5

ENCOURAGE THE CULTURE

“If you are falling short in anything, be ruthless with your environment.”

—FATHER MIKE SCHMITZ

Principle 3: Culture Starts with You, But Your People Prove It

More than once, Golf magazine ranked Pine Valley Golf Club the number one course in the United States and on the globe. Most golfers won’t ever get a chance to play the renowned course, let alone dream of having access to it regularly. As the son of the president of the Pine Valley Golf Club, Chip Brewer considered himself pretty lucky to have that privilege, and growing up, he immersed himself in the game of golf.

Despite an excellent track record, the pressure of living up to the legacy of his father, a two-time USGA Senior Amateur, constantly lingered. After playing college golf at the College of William and Mary and graduating, Chip made the decision to refocus his efforts on his business skills instead of his golf skills. His professional journey eventually led him to get his MBA at the Harvard Business School, and in 1991 he took a job working in the paper industry. Inevitably, his worlds soon meshed as a round of golf with an old friend led to a promising business introduction. This on-course connection with the CEO of Adams Golf led to a position with the company in 1998. He thrived immediately by pouring in his passion for the game and combining it with his great business education. Four years later in 2002, Chip climbed the ranks to become the CEO. After an incredible 10-year run with the upstart golf equipment manufacturer an executive search firm took notice, hiring him away to be the president and CEO of a struggling company named Callaway Golf.

From his extensive experience, Brewer knew there was a major challenge not only to his new company but to the entire industry. Once a favorite American pastime, golf was in decline as people moved away from their grandfather’s game to shorter, less expensive entertainment options. If this wasn’t a big enough problem for a new CEO, he soon realized many of Callaway’s employees weren’t giving the best they had to offer in terms of their thinking and behaviors every day.

Discouraging moments were plentiful in his early days at Callaway Golf; he knew he had to ignite his people in order to ignite his company but wasn’t sure exactly how. His moment of clarity came with the development of a new golf club in 2013. His team brought Chip the product; they were excited about its finished form, but all he could see was how much it still needed to be improved.

He spoke to his team from the heart: “Our founder Ely Callaway created this company to make products that were demonstratively superior and pleasingly different. This product doesn’t live up to that vision. Each and every one of you are talented professionals, and I just want you to make products you are proud of. I do not care how we have to do it and how many things we have to fail on—we aren’t going to launch this product to the market because it isn’t worthy of this organization.”

The team stood in silence, dumbfounded. Moments passed before the responses finally came. Instead of excuses or rebuttals, they offered a consistent agreement. It was almost if they were relieved their new CEO was a leader who wasn’t going to settle for average. From that point on, the change was palpable. Employees began staying late to work together, collaboration between departments became the norm, and new ideas were plentiful.

Chip knew that it was his job to encourage his people to explore and discover the answers while creating a culture that allowed them to their best work. In the golf business, this meant allowing team members the freedom to be creative and try innovative things. Thinking of new technology, building it, and then testing it can cost millions of dollars, and the majority of ideas or products fail more often than they become successful.

A revised version of the product was eventually presented to Chip, branded X Hot. This would end up being a transformational product in the golf industry that year, and it marked the beginning of Callaway’s climb back to the top. While there are many reasons why the Callaway Golf team was able to be successful, it began with the environment and culture in which they worked.

Since 2013, Callaway Golf has produced an endless string of products that equal or surpass the success of the X Hot three-wood. Chip makes it a priority to literally and figuratively wrap his arms around people by championing their work and supporting both their success and failures. When I had the chance to sit down with him, Chip told me, “You cannot lose confidence in your people, and I love the people here. I choose that word love intentionally because I do not just like the people here or the environment we have created, I love it.”

Callaway Golf has gone from a struggling golf brand in 2012 to the second-largest golf equipment company in the world and one of the few growing in a shrinking golf market. To give you an idea of the difficulty in the industry, most reports show golf sales shrinking between 1 and 3 percent year over year. One of Callaway’s competitors, TaylorMade, was sold by its parent company Adidas after going from $1.7 billion in revenue in 2012 to around $900 million in 2016.

Conversely, Callaway’s trend is moving in the opposite direction. The 2017 year produced net sales over $1 billion, a 20 percent increase over 2016. In 2018, improvement is even higher at 30 percent, leading Callaway Golf toward becoming the best golf brand in the world. Like all great leaders who focus on building the best, Chip gives credit where it is due. In a second-quarter 2018 public earnings call, he said, “I’d like to take this chance and thank the Callaway Golf team for delivering these results. The team should be proud of what we have accomplished. I’m also sure they understand we have a lot more to do and like me are motivated to take our company to the next level.”

Creating and maintaining an encouraging culture is difficult, but ultimately attainable. You may not be in the position to completely revamp your company culture.

A shift in companywide culture must start at the ground level with just the team in which you lead because culture comes to life at the team level first. But before you can mimic what Chip did at Callaway, you must understand what “culture” really means. “Culture” comes from the Latin word, colere, meaning, “to cultivate.” I define culture in the modern business sense as the shared beliefs and values that guide thinking and behavior.

An easy way to test the strength of the shared beliefs and values on your team is to ask yourself: “If I were gone for a month, would the team carry on with their best thinking and behavior, or would they begin to slip?” Your answer will give you a hint about the current state of your team culture. If you are going to build the best, it is your job to ensure your culture promotes effective thinking and positive behavior of your people regardless of the circumstances.

Four elements make up any team’s culture:

   Safety. Before people can perform at their best, they first need to feel safe and protected. How does the current environment make your people feel? First, are the working conditions physically safe? Second, do team members feel emotionally safe to share ideas and feelings without fear of any repercussions?

   Unity. Inclusivity and people feeling like they are part of something bigger than themselves help feed productivity and innovation. Does each person on your team feel like he or she plays an integral part? Does everyone work together as a team, or do they create silos or cliques? At the center of unity is mutual respect among team members and a feeling of belonging.

   Positivity. Beliefs drive people’s actions, and actions drive results. If your team’s beliefs are optimistic, the chances of good things happening in the future are drastically higher than the alternative. Positivity is driven from the top down, and it’s contagious.

   Energy. Energy keeps your team going and impacts the intensity and speed at which people perform. High energy yields high performance. You can always tell the energy of a team by what they’re doing midday. Have they settled into complacency, or are they revving their engines to power through the rest of the day?

The level at which these elements are present determines the quality of your team’s culture. You cannot have a successful culture if one or any of these elements aren’t being fulfilled. The graphics in Figures 5.1 and 5.2 give an example of an elite team culture versus one that isn’t.

FIGURE 5.1   Elite Team Culture

FIGURE 5.2   Deficient Team Culture

When all four of these elements are achieved simultaneously, at high levels, it’s called an elite team culture. When the average of the four elements is at a level two, it’s called a deficient team culture.

Leaving the development of your team’s culture to chance will lead to things moving in a direction you may not like because the culture is being shaped every day whether you like it or not. If you do not mold and guide it, your team may end up disengaged, voluntary turnover will increase, and a lackluster attitude will develop. Conversely, your proactivity will give way to a more productive team, better morale, and overall positive results. Here is what you can do to actively increase each of the four elements of your team’s culture.

Safety First

If you walked into a restaurant and the hostess asked whether you would like a booth or table in the open, how would you answer?

Most patrons would prefer to sit in a booth, and the reason why is subconscious. When sitting in a booth, you inevitably feel safer and protected. Human beings have a constant desire to feel safe, so that’s where we naturally gravitate toward.

The need for safety extends to every facet of our lives including the workplace, specifically two key areas: physical and emotional safety.

Creating a physically safe environment is cut and dried. At a desk job, this is not typically an issue to address, but it may pose an issue if your team is in manufacturing or on a construction site. There are industry standards and rules in place that tell you, at a minimum, what to do to keep the environment physically safe. Letting your people know you’re abiding by these rules and asking if there’s anything you missed is always a good practice.

What isn’t so cut-and-dried is creating an emotionally safe environment so people on a team are able to set aside their self-doubt, uncertainty, and fear so they can perform at their best. Turns out this is one of the most important things you can do as a leader to build the best and improve the culture. Google’s Abeer Dubey, director of people analytics (HR), and Julia Rozovsky, a people analytics manager, led a two-year study called Project Aristotle, which evaluated 180 Google teams, conducted 200-plus interviews, and analyzed more than 250 different team attributes. Rozovsky outlined the five key characteristics of enhanced teams they found: dependability, structure and clarity, meaning, impact, and psychological safety. As interesting as all five of them are, the most important was psychological safety.

The only way for you to encourage a psychologically safe environment is by understanding that it starts with you. Specifically, your ability to create a collaborative environment that challenges the voices in your team’s heads that provide doubt. You have to be intentional about creating an inviting workspace where people can share ideas, ask questions, and collaborate. If your team perceives their comments are going to be judged or not respected, they will begin to reserve those ideas and questions for a different environment altogether. There is a famous leadership quote from Andy Stanley that provides the key for you to create a safe environment: “Leaders who refuse to listen will eventually be surrounded by people with nothing helpful to say.” A mentor of mine told me, hearing is through the ears but listening is through the mind. You have to make the choice to listen to the ideas and perspectives of others instead of just hearing them. Most people aren’t good listeners because when they hear something they begin thinking about how they are going to respond. They begin formulating their points one by one, and the whole time the other person is still talking. Because listening is critical to creating psychological safety, I want to give you a few tips to help you develop the skill.

1.   Anchor yourself. You can’t listen until you are anchored into a conversation. Put away your phone or any possible distraction in order to anchor yourself. If for some reason you can’t anchor because of other priorities, be honest and tell your team member you need to come back to this when you can anchor yourself.

2.   Consider what other are saying. There is too much going on and too many variables for one leader to know it all. Ensure that when others are providing ideas or alternative ways of doing something you are truly considering what they are saying.

3.   Prove you listened. The best way to create a psychologically safe environment is to prove to others you were listening by implementing what was said. While the implementation of every idea isn’t possible, testing the idea or discussing it in more detail rather than disregarding it will be another sign to prove you listened.

A Unified Team

Everyone has a series of fundamental needs. One of these is the longing to belong and be connected to others. The psychological theory called “the need to belong” proposes people’s sense of social belonging is indeed fundamentally required. Research conducted by Julianne Holt-Lunstad, Timothy B. Smith, and J. Bradley Layton in 2010 found the quality and quantity of social relationships is linked to mental health, morbidity, and mortality. Solid connections are as important to your health and happiness as food, water, and shelter.

In high school, I was named one of the captains of our football team. During one preseason, a new student named Jake transferred into our school and tried out for the team. He quickly became one of our better players. The only problem was that Jake never seemed to find unity with the other players.

After several weeks of Jake putting in the maximum effort during practice, he started to miss days and slack off during drills. I took notice and made my best effort to find out what was going on, but Jake was reluctant to talk. Just one week before our first game, the coach made an announcement. Jake would no longer be a part of our team; he had decided to quit. While most of my peers were unfazed by the news, it ate at me. Jake was a great asset to the team and could have helped us achieve big things.

Years later, I ran into Jake. I could not help but ask him why he made the decision to leave the team. He told me, “I just never felt like I belonged.” It was clear at that moment, our team had failed him. We did not welcome him. Quite frankly, the opposite had occurred. Jake was excluded from gatherings after practice, and I know multiple times he had overheard negative comments from other players about the small town he had moved from. As team captain, I should have done more to make him feel an important part of the team.

It is a major responsibility as a leader to give your people this sense of belonging in order to create a unified team. Unity requires proactivity. There are many ways to go about it, but one of my favorite examples came from a leader I coached at a medium-size company; his name was Harry. He shared with me an incredible practice he uses to create a united team right after a new team member joins. Harry handwrites a note to each new hire, inviting them to be a part of the team. This formal note has become a big deal. Shortly after receiving the note, Harry has a one-on-one conversation with the recruit to truly invite the new member to be a part of the team from day one. This particular team does not suffer from silos, cliques, or having outsiders. The team, as he says, “works in harmony and together because people know they have been invited and their participation isn’t a nice-to-have, it is warranted.” The case can be made that this exercise shouldn’t just be for new hires, but it could also be done for an entire team that isn’t united in order to reset the human connections among the employees.

Effortless Positivity

Mike Erwin, a West Point graduate, served three tours of duty for his country. He transitioned out of the military in pursuit of a passion he discovered during his graduate studies at the University of Michigan.

Erwin explored the ins and outs of “positive psychology.” This approach is that no matter how innately good or bad a person may seem, there are positive character traits present within everyone. He began writing about his work and shared it with friends and colleagues. His goal was for people to pull their best character traits out of themselves and others. Through what he calls “divine intervention,” two old friends who were high school principals decided they wanted to teach the concepts of “positive psychology” to students in schools in Massachusetts and asked Erwin to help.

What started as a small pet project turned into a nationwide movement called the Positivity Project. It began at a single institution in 2015 and has grown to over 200 schools in 14 states with no signs of slowing down. With the program in place, teachers observed a 24 percent increase in students’ ability to recognize, articulate, and appreciate others’ strengths. Not only that, but their ability to articulate their own strengths rose 39 percent along with a 22 percent increase in peer-to-peer relationships.

As impressive as these numbers are, it’s what’s behind them that is so important. Erwin was able to instill the importance of a positive outlook and the belief that good things happen to students and teachers alike.

Erwin told me in an interview, “Of all 24 character strengths, optimism and the idea of being a positive leader is so important. Because of the information age we all live in, people are more in tune with all the challenges and negativity in the world. It has made it hard to be more optimistic. So to be an optimistic leader who is relentlessly positive in the face of challenges is a true competitive advantage.”

While positivity, as Erwin suggests, is a true competitive advantage, it’s also unique in that it’s a choice you make for yourself. And the benefit of being positive creates a magnetic pull for like-minded people. Kim Cameron, associate dean of education at the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan, cites the heliotropic effect in a 2018 TED Talk as to why this is the case. He said, “All living systems are inclined toward that which is life-giving and . . . avoid that which is life depleting,” or “toward positive energy and away from negative energy.” For example, “if you put a plant in the window, over time it leans toward the light.”

Gravitating toward things that create vibrancy or are life-giving is in our human DNA. But as easy as it is to write about this, the world we live in is more complex than photosynthesis. You know what it feels like to be frustrated, disappointed, or to catch a bad break. For most people, it feels easier to adopt a negative point of view for the sake of saving face rather than looking for the positive in every situation.

If you want to have a culture that is encouraging for others, it is your responsibility to make a conscious effort to be positive. Take the heliotropic effect to heart and do everything in your power to be positive every day and in every situation. But for positivity to take root in your culture, it has to reach every individual on your team. The strategies are endless, but those leaders who are relentless about building the best leverage these strategies:

1.   When bad things happen, respond with a positive comment. There is no doubt you’ll experience frustration and events will happen that aren’t positive. In these moments ask yourself, “What is one possible positive outcome?” Regardless of how bad things might be on the surface, there is always a sliver of positivity that can shine through if you just adjust your perspective.

2.   Promote and encourage things that help create positive energy. While work can and absolutely should be a place that helps create positive energy for people, it is easy to lose sight during difficult times. Find ways to promote other areas of life that typically create positive energy like going to church, healthy eating, physical fitness, and building quality personal relationships. This could mean a free gym membership for your team, healthy snacks around the office, or a paid vacation that allows team members to take their spouses away for a weekend.

3.   Remove the people that cause negativity. Regardless of how good a performer someone is on your team, people’s value must also be measured by the positivity they bring to the team. There’s a famous saying, “Don’t let one bad apple spoil the bunch.” Each person, regardless of his or her role, plays a part in the ongoing development of your culture. One drop of negativity will spread like a cancerous cell. Consider what behavior you allow while continuing to promote positivity.

Contagious Energy

The last element of an encouraging culture is energy. Traditional thinking says energy comes from results. While this isn’t wrong, energy can be produced, well before results are achieved, through the power of words or mantras.

In 2012, P.J. Fleck was hired by Western Michigan University as its head football coach. He was the youngest in the country at just 32 years old. At the time, there wasn’t much excitement around the program. Fleck’s first order of business was to implement activities that would add excitement. He introduced a program-wide mantra, “Row the Boat.” This was designed to motivate players during times of difficulty, helping them remember not to give up. There were three parts: The oar stood for energy each person brings to the team. The boat was the sacrifice each member of the team had to make. And finally, the compass was what directed each team member down the path of success.

Fleck personally committed to this idea when his young son passed away. Although it was difficult, Fleck wanted to continue living his life as a tribute to his son’s legacy. As the mantra caught on, energy in the program skyrocketed. However, the results did not translate at first. The team’s first season was abysmal, compiling a win-loss record of 1-11. This did not discourage Coach Fleck, however. He stayed faithful, making it a priority to create an encouraging culture on and off the field. As a result, the following two seasons saw much improvement.

Everything seemed to come together in the 2016 season as Western Michigan went a perfect 13-0 in the regular season. They nabbed their first Mid-American Conference title since 1988. While they narrowly lost the Cotton Bowl, their newfound success catapulted Fleck into contention for the best young coach in college football. In 2017, he was rewarded with the head coaching position at the University of Minnesota.

Mantras are not specific to sports. Todd Weiden, a VP in the banking industry, was tasked with taking over one of the lowest-performing divisions in his company. It included more than 140 separate branches in Atlanta. Facing a division riddled with underwhelming performers and high turnover rates, Todd knew the only way he could turn the situation around was by building an elite culture. This would make it effortless for individuals to lean in and win. He began by setting incredibly high standards coupled with the mantra, “Run this town.” These words influenced the team so positively they began to understand where they were missing the mark and self-corrected their behaviors. Over time, the teamwide initiative and proactivity were so prevalent that the vast majority of 140 branches were blowing the results out of the water as people strived to “run this town” again. Todd’s people had a new sense of swagger and energy that abolished the old mentality with ease.

Imagine being a player on P.J. Fleck’s team or team member of Todd Weiden’s. Feel that jolt of energy? Run with it! Employ that energy you are imagining and pour it into your own people. Fleck’s “Row the boat” and Weiden’s “Run this town” are just two examples of what I call a Maximizing Mantra; they are critical to energizing any team or company. A few of my favorite examples include:

   Let’s Go

   Take Dead Aim

   Move the Needle

Part of your job as a leader is to ensure you have a Maximizing Mantra for your team, company, or even your family so you can create a similar sense of energy for others.

While this comes easier for some, I have seen it done well in various ways. One leader I coach struggled to come up with a Maximizing Mantra on her own, so she explained the concept in a team meeting. Within just a few minutes the entire group got behind one of the suggestions, “All Serve Customers.” This fits perfectly in their industry selling commodity steel products. One of their only differentiators is how every employee serves their customers. Other leaders I have worked with look for inspiration from earlier in their life or from the hobbies they engage with outside of work.

Regardless of the method you use to get there, it’s important that your Maximizing Mantra is simple, provides clarity, is action-oriented, and most importantly, is fun. Once you have one, put it on walls, on T-shirts, or in e-mails. Use it all the time and keep it in the forefront of your people’s eyes and hearts.

When you put all of this together and you have a safe, unified, positive, and energized culture, keep it growing and evolving by providing recognition and praise to those best living out these things every day. This can come in the form of an award, gifts, or simply verbalizing it to people in person. The key when giving out praise and recognition is to be sincere and emphasize things that are under someone’s control, things like attitude, effort, and actions.