Lessons - From NFL to Fixing Broken Companies | Matt Mayberry - Fmr Chicago Bear & 2x WSJ Bestselling Author

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