Is Your Culture Helping, or Hurting You?

It’s a force that drives you towards success or failure, and most people don’t pay it much attention: culture. Most people think about culture in terms of a business culture. But if you’re the leader of a team, you need your personal culture in line for your business culture to fall into place.   Joe’s definition of culture is your environment. When done intentionally, it's a philosophy about life and business that you play out, that's played out by your team and those around you. At its worst it's a demoralizing and destructive force. At its best, it’s an uplifting, motivating force that gives you momentum. It's a rising tide that lifts all boats, carries your team forward, and gives you and your team the ability to keep pushing.   Culture is one of those things that even if you don't pay attention to it, will still come to be. If you have a team and you don't create a culture intentionally, it's going to grow organically and it's probably not going to be what you want it to be. It's no fun to fight a bad culture.   Intentional Culture versus Organic Culture Right now organic is really big. Everybody wants organic food; organic is seen as a good thing. But when you're talking about culture, organic is a bad thing. Organic is the kind of culture most people and businesses have. There's no one thinking about it. There's no one putting any guardrails in place. Meanwhile, an intentional culture is where you think through the building blocks that create culture and you put them into place so you have the kind of environment and the kind of motivation and momentum you want in your life.   Culture is driven by your beliefs and the beliefs of those around you. If you have positive, empowering beliefs and that's your dominant focus, then you're going to have a positive, empowering culture. But if the dominant focus is negative or limiting beliefs, then that's going to create a negative or limiting culture.   Have you ever seen people who just have a dark cloud over them? They're always negative. Everything that could go wrong does go wrong. That's someone who has a very bad personal culture. They’re usually speaking negative things into the world and living those negative things out. Someone who has that kind of demeanor and life almost always has automatic negative thoughts. Or as Jim Kwik calls them: ANTS, automatic negative thoughts. That's where when something happens you immediately think negatively about it.   So many people allow those kinds of thoughts to dominate their mind. What you feed into your mind and what you say out into the world eventually becomes your reality. Because, if that's what you're always saying and always thinking, your life is naturally going to follow that progression.   Some people live such negative lives they don't even see the positive opportunities that come their way. They are ruled by their emotions instead of by their thoughts and they're lying to themselves all the time. So, what are you saying to yourself? What are the thoughts that pop into your head when things come up? What are the things you say to the world about yourself?   You're creating your personal culture with that.   Another way to look at it is with an organic culture you allow life to happen to you and then you react to what happens to you. You're always playing defense.   With an intentional culture, you happen to life! You play offense and you set the agenda for what your life's going to look like. When bad things happen, you find the positive in it. You study it to find out what went wrong and you fix it and move on instead of just staying in a negative place.   Personal culture You have to know and intentionally live out your core values. What do you believe? You also have to know your vision very clearly. Who and what do you want to become? You have to know your purpose and you have to seek out opportunities to be working in the purpose God created you for. You have to cultivate an attitude of abundance as opposed to an attitude of scarcity and that comes from knowing what you believe.   A culture is naturally going to grow around you based on those things, rather than on what you would become if you were just living life haphazardly.   Who you associate with is going to shape your personal culture. If you're hanging around a bunch of people who are negative, always talking about how they're failing and say they're not good enough, then that's your sphere of influence. Guess what you're going to end up being like?   Instead, surround yourself with people who are positive. Be around people who are seeking fulfillment in their life, who are working towards being better people and towards their own vision. Are you developing and building positive and empowering relationships?   What do you spend your discretionary time doing? Are you sitting on the sofa with a bag of chips instead of doing something productive? That's fine once in a while, but you should be spending most of your discretionary time reading and learning and trying to better yourself. Are you moving towards your vision and figuring out what you need to learn to achieve it?   How do you behave in your moments of crisis? What happens when you're faced with a moral dilemma? How do you treat other people?   If you’re a leader, what do you encourage in yourself and in others? How do you carry yourself in front of them? And what do you tolerate from people and from yourself?   Are you content with your life right now? Even if you're not satisfied, are you learning to be content with where you are? There are a lot of people who spend their whole life dissatisfied. It's ok to not be completely satisfied with where you're at, but if you've got core values and a purpose and a vision and you're going after those, you can be content where you are while still having a clear idea of where you're going and what you want to accomplish.   All those things come together to create your personal culture. So whatever you create, however your life looks, because of that, know you're going to attract more of what you created. If you're someone who's always negative, positive people will not want to interact with you. If you're someone who's always positive, negative people won't want to interact with you. It's your choice which group you want to be a part of. It's up to you who you want to be, who you want to attract and how you want that all to play out.   Joe’s personal culture Joe strives to be a person who is a thinker, contemplator and someone who ponders the big questions in life. He always wants to be learning. He is always listening to podcasts, trying to read as many books as possible, looking for people to learn from. He is always striving for achievement and fulfillment.   He is really trying in life to live out his purpose and the reason that God created him. He spends time focused on and working on those things. He strives to stay true to his core values to use them as a tool to filter life decisions through.   Additionally Joe wants to spend his discretionary time wisely. He doesn’t want to waste time or hang out with people he doesn’t enjoy being around. He has a small group of people he spends discretionary time with, who he enjoys being around. They’re people he brings value to and who bring value into his life. They’re people he can learn from and who can learn from him as well. Joe wants to spend his time in general serving people and helping them get better.   He also wants to always be content with where he is in life, knowing he’s done all he can to get where he is, but never satisfied. He strives for healthy dissatisfaction, which drives him to do better and reach more of the potential God has placed in him.   All these things create Joe’s personal culture.   Business culture Your business culture flows directly from your personal culture. If you're doing things in your personal life that you shouldn't be doing, or that you don't want other people to know about, it's going to show up in your business culture. You want to be the best person you can be so that people will respect you because they know you're a person who walks the talk.   Most businesses have an organic culture, which rarely results in a culture that's pleasing to the leader. It’s common to hear the statement, if you just get great people the culture will take care of itself. Joe couldn't disagree with that more.   Great people could be very talented, but they could have different core values than you. They could have their own agenda coming into your organization. They could have different goals than you and be working towards their goals while they're in your business, leading other people in a different direction than where you want them to go.   You need great people, but you need great people who are like-minded to you and who are sold out to going after your vision. Otherwise, you're going to develop a culture that's geared toward the vision of your people. That’s probably not your vision.   Have you ever had one of those situations where you just can't drag yourself out of bed in the morning to go into the office? You just can't bear the people there, you can't bear the environment there and you can't bear what's going on. Working in a bad culture is just miserable.   Characteristics of a bad culture

• Everyone does their own thing
• Office cancers actively working against your vision
• Infighting and office politics
• People protect their turf and refuse to share or help other team members
• Team members sabotaging one another
• Poor client experience because your team is working against one another at the expense of your clients
• Good people leaving your team out of frustration
• The wrong people sticking around too long
• A toxic atmosphere / office gossip
• Staff always arriving the moment the work day starts and leaving the moment the work day ends
• Salespeople find excuses to stay away from the office as often as possible

    Do you have any of those things going on with your team or in your office? If you do, it’s a big red flag. You need to take a look at this and see if you've got things rolling the way you want them to.   If you are the leader and you've got a bad culture in your office, it's your fault. It is nobody else's fault. As the leader you are 100 percent responsible for your culture. You set the tone for it. You allowed it to flourish. Think of yourself like a gardener. You've got this garden to tend, you're trying to grow flowers, and when weeds are popping up you're just sitting back and letting them grow. Do you blame the weeds for being there? Or do you blame yourself for letting them grow?   It's the same thing in your culture. If you've got a bad business culture, it doesn't matter if someone on your team is causing it. You're the one who sets the tone, so you're responsible for it.   Building an intentional culture within your organization It's a very simple process. It's not easy but it's very simple. It starts with very clearly defined core values and a very clearly defined vision. These fundamental principles are foundational to building a great culture.   What do you believe for your business? Do you have this written out so you can recite it? How does your purpose create this vision of who you want to be and what you want to become?   Your next job is to give them away to your team, and to do it with conviction. You stand behind them and say, “these are things that we're not going to compromise on.” And then you personally live them out. You're the example everyone else is going to follow. So you need to truly believe them, and you need to hold your team and yourself accountable for living them out.   One of the beautiful things about having a great vision and culture is that you don't have to make all the decisions yourself. You can create an environment where everybody's running forward together instead of you out in front dragging them along behind you. You, as the leader, are the keeper of the culture in the beginning, especially if you've had a team that's been together for a while and you've been really lax. They're going to test you and make it difficult on you at first. You have to keep that culture, and encourage and correct the people who aren't living it out, to get it established. And then when you bring new people on to your team you have to filter them through your core values and your vision to make sure they're buying into those things before they ever join your team. Check out Episode 3 for more on that.   Over time, the culture takes over and starts to correct itself. You'll have the people on the team who are sold out to your culture, core values and vision. They're going hold people in line or make sure  someone who's not operating within the core values knows it. Your time to step in and deal with those things is going to be relatively minimal because the culture will protect itself. But that takes some time to get into place.   Culture is an incredible force. It’s probably the most important thing in business that nobody thinks about. Are you letting it be momentum against you instead of momentum for you?     If you enjoy the podcast, Joe would be greatly honored if you would give it a review on iTunes. Also, if you haven't already, please go to iTunes, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts, and hit the subscribe button.