Creating a Safe and Carefree Culture with Tim Padgett of The Pepper Group Company
Creating a culture where people feel safe and free to be vulnerable is by far one of the
most challenging tasks any leader of a company can perform. While it can be difficult, it can also be very fulfilling.
Indeed it is the responsibility of a leader to create an environment where employees can be themselves, with freedom to make mistakes, correct, and improve. No one is perfect, but most people can improve is given the opportunity. Having the right culture can make or break an organization.
Tim Padgett, our guest today, will introduce to us the two faces of culture: the bad and the good. In this episode, we will present a clear picture of what a bad culture looks like, and also what damage it can do to a company. A bad culture is damaging not only to the morale of its employees but also to the business as a whole.
Tim Padgett is the CEO of The Pepper Group company. Having been inspired by the bad experience he had with a company which was plagued by bad culture, he established his own company. He vowed that the core values governing his new company would reflect build a strong culture.
“It doesn’t matter what we teach. All knowledge can be leveraged later.”
Want to hear more from Will?
Subscribe to Culture Czars podcast on:
In this episode, you will learn:
1:45 – Introduction to The Pepper Group company
3:45 – Personal definition and perspective about culture
5:55 – A program called kick ass
10:40 – The process of creating the core values of The Pepper Group
12:15 – Frameworks of the company’s culture
26:00 – A powerful recruiting message
32:00 – The dynamics that make people move
34:45 – Philosophy Tim got from other companies
35:28 – 2 main job responsibilities in the company
40:18 – Examples of a bad culture experienced: culture of family, culture of pride
46:05 – How to build a culture of joy
Resources:
Connect with Tim:
Connect with Will:
Episode Transcript
Speaker 1: From Core Values, to Valued Culture, here is your host, Will Scott, interviewing another CEO about leading culture in their company.
Will Scott: Hello listeners and welcome to another Culture Czars interview where we talk to CEOs about the care about their corporate culture. We call this series From Core Values to Valued Culture and Tim, from the Pepper Group, is definitely a culture czar in his organization. Hi, Tim.
Tim: Hey. Good day.
Will Scott: How is everything on this gray morning in Chicago?
Tim: Well, I'm excited to talk about culture every day. This is a thing that I've been studying for over 10 years now. I really enjoy working in a company that has a great culture. It's something that I hope to influence in everyone's company.
Will Scott: That's awesome and I'm particular excited to talk to you, Tim, about that because I know you are passionate about culture. You not only do have a great culture at the Pepper Group, but you're also expanding that beyond the Pepper Group to your clients and helping them with their culture, so I'm really looking forward to hearing a bit about that too. Speaking of the Pepper Group, tell us about the company.
Tim: The Pepper Group is a full service marketing communications firm. We've been around for about 24 years now. We work strictly with B2B clients, companies who want to sell to other companies. It's a little bit more of an involved sale, where we have the responsibility to not only help to define the product or service or company value proposition, but also to educate. A lot of the things that we develop are meant to be educational tools. Sometimes they include video. It could be brochures, it could be white papers, it could be anything that's digital. You have to be in the game these days with that.
Tim: Our clients are in all different sectors, so we get a chance to exercise our curiosity quite a bit. We're forced to do that because we can't really work for competitors at the same time. Obviously they don't want to share secrets with someone who's also talking to the enemy. Plus, from an ethical standpoint, if we get a great idea and we have two clients in the same space, who do we give it to and which one's not going to be happy that we gave it to the other one? It's a lot of fun doing marketing. It's one of the few things that you can do where it starts off on the back of a napkin and next thing you know, you've got something that's pretty cool.
Will Scott: Yes. You've been doing this awhile, haven't you Tim? You've got some good experience in this industry.
Tim: Yeah, we started out as a design firm for about the first eight years, and then the last 16 years we're moved on to helping companies with their strategy. That's really the fun part because we haven't run into a client yet that has an unlimited budget. We have to be very strategic about how we help them spend their money.
Will Scott: Yeah, I understand that for sure. Then tell me too about when we talk about corporate culture, what does that mean for you?
Tim: I'm sorry, Will. You just broke up. There's probably a cloud that went across the ethernet here.
Will Scott: Thanks for letting me know about that. Yeah, you know, I think just culture maybe means different things to different people. What do you think about when we talk about corporate culture?
Tim: When I talk corporate culture, it's mainly within the framework of how do we have more fun exercising our craft? In marketing, we live in a very risky environment. We have to provide our clients with some ideas and some tangible things that they didn't expect and they are looking for us to have the energy that carries that idea across. Oftentimes, we're going to show three ideas. Two of those will eventually die off. You have to ask people every day to come in and take a lot of chances and know that not everything's going to fly, but still go at it with a passion that is hard to describe.
Tim: I mean, it's really something where if you don't have it that morning, you have to generate it by the time you get to work. We have a lot of really smart people, a lot of curious people. To continually stimulate that is survival for us. We can't do it any other way. I think a lot of the things that we've implemented at our own company were born out of more of that survival instinct. I'll give you a real quick example, if that's alright.
Will Scott: Yeah, love examples. Go ahead.
Tim: We have a program called, "The Kick Ass." The Kick Ass has to do with peer to peer recognition. How it works is that everyone in the company has the ability to create a little form. In fact, I have one right here. Let's see if you can see that.
Will Scott: Yes.
Tim: It's just a quarter page form and basically it says, "Who kicked ass? Who's recording this? What day or timeframe did they do it? What exactly was that behavior that stood out?" Sometimes it can just be coming in early, staying late, giving a great presentation, pitching in when you didn't have to. We don't really have definitions for what a kick ass behavior is because I think it's personal. Whoever thinks someone kicked ass, that's good enough for us. We don't measure them against each other.
Will Scott: It's not something that you want to judge.
Tim: No.
Will Scott: If somebody saw that in somebody, go with it. Yeah.
Tim: We're a team of about 17 here. When you fill one of these out, it goes into this little can. That can is opened on Monday morning with our all company meeting. Each one of them is read out loud. We have between 15 and 30 of these a week.
Will Scott: What? No way.
Tim: Yes.
Will Scott: A week?
Tim: There is absolutely no financial reward for getting these, but what does happen is that by just reading them out loud, people are getting their due. They really enjoy it and it becomes a currency. Obviously, if you're giving a lot of them out, you're probably going to get a lot of them too because people recognize that you're, in effect, playing the game. At the end of the day, what happens is we will count out who got the most that week, and they get a little traveling trophy on their desk.
Tim: It's a little donkey kicking its legs up in the air. It's really been phenomenal. I guess the last thing about it is we were talking earlier here at Pepper Group about all those brass plaques in the lobby, that have core values and things that people in the back aren't necessarily living by, nor attributing their success too. On our little form, and again I don't know if this is going to work, but let me see if I can bring it up closely, but ...
Will Scott: Yeah, we can see it.
Tim: Our eight core values are listed on here.
Will Scott: Yes.
Tim: With little check boxes.
Will Scott: Yes.
Tim: So each behavior, we try and check one or more box that represents that behavior within our core values. Oh, sorry. The phone's going off.
Will Scott: Well, that's what happens. That's okay.
Tim: We will re-emphasize those every week by doing this system. Then last but not least, we've created what we've called culture kiosks within our workplace. A culture kiosk is an area that you dedicate to a physical presentation of what your culture's all about. We have a long wall that has all of these forms taped up to it. It's impressive. I mean, in marketing we have a thing called you can make a claim. But then you need to have proof of claim. If we claim that we trust and appreciate each other, that's a claim. Now proof of claim is seeing the wall with literally hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of these up on it.
Will Scott: Yeah, that's awesome. I always encourage folks to have some kind of nominating system as a way of keeping the core values alive. At least now, at least once a week ... Well, actually, you're getting several touches a week from people doing the nomination, but when you get together at your all company meeting on Mondays, you're getting a chance to reaffirm the values. People are actually not just nominating someone for something that they did that was kick ass, but they're checking one of the core values, right? They're tying it back to a core value.
Tim: Yeah, absolutely.
Will Scott: That's beautiful. Wow, that's a really cool process. I've got to see that wall sometime. Maybe you'll send me a picture of hundreds and hundreds of those names posted there.
Tim: I can absolutely do that because it's part of one of our presentations. It's really quite impressive.
Will Scott: That's really cool. We saw obviously you have your eight core values, but is there anyway you can describe, just at a macro-level? We are this kind of a culture company? Kick ass, probably.
Tim: Yeah, we're a kick ass culture. When I developed our core values, and there are eight of them which is usually a little more than most companies will do, but I got to tell you quite honestly, I avoided mission, vision, values, all that stuff for a long time. I've been in sales almost my entire career, in one form or another, and I've been in a lot of lobbies. I've seen a lot of those brass plaques and I've basically wanted to go up there and scratch out the name of that company and put any company here because ...
Will Scott: Integrity. Integrity and respect.
Tim: Yeah, exactly, which are important, but they should be table stakes, right?
Will Scott: Yes, I agree.
Tim: There should be something more.
Will Scott: I like people to do something a bit more novel, a bit more that's personal to them. Yup.
Tim: Both of us, we're involved with the entrepreneur's organization and we go on an annual retreat every year. At this point, we went on a retreat where we had a facilitator and they said, "For the next two and a half hours, we're going to work on core values and things like that," and instead of going in the corner and pouting and saying, "I don't want to do that," I decided to give it a try and try to find my voice. Here, let me just read to you our core value.
Will Scott: Yeah, please do. That's just one of my questions.
Tim: We'll see how much fun this is.
Will Scott: Tell us your core values.
Tim: Again, these are all inward facing. I don't care if the rest of the world ever sees that. Obviously I do because we put it up on a big wall in a culture kiosk format, but really it is about our own employees. If they feel safe in this environment, then their work product is going to be that much better. Here's how they go. Number one, initiative has no boundaries. We want people to come up with as many ideas as they can and own them, so that they can help us to grow our business and to improve it at every step. Work and play with passion.
Tim: We work in an industry where we have 40 bosses. They're called clients and none of them talk to each other. They constantly make requests of us that, if they knew what the other 39 were doing, would realize that that's a pretty crazy request, but we have to fulfill it. We play outside of work together so that when we come back to work, we also circle and play together here.
Will Scott: That's cool.
Tim: Pride in craft and service is important to us. That pride of what we get to do, the sandbox that we get to play in, sometimes when you're showing things to a client and they're very subjective about it, they may not be as diplomatic as they could be in describing how they feel about it. We need to know that what we did was great. They just don't know, oftentimes, how to communicate it. If we allowed ourselves, our feelings could get hurt. We need to always know that we have great pride in the craft that we do, and we are a service organization.
Tim: Every Monday at that same meeting where we read the kick asses, one part of the meeting is called, "Critique of the Week." That's when people bring things in that they have seen, either in the mail, in a publication, online, broadcast media, it doesn't matter, but the one thing is that they love it. Whoever did it, and it's not us, these are things that we receive, we are celebrating our pride in our craft by sharing what other people have done well. Our fourth one is be smarter tomorrow.
Will Scott: Be smarter tomorrow.
Tim: Which basically implies that every day we have a responsibility to be smarter. We also have a mechanism for that. That is the Higgi. This is a little statute. It's named after Dave Higgins. It's a long story. He's a former coworker of mine, before I started Pepper Group. I just remember that he got very excited one day about something that he learned. At Pepper Group, how we use the Higgi, is that it will sit on someone's desk for the entire week. It is a reminder to everyone who comes to that desk to teach that person something. It doesn't matter what we teach because all knowledge can be leveraged later.
Tim: Especially in an industry where we might be talking about pharmaceuticals one minute and then talking about an intricate manufacturing company in the next. As we come up to that person and teach them something, they record it. On Monday, another part of our meeting is where they will bring the Higgi in and they'll say, "I learned this from George, and I learned this from Melissa, and I learned this from Cindy, but the coolest thing I learned was from Tim. He showed me how to do this." Then they present the Higgi to me and then it will be on my desk for the next week and people will be reminded to teach me something. Now, the cool thing about this is while it might seem a little gimmicky, it's been working for over 20 years. We have literally tens of thousands of learning experiences attributed to it.
Will Scott: That's fantastic. When you talk about these little statuettes that you think might be hokey or whatever, I just hear examples all the time of people using symbols like that to, again, to bring their core values alive. My friend Mike Petsalis from Vircom in Canada, his values are tied to Star Trek characters. He hands out like Scotty awards and Spock awards. Well, actually, he doesn't hand them out. Again, it's done by nomination within by the employees. People sit them on their desk and they have them on their desk with pride. One month years ago he kind of thought, "Oh, it's not that big a deal."
Will Scott: In his weekly meeting, he announced who got them but he didn't both with the actual statues. Well, they beat his door down. "Where's the statue? I want it on my desk for the week. I want Spock. I want Scotty." Yeah, once it's part of your culture, it really is ... Again, it doesn't have to be monetary. It can be, but it doesn't have to be. Sometimes the value, it's more than monetary. It's about the feeling that people get from having those awards on their desks.
Tim: A very interest byproduct of that too is that they are reflecting back on all the things they learned from that previous week. If anyone else in the room did not know those things, then they are also being educated at the same time. It's really great to hear, "Hey, after the meeting I'd like to see how you did that because I think it would be helpful for me as well." Our fifth core value is scraped knees teach us to dance.
Will Scott: You've got some nice, interesting, very exceptional language there. Nice metaphors. Go ahead.
Tim: For us, what this means is that you cannot be afraid to fall down. There are many times you're going to take chances and you are going to fall down if you take enough of them. We encourage that because the best lessons learned are the ones where we make a mistake.
Will Scott: You learn it personally. Yeah.
Tim: What also helps is that you're going to have to admit that mistake at some point. It's going to be found out, or you're going to volunteer it, but it is going to be revealed. The nice thing, as a member of the leadership, when someone says, "Hey, I messed up with this," all I have to say is, "Put a Band-Aid on it. We're good." It's fantastic to use just that little metaphor to do that.
Will Scott: You spoke earlier, Tim, you used the word safe. People feel safe. You can help people on your team feel safe through the culture that you're doing, so when they make a mistake and they own up about it, that really is huge for a creative environment in particular. Daniel Coyle, in his book, The Culture Code, talks about the importance of particularly new members joining the team. How do you make them feel safe? That's how they're basically going to perform better.
Tim: Exactly. It's got to be something that's genuine and that I can be vulnerable too. I sometimes have to walk into a room and say, "I messed up." I ask for a big gauze pad, sometimes.
Will Scott: You're a great leader, Tim. Of course, one thing they say about great leaders is they're willing to be vulnerable.
Tim: It's a lesson that took awhile to get learned because you think you have to be all things to all people and be strong and so forth. But they really need to know that you're just like them. You're going to make mistakes, and they might be at different stuff, but that's how I learn. I'm willing to push forward and give it a try and we'll see what happens.
Will Scott: Number six.
Tim: Number five is face to face ...
Will Scott: Oh, number five.
Tim: ... with grace.
Will Scott: Say it again.
Tim: Face to face with grace.
Will Scott: Wow.
Tim: What this really means is that we're in a business where we make a lot of social contracts. In other words, expectations may not be aligned. We have some gray areas in our business. So if someone thinks, "Hey, I thought that was included," or, "Can't you just make this little change," when they don't oftentimes realize how in-depth that change could effect other things. Just a couple of examples. When those kinds of encounters happen, we don't want to send a bunch of emails back and forth with no emotion in them.
Tim: Even leaving a voicemail is not going to give us the opportunity to have a dialogue about the situation because sometimes a client may need us from a budgetary standpoint to not charge us extra for something, only because it's just going to make things difficult. But, we could have the conversation with them, "You know that other project we're doing next month? Can we add another $1,000 to that to make up for this? Will that be okay?" "Yeah, that's fine. Thanks for being lenient with that." We also make a lot of social contracts within the business. "I'm going to have it to you by 2:00."
Tim: "Well, you have to because I only have three hours to work on it and it's got to go out." We want to be face to face as often as possible. I think another big part of that is that body language will tell us so much. Again, this is something where ... I'll tell you a quick story, when I was first starting out, I went and I presented something to a client. He looked at it for the longest time, you know that silence that's painful, and he says, "I just don't like it. It's not doing anything for me." These are not helpful comments to me.
Tim: I really don't know what I can do about those, so eventually I have to start asking questions. If I didn't see him kind of squirming so much, I probably wouldn't have pushed as far as I did. It turns out that one of the designs had purple in it and his ex-mother-in-law loved purple. It just had a psychological problem. The fact of the matter is that he wasn't the audience for this particular project, soccer moms were. Soccer moms do like their purple. Frankly, he hired me to talk to them, not to him. We were able to have that dialogue. Something like that, if I was to do it over the phone, or even through a WebEx or something, I wouldn't have seen that body language and he might have stayed silent for a couple of weeks before he got back to me about it.
Will Scott: I completely agree. Big proponent of face to face when you can do it. Yes.
Tim: Seven is strength of the wolf is in the pack. I guess the kick ass program's a great supporter of that. If the pack isn't recognizing the wolf, that wolf is probably going to leave the pack and we don't want that. Turnover is very expensive. Last, but not least, is choose to be challenged. I had one of our newest people, right out of college, about three weeks into joining us, she came into my office and the gist of it was that she was getting frustrated because she went and asked two different people how to do something and they both had a different way to skin the cat.
Tim: She came to me and said, "How would you handle this?" I said, "Well, I'd probably do this, this and this." She goes, "Oh, so that's a third way in which I could make this happen." I said, "Yeah. That's kind of how our business is. We rely on our strengths to solve an issue and we all have different experiences, but I want you to do one thing. I want you to replace the word frustrated with challenged because as you recall, our eighth core value is to choose to be challenged."
Will Scott: Choose to be challenged. Yeah.
Tim: You're going to learn a lot when you consider it a challenge versus frustration, which it can zap your energy if you're frustrated. It's something that you think you're a victim of. Whereas, if you choose to be challenged, you're going to figure it out.
Will Scott: You have some beautifully worded core values. I absolutely love it, how unique those are. Face to face with grace, and choose to be challenged. Those are nice. Do you mind sharing those with me in some way? Just take a picture with your phone of that little slip and send it to me. I would appreciate that.
Tim: Absolutely.
Will Scott: You have eight core values. They're obviously alive and thriving because they're just a part of your every day there at the Pepper Group. Do you think your employees could probably name, if you stopped them in the hallway, they could probably name, I don't know, six out of eight off the top of their head? They're that familiar with them?
Tim: I'd almost guarantee it.
Will Scott: Really? That's cool. Yeah, yeah. Very, very good. When did that happen? It's interesting that you're kind of a convert. I think you said you kind of resisted it and then you went on this ER retreat and you got into it. Now, you're a huge proponent. How long ago was that?
Tim: That was about nine years ago.
Will Scott: You've been using these same core values now for nine years. Any particular stories over that period of time, where just a favorite story maybe, that you can associate with? You gave one about your ex-partner, for the Higgi award, but any others regarding employees?
Tim: I think that when we have a recruit and we take them on a tour of our place, and especially millennials, they want to know that they will be well taken care of through their development. When you stop at our wall of kick ass nominations, two things usually happen. One is for prospects and maybe new members of a client team, when they're first coming through our place, I get asked quite a bit if they can take a picture of that wall because they want to use that somewhere in their organization. But with a recruit, when they look at it, they are intense about reading them. From a distance, you see all these colored papers. This is just one color, but we have all kinds of colors so it's a dramatic presentation.
Tim: They actually want to see what are people writing about each other and is it sincere? Is it something that I would like to be recognized for when I accomplish that? That's a big part of our recruiting message, is that we will not put you in the corner and hope you survive. We are going to surround you with ways in which you'll be supported until you get it. Unfortunately in our business, we can't send someone off for eight weeks of training and we don't have a book that says how to be a great account manager, for instance. It's on the job training. You're going to eventually learn how to dance because your knees will be scraped. All of these things that I mentioned, the core of what those core values are, are those regular things. We believe in education.
Tim: We believe in being honest in having our conversations. We want to negotiate certain things, but we want to win-win negotiate, because that's the only way we keep clients for a long time. It's exciting to do that. If as many people who took a picture of that, or requested a sample of our form, actually went back and initiated that program, I'm a happy guy. I want people to enjoy where they work and to live according to some sort of standards. I mean, it goes back to the 10 commandments, if you really look at it. Those were some core values that were initiated.
Will Scott: Absolutely, yeah.
Tim: I think if we follow that same lead, you have a much better chance. As you know, we go out and have an entire suite of services that we do for companies to help them better communicate their culture, in a variety of different ways of course. We don't do things that are behavioral change, but more of how do we communicate better? As we look at things that we can help other companies do, one of them are these culture kiosks. Imagine if you put something into the workplace where if diversity is important to you, why couldn't you have a culture kiosk that every month, someone with a different heritage curates that display?
Tim: They could put things up that had to do with the arts, or maybe the sciences, or maybe the cuisine, or maybe sports. Whatever it is, the more we know about where each of us came from, the more we understand each other, appreciate each other. A lot of those core things are all the same. Another idea for culture kiosk is to do something that has all of the social activity in your company. No longer do we just do a bowling team in the winter and a softball team in the summer. Now people have a lot more varied interest. What if you were able to have a book club at your business? You put up all the different books and maybe some comments people made about them at the meetings.
Tim: Or you have a lot of gamers now, so how could you show off something that's happening in that gaming community? You've got people who fitness is a big part of their world, so maybe there's a biking club, or maybe there's another way to do that. I think as an employer, if the studies are right and it says that the more friends you have at work, the harder it is to leave work, then you want to encourage people making friendships. You don't necessarily have to organize everything or pay for everything, but I think if you facilitate communication about it, then people know what they're missing or they know that they're part of a tribe. That tribe is very important to them. Everything comes back to that mission.
Tim: Our purpose statement, which we also developed during that same time as the core values, is we move people. We move them emotionally. We move their level of education. We move them off of their biases. We move them into a new perspective. We move them through laughter. We move them through sadness. Everything is measured against that. The more that we can understand what dynamics make people move, the more successful we'll be. Of course, as I mentioned before, there's a lot of different ways that we could go about everything, in our business especially, but I think almost every business, there's more than one way to accomplish something. If we move there together, then we're going to solve the issue and not worry about who's right or wrong.
Will Scott: Yeah. Is that something, when you onboard new people, that you talk about the purpose and moving people? So they get that feeling of, when they go home at the end of the day, they're actually doing something meaningful for the world? It's not just about a paycheck, they're helping move people, your clients?
Tim: Absolutely. In fact, Will, I take people out for lunch in their first week. That is my job, to initiate them into our culture. Now, they've been exposed to it a little bit along the way, but I actually sit down with them over a breaking of bread and we talk about what those core values really mean and why it is our essence of how we can be the best we can be. Then we also have a list of philosophies. These are things that are ... Well, I'm going to admit it right here, on tape, or whatever we call the digital world these days ...
Will Scott: Go ahead. Please do.
Tim: I stole every one of those philosophies from another company because they were brilliant. If that's the sincerest form of flattery, then I will admit that I stole them.
Will Scott: Give that to them.
Tim: They're things such as the boss is not always right. For everyone's sake, please remind them of that. I get a chance to say that right off the top. We will not do business with bad people. There's no good deal that we could do it. I used to work with people and sales people especially who knew that there was a pain in the butt client out there. They'd put a tax on them when they gave them pricing, but it's still not worth it. It just causes too much angst to deal with bad people. It's things like that that we really talk about, and especially with young people. They've come up and they haven't had a lot of experience at other companies. When our company's the first one, well they're kind of, in my attitude, they're come into a pretty cool company and they don't know how bad it can be on the other side. I want to really share with them the why's.
Will Scott: I think I know how you would answer this, but I do like to ask the question about, in terms of all the priorities that you're juggling as CEO of your own company there, whether you're trying to manage the profitability or the clients or how you're marketing your own services, strategy, all of those priorities, where's managing culture, or giving time to culture amongst all of those?
Tim: I basically have two primary jobs at the company. One is to sell because without sales, we don't have anything but a hobby here. In the agency business, it's not unusual for the top sales people to be the partners in the business because we obviously can create a lot of confidence with the prospects. After that, it's how do we continually improve our culture so that it's innovating along with the business and what it's doing? I'd say, if I was to do something 25 years ago, face to face with grace might not be one of our core values because it was the only way we could do things, other than maybe leave a voicemail, but we certainly couldn't fall on the email rollercoaster.
Tim: I think we constantly have to innovate how that culture does things. For instance, I've mentioned the Monday morning meeting. We have about 13 things on our agenda, not the least of which is going through every open project in the place and giving a status report. Other things that we do, we now have a designer who lives in Dallas. We have the Dallas Observation of the Week. What's going on in the Lone Star state that's a little weird compared to what maybe we're used to in Chicago. That employee, who worked with us up here for five years, so he knows us very well, but you always feel kind of out of it when you're working remotely. We give him something to be observational, come back and give us a laugh.
Tim: We have another employee, as a mater of fact, tells the joke of the week and they contribute that way. We have another employee that does the word of the week, and that's our copywriter. He finds some obscure word to share with us. Not only do we get value out of it when he announces it, but he also puts together a little blurb for our signatures on our email. We're sharing that with everyone. We're educating them as to what kind of terms we might be able to share with them. It's just a lot of fun to make sure that you're inclusive with everything that you're doing in a culture.
Will Scott: That's very cool. Would you say then that your culture has ... If you put culture first, do you find the other things will fall in place? I'm thinking about top line and bottom line. Can you attribute those being better since you focus on culture?
Tim: Absolutely. It's something we can measure ourselves against when we interact. It's an easy reminder that we have a responsibility, each one of us. Even if you're the owner of the company, you have a responsibility to act a certain way. Whenever we can have reminders of that, it helps because there's stressful times. Sometimes you can fall victim to losing your pride in the craft and service that we're doing. You may want to hide a mistake you made, but if you know that you have the freedom to share it and that you won't be judged for it, other than in a positive way, because now we know that mistakes lead to being better and being smarter.
Tim: I think in the old days, I probably would have run around like a chicken with my head cut off trying to fix everything for everybody. Now they understand, the guidelines are this. When your core values start with, "Initiative has no boundaries," and, "Choose to be challenged," you know that everything in between there is going to be up to you. You can't be a victim around here. You have the opportunity to change anything that needs changing.
Will Scott: Sure, but by doing that, then, it sound like also your job becomes easier because people are able to act and make decisions similarly to how you would, based on this compass, if you like, of the core values.
Tim: Absolutely.
Will Scott: Tim, before you started the Pepper Group, did you ever work anywhere where you saw the opposite extreme where culture sucked?
Tim: Oh, dude. I'll give you a great example. The business that I worked at before this one, starting this, was a printing company. I worked there for six years. When I came into the company, there were about 50 people in the company, and it was a culture of family. It was a culture of quality. We were doing some of the most high profile work. Back in the day, if you did annual reports, there was no budget, you just did something that was amazing. We did the automobile showroom books. Every year we would do the new books. Everything had to be perfect on those. No deficiencies at all. Out of this 50 people, there was probably three or four of us that even had a college education. A lot of these guys came up through the apprentice program and then they would become journeymen.
Tim: They would be some of the finest technicians you could imagine. I mean, we had people who when they did their job without explaining what each job was, these were the guys who would be the most sought after in the world to do this. There was that culture of pride that really went a long way. Then we were bought out by a real big conglomerate. They started pushing volume over quality. We went from doing these beautiful pieces, to doing what would commonly be called the bird cage liners, those Sunday supplements from all the retailers, and how quick could we process these pages? Because we were pretty large, we were able to invest in equipment that we could process those pages pretty quickly and very profitably. When I left there, six years later, we had 190 people.
Tim: I was part of the management team and I had five different departments. I was a little scared about what my joy was ... What was happening to my joy. My joy was being squashed by bureaucracy. People weren't doing projects according to ... When you'd step back and go, "I did that," there was no more of that. It was all, "Get that done. Get that passed through." People working 60, 70 hours a week just to accomplish the volume we were doing. These are not happy people.
Tim: As much as I tried to make sure that we were paying attention to the things I thought were important, I started a newsletter for the employees, just so that we could share information and maybe recapture some of that, but when it all came down to it, we were not the same company we were before. We were not spending time with each other outside of work. We were not recognizing each other for whatever form of accomplishment we were doing. What also hurt is that they were just moving everyone out of the company that was ... Well, you know how it goes. You were making too much money and the squishy things that you were involved with aren't recognized or ... It got bad. It got real bad. You never know who's going to leave next.
Will Scott: Was that bad culture, was that one of the motivations that you had for starting your own company, where you could create the culture that you wanted?
Tim: Yeah. I think I was an entrepreneur before I was an entrepreneur. What do they say? It's better to ask for forgiveness than permission? I would instigate a bunch of stuff and some of it would stick and some of it wouldn't. Then as we went along, fewer and fewer things were accepted and you were just supposed to get in line and do what they wanted you to do. Don't get me wrong. We were super successful. We were way over projections and we were making money left and right.
Will Scott: It wasn't joy. People weren't feeling ...
Tim: There was no joy. No joy at all. In fact, unfortunately, the industry itself started to diminish with the digital advancements. Now a company that I worked in doesn't even exist anymore because everything went digital.
Will Scott: I still wonder, if they had had a great culture, would they have been able to pivot, rather than just the company not existing anymore?
Tim: Oh, absolutely. I believe that because people wouldn't have been afraid to try and innovate.
Will Scott: Exactly. Well, this has been absolutely awesome. Before we sign off here, any final thought or advice that you would like to give to our listeners around creating environments where people thrive and a culture where joy is present?
Tim: I go back to the pride in craft and service. We have all risen to the point at where we are. We've learned things. If you've used your hands, you have certain techniques. You're a craftsman that way. If you use your mind, you're a craftsperson that way. If you do research, you're on a mission. These things where we strive to accomplish things are the most important thing that we get out of work. We sit around and we do post mortems on projects. We definitely start with what are all the good things first?
Tim: We can be as critical as we want to be, but at the end of the day we probably did some really cool stuff. Sometimes you have to verbalize that. Sometimes you have to believe that that is what gets us out of bed in the morning. I think that if more and more companies could support the craft side of what people do, then I think they're going to find joy in the workplace. You will start to make rules and you will start to have processes that make sure people are getting that joy out of their craft.
Will Scott: That's great. Awesome. Okay, well thanks, Tim. Please do send over a copy of your core values.
Tim: I'll do it in just a second because you're not the first to ask, so I know it's right on my desktop.
Will Scott: They're very cool. Thank you very much. Listen, have a great day and congratulations with the success, not only with of the Pepper Group, nine years in business, but the culture that you've created there.
Tim: Thank, man. I love it and I really enjoyed this. I'm looking forward to listening to some of your other podcasts as well.
Will Scott: Cool, well thank you. Please do. You'll find those at cultureczars.com.
Tim: Sounds great. Thanks, Will.
Will Scott: Thanks, Tim.
Speaker 1: Thanks for listening. Be sure to click subscribe. Check us out on the web at cultureczars.com and we'll see you next time.