, just so listeners, I I was fascinated when I was on your podcast to hear how early you were doing this work. When when were you starting to share these eight steps of building a culture into your organization?
SPEAKER_01Well, it was so in the early days, two things I'd say. One is in my very early days of building that company, I was not thinking about culture. I was thinking about standards. There's a set of standards. I have very high standards for myself and everybody around me. And as I began to build the company, I understood that I can't assume that everybody thinks like I do, that I ought to be, I would be a lot better served if I taught them this is how we want to do things. And I created a set of standards and this is how we do it. It was only in retrospect that I realized, I guess that's kind of a lot what culture is. It's just really a set of standards for how we do things. So in the early days, I wasn't thinking of it as culture per se. And but yet I had created a set of behaviors that we practiced and we we worked on them over and over and over again. We call them fundamentals, and it became the foundation of, I really thought of as the signature of my leadership career, was the creation of this methodology that I had built in the later stages of that first career. And but I even then there was no such thing as the quote, eight-step framework. It was just stuff I was doing. That eight-step framework came when I wrote the first book. So when I wrote the first book, I thought about that. That was in 2008, is when I wrote the first book. Yeah, so that's early. It was right after I'd sold it, yeah, it's right after I'd sold my company and I sat down to write that book. And so yeah, that's when I started talking about this. And to your point, you know, the early in the culture journey, if I think about the difference between when I first started talking about this stuff and when I later started talking about it, in my in the early days of talking about culture, and you probably remember this too, culture wasn't such a hot topic. It was like, cult, what are you talking about? It was different for people. Today, everybody's gotten, you know, they've gotten religion about culture that people realize it's really important.
SPEAKER_00It's the sexy word for lack of a more biblical term for it. I wonder, I've got a little hypothesis. I was thinking on my early morning run today about our time together, and I I just wondered why didn't we talk about culture till I mean I wrote a book on culture in 15, it was still kind of a new thing. You've already been doing it seven years by then, but why not before then? Why didn't my granddad talk about this? You know, and I kind of wonder, here's the hypothesis, and you you're the expert, so tell me what you think. I think we might need to give credit to the millennials for the topic of culture coming up because I think, you know, when my granddad went to work, you went to work at a company and you've maybe changed companies once, but more likely you were gunning for the 35-year gold watch or whatever the you know the thing is for working one place throughout. Fast forward to millennials that grew up with a computer, even a laptop, with on-demand TV, they can change channels. They've had a world of options, and so you see all this job uh churn and movement, which isn't necessarily bad. But I think it it has made um employers have to drop back and go, we better make our workplace pretty irresistible, or people are gonna leave more quickly. That that's my hypothesis, that it is a product of the sort of job changing and career changing that has become normal with the millennial and Gen Z.
SPEAKER_01What's your Yeah, I would agree with that, William. I think that's largely true. That that I think the expectations of workers a generation or two ago were different, and that's that's changed over time. To your point, older generations, hey, you get a job and you shut up and do your job and you stay there for a lot of years and don't complain and just work and they don't expect anything different. And yet, and and the younger generation thinks more about well, is there a purpose here? Do I feel connected to the people? Do I feel connected to the company? They have different expectations about what they're looking for out of work, and I think employers have had to respond. Having said that, though, like I when I talk to people about culture, I try to demystify it because I think for so many people it's this like fuzzy, uh ethereal kind of thing. And I hate that stuff. Exactly. And yet it's really simpler than that. And when I talk to people of previous generations, so many of our clients, most of our clients are entrepreneurial businesses. Many of them are multi-generational family businesses. And they often have a founder who's probably, you know, he or she might be 70, 75, 80 years old. And if you talk to them about culture, they'd say, culture, you don't need that culture shit. You just gotta show up and you take care of customers. And if you take care of customers, everything else will take care of itself. And when I describe that, everybody said, Yeah, that's my dad. You know, they think of it that way. And when I talk to people like that, I often say that, again, demystifying this, that you as the founder, let's say it was you, William, and you're 75 years old and you've built this company, um, I would say to you, William, there are ways that you've always done things. You know, you always knew that if you just take care of the customer and you give great service, you know, everything will take care of itself. But we have to be able to, if that's gonna carry on from generation to generation, we've got to be able to extract Williamness, you know, that the essence of who you are and the way you do things, we've got to be able to extract Williamness and codify that so that we can teach that purposefully to people in the future, because not everybody's gonna think like you are. And we don't want to lose what made you you. And so that's really what culture is. It's not this fancy stuff, it's just extracting Williamness and being able to document and teach it and embed it in people so that as generations go on, we still do the things that you always talked about. And if you think of it that way, it's not this fancy culture stuff.
SPEAKER_00Huge mistake I made as a young leader. I would became a senior pastor of a very large church at 31 years old. They probably should have had a search firm help them find a better candidate, but they didn't, there wasn't one back then, so they couldn't. I I just, you know, I think the only thing I had going for me was I was 31, so I knew everything. Um but I didn't, I thought we we need to make some changes, and Houston's a very change-friendly environment. I mean, innovation drives the city, so it's not like, you know. It was the oldest church in the city, and I didn't realize that the longer an organization has been around, the harder it is to make rapid change. And with a younger organization, you want to make a culture shift and the founder's still there and the three or four people that started with them, just change them. You'll change the cult. Like it's a whole different thing if you're in an older organization or a more established organization than one where the founders are still around. I don't know if you've found that true, but it sure bit me in the rear end when I try to change things too fast.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I mean, I think we certainly want to be respectful of that. And I say, I say all the time, to me, creating a culture, it I call it a design function. We're designing the amazing company we're trying to build. Having said that, if you've already been successful, there are probably many things that have been foundations of your success that have led you to get to this point of success. And we want to capture that as once again and codify that. And in addition, there are probably some other things we got to get better at. So chances are our design of this future company borrows heavily from things that have been there for years and also incorporates things that need to be improved upon.
SPEAKER_00Well, I tell people uh discovering your culture as a workplace um is much more it's it's not, as we talked about before, it's not the leader going off to the mountain to figure out the culture. Rather, it's the exact opposite. It's getting down in the dirt and doing an archaeological dig and figuring out like what has been around here, what has been what's made this place work really well, and how do we codify and replicate that.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I I mean I I agree with that, and yet I would I would differ from that a little bit. Okay. Um and so so my point of view is that ultimately the creation of the culture is a leadership function. It is one of the leaders' most important responsibilities. And I think that a mistake, in my view, that many organizations make as it relates to building their culture is they make it too collaborative a process. And I know that runs a little counter to much of what you've written about, but I'll just share with you my own. Oh, that's great.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01And so I to a certain extent, again, to me, this is a design function. I'm the CEO and I'm trying to call out a vision of the amazing company we're trying to build and what I want to see, what that needs to look like. And then we're gonna go about building that. Now, chances are, again, it likely, not guaranteed, but it likely borrows heavily from what we're doing now. And so to your point, we could do some archaeological digging to figure out what that is. But I'm not creating the culture. I'm gonna say this and I'll explain what I mean. I'm not creating the culture that my employees want. Because some of them might not even be here in the future. Why would I be designing around what they want when in the transient world, some of them are gonna be here and some aren't? I'm designing around my vision of the amazing company we're trying to build. And I'm gonna get my people aligned behind that. Now, if you're not aligned to, uh chances are I'm not gonna come up with something that all my employees are gonna say, oh my God, that's not what I thought we're doing here. I mean, they've already tacitly, implicitly signed up for your game by the fact that that you've joined that they've joined you, even if you've never articulated it clearly enough. They kind of bought into you. So you're not gonna come up with stuff that's totally different. But at the end of the day, I'm designing what I want and I'm gonna get people who want to go there. And if you don't want to go where we're going, you probably aren't a good fit here. And so I think it's the leader's job to call out the vision of what is it that we're building here? What is the vision of the company? What is the culture we're trying to build? And I'm not designing around asking everybody what they would like. Um, I may do some archaeological digging to see what has helped us to be successful, but this isn't about satisfying the people I have. It's about calling out a vision of where we're trying to go and get my people aligned behind that. And once again, if you're not aligned behind that, you're probably not a good fit here because this is where we're going, folks. That's right. That's right.
SPEAKER_00Well, I wonder uh if we could take a minute or two and you could walk people through steps because you were kind enough to send me uh you had me on your podcast to talk about our book we wrote, Culture Wins, which is a simple case study with 150 data points. You've got thousands and thousands and thousands, and you sent me your book, Culture by Design. And I and it's second edition, so that means it's been around a while and done well, and you've learned more. What have you learned in this second edition that uh that is a new finding for you? It doesn't have to be the best one or whatever, but like, oh yeah, that's right. That needs to be in a second edition.
SPEAKER_01Well, the the main reason that I created the second edition, I wrote that in uh 2018, I think it was, or 20. I don't know, whenever it was. I wrote the second edition um mostly to respond to the change in the workplace that remote and hybrid work created. So um, you know, everybody when when the pandemic happened and everybody went remote or hybrid, then people started saying, well, does the same stuff apply, or is there something different we need to do because of this new environment? And what I would say that, and so I wrote some chapters that I added some chapters to the original book that address that. What I would say in my experience is that the basic framework that I call the eight-step framework and the system that I teach, that framework is as applicable in a remote environment as it is in an brick and mortar environment. In fact, my first company was a brick and mortar company, my second company is 100% remote. We have no office. All my staff is completely remote, and we practice the exact same thing. So the methodology is equally applicable in a remote environment. What I would say the biggest difference is that the remote environment and all these people working hybrid or remote made it more critical than it's ever been to be purposeful and systematic about culture. Because before, when we were all together, we could get away with, it wouldn't be the best way, but you could get away with, all right, we weren't so systematic about it, but people were around each other and they picked up the vibe, they saw you as the leader every day, and just kind of be like William, and that would be kind of good enough. But when everybody started working remotely, or even the same dynamic happens as companies grow. If a company goes from 10 or 20 or 30 people to 50 or 100 or 200 or multiple locations, they're not seeing the leadership anymore. And that's right. I'm not gonna pick up the culture at the water cooler. And so if there isn't some more systematic methodology for how we're driving our culture, we're gonna be at risk of losing the stuff that we used to be so proud of that isn't that way anymore because we're all working remotely. So it just forced people to be more systematic.
SPEAKER_00I'm a I'm a uh I'm good at some things. I'm pretty bad at training and being a manager. And I didn't realize this till I mean, I I I love sales. Now my church friends are gonna hate that word. If you're a pastor, you're in sales. Absolutely. Call it call it eternal fire insurance. That's what you're selling. I don't know, but you're you know, you I love convincing somebody about a better reality, right? And and so I brought on our very first person that handled sales for us, and she had been in sales, this was gonna be wonderful, and so I started training her, and it was horrible. And I realized most of my best training is uh we actually adopted, I called it Ruth One training. Where I go, you're gonna go. Where I lodge, you're gonna lodge. Hang out with me for six months and learn from osmosis. And that's how that's the the best form of training I know, but you can't do that virtually. So it you can't do that in a franchise model. Uh you look at the most successful multi-site churches, they have a pretty tight culture from site to site, like a Chick-fil-A or a Starbucks. And I think that's what you're saying. That yeah, if you really want your organization to expand, and if you want to have any sense of hybrid or remote work at all, you better double down on the culture.
SPEAKER_01Is that well, and I would say I learned a lot of the foundation of what I learned, I learned from an experience that I had many years ago where I took my team to the Ritz-Carlton in Philadelphia, and I learned about what Ritz-Carlton did. And short version of the story is Ritz-Carlton has a set of behaviors that they call their basics, and they scroll for them every day. Every day there's a daily lineup where every team member is in a daily lineup talking about the same basic, and they scroll through them every 20 days. And that methodology made a lot of sense to me. And what made sense to me is to your point, Ritz-Carlton has lots and lots of locations, you know, 20,000, 30,000, 40,000 employees all over the country, all over the world, literally. And they want to make sure that you have the same experience no matter where you go. And the only way they can make sure that you have the same experience no matter where you go is if there's a way that we do things here.
SPEAKER_00That's right.
SPEAKER_01There has to be a way that we do things. And really that's in its simplest form, it's the foundation of what I've taught so many leaders is there needs to be a way you do things in your company. You know, Vanderbilt, there's a way that you do things, and we've got to document that and teach it and get it embedded in our people. And if we do that all the time, that's all culture really is, is a way that we operate here. It's a way that you live in this company.
SPEAKER_00There's there's no singular definition of culture that's caught my mind saying that's it. Uh the one we use when we're talking to clients is you know, if you have a mission or a vision for what you're trying to accomplish as a church, school, organization, whatever it is, if you have a vision you're trying to accomplish, your culture is how you as a team are going to behave. While you accomplish that mission. And that's not just treat each other nice. That's like well, we have these distinct, uh what it would you fundamentally different things that we do that are uh uh kind of how we do things. By the way, just as a side note to listeners, um it sounds like an infomercial, but you touched on the Ritz-Carlton. I am fascinated with the Ritz-Carlton. Yes. When you talk about a Ritzy item, Ritzy wasn't an adjective until that hotel. Yeah. I don't know what Friedmany is or Vanderblumy, but like when your brand becomes an adjective, you have achieved a culture. Then you've done something right. And uh he walks us through how he did that. So go take a listen to that. He's a he's a genius. Um, and I think a lot of what he's saying is what I've built things on here, and maybe what you've studied as well.
SPEAKER_01It's completely what it did.
SPEAKER_00David, I want to I want to return back to you and ask a couple questions. Um, I'm betting there's a listener out there today who says, I don't want to admit it, but our culture sucks. I can't wait for this presidential election to be over. I can't wait for the divisiveness in the country to simmer down a little bit because it's bleeding over into our people. And everybody's mad that I make them come into the office or mad that we're remote or mad. I've got a pretty angry group of people or disengaged group of people. What are a couple steps you would advise people to take right away if they're noticing disengagement or anger and polarization in the workplace?
SPEAKER_01Well, I mean, the first thing you've always got to ask is what's the what is the environment that I've created? So I'd look inwardly first and ask, what's the environment that I've created that is allowing that to take place? Um, because culture starts with leadership. Uh I mean I always say that that the single most important ingredient in any culture initiative is I call it CEO sponsorship. It starts with you. So if I'm seeing that in my company, I'm actually looking at myself in the mirror and asking, what have I done or not done that has created the environment that has allowed this to take place? And I'd be looking inward. Um ultimately, I mean, once I've I've taken a hard look at myself, I'd be thinking about, well, then what are the behaviors that I want to see evidenced in my company that would be the way that I want our people to be? And I'd get those documented and then begin to teach them. But you gotta look inwardly. If I mean your culture is a reflection of leadership. And if you've got a dysfunctional place, you've got to look there first.
SPEAKER_00I have been uh trying to read the Bible for years and years and years, go straight through every year for probably three decades now. Today I learned something new. Okay. Um, you know, if you see a speck in your brother's eye, what does Jesus say to do something? Oh, don't worry about that. Take the log out of your own eye first, right? Everybody says, so uh what I had failed to pay attention to is what happens after. Take the log out of your own eye so that two of the most important words in any scripture verse, so that, oh, why are we doing this? Take the log in here and so that you may see clearly and remove the speck from your brother's eye. It's not just don't call it bad if it's bad. It's like get your own stuff straight so that you can see clearly and then address what's going on. And I think that's what I'm hearing you say.
SPEAKER_01Absolutely. That that this culture is all about leadership. I mean, no, this is a leadership podcast. It's all about leadership. It's me as a leader, you as a leader, our listeners as leaders, being able to say, what is the vision I have? Not necessarily a fancy vision statement, but what's the vision I have of the kind of company that I want to build and the kind of leader that I want to be? And as I can identify the kind of leader I want to be and the things that I want to promote, there's a series of behaviors that this is how we do things. This is what it means to be to be a part of my company. And I, of course, as a leader, need to be a good example of that. Otherwise, there's no credibility about it. I don't have to be perfect, but I have to be a good example. But I've got to ask myself, what is the vision I have of the kind of people that I want to be around and the kind of company I want to be and the way that we want to operate? And then once I've identified that, then it's just a question of teaching that. And the system that I teach is really all founded on, again, this is this eight-step framework, but two of them that I learned from Ritz Carlton really, is defining so what are those behaviors that you want your company to be about? I call them fundamentals, and then just creating a structured way to teach those behaviors over and over and over and over and over and over and over again so that those behavior behaviors become internalized in our people. But it starts with you as a leader. What is it that you want to be? What do you want to represent in the world?
SPEAKER_00If if you've got there also, I talk to leaders all the time, CEOs, um, headmasters of schools, what have you, that you know we're all a lot of people going back to the workplace now. I think Google just announced they want everybody to come back to work. I I think there's some people out there going, I better address this culture thing. Because I got people that are having to come back that didn't have what's a first step? I've never paid attention to this. I need to build a culture. David, what do I do?
SPEAKER_01Call me.
SPEAKER_00Call David.
SPEAKER_01Yes. Well, and then your second step, it really starts. I mean, in my eight-step framework, step number one, as I've been sort of referring to, is defining what you want your culture to be. I can't, this is obvious, but I can't go about building a particular culture in my company if I can't describe clearly enough, well, what the heck is the culture I'm trying to build? I mean, how would you go about building it if you don't know what you're trying to build? And so that's obvious, but very few companies do this well. And so this first step in the eight-step framework is all about how do you define what is it exactly that I want that culture to be? I know in your company, you know, you've got a set of behaviors that you teach, and I have a set of behaviors in mind. That's the definition of your culture. Once you've got that, we can start to teach it and work on it and reinforce it and hold people accountable and coach about it and all that. But I can't do any of that if I can't describe what is it that I want. So the absolute first step is there.
SPEAKER_00Will reading your book get them there or at least get them off. Absolutely.
SPEAKER_01So so in that so that book describes the eight-step framework. There's a chapter on each of those eight steps, and there's a full, lengthy chapter on defining your culture. How do you go about doing it? What are the steps? What every detail of how to go about defining it. There's a full chapter on that book.
SPEAKER_00That's great. And the book is called Culture by Design, uh, David Friedman. You can find it anywhere. There are books. I I checked it out ahead of time. Uh fantastic tool for you. I I'd give you, I hate to give two sort of call to actions on the same webinar, but uh we do have a free cultural assessment, and it will not do what David's book does at all. Uh for right or wrong, we've we've decided building a culture has two layers. One is are we healthy? Like are we treating people in a healthy way? And then two is how do we build the distinctives, the things that make us fundamentally different. That second part is what David's book will help you do and change your organization. Uh, before you ever get there, you gotta figure out whether you get a toxic place to work or a healthy one. So go to the culture tool.com. You can take a free assessment and see how, against maybe 5,000 other values-driven organizations, uh, you match up in eight key indicators we've found for health or toxicity. That's only step one, though. Step two is then building out a defined, scalable, repeatable set of behaviors that uh that mark you. And if you don't have a way to figure that out, I'd strongly encourage you to get David's book and uh design a culture that will last even after you're gone. So, David, I I can't thank you enough for making time for us today. And uh I'm sure if people read the book and they're like, oh my gosh, I need to know more, they can contact you or hire you, or whatever the right steps are to take it to the next level. How would people find you to do that?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, the best way is to go to our website, and the website is culturewise. My company is called CultureWise. So the word culture. If you go to culturewise.com, you can see lots more about the process.
SPEAKER_00That's great. Well, thanks again, David. Enjoy Philadelphia. Your baseball team looks pretty good this year. I'm a little nervous about our Astros, but uh and the Eagles are gonna be even better.
SPEAKER_01Go Eagles.
SPEAKER_00Have a great fall, and thanks for tuning in. If you want to get the show notes, just go to Vandercast.com, leave your email address. We won't beat you up with other offers for Ginsu knives or supplements or searches or anything like that. You'll just get show notes and what's coming up next on the podcast. I'm really looking forward to some of the folks you're gonna get to meet this fall, and I hope you'll tune again soon. All right. So leave your browser open.
SPEAKER_01Yep, it's a second.