Podcast Ep 116 | Is Your Corporate Culture Really Aligned with Your Core Values?

Is your com­pa­ny cul­ture real­ly aligned with your core val­ues? Some­times there can be a dif­fer­ence between what your core val­ues state, and what is real­ly occur­ring. Lead­ers of a busi­ness can appear like they don’t under­stand what’s hap­pen­ing if the core val­ues don’t rep­re­sent the cor­po­rate cul­ture accurately.

In this week’s episode of the Growth Whis­per­ers pod­cast, Brad Giles and Kevin Lawrence dis­cuss why the core val­ues of a busi­ness must align with the cul­ture that peo­ple observe and live every day, and sev­en things you can do to ensure that your cul­ture is aligned with your core values.

EPISODE TRAN­SCRIPT

Please note that this episode was tran­scribed using an AI appli­ca­tion and may not be 100% gram­mat­i­cal­ly cor­rect – but it will still allow you to scan the episode for key content.

Brad Giles 00:13

Hi there, wel­come to the Growth Whis­per­ers where every­thing we talk about is build­ing endear­ing great com­pa­nies. My name is Brad Giles. And today as always, I’m joined by my co host, Kevin Lawrence. How are you doing today?

Kevin Lawrence 00:26

Good, Brad. Oh, this is episode 116. And I think prob­a­bly 112 times I’ve said I’m doing great. And today, I am doing real­ly well. I’m excit­ed to talk about this episode, some­thing we’re both very pas­sion­ate about and excit­ed to dig in.

Brad Giles 00:44

And so we always like to start with a word or phrase of the day what might be on your mind.

Kevin Lawrence 00:51

Now mine is cel­e­brate, just com­ing off a bunch of birth­days recent­ly, my daugh­ter’s birth­day and oth­ers and just the pow­er of cel­e­bra­tion and real­ly what there is to cel­e­brate up here in the Okana­gan region of Cana­da. I also have a gen­tle­man got to know fair­ly well his name’s Fitz and he’s build­ing a cham­pagne style sparkling wine, can’t call it you know, cham­pagne here in Cana­da because it’s not grow­ing in the Cham­pagne region of France. But I just every time I think about fitz and their sparkling wine, I’d also think well just it’s about cel­e­brat­ing Cham­pagne is for sure tastes good. But more than that, it’s the pop­ping of that cork and that moment to cel­e­brate all the good things that are hap­pen­ing. That’s makes you feel good makes you feel makes peo­ple around you feel good.

Brad Giles 01:43

Awe­some. Mine would be for­ward. Unusu­al. But yeah, I had COVID last week. So I was in iso­la­tion. And there’s just a lot of chal­lenges in the world with, I don’t know, sup­ply chain inter­est rates, a whole range of things. We spoke about that last week. But yeah, just for­ward, it’s just keep on march­ing forward.

Kevin Lawrence 02:10

Got it. So I would say cel­e­brate. And then look for­ward. You know, there’s a lot of research, a lot of research, some that I have seen around the ben­e­fits of hav­ing some­thing to look for­ward to and what that does for your psy­che. And I know that works for me, look­ing for­ward to things gives you a lit­tle bit of lift, because you take you look for­ward and you look up, and which is very dif­fer­ent than dread­ing so great. Let’s dig into the show today. Brad, what what are we talk­ing about that we’re both quite keen and pas­sion­ate about? And what are we look­ing for­ward to today?

Brad Giles 02:44

Well, how authen­tic are your core val­ues? It’s is your cul­ture real­ly aligned with your core val­ues, because we see it enough talk­ing with lead­ers and lead­er­ship teams where we find that, I don’t know, they have got some core val­ues, and they’re good. They liked them. But they’re not real­ly nec­es­sar­i­ly com­plete­ly true. And it’s not that they’re not alive, but there might not actu­al­ly be what is real­ly real.

Kevin Lawrence 03:16

Yeah, and there’s two dif­fer­ent sce­nar­ios that we see. They have them and they’re fluff, their busi­ness prin­ci­ples or busi­ness strate­gies under the guise of core val­ues. So they’re actu­al­ly not tech­ni­cal­ly core val­ues. And we’re both hard­core stu­dents of the research that Jim Collins has done about real­ly core val­ues and what they’re intend­ed to be. And pret­ty fanat­i­cal about or might say, and, and the oth­er is that got them this wall­pa­per, like their words on the wall, but they’re not actu­al­ly alive in the com­pa­ny. And even some­times, they intend for them to be in live. And we want to dig into those, those com­pa­nies who intend for them to be alive and tru­ly live by them. But over time, they fade and degrade. And they need a lit­tle help. But you know, we’re going to, we’re real­ly going to dig into upfront, mak­ing sure you got them right. And the way metaphor I like to use for this is it’s like a gar­den. Let’s just say you plant a per­fect crop. And the crop is like your core val­ues. Well, crops need help. They need water and fer­til­iz­er, you got­ta prune some types of plants. And you also have to pull the weeds and clean things out pulling the weeds is like a metaphor for remov­ing the wrong peo­ple, but you got to keep active­ly tend­ing that gar­den oth­er­wise it starts pro­duc­ing the wrong kinds of things. So I would imag­ine and I know noth­ing about prun­ing flow­ers or you know, or I’m not a, you know, per­son who grows prized ros­es or any­thing but I can appre­ci­ate peo­ple to do but it’s you know, if you’re going to have pride iced ros­es, and these amaz­ing beau­ti­ful rose gar­dens, you’re going to put in a lot of ener­gy into the fer­til­iz­ers and the water­ing and the weeds and the prun­ing. And a cul­ture based on core val­ues is the same. And it often gets neglect­ed into kind of ends up a big, weedy over­grown gar­den. And that’s not what we aspire to.

Brad Giles 05:21

No, no. So the first step is that we’ve got to actu­al­ly con­firm that they are core val­ues. And they’re not just a list of state­ments. You know, there’s a slide that I use when I’m talk­ing about this with lead­er­ship teams. And it’s, it’s, I think, its integri­ty, doing the right thing. There’s three or four there, and it was actu­al­ly the Enron core val­ues, you know, Enron, the finan­cial com­pa­ny that obvi­ous­ly, yours. Yeah, yeah. And so they weren’t real­ly what was val­ued at Enron. And so you can do it the easy way, which is just pick some words that sound cool. Or you can do it the real and gen­uine way.

Kevin Lawrence 06:09

Yeah, and some peo­ple will do a poll, what­ev­er all the val­ues we aspire to have in the com­pa­ny. And, like it’s a, it’s a real strate­gic deci­sion that that should be man­aged. Well, we talked about it in Episode 26, one of our, you know, for ear­li­er episodes, you know, how to have, you know, your core val­ues are right. But Brad, you know, you and I both go through very rig­or­ous posts, because in my mind, I’m iden­ti­fy­ing the cul­ture of the com­pa­ny, and who gets fired, and pro­mot­ed, who does­n’t get pro­mot­ed and gets writ­ten up or gets a per­for­mance improve­ment plan. And then who gets fired? This list, if done right, guides us on our peo­ple deci­sions and guides us on our accept­able behav­iors, like it’s a, it’s a seri­ous deal. And we want to make one, we want to make sure it’s right. So the sim­ple thing Jim Collins calls about some­thing called Mis­sion to Mars, and if you’re gonna send a bunch of peo­ple to Mars to repli­cate, which is a great exer­cise, we’ve evolved into some­thing we call top and tox­ic, tak­ing the mis­sion to Mars con­cept to help you get your top peo­ple that you would want to repli­cate on Mars. But then tak­ing your top five tox­ic peo­ple, peo­ple who may have been very good at their job, but were tox­ic as heck in your com­pa­ny. And there was almost like applause and cel­e­bra­tion when they left or a relief when they left. The idea is that if your core val­ues are right, your high­est per­form­ers who you believe fit the cul­ture will match. And high per­form­ers who dri­ve you insane. And you’re thrilled to lose these prized per­form­ers. Don’t they vio­late at least two of those core val­ues? Some­times three, but at least two? So the bal­ance of those two helps you to cal­i­brate to make sure you got them?

Brad Giles 08:04

Yeah, it’s a, it’s a real­ly effec­tive way to under­stand the intan­gi­ble you can, you can start off with a blank sheet of paper. Oh, and by the way, this is the way to not build the core val­ues. Num­ber one is doing poll with the whole com­pa­ny. And that to know is to engage your mar­ket­ing com­pa­ny and say we know, values.

Kevin Lawrence 08:26

No, well, tell me, why not tell me that? Why not the mar­ket­ing com­pa­ny, mar­ket­ing com­pa­nies are great. They’ll make your beau­ti­ful posters, whiz bang phras­es and all kinds of cool stuff wide. And by the way, I love mar­ket­ing com­pa­nies. Not for this.

Brad Giles 08:44

Because mar­ket­ing com­pa­nies pre­dom­i­nant­ly come at it through the eyes of the cus­tomer. And I love them, too. Okay. But mar­ket­ing com­pa­nies are very, very good when it comes to get­ting things in the eyes of the cus­tomer. Now they can very eas­i­ly say, but the cus­tomer is the employ­ee he here. But it’s not nec­es­sar­i­ly much bet­ter is this tool that you’ve just men­tioned? That were the things that are real­ly who are the peo­ple, part of me who’ve real­ly ground your gears? And who are the ones that if you had a cloning machine you would love to clone? Yeah. And then think­ing about what are the words that you use to describe those peo­ple. That’s who we can. That’s how we can find out what our real val­ues are.

Kevin Lawrence 09:30

Now, and, and that’s why I often say with core val­ues and pur­pose, like I come from Mar­ket­ing, and I respect it great­ly, but I say don’t let the mar­keters touch it until it’s carved in stone. And then they can help us to pret­ty it up and make it a bit more engag­ing, but not chang­ing any of the con­tent or con­text. And again, their intent is good, but you’re either the voice of the cus­tomer and when we devel­op the stuff we actu­al­ly don’t even want to con­sid­er the cus­tomer. That’s the key. You This is not cus­tomer strat­e­gy. It’s the WHO that we want on our team. And we don’t need the cus­tomer’s not even on the table. That’s why we see like, one of my team has been work­ing with a client where we’re help­ing them to reset their strat­e­gy and exe­cu­tion dis­ci­plines. But I look at their core val­ues. And it’s, I don’t have a respect­ful word. But it’s like, it’s about cus­tomer. And it’s about the com­mu­ni­ty and stuff like that. They did­n’t know what they were doing. They’re actu­al­ly not core val­ues. core val­ue, what are they gen­er­al­ly a list of three to five things that are attrib­ut­es of the humans who nat­u­ral­ly fit in your oper­at­ing sys­tem. That’s it. I call it peo­ple that a lit­tle bit weird, like you. So like, our com­pa­ny is almost in many ways, like its own lan­guage, or its own reli­gion, what­ev­er it hap­pens to be. So we’re look­ing for peo­ple that are in sync with that, that’s it, it’s not good or bad. It’s just, they oper­ate in a sim­i­lar way in fash­ion that you say, think and oper­ate or behave in a sim­i­lar way based on their upbring­ings and their expe­ri­ences in their life. So three to five things, you hire a fire based on it, you pro­mote or don’t pro­mote based on it. You take a finan­cial hit to pro­tect them, and they’re already true for your best peo­ple. It is not aspi­ra­tional, it is not where you want to be when you grow up. I remem­ber one com­pa­ny I worked with real­ly nice peo­ple, one of the core val­ues was account­abil­i­ty. Well, I showed up. And after three quar­ters of doing strat plan­ning and you know, an exe­cu­tion with them. They were trend­ing to 50%. And I look at them, and I said in my nicest way I could, if account­abil­i­ty was a core val­ue of yours, none of you would be here, includ­ing you, the man­ag­ing part­ner of this firm. It’s like it’s not a core val­ue, it’s an aspi­ra­tion. So this is not a high per­for­mance or high­ly account­able cul­ture. It’s a very sweet place. Let’s not pre­tend to be some­thing that you’re not because you bring in a high account­able type per­son, they’re not going to like it here.

Brad Giles 12:17

And that’s what we’re real­ly talk­ing about in this episode, isn’t it? It’s is the things that you’re actu­al­ly doing? Real­ly what it says in your core val­ues, right? So the next point is, per­haps your val­ues could be clear­er. Per­haps your val­ues are right, but they’re just not clear enough. And peo­ple are mis­in­ter­pret­ing your val­ues, or not under­stand­ing them and doing things at a kind of grind­ing your gears, but that’s because they don’t com­plete­ly under­stand those values.

Kevin Lawrence 12:55

By the way Brad can you trans­late what you mean by grind­ing your gears? That’s Aus­tralian for some­thing? I don’t know what that means.

Brad Giles 13:03

So grind­ing your gears. It’s when some­body does some­thing that annoys or upsets you.

Kevin Lawrence 13:17

It’d be like trans­mis­sions and old vehi­cles where you don’t shift prop­er­ly in a grinds.

Brad Giles 13:35

And how does that make you feel?

Kevin Lawrence 13:38

Yeah, hor­ri­ble.

Brad Giles 13:39

Yeah, that’s grind­ing your gears? Yeah, got it. Yeah, so let’s move on. Some­times we could make them clear­er. Per­fect. So that means if you’ve got a word such as I don’t know, be mem­o­rable. Let’s imag­ine that. Your val­ue is being mem­o­rable. I could have a dif­fer­ent inter­pre­ta­tion of the mem­o­rable to you. And to the mid man­age­ment team, and to any­body else. We could have 10 dif­fer­ent inter­pre­ta­tions. Some, some peo­ple might say, be mem­o­rable, means be mem­o­rable at any cost, or at any speed, or be as loud as we can, no mat­ter the dam­age. So every­one can inter­pret things dif­fer­ent. And that’s why we need to explain the core values.

Kevin Lawrence 14:37

It’s not right. And some­times they can, lots of the firms that we work with, we have the val­ue like that’s the term remem­ber. And we have a sen­tence or two to describe it. Yeah, some orga­ni­za­tions that seems to work some­times and we’ll get to in a sec­ond to what you’ve done in your new book that’s com­ing out if you want to share that but yeah, we’ve done com­pa­nies of what it is and what When it isn’t ear­ly, prob­a­bly more than a decade ago, I did some work with a com­pa­ny called Hero Hon­da in India. And they were a joint ven­ture between hero motor­cy­cles and Hon­da motor­cy­cles. And they obvi­ous­ly did very well, I worked with some of the exec­u­tives and they had a great list of their core val­ues they just had is and is not. Yeah. So it gave that fur­ther clar­i­ty and def­i­n­i­tion of know­ing what it is. You know, we’ve also got some peo­ple that have used that some peo­ple have a quote to fur­ther kind of help it. But that’s, that’s help­ful. But you’ve got it, you help to take it to anoth­er lev­el as well Brad.

Brad Giles 15:37

Yeah, so my new book’s com­ing out in the next cou­ple of months, it’s called Onboard­ed. And it’s about onboard­ing and the impor­tance of onboard­ing and how to build a great onboard­ing process that’s sim­ple and high­ly effec­tive. To this point, what I said is that you need to have core val­ues, and you need to have behav­iors. And you need to have onboard­ing in order to build a great cul­ture. The part that we’re talk­ing about here is the behav­iors. So behav­iours are the, we always, and we nev­er, so we always do this, and we nev­er do that, which is a set of, let’s say, three to five sub points under­neath each val­ue. So I use an exam­ple in the book one of my cus­tomers is the physio co aged care phys­io­ther­a­py in Mel­bourne, right? Yeah. Yeah. And you know, Tris­tan, you’ve met, I met him, yeah, yeah, he’s a good guy. And so one of the val­ues is be mem­o­rable. So this is the way that they do that. We are friend­ly and make pos­i­tive first impres­sions. We make peo­ple smile with our per­son­al and under­stand­ing approach, we take the time to cel­e­brate mile­stones and suc­cess­es. And we were peo­ple when­ev­er pos­si­ble. So that does­n’t say the word always and nev­er, but as much as pos­si­ble, I try to get them because these are bina­ry. And it gives us great clar­i­ty into are we or are we not liv­ing that value?

Kevin Lawrence 17:04

Yeah, it’s not rock­et sci­ence. It just makes it crys­tal clear to help peo­ple in case there’s any doubt want to move the shad­ows of adults? So let’s make sure you got it. You got that? Right. You got your three to five, there are real val­ues of humans that fit on your team, or don’t. You made them crys­tal clear? Excel­lent. Now, when we want to talk about as well, how do you make sure the cul­ture that you’re expe­ri­enc­ing is con­sis­tent with it, you know, some indi­ca­tors that we see in com­pa­nies is where there’s fric­tion around peo­ple on the team or behav­iors on the team. We do a test some­times to test the core val­ues, and assess the orga­ni­za­tion on it. Some­times we assess key lead­ers on it and 360s. But some oth­er big con­ver­sa­tions com­ing up where there’s dis­sat­is­fac­tion about liv­ing those val­ues, or you hear about behav­iors that are not con­sis­tent with the core val­ues. And there’s two roads that we’re gonna go down on this today. And one we’ll talk about is the tal­ent review. That’s Brad added in point num­ber six, as we’re going here that is popped to me, for­got did­n’t even cov­er it. But we’ll cov­er that we’re talk­ing about for a minute. Now. There’s anoth­er pod­cast that relates to it. But the main thing is as a team, and there’s a great lit­tle arti­cle, Collins wrote on this fur­ther to the stuff­ing Great by Choice where core val­ues first came out, was around align­ments and Miss align­ments. Just note, where are things con­nect­ed and in sync with the core val­ues and where it’s not just humans, like humans have behav­iors of how they con­duct them­selves in meet­ings or dis­cus­sions. But there’s also poli­cies or deci­sions that we’ve made it a mem­ber and in a ses­sion with Jim, he said, you know, you got to be care­ful. Your cul­ture isn’t what you say it is. It’s the behav­iors and deci­sions of your lead­ers, most­ly the deci­sions, because you can fake behav­iors. But at the end of the day, if you pro­mote a tox­ic jerk, right, we anoth­er episode on that. If you pro­mote some­one who’s you know, a tox­ic off cul­ture, high per­former, well, maybe your core val­ues don’t mean any­thing, right. And you got­ta be real­ly care­ful so mis­align­ments and tak­ing a look at it’s a great exer­cise as a team list. The mis­align­ments and things the for each of those val­ues. Actu­al­ly, I’ll come back to that I skipped that’s the sec­ond step. The first step is just to have the con­ver­sa­tion about where are how are we doing on these val­ues and rate zero to 10? Yeah, you know, where and zero was always bad that we use the zero scale because, you know, in hos­pi­tals when they’re not­ing the health of a baby, they use noth­ing as a 03 scale. But zero is gen­er­al­ly nev­er con­fus­ing. Zero is always bad. So that’s why like zero to 10, what­ev­er you scale, you want to use use but, but real­ly, zero to 10 How well we live in those par­tic­u­lar val­ues and get a ground­ing on where you’re at. It’s almost like a health check. That’s num­ber one.

Brad Giles 19:54

You know, jump­ing in the research for the book, I I’ve inter­viewed quite a few exec­u­tives. And one of them came up with a great tool for this. And he said, if if you’re part­way through your onboard­ing, and you’re not too sure about the per­son, which is what you’re about to say, then con­sid­er the per­son through each of the val­ues and write them one to 10. He said, if you’ve got five val­ues, think about this per­son, why am I feel­ing uncom­fort­able? Val­ue? Num­ber one, how well does this per­son align with val­ue num­ber one, one to 10. And then val­ue num­ber two, and then that’s going to sense check or a real quick and dirty stress test for that.

Kevin Lawrence 20:41

That’s the tal­ent reviews where we force that to hap­pen on a reg­u­lar basis in com­pa­nies. So it’s great to do as part of your onboard­ing and on an ongo­ing basis. Awe­some. So basi­cal­ly, how the hon­est con­ver­sa­tion rate your­self zero to 10, how are we doing on these things, as the lead­er­ship team, and then from there, you can just take your aver­age scores then get into the align­ments and mis­align­ments that I was talk­ing about? What are the things we’re doing that are help­ing it help­ing the rein­forc­ing it? Like always look at the good, we’re going back to, to cel­e­brate I was talk­ing to ear­li­er? And then the mis­align­ments what are the deci­sions, or the things that just hap­pen in the com­pa­ny that are absolute­ly incon­sis­tent. So it could be a gen­er­al behav­ior? You know, peo­ple are gen­er­al­ly late to meet­ings are gen­er­al­ly slow on email, or there’s a lot of that. Or there’s pock­ets of it. But not­ing those align­ments, and mis­align­ments and where you’re see­ing things that aren’t con­sis­tent with what the val­ues say that you want, or, or would like to have? Not? Yeah, it’s not right.

Brad Giles 21:50

So good deci­sions, behav­iors are the things. There’s a team that I work with, and, gee, we built, they built the core val­ues, prob­a­bly 10 years pri­or, they thought they were real­ly good. And then one day, it just hit them like a ton of bricks. They were like, This isn’t what we val­ue at all. And so we stress test­ed the val­ues, and then we went back and then we real­ized there might have been a few of them that were good. But yeah, we rebuilt the whole lot. So yeah if it’s not work­ing, you could get to that point.

Kevin Lawrence 22:25

You could end things change, we’ve gone back and went to an orga­ni­za­tion, a very large well known orga­ni­za­tion around the world. And we went and went back and there will 40 years old went back and reset them. You know, anoth­er orga­ni­za­tion that we work with, it’s just under 30 years old, they went and just refresh them. You know, the point of it here is that is you know, going back­ward and mak­ing sure the right but then just the behav­iors degrade over time. Remem­ber, it’s the fer­til­iz­er and the weed­ing and the prun­ing that we have to do to keep them tight. So so once you’ve gone through and fig­ured out those mis­align­ments, there’s some amaz­ing things that you can do to help tight­en it up. And again, give them the main­te­nance and the respect they deserve. And it’s real­ly to note the root of all the gaps. So let’s just say, you know, on a scale of zero to 10, one of them’s a six, which would be con­cern­ing. Well note the root of the gaps, is it, you know, is it a is it some­thing that we’re miss­ing? IE, maybe it’s not read­ing the sys­tem? Maybe it’s, you know, some peo­ple like what’s, what’s the root cause? And then look in the mir­ror and say, Well, wait a sec­ond, how are you doing? Maybe you’re allow­ing some of these behav­iors as a leader in the orga­ni­za­tion. I mean, the core val­ues go from the CEO and exec­u­tives through the org, and they start at the top and flow through. But basi­cal­ly look at those gaps. And then con­sid­er what some pos­si­ble solu­tions. And we did this with a team recent­ly in the team that kind of forced me to look for a way to help dial this in. We had great con­ver­sa­tion about it. And in the end, we went and looked at this and found some root caus­es. And then we just looked at our­selves and said, Well, what do we have to do dif­fer­ent as an exec­u­tive to make this improve­ment which I’ll share more on the final piece? So basi­cal­ly, fig­ure out those mis­align­ments fig­ure out what you can do about those things and to get him fixed. And then as you touched on, Brad that client, like ques­tion for client, the tal­ent review, you know, for peo­ple that and this goes back into top rat­ing, and we have Episode 100, where we talk about top grad­ing, hir­ing, keep your best tal­ent. But the idea of this is that if you do it right, and just did this last week with anoth­er team, and most of our clients we push to go every quar­ter through your most impor­tant lead­ers, not all it’d be too many of the top 2530 peo­ple and you go through and you eval­u­ate their how they’re doing and you eval­u­ate them on each of the core val­ues like you talked about Brad iden­ti­cal, and their per­for­mance, and if there’s gaps we go through sev­en ques­tions that Jim gave us sev­en Jim’s sev­en ques­tions, to fig­ure out whether we devel­op them or release them. And then we talked about suc­ces­sion plan­ning, but to go through all of your top tal­ent, which is like your top invest­ments every quar­ter, but rat­ing against those core val­ues is one of the real­ly, real­ly crit­i­cal things.

Brad Giles 25:18

Yeah you’ve got to have some way to under­stand, are these val­ues work­ing? Or are they not? In a quan­tifi­able way? I sup­pose. That’s what we’re say­ing here. We’re try­ing to make the qual­i­ta­tive, quan­ti­ta­tive, using these methods.

Kevin Lawrence 25:39

Now, why do you think most lead­ers need a mech­a­nism like that tool or that tal­ent review? Where you look at peo­ple through the win­dow of val­ues? And per­for­mance? Why do you think we need mech­a­nisms in com­pa­nies and it does­n’t hap­pen naturally?

Brad Giles 25:56

Because it’s emo­tion. It’s hard to replace peo­ple, peo­ple, you know, get caught up in the day to day, there’s a whole range of things.

Kevin Lawrence 26:08

Yeah, it is. And it’s, most peo­ple aren’t great at this part. And if they are amaz­ing at it, then they’re prob­a­bly a psy­chopath. You know, we’ve had peo­ple that have been in com­pa­nies from two weeks through to 30 years that we’ve had to sort of say, this isn’t gonna work, it’s not easy. So the final thing to bring it togeth­er, so look, assum­ing you had them right up front, but, you know, we need to fig­ure out to real­ly, real­ly make sure that your cul­ture is con­sis­tent with your core val­ues, a top cou­ple of things that you need to do based on your analy­sis of look­ing at the gaps, look at the mis­align­ments get­ting to the root, and what you’re going to do, and pick one or two things you work on as a team. If it’s real­ly off, I rec­om­mend that you touch on it every week, and recal­i­brate once a month. How are we doing? How do we rate it? Where was the progress? What do we have to do next? Because these things don’t fix them­selves, we actu­al­ly have to help them along. So some­thing on a reg­u­lar basis, obvi­ous­ly, you can involve your teams and every­thing else. Any­thing else you’d add in there, Brad?

Brad Giles 27:14

Do some­thing about it. If if you are say­ing to your­self that the val­ues don’t real­ly feel like they rep­re­sent the cul­ture accu­rate­ly, I reck­on that every­body else in the orga­ni­za­tion knew a long time ago. And so if every­body else knows, and you know, you should assume that you’re the last to know, and there­fore the quick­er that you take some kind of action, the better.

Kevin Lawrence 27:43

It’s not rock­et sci­ence. It’s just dis­ci­pline like most things, dis­ci­pline to have them right. And if we’re gonna run through, con­firm, you actu­al­ly have them right and you’re actu­al­ly core val­ues and you got three to five you can dri­ve your busi­ness by and then look at things you could do to make them clear like you’ll see in Brad’s upcom­ing book about the always nev­er list. And then have an hon­est con­ver­sa­tion on rate where you’re actu­al­ly at on them today, you could use a deep­er assess­ment, but even a con­ver­sa­tion with an exec­u­tive lead­er­ship team can be a great point of cal­i­bra­tion. I want to cov­er off the rest of their show.

Brad Giles 28:15

Think note the align­ments and lists and mis­align­ments with the cul­ture and the val­ues? Are they actu­al­ly trans­lat­ing into the actions that you can see then act on the mis­align­ments? Remem­ber the tal­ent reviews and assess­ing peo­ple and then lead by exam­ple? Good. Check, Kevin. It is. Yeah, it’s, it’s good. It’s some­thing that we say quite a bit.

Kevin Lawrence 28:38

It’s easy to say and hard to do like a lot of the most impor­tant things. So hey, thanks for lis­ten­ing today. This has been the growth whis­per­ers pod­cast with Kevin Lawrence and Brad Giles, to sub­scribe, you can just go and find us wher­ev­er you’re lis­ten­ing to your pod­casts. And if you’re already there, feel free to rate us and if you’re hap­py, give us a great rat­ing. We’d love it. If you’re not maybe send us a note we’ll be glad to hear your feed­back. For the video ver­sion, go to youtube​.com and search for the growth whis­pers to reach Brad Brad has a great newslet­ter a very thor­ough newslet­ter to con­tact him at evo­lu­tion part​ners​.com​.au And for myself, Kevin, get me at Lawrence and co. We also have a great newslet­ter and tons of resources on the site. You can search an archive of all the past pod­casts and every­thing else. Lawrence and co​.com. Have an awe­some week.