The Culture+ Blog
Insights to help you create a compelling and connected culture
High-performance teams come from high-performance cultures
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The hard work of making something easy
Make it easy. Make the concept easier to understand. Make the work easier to finish. Make the gathering easier to attend. Easy is hard. Easy is where the real work hides. Many of us attempt to make our idea easier to understand by barfing up more and more information. Or, we try to make our work easier by cutting just a few corners that nobody will notice. We assume easy means add "more" or do "less." Neither are necessarily true. Easy means precision. "Come over for dinner. It's on Sunday. Be...
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The concept of character arc in leadership
Characters in (good) movies have an arc. An arc simply means the character starts out one way and then, in reaction to experience, changes. The key to an arc is the concept of change. As it goes for fictitious characters, so it goes for us. Each of us is on an arc of...
Starlord shows us the delta between talk and action
Infinity War started playing on my Netflix again (I don't know how that happened!). And, while watching the scene with Starlord (Chris Pratt) and Thor (Chris Hemsworth) I was reminded of something Pratt said a while back. An interviewer asked him about his...
A “farm team” for your organization
I made a comment to a coworker today about creating a "farm team" for our company. This weekend I watched my FIRST EVER (!) professional soccer game. Way better than I thought it was going to be. The team I was watching was the feeder team for the Seattle Sounders,...
Trash the tropes
"Pay peanuts, get monkeys." The bumper sticker philosophy was coming from the bearded man in 16B to the lady in 16A. I was seated in 16C. He was referring to the flight attendants on our Southwest flight. His proverb came before the jet had even pushed back from the...
The listening “twofer”
1 to 1. It's the listening to action ratio. I heard this concept on a podcast recently. There is a lot to unpack with a comment like that. Here's one angle. The interviewee was saying that listening without action ends up changing nothing. So, all listening has a...
A return to quiet time
60 minutes first thing in the morning for peace and quiet? That was the reveal from an Inc. article I read this morning talking about Melinda Gates' morning routine. She called it her quiet time - time used for meditation, study, exercise, etc. (Love this idea by the...
Do hard things
Consistently do hard things. In a leadership role, consistently doing the hard things is what separates the underperforming leaders from the great leaders. What are the hard things? Ever had somebody crying at your desk, or pleading with you not to fire them, and you...
Distributed team meeting checklist
- Take whatever amount of time you think you need for the meeting and halve it (promotes focus). - Show up 10 minutes early to pay the "tech tax" (trying to get Skype, or GoToMeeting, or the 10 year old desktop, or the conference call dial in, or whatever to work)....
Leaders’ actions signal expectations
Our actions as leaders create expectations. As you move higher up in an organization, people start looking at you more closely. They look more closely at what you wear. They look more closely at what office hours you keep. They look more closely at the words you use....
Provide context to bridge the gulf
There is a gulf between what we think our team knows and what they actually know. Not talking about their technical skills. I am talking about real time information on projects, the organization, strategies, mission, the broader competitive marketplace, etc. We think...
Solutions are never binary
Rarely is any solution strictly binary. Meaning, rarely is any solution only answer A or answer B. For whatever reason, especially when we are stressed, we tend to see only two alternatives. "I can stay and tolerate my intolerable manager, or I can quit." Binary...
For Generation X, how we lead must change once again
"I feel more like a therapist than a manager." This is a paraphrased comment I heard recently from a leadership group I was presenting too. "The younger people on my team seem to need more validation than I am used to giving. They want to know that they are OK more...