Latest / Success Story with Scott Clary / Lessons - From NFL to Fixing Broken Companies | Matt Mayberry - Fmr Chicago Bear & 2x WSJ Bestselling Author

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Lessons - From NFL to Fixing Broken Companies | Matt Mayberry - Fmr Chicago Bear & 2x WSJ Bestselling Author · Success Story with Scott Clary

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  In this lessons episode, explore how building a high performing culture starts with developing people
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  rather than simply driving results. Discover how defining and embedding culture creates alignment
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  across teams, understand why leadership behavior and consistency determine long-term success,
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  and uncover how prioritizing culture as a competitive advantage drives sustainable growth.
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  So how do we build a culture so that people are elevated to the best versions of themselves
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  and then they perform? What are the steps of the playbook?
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  Yes, so I have a five-part framework and I'll touch on those, but I think a very high level
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  answer, because this doesn't matter if you have a small, medium, or large-sized business for
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  whoever's listening. Most people use their people to build their business,
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  but the best leaders that make the biggest difference, not only in the marketplace
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  and drive the greatest profit but also build people, they use their business to build their people.
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  And I think that understanding the differences between those two is really the answer of how do you
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  build a great culture that actually produces for what we're doing in our particular sector,
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  our particular industry, the product we sell, the service that we go to market with.
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  It's really understanding that we need to utilize the people that we have and build our business,
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  use our business to build our people, which is going to build and transform our business,
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  rather than simply using your people as a commodity to build the business.
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  There's a very, very big difference in distinction between the two.
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  And I think after understanding that, it's really driving down to that five step framework,
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  which number one is, we kind of touched on this already, but it's defining your culture.
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  What I mean by that is, if you saw 20 employees that work at the same company,
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  let's say at a conference, and you asked those 20 employees, what is your culture at XYZ company,
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  you're most likely going to get 20 different answers.
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  If you go and ask the New England Patriots, or whoever your favorite team or organization
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  is, chances are, you're going to get pretty similar answers, maybe not exactly to the
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  two a T, but you're going to get pretty similar answers about expectations.
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  What is the work experience like as an employee there?
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  And what is the overall mission and purpose of that particular company, that organization?
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  You have to define your culture.
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  The second aspect is what I put is discovering through collaboration and inspiration.
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  What I mean by this is, it's really engaging the hearts and minds of every single people manager
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  in the company. When you think of building culture, most senior leaders and executive teams,
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  regardless of how big that organization is, they keep it at the top, right?
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  And defining your culture starts at the top, but then after you get to that piece,
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  then you have to go to the bottom and different levels of the organization and ask them for their
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  input. What is it like working here? What are you happy with? What are you not happy with?
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  You know, what can we do? What makes this company, this organization unique and special?
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  And then it's cascading, you know, from that, it's getting all that intel, that information.
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  And then from there, you know, set number three is all about launching cascading and embedding
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  your culture, right? A lot of companies will just say, hey, this is our employee survey that we did.
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  We're going to take the survey, get these results. We're going to talk about it for a month.
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  We worked on culture. They checked the box, right? But the best teams, and this is what football
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  teams do best than better than anybody, is the culture is not just launched and talked about.
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  It's cascaded throughout the whole team, the whole organization, regardless of your role.
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  And it is embedded daily in every function, offense, defense, quality control, video, video team,
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  you know, recruiting team staff. I mean, every function of that team, that organization,
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  it's embedded deeply. And then the fourth step of that, the whole five step process is driving
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  long-term impact. You know, what you talk about how some business leaders, they may hit the PNL,
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  they may have a positive year, they may get the, you know, investor money that they're looking for.
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  You know, but at the end of the day, if you're not building a business for sustainability and really
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  having a culture that drives that sustainability, somewhere along the line is going to collapse and
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  fail. And not only is it going to collapse and fail, it's probably going to be worse off than it was
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  from the very start, right? So then it's utilizing your culture to drive that sustainability.
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  So it's all about the best practices of how do we not only embed our culture, but how do we make
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  it the very fabric of our company? And then the fifth one is, you know, leaders blaze the trail.
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  And this is simply that, you know, you can't change any organization until the leaders first
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  model the behavior and lead the way forward, right? The behavior of the leader is eventually the
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  behavior of the rest of the company and organization. There's no way around it, you know, and I think
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  you have, you have a lot of leaders in organizations that are unhappy with maybe the results they're
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  producing or, you know, they want to be more innovative or they want to be able to handle and deal
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  deal with disruption and change better. But then when you, when you dig a little bit deeper,
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  you start to realize that the leadership team is the one who actually massively and severely struggles
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  with those same very things that they want to get better and improve on, right? So you have
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  the leadership team as a leader, you first have to be living that 100% all in fully committed
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  before you ever can drive transformation and change throughout your organization. So those are
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  the five steps got define your culture, you know, engage the hearts and minds of every people manager
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  in the company to get them involved in the process. That gets them more excited about creating the
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  future. The third step is launch cascade and embed the daily fabric of your culture in the organization.
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  The fourth aspect is driving long-term impact for sustainability and the fifth is leaders lead the
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  way forward. What's what's the number? Because I think that when everyone's listening to this podcast,
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  everyone is not, I mean, there's some city people out there that don't care about this, but the
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  majority of people want to do good by their team and by their company and they're saying, yes, I
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  love a culture like this. I love a culture that uplifts the people that I work with every single day.
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  What's stopping people? What some people are going to take this away and say they don't, you know,
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  check out your book or whatever and they they've tried this before and it's just as totally failed
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  and they know that even though they've tried to implement culture, you still talk to 20 different
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  people in the organ. You still get 20 different answers as to what the culture is. So what stops people
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  from being successful when they try and do something like this with the organization? Yeah, I think
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  there's really three things. The first thing is, you know, the leadership team is not committed,
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  right? It's a check-the-box initiative. Maybe they had a bad survey result, so now HR or, you know,
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  shareholders, you know, there's outside pressure if it's a publicly traded company. They have to do
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  some type of initiative to build a healthier culture. So from that standpoint, it's just to check
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  the box. It's never going to move the needle, right? That's the first one. The second one is we
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  kind of already touched on this, but I want to stress the importance of this enough of why it just
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  derails so many efforts, the misconception of what culture is, right? I mean, at the end of the day,
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  you know, it doesn't matter if you have a 10 person company or a 200,000 person company. You have
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  to understand every business owner, every leader has a strategy, a strategic framework of
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  how we're going to go to market, how we're going to win in the marketplace, how are we going to
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  create our unique competitive advantage in the marketplace? You have to understand that strategy
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  does not achieve itself on its own. That is the job of culture. It's behavior at scale. So after
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  you create your strategy, you have to look at your culture and do we have the right behaviors in
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  place? Rather than just having core values, we need to make sure that we have specific defined
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  behaviors, like what are the daily expectations to live these values that is going to help us
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  succeed and win and execute in the marketplace? You know, I think for any leader that doesn't want
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  to build a better culture, they're basically saying that I don't want to win and build a thriving
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  business. You know, because I mean, that in the two go hand in hand, like eventually,
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  somewhere down the line, it's going to come back in backfire, backfire. Massively. You know,
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  you know, the third one would just be, you know, the consistency. You know, I think that there's a
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  lot of leaders, especially you seen with COVID and a lot of the statistics and you know, we heard
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  about the great resignation and the big quit and all those kind of terms, you know, as far as
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  just so many people leaving the workplace, you know, I think that when you have that type of
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  dysfunction and people talking about the realities of the uncertainty of the future,
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  leaders will start to initiate the process, but then somewhere down the line, they get busy,
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  you know, there's customer fluctuations, there's, you know, dealing with supplier challenges,
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  you know, the supply chain, just all these different complexities of the business structure,
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  they let interfere with building the culture, but the best leaders that I've seen in some of the
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  most prestigious dominant companies in the world, they literally view their cultures as their
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  greatest competitive advantage in the world. You know, not their ability to innovate, not their
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  ability to market and have new product design. I mean, their greatest competitive advantage is the
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  culture they build. So I think that those three things, God, is really, you know, why most leaders
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  kind of fall short there. To your last point, it's about prioritization, like if you want to make
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  this a priority, it'll get done. That's really where it has to, that's really where it has to come
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  from. Can you off the top of your head, just speak to like the best culture that you've seen,
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  and why pick a company or some sort of case study, and why is that culture so great? What is one
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  look to when they're looking at a company and like, shit, they're doing it right? Yeah, I mean,
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  there's there's a lot of examples that I can use, you know, I think, you know, using the book and
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  keeping that kind of in mind here, just because it's fresh on my mind. You know, there are different
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  personal case studies that I utilize in the book. You know, and one of those is, you know, I think
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  Southern Glaciers Wine and Spirits, you know, a company that I've personally worked with for
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  quite a few years now, particularly, you know, they're ill and annoying Indiana Division. Those two,
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  you know, organizations are, you know, even though they're a part of the same entity of a 19,000
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  person organization, you know, at the state level, the work that they've done, particularly
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  Illinois, who I kind of take throughout the book, like, from when they started the process of
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  building a better culture to where they are now, you know, it's been unbelievable, you know, as far
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  as knocking down silos, they were never in a terrible or unhealthy position in the very beginning,
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  but their culture was never the sole reason why they were going to market and why they were
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  dominating. Their culture was never why they're, you know, retaining but also attracting top talent.
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  And now, you know, so many of the internal employees and team members of Southern Glaciers,
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  you know, particularly Illinois, you know, the the domino effect that was created from that
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  internal transformation of building a better culture has been phenomenal, you know, of defining
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  that culture, but then also kind of embedding it throughout every function. You know, so that's
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  an example that I've always used and I kind of highlight that in depth in the book. There's
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  another, you know, company direct federal credit union, you know, they're they're another company
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  that I've, you know, kind of briefly highlight in the book, Joe Walsh is their CEO, you know,
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  I spoke at an event for for them at the end of 2021 and kind of grew up growing a relationship
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  with him and see the work that he's been able to do as far as, you know, it's important to me,
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  right? This is not a check the box initiative. This is not just to, you know, kind of beef up
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  our employee engagement surveys, like we want to create an environment where we win in the market,
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  but we also create something special internally, you know, that that really stands the test of time.
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  You know, that that's a great example. I think Disney's another great, you know, example,
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  obviously they've been in the news for kind of not the so right reasons.
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  That's true, but you know, that's every great, that's every every big company, especially over
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  100,000 employees, you know, you're always going to have, you know, those fluctuate. And that
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  was also a challenge of this books got to be honest with you of, you know, I was very kind of
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  hesitant and cautious of using what I deem is world-class cultures because what may be a culture,
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  great culture right now, if there's a change in leadership or one of the senior leaders for
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  tires or, you know, if there's some type of turnover, you know, that that can be completely
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  a different story next year, but to your point though, that's a, that's a, that's a, a good
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  commentary on why culture is not a time-bound initiative where there's like a deadline on it.
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  It's not right. You know, in the book, I clearly say there's a start date and that's it, you know,
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  most, most change initiatives, there's a start and end date like, hey, for the next six months,
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  we're going to be doing this and, you know, but really building culture. I mean, there's a start date
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  and then that's it, you know, it's ongoing from there. It's continual. It's relentless. It's
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  got to be rigorous. You know, in the book, I use the term being fanatical. Like, you literally
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  have to be fanatical and, and to a lot of people that may seem aggressive, but that's literally
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  what the best leaders do. They're fanatical about their approach and how they think of culture.
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  Thanks for tuning in. If you found this valuable, don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you
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  never miss an episode. And if you want to dive deeper into this conversation, check out the links
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  in the description to watch the full episode. See you in the next one.