The Culture Fix Audio Companion: Introduction
In this episode, Dr. Jeremy Weisz sits down with Will Scott to discuss the origins and inspiration for his new book The Culture Fix. Join them as they go over what Will means by bringing Core Values to “life”, how his upbringing influenced his career choices, and how the implementation of well-crafted Core Values can affect current employees.
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In this episode, you will learn:
[01:29] What Inspired Will to dedicate his life to Corporate Culture
[03:50] How growing up in Zambia shaped Will’s life
[04:40] Will remembers when the implementation of Core Values let to an employee self selecting for termination
[06:50] Bringing Core Values to “life”
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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.
Jeremy Weisz: Jeremy Weisz here today. I'm very excited. We have Will Scott, he's the founder of Culture Czars. He talks to CEOs that care about corporate culture. His purpose is to help CEOs create environments so that employees love where they work and why they work. And as we know, staff employees are the lifeblood of any business. Today's episode is brought to you by the Culture Fix. This is Will's life's work on culture boiled down to the most important aspects you need to know in his book. Go to Cultureczars.com to pick up a workbook that will help you start implementing a great culture. He's been sought after by many companies to create this, so he finally did. And if you check it out, it helps you bring core values alive in a graphical way. You'll find out more and you'll understand. Go to Culturczars.com. So I'm excited to dig into this, and going back to when you first, why you came up with this, where this originates from?
Will Scott: Yeah, that's interesting, because I've owned a couple of tech companies. I definitely enjoyed growing those and leading those companies, Jeremy. But I'm really excited about Culture Czars, my latest company, and the material that's coming out of there. Not just for me personally, but for the benefits it's bringing my clients. But the story begins, actually, and that's why I feel so aligned doing what I'm doing, because it takes me back to growing up in Zambia, which is in Central Africa. And one of the things I used to love doing was building clubhouses there. I built all kinds of houses. This is before I was even 10 years old. I built tree houses, I built forts on stilts, I built an underground cave, and even a bamboo house underneath a mango tree, which had a fence and everything around it.
Will Scott: So I love doing that, and I still love doing that. My mantra today is still, "Creating environments where people thrive, so they can be the best that they can be." But there's no point in sitting in those clubhouses on my own, so I would want to invite friends around, but I would want them to respect my efforts and not trash the place, and also, I just like including people, and I like people being nice to each other. So I put some rules on the wall in all of these clubhouses. I put little rules. And I remember one of them, for example, was "Be nice to each other." So if you wanted to be a part of the clubhouse, they had to be nice to each other. And as soon as people weren't being nice to each other, I would point to the poster on the wall and say, "Hey guys, we agreed to be nice to each other." And that was kind of the end of the story. I didn't need to be-
Jeremy Weisz: I can totally see the little Will doing that.
Will Scott: Yeah.
Jeremy Weisz: Because you do that now with people. It's just a very third-party way of doing it in a nice way.
Will Scott: Well that's one of the benefits of having defined core values. So I think it's the same in corporations today. Let's define, by some core values, how we want to coexist in this space together, and how we want to work together. And then it makes all of those conversations really easy, and as you know, I believe a great culture leads to great performance. So yeah, that's why I'm doing what I do today and why I feel so excited about it, because it's really who I've been all my life.
Jeremy Weisz: How do you think growing up in Zambia shaped you?
Will Scott: Well, it's obviously a little different from everyone's regular upbringing. I ran around barefoot for a long time in the bush entertaining myself. At a young age I was also sent to boarding school in Ireland, so getting on a plane at 11 years old and flying across the world to go to boarding school, because we didn't have the best English-speaking schools there. So yeah, definitely different upbringing, but one I value very much.
Jeremy Weisz: So there's a couple ways this has manifested in your career with the core values, and people even self-selecting out, and there has been a couple examples where after you've kind of expressed to a company, and what happened after that? Can you talk about that?
Will Scott: Yes. Well I remember at Lextech, our mobile app development company, early on we defined our core values there. And as I recommend in my program, one of the things is, you have a role out of those, and you announce them. And that's just how it starts. You've then got to keep that momentum going, but yeah, the first time we did that one of our employees basically walked out of our conference room and resigned. He just decided, and knew, had a feeling probably, that these values were not the right environment for him. So just a perfect example that saved us a lot of trouble, we didn't have to ... We'd probably have to exit this guy at some point down the road, but he self-selected out, as you say Jeremy. And that was, again, one of the benefits of having a defined culture.
Jeremy Weisz: What was it? Do you remember, what was it that ... It's almost the opposite of resonating, right? It didn't resonate with him.
Will Scott: Yeah. Well I would say it probably wasn't any one thing. It was because together, a bunch of core values will describe the environment. And he just knew that that environment was one that wasn't going to work for him.
Jeremy Weisz: What was one of the core values of that company that you remember that you could share?
Will Scott: Well, funny you should ask, because I think specifically to this individual one of them was teamwork. Right? And we personified that with actually two characters that we came up with, T and Work. And this guy was kind of a loner. He worked alone, and that was not going to work for us as an environment. We knew we wanted folks who worked together, and that creativity and productivity would be much better with teamwork. But he was one of those lone cowboys, and that might have been one of the things that nudged him out.
Jeremy Weisz: So one of the things I get excited when I hear you talk about is, bringing core values alive. And obviously people can check out that workbook at Cultureczars.com. So talk about what that means exactly, so when people check it out they have a better idea?
Will Scott: Yeah, absolutely. So the book is broken up into three basic sections, and I call those bringing core values alive, make them thrive, and use them to drive performance. So under the 'bring them alive,' that is really about not just having words on the wall, but somehow bringing imagery and the arts really, and creativity, so that they become more memorable. There's tons of research that shows we remember things 65% better if they are, in some way, imagery. A picture tells a thousand words I guess.
Jeremy Weisz: Yeah.
Will Scott: So one of the main things that I do, one of the things that people enjoy doing to bring their core values alive, is bringing personas. And that could take all kinds. It could be a character, a cartoon character, it could be a real-life historian, it could be, as one of my friends did, a character from Star Trek. His core values are represented by Spock, and Scotty, and stuff like that. So somehow bring them alive with imagery. Even add music. I used to begin all the time at my town halls with a theme song that represented the core values. And some of my clients do that too.
Jeremy Weisz: So everyone, check out Cultureczars.com. There's a workbook. The Culture Fix is the book, and I would get it just because there's an awesome picture of Will in his tree house. I can't believe you actually built that thing. Did you actually build that?
Will Scott: Oh yeah. And it had a retractable ladder so that-
Jeremy Weisz: Wow.
Will Scott: So after you ran up, and they would pull a ladder up, and yeah, that would stop other people coming up.
Jeremy Weisz: It's amazing. I love it. Thanks Will.
Will Scott: Cheers, Jeremy. Thanks.