CHAPTER 11

Making Choices: Culture and Leadership

One of the biggest challenges any business owner has is taking valuable written information and implementing a plan of action. As David Sadler, the creator of the Sandler Sales System, once said: “You can’t teach someone how to ride a bike in a seminar.” The first step in taking action starts by making some important conscious decisions. The choices you make will then determine each next step to be accomplished. Those decisions will require you to forsake other choices; in this case not all roads lead to Rome.

Culture

Creating a culture of trust in your business has to lead somewhere. First, that means making a choice on the type of culture you want. There is already extensive research available on the positive impact a healthy aligned culture has on employee morale and overall profitability (Grodnitzky 2014). I mentioned in the introduction, the shift away from corporate capitalism toward social capitalism. The traditional corporate culture does not fit well with the social capitalistic model. The end goals for corporate and socialistic companies are different and the alignment of people and process has to be different. I am a baby-boomer and grew up with a very clear sense of corporate capitalism when I started working in my family’s business. I come from a long line of men and women who worked diligently in that type of corporate structure and there was not much thought of doing business any other way. I never understood I had a choice, and a culture like Clif Bar would have never entered my mind.

Current and future generations of workers want a choice, they do not want to be as compliant, and their work life balance alignment is different than prior generations. They want more social engagement. Look at the growth of use of LinkedIn, Facebook, and YouTube for business. The social proof is there; everyone wants to be connected but it has to be on their terms. There is a real downside I believe to all this connectedness. Without a sense of trust and respect, I see so many connections devolving into distrust, unfriending, social tirades, online bullying, trolls, and other toxic forms of social behavior. Here is where you can build and leverage a culture of trust to make the most positive use of social connections. Social platforms now allow you to connect with all your stakeholders in ways that were impossible to imagine before.

I believed that the culture of my business was predetermined; now I know there is a choice and you will have to decide the type of culture you want to cultivate. What type of culture do you believe will attract the best and the brightest from each new generation entering the workforce and specifically for your industry? I believe the financial numbers bear out that social capitalistic companies will outperform the older traditional corporate model. The balance of this book will be using a social capital culture as the baseline for instilling trust as the main underlying theme for everything you do.

Leadership

There are thousands of books written on leadership and leadership styles. I have already referenced a few of the ones I’ve researched for my book. Most of us are very familiar with the heroic model, the CEO or president leading the company. He or she is the visionary, setting the course, giving commands, and navigating the company to its goals (Goleman, Boyatzis, and McKee 2002). Some heroic leaders are charismatic like former President Bill Clinton, others tough and brooding like Apple CEO Steve Jobs, visionaries like Martin Luther King, or commanding like Jack Welch. The heroic style is more “I” centric, focusing on the individual rather than the collective group. History is full of heroic business leaders, but that style is becoming more old school; it’s changing and focusing on how decisions can be made differently.

Enter in the concept of shared leadership, a more dynamic group process driven to empower all rather than just a few in the C-Suite. The concept has been around since the 1920s and a few companies like Gore have embraced this style of leadership from the start. Others are starting to see the real benefit as the pace and complexity of business speeds up. This style fits well with the social capitalistic culture which is designed to be more inclusive of all stakeholders. We all win or lose together rather than the C-Suite getting compensation regardless of performance. There are countless examples of that scenario.

I’ve experienced both styles as a worker and I have been both types of leaders. In many ways the heroic model is easier because most of us are quite familiar with it. As a Fire Chief the heroic commanding style of leadership works very well in a time of emergency. It centralizes command and final decision making. But before and after a 911 call, the shared leadership style in today’s world is much more effective and far less exhausting. Being at the top is heavy burden to carry, why do it alone? While building a culture of trust is not exclusive to either style of leadership, it is easier to build and sustain when everyone feels responsible and empowered to hold that standard. To be effective as a leader you have to choose the type of leader you want to be. That style of leadership must be in alignment with your corporate core values and the type of capitalism you use to set goals and conduct your business transactions.

These are no small choices; these choices will shape you, your ability to lead and the fundamental nature of your company. Whether you build it to last (Collins 2001) or build it to sell it to someone else, it is part of your legacy and you can never get that time back. Think carefully; create a vision for yourself of the type of leader you want to be. Who are your heroes and why do you admire them? What type of companies inspires you—Clif Bar, Starbucks, WL Gore, Whole Foods, and Costco or more formal ones like IBM, Walgreens, Merck, and General Motors?

I want to go back to my example of Clif Bar for just one moment. Clif Bar has shared leadership with several outside CEOs and then back to that of owners Gary Erickson and his wife Kit Crawford as co-CEOs. The company itself is privately held with 80 percent owned by Gary and Kit and 20 percent by the employees in an ESOP. They are open and vulnerable to each other internally but not nearly as much with the outside business world. They do not share gross sales, net profits, or other financial details. Their culture or leadership thinking does not require them to do so. They make all the things (culture, leadership, and profitability) that would not seem possible using the old corporate capitalism work under social capitalism.

There are two important pieces to tie culture and leadership together and that’s ownership and passion. In Extreme Ownership (Willink and Babin 2015), the authors put forth the premise that you are 100 percent responsible for your life and how you live it. Blaming others or circumstances for what happens to you only weakens you as a person and creates a victim mindset. My initial response when I read this was “sure, easy for Navy Seals to say,” but on further reflection I decided this was one of those moments of surrender. I could take 100 percent ownership of my life or believe that others could dictate how my life should be. It’s a choice and very empowering to take ownership. I’ve made the mistake of blaming others and didn’t realize the impact it was having on me. I am unwilling to do that anymore, how about you?

Without passion for what you do, none of this work will amount to anything. People will see through you instead of wanting to follow you. Your passion for your business will connect you to all the other topics I have discussed so far, vulnerability, the head and heart connection, trust builders and trust killers, core values, the vulnerability scale, and the trust matrix. You will use all of these things in the step-by-step process to build trust between all your stakeholders.

Thoughts for Reflection