CHAPTER 6

Defining a Destiny

Not long ago we hired someone to work in our New York office, and I experienced one of those affirming moments all leaders cherish.

“I’ve had lots of opportunities,” she told me, “but I picked Mitchell because I want to be in this kind of culture. I’m very impressed with your culture. Everybody talked about it. Everybody was consistent, all the way to the top. That’s where I want to be—in that kind of environment.”

One of the biggest challenges I’ve faced as a leader has been building and maintaining a culture that prompts people to say things like this new teammate said, and not just on their first day on the job, but for years to come. It’s a challenge because a culture needs constant nurturing. You don’t put it together like a jigsaw puzzle and then sit back and admire the picture. The very word culture originates from Latin, where it was all about agriculture: the cultivation of plants and fields. It’s something that thrives and sustains when you commit to caring for it over time.

So in that sense, a culture has no destination. You never get there. But ironically, you can’t create a great culture if you don’t know where you’re going. You have to define a destiny that inspires people to join you. That definition must include the how as well as the where. Because how you bring your destiny to life is your culture, and it determines whether you get where you’re going and who will join you for the journey.

Culture, in fact, is a clear example of how critical the intersection of destination leadership and a journey mindset can be. Creating an environment where goals can be achieved by people who feel inspired and valued is the holy grail of leadership. Both where you’re going and how you’ll get there matter. When you have both, great things can happen, even when all odds are against you—especially when all the odds are against you.

A Formula for Culture

When discussions these days turn to organizations with great cultures, most people think of high-tech companies or other trendy start-ups that shower their employees with great pay and perks such as onsite game rooms or yoga classes: Google, Zappos, Warby Parker, Facebook.

I think of an energy company. In fact, one of the first things I learned from Southwestern Energy was the importance of defining a destiny when it comes to building a great culture. Programs and perks don’t matter much if they don’t align with the destiny, and for Southwestern Energy that destiny was defined with a formula that emerged during the darkest hours of its history.

“We had lost a major lawsuit over royalty payments in October of 1998, and we lost the appeal in June of 2000,” Harold Korell, retired CEO of Southwestern Energy Company recalled. “We didn’t have any cash to do anything with, and no one in the world wanted to talk to us. I was worried someone was just going to take us over because our stock price was also depressed at the time.”

Harold had just joined the company in 1997, and he quickly found himself with a nearly insurmountable leadership challenge. The small company had lost nearly half of its value overnight due to the court’s unfavorable decision.

In fact, the company’s assets were worth more than its stock.

“We had a meeting to plan our annual report and its primary message,” Harold said. “What do you say at a time like that? ‘Let’s just sell the assets and all go home?’ We talked intently as a team for quite a while and agreed we had done a lot of the hard work already by putting the right people into place. We believed we had some really good projects that could create real value for the company.”

As the meeting wore on, Harold went to a marker board and wrote what looked like a mathematical formula:

He was trying to capture the essence of what the team believed: it had the right people doing the right things, and supported by the underlying assets of the company, the team could create exponential value—or value plus.

After some discussion about the inevitable ups and downs of pursuing value creation, Harold erased the equals sign and replaced it with an arrow that mirrors the challenging path to success, creating what has become known at Southwestern Energy as the “Formula.”

“That became the theme for our annual report that year,” said Harold. “I could say to a shareholder, ‘You may not believe in us, but this is why we believe in us. If we have the right people doing the right things and assets that are creating cash, and if we invest that right, then we’ll create more value. Therefore, we have a reason to exist. It’s one thing to think about selling the company and its assets today, but you might be better off if you stay with us and allow us to create more value for you.’ ”

Instead of giving up, Harold and his team defined a vision for where it wanted to go and how it would rebuild. They made some bold decisions to jump-start the business and began sharing their story with shareholders, investors, and employees.

“We were right,” said Harold.

Over the next decade, Southwestern Energy became the number one performing stock in the S&P 500, increasing 5,776 percent from January 1, 2000, through December 31, 2009, outpacing even Apple. The company has continued to grow at a strong pace, and today it is the third-largest producer of natural gas in the US Lower 48. Even as commodity prices have fallen and times have grown hard on energy companies, its mission is still driven by the Formula: to create value+ by providing energy to the world. The Formula represents the essence of the company’s corporate philosophy and how it operates.

Southwestern Energy has been a client of Mitchell Communications since the early 2000s, and we’ve been fortunate to work with them as they experienced dramatic growth and success. Harold and I have talked on many occasions about the company’s compelling culture, how it came to be, and how critical it was as Southwestern Energy experienced rapid growth.

“While there were so many things involved in our success, it really comes down to the Formula,” said Harold, who retired as CEO in 2009 and as chairman of the board in 2014. “We had the right people—people who had curiosity, who were innovative, creative, hardworking, who know right from wrong. They began to interpret the Formula to mean things that were empowering to them, saying, ‘I must be one of the right people.’ And feeling good about yourself is part of doing good.”

Indeed the beliefs represented by the Formula are timeless. If you ask the company’s current CEO, Bill Way, what the Formula means to the company today, he shares thoughts quite similar to Harold’s—but expressed in a different way.

“It’s very much a source of inspiration and guidance for all of us,” said Bill. “The Formula and our core values form the foundation of our culture and our strategy. During the recent collapse in product prices, we took a visible leadership role in halting drilling and completions operations. While an extremely difficult decision, impacting hundreds of people, our Formula speaks of ‘the right people doing the right things, wisely investing the cash flow from our underlying assets.’ The Formula anchors our decisions and how we act, when prices are high and when they are not.”

Bill told me he was especially proud of how quickly the team rallied around cost and margin improvement, enabling them to return the company to strength and resume investment. “One thing is for sure, we never lost focus on our corporate responsibility work, which includes assuring safe and healthy workplaces for our employees as well as a commitment to environmental stewardship, philanthropy and community engagement.”

Bill sums it up best. “Our Formula is enduring. The culture that has been built upon its wise principles enables us to thrive in good times and bad and deliver value+ to all of our stakeholders. It represents the true spirit of Southwestern Energy.”

The Formula was created during one of the company’s darkest times. But, it became the foundation upon which the company’s compelling culture was built and brought to life during the good times and bad that followed—and will for many years to come.

Building Mitchell’s Culture

I learned a lot about the importance of culture by working closely with Harold. It was during this time that I began to crystallize my own thinking about establishing a compelling approach to our work, a common team spirit, a collaborative nature, and a collegial environment.

As we started experiencing dramatic growth, I knew I wanted to continue some of the things that had worked so well with LocalLink and add new things that better suited an expanding full-time team. So over the second decade of Mitchell’s history, 2005 to 2015, we established five signature culture programs, we made conscious decisions about how to invest in our people, and we worked hard to become an employer of choice.

But the agency needed something more powerful than a collection of programs if we were to have a truly compelling and sustainable culture. The Formula became a destiny definer for Southwestern Energy, and we needed a similarly clear foundation for how we would do things. Programs come and go. We needed something durable. And just like Southwestern Energy, when we needed it most, we found it.

Things came to a head in the summer of 2009. We faced a rising tide of new work and an increasing need for more team members, but everyone was too busy to interview prospective employees. Even if we could hire someone, no one had time to train them. So we were spiraling further into a black hole.

Finally, COO Michael Clark and I decided to bring in several candidates for our leadership team to interview in one jam-packed day. It was a good idea in many ways and it helped us make some key hires, but it also exacerbated a problem that had been brewing. By the end of the day, our leaders were mentally exhausted and several faced an all-nighter to catch up on the work they had put off to focus on finding new team members. Their frustration with the situation seeped out to the group. Some harsh words were exchanged and plenty of voices were raised, until I found myself jumping in the middle of things to keep the peace.

That evening as I was leaving the office, one of our leaders told me pretty bluntly: “You’re the only one who wants to grow, Elise. The rest of us are just worn out.”

That comment crushed and disappointed me, until I realized it was only partly true. The team really did want to be part of a growing company; they just didn’t like the personal toll it was taking on them. This was exactly what I was trying to fix, but I could see that simply adding more head count wasn’t going to solve the whole problem. We needed to address something deeper.

After a sleepless night or two, I decided one thing we were missing was shared team norms. These are the principles by which a team agrees to treat one another. Blake Woolsey and I had helped many teams write their norms when we were conducting workshops through our other company, Executive Communications Consultants (now known as the Center). So I was well aware of this concept and knew we needed it.

When I called our team together for an unscheduled meeting, the look on their faces told me what they were thinking: “Why is she taking more of our time again when we just spent an entire day not getting any client work done?” But I knew the time we were getting ready to spend together could change everything.

“We’re going to fix some underlying issues,” I told them. “Today we need to agree as a group how we’re going to work together more effectively, and more specifically how we want to treat each other. Let’s start by brainstorming: what does this group absolutely need to have in place to function at its best?”

After a few minutes of silence, someone finally spoke up: “Trust. We need to trust each other more, to be reliable and to do what we say we’ll do so no one has to go around checking behind others to make sure something got done on time and at the right quality level.”

A great start. And from there the list grew until it became obvious that we were defining our values as a group. Each of us had individual values, but we’d never established a common set of values: a “true north” to guide us as we grew together.

Once we had the list, we decided our next best step was to take it to the larger team. We didn’t want to choose our company values for everyone; we wanted it to be an employee-led process. So we shortened the list to the five things we felt the strongest about. We held an all-employee working lunch, where small groups took one of the five words and fleshed out what it looked like when we were truly living the spirit of that word. Each group also had the power to change the word if they thought of something better.

We ended up with the original words still on the list, but with fantastic thinking about how we would live out these ideals on an everyday basis. What we came up with still stands as our values:

Trust

•   Honest, transparent, forthcoming

•   Reliable, dependable: we do what we say we’ll do

•   Treating others as you would like to be treated

Open Communication

•   Encouraging healthy debate to bring our best thinking forward

•   Challenging underlying assumptions

•   Ensuring clear understanding

•   Resolving conflict productively

•   Appreciating the professional knowledge, skills, and contributions of others

Service

•   Anticipating the needs of others

•   Being responsive

•   Offering strategic counsel

Results

•   Goal-oriented

•   Delivering results that are valued and recognized by others

•   Ensuring excellence, quality

•   Being dedicated, demonstrating drive and a strong work ethic

•   Recognizing contribution

Commitment

•   To integrity

•   To our clients

•   To our profession

•   To each other

To clarify, our values are aspirational, as all values should be. I’m the first to admit we’re not perfect. But we get up every day trying to live up to them, and I think knowing what’s expected of everyone means a lot to our team members.

They are a powerful reminder of how we want to live and work every day. They guide the decisions we make and the actions we take. They allow us to hold each other accountable for how we behave. They give us a foundation for dealing with organizational change, like mergers and acquisitions or opening new offices in different cities. They guide our hiring. And they shape how we deal with what I call “cultural scoundrels”: people who can be high performers but who don’t live up to our values and cultural norms, and end up creating more havoc than they’re worth. We work with these people to help them improve their behaviors, but sometimes it’s best for us—and them—for them to leave.

In short, we’ve learned the powerful combination of weaving our business goals and company values together to make sure we’re focused on not only what’s being accomplished, but also how it’s being accomplished. Values should enable employees to make decisions that not only propel the company forward but also ensure the company is a place where people want to work.

More Than Words

Once we had our values in place, coming up with ways to bring them to life became nearly second nature to us and something I thought about frequently. I wanted them to be more than words on paper, so we needed tangible initiatives to show how Mitchell was different.

One of the ways we did this was by taking a more dedicated approach to human resources. In the early days of Mitchell, Marla and I had handled this pretty well. But in the fall of 2011, we were growing so dramatically that I walked into Michael’s office one day and announced, “I quit.”

As the blood drained from his face, I realized I hadn’t made myself very clear, so I added, “. . . as HR director. I don’t think I can do it anymore.” There were just too many things I didn’t know, and I was afraid I’d make a mistake out of ignorance that could become a legal issue for us.

We were fortunate to recruit a top-notch human resources professional who brought tremendous knowledge and capability to the agency. I’ve found that a strong human resources department helped us create the structures and implement programs that bring our values to life and ensure we maintain the culture we’ve worked so hard to build.

There are many ways you can bring your values to life, but I want to share six that have worked well over time for Mitchell. The first is about pay and benefits, but I also believe your culture should shine in unique ways that reflect your values and underscore your organization’s business strategy. So the rest revolve around the five signature programs that give us greater opportunities to demonstrate our commitment to our employees, our industry, and our community.

1. Share the Wealth

One of the most important parts of an employee-employer relationship is compensation. As our full-time ranks began to swell, I recognized the need to be competitive, not just in pay but with an entire compensation package.

As hard as it was to find qualified talent to hire in Northwest Arkansas, I didn’t want to lose employees over a small increase in base salary they might find somewhere else. We already offered professional development dollars, companywide outings, and other nice perks, but we began adding new benefits that I thought would make a difference.

First, we decided to offer 100 percent employer-paid health care benefits to all full-time employees. This was pretty unheard of, but we found a way to make it work, and it made us extremely competitive—in many cases, a far more attractive employer.

We also wanted to share wealth with our team. So we established an informal practice of giving a year-end bonus to every employee no matter what they did or how long they had been employed. In fact, one year a graphic designer lucked out on his timing; his first day was the day we were distributing bonuses, so we included him in the process and gave him one, too.

We used this time to reinforce our company’s culture and illustrate how important every member of the team was to our success. We brought small groups to my office, and Michael and I spent about 30 minutes sharing stories about the company’s year and highlighting ways in which they had contributed to our growth and progress. Then I would hand each person an envelope with a bonus check.

This was always one of my favorite days of the year, and I think it was pretty popular with our employees, too. It got me thinking about how I could do even more for our key leaders. So we worked with our legal advisors to devise more formal ways of wealth-sharing. Among other things, we created a bonus initiative called KEEP—Key Employee Excellence Program—that rewarded directors and above with an annual bonus based on the company’s performance. It included a vesting period to encourage retention.

While people care about money, of course, and the benefits they receive, sharing wealth isn’t just about giving people more compensation. It’s also about showing your people that you care for them and appreciate what they do. I always knew we would never have been as successful as we were without a highly accomplished and productive team. I wanted them to see we believed in their ability to deliver for clients and their do-whatever-it-takes attitude, and that when we achieved success as a team, their individual efforts would be rewarded, too. In this way, we demonstrated our values of trust, results, and commitment.

2. Promote Diversity: Big Break

Fostering diversity and inclusion is a core competency at Mitchell. We believe a more diverse and inclusive workplace makes us stronger as a company and helps us serve our clients’ needs to reach increasingly diverse audiences. Diverse thinking and incorporating broad points of view in ideation and decision making almost always yields a better result.

Living this out isn’t always easy when you’re based in Northwest Arkansas. In 2000, the metro area had about 350,000 people and only 14 percent were from ethnically diverse backgrounds. By 2012, the population had grown to nearly half a million. The Caucasian population had grown by 18.5 percent. Other groups had grown much faster: Hispanic Americans by 139.3 percent, African Americans by 113.8 percent, Asian Americans (or Pacific Islanders) by 207.1 percent. These groups still represented less than 25 percent of the population.¹ So it is now, and historically has been, a challenge for companies in the region to find and hire top talent from minority backgrounds. As a small company, we definitely faced this issue, and it’s also a challenge throughout the public relations industry, particularly in agencies.

To help us attract more diverse talent, we developed “Big Break,” an all-expenses-paid, weeklong internship during spring break for high-performing graduating college seniors. Big Break gives students real-world experience while working with talented peers from across the country. It’s also an opportunity for Mitchell to introduce potential job candidates from diverse backgrounds to our agency, while showcasing a community and region they may not have previously considered.

Each year we accept nominations from students at top-notch communications programs, including several minority-serving institutions. The 6 to 10 students we select are immersed in the world of agency life. They have one-on-one visits with our leaders and receive customized trainings to provide insight about working in the industry. In some years they have worked in teams with selected nonprofit organizations on specific communications challenges. During the first year alone, we offered jobs to five participants, with four accepting.

Big Break became well-known among our clients, but it is just one way we are proactive and creative in tackling our diversity challenges. For instance, we’ve also formed task forces and brought together representatives from clients for discussions and to look for ways to promote regional diversity and inclusion.

As a result, we’ve made several key hires and continue to broaden our multicultural capabilities to help clients build relationships with diverse stakeholder groups. We’ve also reinforced our values of trust and open communication.

3. Celebrate Accomplishments: Bright Spots

In our early days, we often used the excuse that we were just “too busy” to mark our milestones. But research shows that celebrating small wins can be critical to long-term success and employee happiness.² In the life of an entrepreneur, risks and setbacks are so common that celebrating small markers of success can boost morale and refuel you for the fight ahead. Having a journey mindset means you can take some time to stop, look around, and appreciate the beauty of where you are, no matter what might happen tomorrow.

To help us do this, we established Bright Spots meetings to shine the light on our employees and their performance on behalf of clients. Teams present a project they’ve been working on, any learnings they discovered, and opportunities they found for cross-team collaboration. We also use these times to highlight company values, employee promotions, and client relationships. In addition to Bright Spots, we hold cookouts, tailgates, and ice-cream parties; bring food trucks on-site; and hold other informal celebrations to honor team accomplishments.

We’ve found it’s important to be mindful and intentional in how we praise our team. Recognition is a powerful motivator, and what leaders praise is noticed by everyone. We try to spotlight the behaviors we want to encourage. Performance is at the top of the list, of course. But if praise is solely performance-based, you’ll breed a performance culture. It will no longer matter how employees achieve results as long as they’re achieving them. This kind of focus can diminish the meaning and impact of your values, which will hurt your company’s ability to succeed long-term.

We often recognize team members who exhibit one or more of our values in their actions, and we have in recent years implemented an online recognition program. This allows all team members to post thanks or recognition on a fellow employee’s page and the agency’s wall. Team members can also give a badge to someone for a value that the person has demonstrated in his or her work.

Celebrating small wins and publicly appreciating hard work helps us live out our values of open communication and results. It yields better morale, a greater sense of meaning, and subsequently, a higher level of employee retention. Year after year, our employee survey reflects how much our team appreciates these things. Our annual turn-over rate at the agency is often in the low teens, half of the industry average.

4. Develop Your Leaders: Accelerate

We all recognize the importance of a talented team, but we should not fool ourselves into believing we will always keep our best employees. Competitors will attempt to woo them away as we become more successful. One way to combat this is to invest in your people with a variety of benefits—not all related to money.

We help our employees grow through professional development trainings offered through the Center (our training division). One of my favorite trainings is Accelerate, an emerging leaders program designed to give high-potential employees a chance to flex their leadership muscle and develop new skills as they grow their responsibilities in the firm.

Accelerate helped us tackle a potential problem. We had a number of talented young professionals who were eager to rise in the ranks but lacked the knowledge and experience to jump head-first into significant leadership roles. These young guns are the ones you’re most in danger of losing. Accelerate became a way to give them training and hands-on opportunities to grow as new leaders, setting them up for success when an opening came up.

Throughout the six-month course, which is designed and taught by the Center, they are given the opportunity for deep-dive learning, teamwork, stretch assignments, creativity, and innovation. They’re also given an opportunity to present their recommendations on a business challenge. Graduation is a special occasion, taking place at a Bright Spots meeting with all employees present. Each graduate is recognized for their accomplishments in the program and given an original piece of art created by a local sculpture that bears the Accelerate logo and the agency’s values.

Since it kicked off in 2012, Accelerate has allowed us to equip more than 25 rising leaders at the agency, and more than 90 percent received promotions during or after graduating from the program. It’s also been a key way we’ve lived out the values of service, results, and commitment.

5. Encourage Giving: Ignite

One of the most powerful ways to motivate a workforce is by enabling them to help others. Our Ignite program gives money and time off to teams of employees to do random acts of kindness in our community.³ It was inspired by a giving experience that changed my life and allowed me to expand upon my wealth-sharing philosophy. (I’ll share this story in more detail in Chapter 13.)

Ignite kicks off each January with a day of giving and lives throughout the year as employees receive time off to volunteer in the communities where we have offices. Since it began in 2010, we’ve made cash and in-kind donations to help dozens of local nonprofits and individuals in need, ranging from homeless shelters, veterans service programs, elementary schools, organizations working with abused and neglected children, and victims of domestic violence. In 2016, the entire agency focused on supporting organizations that champion women and serve women’s needs as a way to underscore our heritage as a women-owned and led company.

It has been a powerful program for us and given us a far greater return than we could have imagined: employees develop deeper relationships by sharing the giving experience with each other; they see a greater connection between company values and their own; and they grow as individuals through understanding challenges that are facing their community in a real and immediate way.

Ignite represents our values of trust, service, and commitment. It provides a priceless experience for our employees, and most important, an invaluable opportunity to see how blessed we have been and how important it is that we continue to bless those around us.

6. Create Ambassadors: Keepers of the Seal

Inviting our employees to become brand ambassadors is another way we bring our values to life. For instance, we regularly gather new employees for a breakfast. More than muffins and chitchat, it gives me the chance to tell our brand’s story. I take them through a brief presentation, narrating each era of the company’s history: significant turning points, how we reacted, what we learned, and how our decisions propelled us forward. Then I invite each of them to become a Keeper of the Seal.

The Keeper of the Seal is a tradition that began in the time of Edward the Confessor, who ruled England from 1042 to 1066. The seal symbolized the integrity of the country, and its keeper was a figure of great esteem, designated the most trustworthy and honorable of all the king’s subjects.

The seal represents trust in our company, too. When we invite employees to become Keepers of the Seal, we’re asking them to become guardians of the Mitchell brand—to feel a sense of ownership and pride in the company. This time together also allows me to be a storyteller, recounting our vibrant history and bringing our compelling culture to life in our employees’ minds.

Creating this sense of ownership is a way to live out our values of trust, open communication, and commitment. It’s one of the key ways we create cultural champions, team members who live the culture.

Top Down

Culture starts at the top. No matter the size of your team or the stage of growth you’re in, you, as a leader, set the tone for how business gets done and what it’s like to work in your organization. You define the destiny: the where and the how. You are the CCO—the chief culture officer. But it can’t begin and end with you.

Especially as your team grows, it becomes harder to find time for those meaningful lunches and small group conversations. So while you never give up the CCO title, your role changes. You need more cultural champions because a great culture doesn’t hinge on a single leader, or even a leadership team. It must live throughout the entire organization, happening organically between people and in the regular interactions they have with each other. When this happens, your culture can actually drive your organization’s success.

For Mitchell, we have long described ourselves as a “high performance, high values” company, meaning that both are necessary for our success. If we live up to both, we attract the right kind of people who want to work with us. Talented people want to work with other talented people and great customers, and “excellence attracts excellence” is a self-perpetuating philosophy that yields powerful overall results.

Over time, I have realized the power of a compelling culture, one built on values and brought to life through unique and engaging initiatives like Ignite and Big Break. I often hear our employees refer to their “Mitchell family” and how much their teammates mean to them. I am well aware that many receive job offers from other employers, yet our turn-over rate is half the industry average, which is a good indicator of the cultural health of the company.

Employees who, through countless emails and conversations, want to tell me what they appreciate about the agency is another indicator of the cultural health of the company. For example, last Thanksgiving, one of our content strategists, who has had at least two other offers, wrote me to say: “Thank you for giving me the opportunity to make Mitchell a part of my life every day. I’ll forever be thankful for that.” Another rising star on our client service team wrote to say: “I wanted to reach out with a huge thank you for allowing me to be a part of the Mitchell family for the last few years. There are so many things I’ve always loved about Mitchell—too many to mention. I’m truly appreciative of all the knowledge, opportunities, and friendships that simply wouldn’t be mine if I hadn’t come to Mitchell.” Another on our new business team shared with me recently: “It has been an amazing experience to work with you and this wonderful team. Not only do we care about the work we do, the company and clients we do it for but it is the great people we work with that makes the task that much more rewarding. . . . There are many companies that talk about nurturing an environment for development and progression but Mitchell encourages and motivates the staff to be the best they can be.”

Clearly our culture is powerful, and the signature programs only help make our culture tangible and an obvious difference-maker in the war for talent. The culture they help create underscores the importance of thinking not just about the destination, or how we grow in terms of size and profits, but also about the journey and that how we go about getting there matters just as much.