What every CEO should know about culture

What is the most important thing CEOs should know about the type of work you do at ADVISA?

Culture can be a distinct competitive advantage for organizations.

Without people, organizations die. Thus, culture is a CEO’s greatest opportunity or biggest threat – because good people seek out and stay at organizations where they can experience a healthy work culture and where their personal values align with the values of the organization.

Culture isn’t just something that sort of exists; rather, culture is something that executive teams and leaders at all levels can influence and shape such that it becomes a competitive advantage.

Your culture is the artifact of the relationships within the organization. It’s the shadow of the leaders who are shaping that culture through their mindsets and behaviors.

It’s something that competitors can’t copy.

Culture is a CEO’s greatest opportunity or biggest threat.

What led to this realization about culture?

ADVISA has been in the people development space since 1986, so we have almost 40 years of observing the way people engage and perform within the workplace.

One of the trends that we’ve observed over time is a lot of missed opportunity related to the investment that companies were making in training and development. Another way to think of it is a leadership development disconnect.

While they were spending money on workshops, or events, or peer groups for CEOs, or book clubs for leaders and managers, those learning experiences were disconnected from the marrow and heartbeat of the mission, vision, and values of the organization.

So, with this missed opportunity, we thought:

What if we could codify the things that actually drive the creation of cultural competitive advantage – and then design learning experiences with great intention to explicitly activate the mission, vision, values of the organization?

In the process ADVISA offers today, leaders get super clear on two critical fundamentals:

• “I understand our cultural DNA.”
• “I understand how to translate our vision to my team and empower them to execute and live out our core values.”

Core values are the pillars of intentional culture. So, if leaders don’t know what to say and do through their communication, coaching, and goal setting, that’s where that disconnect starts to happen – and that’s a huge missed opportunity.

Approximately 10,000 boomers are retiring every day, creating a huge labor and leadership gap. It’s more and more competitive to win the best and brightest people – and without people, organizations die.

So, we really started to lean into the need to create a repeatable, consistent process to help senior leaders diagnose what’s happening on the people side of their business, define values and leader capabilities that are essentially the form and function of the intentional culture, and then follow that with learning experiences where leaders are immersed in and have the time and space to develop the mindsets and behaviors to carry that culture.

Approximately 10,000 boomers are retiring every day, creating a huge labor and leadership gap. It’s more and more competitive to win the best and brightest people.

What are the biggest pain points that ADVISA solves for clients?

There are three main challenges that we see often and we’re invested in helping our clients solve:

No leadership bench

Not only are most organizations not intentional about their culture, but another issue they face is many of them have an owner, founder, or leadership team that’s ready to retire.

As I mentioned, there are 10,000 boomers retiring every day. It’s very challenging to exit your company when you don’t have a bench of leaders who are ready to go and know how to carry on your legacy.

So, that lack of succession planning and leader readiness is a huge challenge, resulting in a lot of owners and founders having to sell their companies for far less value because they don’t have the culture and the leadership team in place to carry it forward.

Productivity and engagement

Coming out of the COVID-19 pandemic, we have a global workforce that is far more selective and choosy about where they’re going to put their time and talent.

The power balance has shifted to the employee. And employees want a healthy work environment. They want their personal values to align with the values of company. They want to do meaningful work. They want to belong. They want companies who are intentional about creating diverse, innovative work environments.

That power shift has created a challenge for leaders who are struggling. They’re saying, “I don’t know how to provide what employees want. I don’t have the tools. I don’t have the training to create the magnetic work environment that we need.” So, driving that productivity and being able to engage employees is a huge challenge, day in and day out.

Getting teams aligned and clear on goals and roles

There’s so much change happening out there. So the change-management expertise that we bring – because we understand the people side of the business, and we understand what motivates people – we can come alongside organizations and help them navigate change more effectively.

That clarity about “what am I supposed to be doing and when” and “how does that align with what other people are doing” as we move through continuous change together is a huge issue. We bring the tools and the training to our clients to help them do that effectively.

What is ADVISA’s approach to culture development?

We believe there are five drivers that create the conditions for cultural competitive advantage.

1. Activation from above

When our clients engage with us, we start at the top. The executive team has to own and relentlessly pursue the creation of intentional culture that’s going to create that value for employees, for stakeholders, the community.

We engage the executive team in an exercise of diagnosing their opportunities for improvement, and then defining core values and leader capabilities that will effectively be the form and function of the intentional culture going forward.

The executive team has to be bought in.

2. Trust and shared purpose

That’s really back to making sure that mission, vision, values are accessible and that employees are aware and they understand how they can trust that leadership has a plan. We have goals and a common purpose, we know where we’re headed, and we know our organization’s character.

When those important things – mission, vision, values – are made explicit and they are authentically communicated and lived out, then employees can lean in and emotionally commit and trust.

3. Leader effectiveness

Your leaders are your culture carriers.

So, once there’s clarity about who we are, our values, and what leaders need to say and do to carry that culture, then leaders can be clear and confident about engaging with their teams in a way that’s consistent with the culture the organization is trying to propagate.

Customized leadership development is the most effective way to empower leaders to be effective at growing their people and activating the intentional culture.

4. Actionable people data

Leaders need information about how employees are experiencing the organization.

Whether it’s employee engagement data, behavioral data, even anecdotal data from exit interviews or focus groups, leaders need to know how people are doing and how people feel about working for the organization.

That information is what lets leaders know how they need to adjust to continue to create that magnetic environment where the best and brightest want to be.

5. Systems that support leaders

Leaders and managers needs systems that support them in doing the work of coaching and communicating and engaging.

Deming once said, “A bad system will beat a good person every time.”

Taking a systems view of all of this is critical.

If you invest in leadership development and front-end strategic work to codify your culture and then empower leaders to carry that through their mindsets and behaviors – but then you don’t examine the existing systems, norms, policies, procedures, even technology systems – that’s a problem. Your systems may create competing priorities or barriers to leaders leading in the way that you want them to lead.

Leaders need the right tools to help them stay connected to their teams. For example, putting software in place that enables seamless communication among hybrid teams or for doing one-on-ones in an effective way. We’ve got to give leaders those tools so that from a holistic and systematic point of view, everything is aligned in the direction of creating that cultural competitive advantage.

Those are the five drivers.

But how does anyone know where to start?

Through that lens, we start with assessment.

First, we diagnose how are you doing on those five drivers, and we have developed a proprietary Leadership + Culture Assessment^® that provides unique clarity to organizations. This leads the executive team to prioritizing where the organization needs to improve.

Next, when leaders are ready to actually change culture, we have a process that we take them through to define values and leader capabilities.

Then we design customized leadership development programming that’s delivered over time and includes coaching, and then we deploy our team of facilitators and coaches to deliver those learning experiences in a consistent way.

What’s the first customer success story that comes to mind?

One that stands out is a company where a father started the business and later the son was in the CEO chair. The son, the new CEO, was faced with some real cultural challenges. There was some conflict and a lack of clarity. Not only was it getting in the way of day-to day-operations, it was getting in the way of growth.

When we engaged with this CEO, we did exactly the process that I described:

We started with mission, vision, values. You have to have a strategic plan. You’ve got to know where you’re going in order for your executive team to gel and align around that common purpose. So, we started with that strategic work, which also included the definition of core values that would be the pillars of the intentional culture.

Then we focused on mindsets and behaviors. With that clarity around mission, vision, and values, we focused on what leaders need to say and do (i.e., what mindsets and behaviors do we need?).

We worked with them to define a few critical leader capabilities, which then flowed into designing learning experiences for all levels of leaders – senior leadership, mid-level, and frontline leaders.

It was important that at every level of the organization leaders were immersed in who we are, and where we’re going; these are our values, and these are the mindsets and behaviors that we expect – and that we’re equipping you, supporting you, giving you the tools to lead in this way. All with the goal of being an employer of choice, so that we can compete for the best and brightest talent in the construction industry.

That process of teaching the executive team how to come together and operate as one team, how to communicate, how to navigate conflict, and then cascading all of that down through leadership development and learning experiences led to breakthrough financial results and growth.

They were able to attribute those results to the fact that they were working together better as leaders, and they had more clarity about how to engage their people and develop people and keep people over the long term.

That particular success story stands out for me because it was in a multi-challenging, hyper-competitive industry where it’s really tough to find and keep people. And even though they were generational with family transition dynamics at play, we were able to come alongside them as a partner and help them become a high-performing organization.

What makes ADVISA’s approach different?

Just double click on where a lot of companies are providing one-off workshops for leaders or a leadership development program.

At ADVISA, we believe that training is just a tactic. We take a far more strategic and data-driven approach.

It starts with the executive team and making sure that they understand those five drivers, then we take them through our process of creating an intentional culture. I really think that’s what sets us apart; linking the leadership development programming to the most important things – mission, vision, values. We’re closing that divide that currently exists.

There are great things to learn out there. If all you need is to go learn how to give feedback or learn how to coach, go read it… go take a course.

It’s the customization that sets us apart and the strategic, consultative approach that we’re taking with executive teams – and then empowering HR to really be successful in executing and being the point person within the organization for how these learning experiences come to life.

At ADVISA, we believe that training is just a tactic. We take a far more strategic and data-driven approach.