Culture for Breakfast #21: The Positive Encouragement Play
Quotes of the week:
“Find good and praise it.” — Alex Haley
“The parenting style that is good for grit is also the parenting style good for most other things: Be really, really demanding, and be very, very supportive.” — Angela Duckworth
Both sourced from Ryan Holiday’s The Daily Dad
These next few posts focus on brass tacks Xs & Os from the culture playbook. The plays are tangible, and you can deploy them with teams today. A recent post summarized the culture playbook. It focused on quantifying how positive culture leads to long-term outperformance, and introduced the playbook’s three pillars:
1) Support individual motivation
2) Create shared purpose and belonging within teams & organizations
3) Build a flywheel to do both consistently
When I talk about culture, most people nod their heads that it’s important, then pause and ask, “Wait, how do you actually do it?” Culture seems like this fuzzy (touchy-feely) or overwhelming concept (how do I drive behavior change of an entire organization?)
The good news is that culture is operational. The best culture companies have a repeatable set of plays. It’s consistently deployed, just like agile sprints, quarterly QBRs, retros, post-mortems, and manufacturing line practices. Transforming organizations and people’s lives happens in the mundane. In this case, the angel is in the details.
The next three C4B posts will profile one play per pillar from the playbook.
1 - Support Individual Motivation
Key Play —> Create a Culture of Recognition and Support
“We have made recognition and support our most abundant resource…The more we recognize and celebrate, the more people experience not only how good it feels to be on the receiving end but also how good it feels to be on the giving end. Recognition creates enormous positive energy. Organizations should celebrate and recognize the things they want more of.” Bob Chapman
Few have heard of Barry-Wehmiller (BW), a private conglomerate based in St. Louis. BW stepped into the light through CEO Bob Chapman’s memoir, “Everybody Matters.” Chapman described BW’s journey from a near-bankrupt manufacturing company into a thriving $3 billion+ revenue global portfolio of 120 businesses, including a private equity and consulting arm, all focused on taking care of employees as priority one. BW IS THE BOOK on positive culture leading to business outperformance.
Recognition is the most important play in a thick BW manual (it’s a collection of lean manufacturing businesses after all). Recognition is built into every level of the company's operations. The lightweight version happens in weekly standups, where team members recognize something a team member did and how it impacted them. At the company level, peer-nominated award winners are selected from written nominations based on actions that represent the company's values. The winners are announced to the entire company and are given a sports car to drive for a week, accompanied by a handwritten note to loved ones from Bob or the specific business CEO.
The entire system is both encouraged from the top down and acted on from the bottom up. The power is given to each employee: anyone can create a new form of recognition, from line worker to team leader to executive. The power is in the team’s hands. Notably, “most of the awards are based on private peer nominations; they are not popularity contests.”
At seed-startup Ethic in 2017, we instituted a weekly recognition meeting when we were a handful of employees. The play was simple: on Friday mornings, the team came together to share recognition and upcoming priorities for the week. That’s it. As a 100-employee company, a successful Series D-stage startup, Friday recognition remains foundational to Ethic’s culture eight years later.
This play is about treating people like human beings and building community. Both are necessary in a world where we spend as much time at work as we do at home with family and friends. Finding the good and praising it while holding a high bar will leave a lasting impact on the many lives around you.
Great content this week:
Let’s go to the source and hear from Bob Chapman and his team (their Truly Human Leadership blog & podcast content is excellent).
Words Matter blog by Bob: In this post, Bob talks about framing leadership in terms of thinking about people in your “span of care” vs. who “reports to you.” Family vs. chain of command. Do that, and you are “bestowed with the awesome responsibility to provide the care and inspiration and support that that precious human being needs to become everything he or she was meant to be.” That’s a different, powerful, and positive way to think about language and leadership
Podcast interview with BW’s Chief People Officer (and seasoned engineering & sales operator) Rhonda Spencer on how to globally scale a repeatable operational machine. The parts I love are breaking the dichotomy opinion that you have to make a choice between results and caring for people, and building systems that scale in part by getting people rapid experiential learning. Here’s a Claude link to a 500-word summary if you want to use AI to shortcut the time investment!