M&A growth strategies promise a multitude of strategic opportunities; from rapid growth, to elimination of competition, to access to new markets. And many organizations are currently, or have, embarked on merger and acquisition growth strategies to varying effect.

When asked about the primary causes of these mixed results, most leaders cite a misalignment between the two organizations’ cultures. This friction can wreak havoc as the members of different groups assimilate to drive the performance gains that M&A strategies forecast.

Nowhere do M&A growth strategies seem as prevalent lately as within the tech industry. Major transactions seem to hit the headlines on a weekly basis, with no end in sight. Amazon’s recent acquisition of Whole Foods for $13.7 billion is just one example.

But the titans of industry are not the only companies engaging in these types of deals. Companies of all shapes and sizes are actively engaged in M&A growth strategies to help position themselves to compete. And organizations of all sizes must be mindful of how company culture plays a role in M&A success.

The Role of Company Culture in Mergers and Acquisitions

Typically, these activities are conducted with a focus on the external. How are we going to gain access to new opportunities? How will this position us better to gain market share? How will this afford us economies of scale to keep ahead of our competitors?

What happens once the deal is complete is quite different, though. People tend to take a laser focus on the internal. How do we sort through multiples payroll systems and integrate our HRIS? Which sales compensation model will we use and how will we ensure that our operations can integrate as quickly as possible?

The risk here is twofold. First, if the transaction was initiated for externally focused reasons, becoming hyper-focused on internal integration can distract people from why the deal happened in the first place. Second, and perhaps more problematic, is that the promises of financial gain can be seductive, leading the organization to find data and examples to support the notion that the organizations are ideally suited to integrate, rather than looking at data objectively.

It’s not uncommon to hear executives talk about how the cultures of the organizations are well-aligned, and how this will facilitate an easier integration.

We’ve seen it play out time and time again as leaders convince themselves that the integration is a marriage made in heaven when, in fact, they have no real understanding or data with which to base that claim. With many millions (or billions) of dollars on the line, it seems ludicrous that companies would roll the dice with something so critical.

Some organizations, however, have a keen understanding of the effect that the integration of cultures has on the wild success (or colossal failure) of an integration effort.

Take Saba Software, for example, who recently acquired HR tech company Halogen Software. “The new, combined organization is now one of the largest independent talent management companies in the world,” according to the press release.

Beyond the headlines, how do mergers and acquisitions of this size become successful? I spoke with Debbie Shotwell, Saba’s Chief People Officer, to understand how they will make this acquisition successful.

A Culture First Approach to M&A

Ms. Shotwell may be new to her role at Saba, having joined the firm less than six months ago, but she isn’t new to M&A transactions and integrations. In fact, she’s lived through over 35 throughout her career, including Oracle’s acquisition of PeopleSoft in 2004.

“Good planning, communication, and being as honest and open with people as possible goes a long way in M&A integrations — these things are always important to people,” Debbie shared.

Now, Debbie is leading the complex efforts of integrating the Saba and Halogen HR systems and processes to drive the behavior of the new organization. This is no easy task, to say the least.

Debbie and her team are wading into the deep end of the integration pool. But they are quite intentional about collaborating with their Halogen counterparts to find a “best-of-both” solution for the integrated organization.

“Both companies share the same customer-centric culture and they are both very focused on customer success,” Shotwell describes. Though, despite their common goals, she also acknowledges that effectively integrating these companies in a way that drives financial performance quickly is no easy feat.

The risk in this situation is that both organizations define customer success differently and how they deliver success looks so different that it can create frustration or anxiety as employees struggle to figure out what the new “right” looks like across the new organization.

Guiding a successful integration through this tricky transition takes intention. Debbie shared with me the key components of her team’s approach to navigating this opportunity.

Take the Time to Really Understand the Cultures of Each Organization:

In all of the excitement of target identification and selection, it can be easy to grab onto the obvious similarities of the two organizations and tout how aligned the two workplace cultures are. Doing this is easy but it’s not enough.

For example, two companies may both value developing employees, but how each company actualizes this in the day-to-day may look totally different. One organization may rely on sending employees to outside training and development opportunities while the other has found success by leveraging internal, on-the-job development and job rotations. Neither is wrong per se, but they are two fundamentally different approaches.

You must take the time to dig deep into what “right looks like” in each organization to ensure you don’t jump on the culture bandwagon and drive yourself into a ditch.

Being Intentional: Take the Time to Do It Right:

“Most leaders want to complete the integration process as quickly as possible in order to reap the financial benefits of the transaction,” Shotwell says. “This can come back to bite them. I believe in taking a step back, planning, and taking your time with your integration strategy.”

Being extremely thoughtful about your integration strategy allows your organization to more effectively manage the human side of the transition process and mitigate many of the risks inherent with using the “ready-fire-aim” approach.

Leverage Transparency to Keep People Engaged:

Integrations are extremely complex. Imagine changing all four tires on your car while driving at top speed on the highway. Oh, and it’s snowing.

Things change again and again and leaders often just don’t have answers to everyone’s questions. Finding ways to engage people throughout the process, to keep them informed the best you can, and to solicit their input helps to create transparency. “Integrations are about the people,” Shotwell says. “Both Saba and Halogen share a common commitment to investing in the long-term success, growth, and development of our people; something that must be acknowledged and honored as we integrate.”

Bring People Together for Purposeful Dialogue:

In the spirit of keeping the lines of communication open, it’s important to bring people along with you throughout the integration process. Creating opportunities for people to come together to look each other in the eye, ask questions, and discuss the realities of the integration in a purposeful way can help people express their anxieties. Dialogue also connects employees with a larger support system as they work through the nebulous days of integration.

Celebrate Successes and Failures:

No integration is ever perfect. There will be successes and there will be failures. Trying to shape the narrative that everything is perfect doesn’t fool anyone. In fact, ignoring the challenges can create a dynamic where employees feel that they cannot share their struggles or failures with leaders. This can have long lasting, negative repercussions down the road when those things grow ten heads and come back to bite you.

Finding ways for people share both their successes and failures allows for the organization to learn from each situation and it creates a dynamic where continuous learning and improvement are valued.

Care About Learning and Development:

One of the primary sources of anxiety for employees during an integration—once they know whether or not they have jobs—is if they will know how to succeed in the new organization. Making an effort to help employees understand how their role and responsibilities will change and providing support with their development can help reduce the stress associated with a transition like this.

Ensure Leaders Are Prepared to Coach Their Teams:

“Leaders are the catalyst that helps everyone else be successful,” explains Shotwell. “Helping leaders understand themselves and each other helps them support their people and teams on an ongoing basis so they can feel valued, accepted, fulfilled, connected to what we’re doing.”

One mistake executives can make is to assume they have to do everything during an integration. This assumption doesn’t scale well when there are so many complexities to navigate. Relying on leaders at all levels to support their teams throughout an integration is a way for them to take an active role, but they must not be forgotten in the process. Finding ways to adequately prepare your leaders to coach their teams through the transformation will pay off in spades.

It’s About Building Connections Between People:

Shotwell believes that people from both legacy companies have ample opportunity to interact and to learn from each other. For example, implementing a buddy program to match up partners from both legacy organizations allows employees to both humanize members of the other company and increase understanding and appreciation for how each legacy organization was independently successful.

In today’s environment, you’d be hard pressed to find a senior business leader who has not lived through (some may say survived) a merger or acquisition in their careers. Why is it then, that we continue to try to convince ourselves that culture is not going to present a significant risk to our future transactions and their ability to drive the financial returns that we hope for?

This article originally appeared on Forbes.

The post Why Company Culture is Critical to M&A Success appeared first on gothamCulture.

As companies scale, more processes are required to coordinate the growing workforce. And the additional management layers that come with them can slow an organization down.

It’s often the reason why large organizations become weighed down with bureaucracy while small companies remain quick and agile.

Consider this recent story from Hootsuite CEO Ryan Holmes:

“Earlier this year, an employee wanted to send a customer a T-shirt with our logo as a gift. There was nothing special about this particular shirt. It was an ordinary, 100% cotton crew neck. But by the time this employee got approval—factoring in his own time and everyone else’s up the org chart who had to weigh in before signing off on the request—the cost of this t-shirt had ballooned to at least $200.”

Many organizations today are trying to hedge against inflated processes like these by changing their organizational structures. Hootsuite, for example, appointed a “Czar of Bad Systems” to help improve internal processes.

In today’s rapidly-evolving business environment, growing organizations need to remain fast and efficient. And some large, geographically dispersed and complex organizations seem to be able to maintain a level of agility despite their size.

How do they do it?

Nurse Next Door is one organization taking a radically different approach to solving this challenge by embracing a culture of self-leadership. They are one of North America’s fastest growing home care providers, with 150 franchise locations delivering high-quality home care services to seniors.

I recently spoke with Nurse Next Door’s President and CEO, Cathy Thorpe, to learn more about what they’re doing, and why.

Rethinking the Value of Middle Management

Cathy took over operations for Nurse Next Door in 2014 and by the beginning of 2016, she was already questioning the efficiency of their organizational structure.

“I wasn’t seeing the results that justified a structure of middle management, and I started to question the role of management in general. For example, whenever there was an issue in our Care Services call center, such as a scheduling interruption between a Care Service Specialist and a caregiver, the specialist would have to email the management team. Then the management team would review, assess and investigate it, and hours later act on it after reviewing 50 -100 more of these requests. Management, to me, was proving ineffective.”

Thorpe’s epiphany came several months later. “I saw a post on LinkedIn titled, ‘10 Things That Require Zero Talent’ (source unknown). I read it and thought, these are basic adult skills people struggle with, and managers deal with on a daily basis. But these skills require personal accountability and professionalism; not management.”

Middle managers would often deal with people arriving late or unprepared to meetings, for example, and thinking it was ok. These behaviors added unnecessary delays. Key pieces of information were missing from these meetings, thus requiring another meeting.

“Our leadership team also realized we were too involved in operational things,” Cathy shared. “We had our hands too deep in the water when it wasn’t necessary. It was starting to affect our team’s performance because they were complacent with waiting for direction from us instead of being proactive.”

Cathy and her team quickly realized that management can’t teach people work ethic or motivation. “We don’t need middle managers to manage people. We need everyone in our organization to hone these skills and take personal and professional accountability. We need people who show up with these skills every day, without excuses.”

Part of this thought was driven by the fact that Nurse Next Door is rapidly growing, and they didn’t want to lose momentum or slow down. “We need to make the best decisions for the company and at a timely pace. To do so, people need to be 100 percent present, accountable, and results driven. It’s hard to support and drive a culture of hypergrowth when your team can’t manage themselves.”

So, over the next few months, Cathy’s team took the “10 Things That Require Zero Talent,” and started distributing it around the office as a cultural artifact. Thus, the journey to self-leadership began.

Shaping A Culture of Self-Leadership

Thorpe and her team eliminated most middle manager roles across the company to create a mostly flat organizational structure. The Team Lead role was eliminated in the call center, for example, and they transitioned Care Specialists to specialized Account Manager roles, giving them more direct control and empowerment over customer-facing decisions.

They also began figuring out how to attract, recruit, and retain self-motivated team members, and find ways to best support them to be successful in this new, autonomous work environment.

By adopting Daniel Pink’s concept of Mastery, Autonomy, and Purpose, team members are encouraged to develop and explore their personal and professional goals and take initiative to proactively identify and improve inefficient processes in their daily work lives.

Nurse Next Door also eliminated annual performance reviews in favor of guidance and feedback in the moment. “We embraced and integrated Kim Scott’s concept of Radical Candor with both our HeartQuarters (headquarters) team and with our Franchise Partners,” Cathy shared. “It takes time to figure out your style of giving feedback. People are conditioned to take feedback as criticism, rather than a gift. It takes time to shift this mindset, but we are getting to a point where giving feedback is taking less energy and becoming more natural.”

The Benefits Of Self-Leadership

Thorpe’s efforts to embrace a culture of self-leadership has shown some significant performance gains in a rather short timeframe:

Increased productivity: Employees are more productive as they manage themselves and their results. They proactively solve problems and develop new ideas to find a better way, rather than wait for direction.

Increased satisfaction: People take ownership of their role, and are engaged and connected to the brand. They are brand ambassadors who are committed to the organization and have a strong sense of purpose. Results from a Nurse Next Door engagement survey (Fall 2016) noted that 94 percent of employees agree that they are inspired to do their best work with the company.

Created a team of leaders: Thorpe believes everyone on the team can be a leader regardless of their title. People report to their peers and hold each other accountable. They are decision makers, and in turn, are advancing their skills at a much faster pace.

Improved business performance: Nurse Next Door has experienced 20 percent growth year-over-year. By encouraging team members to be bold and disruptive, they drive innovation and create significant competitive advantages for the organization in the home care industry.

Given these accomplishments, how can you create a faster, leaner culture of accountability and encourage autonomy in your organization?

Five Things You Must Know About A Culture Of Self-Leadership

Cathy shared five tips to help your team embrace a culture of self-leadership.

1. Self-leadership doesn’t mean your team makes decisions in a vacuum. Formalize how you want your team to give you updates and when they should seek your advice. Expect some collateral damage if you don’t, because people might make decisions and you have no idea what is going on. Perhaps they didn’t inform you of what they were doing, didn’t seek advice, or didn’t make the best decision. Clear up any communication gaps.
2. Work together on the ‘what’ and let your team figure out the ‘how.’ But, don’t just jump ship immediately. You need to establish guidelines and create alignment in order for this to be successful. To implement a culture of self-leadership, your team needs to understand your strategy. If your team doesn’t know why they are doing something, regardless of their effort, the purpose is lost because they don’t have a clear picture of the goal.
3. Create a culture of feedback. Have the necessary and hard conversations with your team. Establish your culture of care and trust. Whether you build trust through weekly updates, one-on-ones or a systemized process, it is important to develop an authentic relationship with your team. By establishing trust with your people, you are building the foundation for success.
4. Have high expectations of your staff. If you don’t, they won’t. Expectations hold people accountable. Come up with your own customized “Ten Skills That Require Zero Talent List” to set the basic expectations of your self-led players. This will be incredibly helpful in creating stepping stones to a culture of self-leadership. If you expect mediocrity you will get mediocre results. Expect excellence.
5. Allow the personal and professional to blend. Welcome authenticity and respect. You must establish respect and trust with your people and genuinely care about them, otherwise a culture of self-leadership will not thrive. “I believe one of the reasons that self-leadership works so well at Nurse Next Door is because people come to work with the same respect they carry in their personal life,” says Thorpe. Imagine how exhausting it is for people to show up to work every day having to be someone else. How can you expect them to give it their best and connect with your culture if they are constantly pretending?

“As a medium-sized organization, a culture of self-leadership works exceptionally well,” says Thorpe. “I believe a culture of self-leadership can be effective in any organization, but this model is not for everyone. Some people feel comfortable being told what to do and some leaders don’t feel comfortable leading less. From our experience, we find this model works best for self-led players who can accept feedback.”

This article originally appeared on Forbes.

The post Embrace a Culture of Self-Leadership to Stay Agile as You Scale appeared first on gothamCulture.

International expansions are particularly tricky. With offices dotting the globe, executives lose the ability to have a personal relationship with each team member. This disconnect makes it challenging for leaders to develop credibility and ensure employees understand the reasoning behind corporate decisions and strategic initiatives. Open-door policies are tough to maintain, particularly because you can’t just drop by someone’s desk or office to check in. When employees are out of sight, they’re often out of mind.

Regardless of the reason for the expansion — whether through organic growth, the acquisition of an existing business in a new region, or building out a new team or office to serve a new market — it’s difficult to preserve a strong, consistent company culture. Effective communication is essential to overcoming any hurdles as your company grows.

The Consequences of Poor Communication

A communication breakdown can have detrimental effects on company culture, including disunity and distrust of leadership. These issues are problematic for any organization, but they can be particularly troublesome during an expansion.

Even the best intentions can quickly turn into messages of impending failure. I worked with one CEO whose communication flub ended up costing him dearly. He wanted to communicate a change in the company’s financial strategy to the team, but he decided to share that information via email. As soon as he hit “send,” the rumor mill began to churn.

The company was shifting resources to increase cash flow and become less reliant on credit, with the ultimate goal of ensuring the company’s financial stability and putting it in a better position for merging or acquiring other businesses. The short-term strategy required, however, that the company freeze budgets and hiring activity and embrace more conservative performance bonuses.

Naturally, the rumors were a lot juicier than reality. People questioned the company’s financial stability, speculating it was preparing for a hostile takeover. Others felt so anxious about the situation that they left the company. The entire organization was clouded in doubt, and the culture spiraled out of control — all because of one email.

The CEO tried to remedy the situation by traveling across the country to deliver his message in person — showing body language, emotion, compassion, and passion — at town hall meetings and through one-on-one conversations with staff in the field. Unfortunately, a lot of damage was already done, and insecurity was planted in the back of people’s minds. This was before the company had even expanded, but it was in the early stages of preparing for incredible growth.

The message could have been disseminated much more quickly and cheaply with quite a bit less heartache. Email might be a great tool for reaching people, but the one-way nature of the medium isn’t the most engaging format. To avoid spreading panic across the company, he could have used email coupled with other types of technology to speak directly with each employee about his strategy.

Tools to Preserve and Enhance Your Culture

With employees spread across multiple cities, countries, or continents, it can be a challenge to keep everyone on the same page. Beyond a unified company handbook, it’s critical to ingrain the company’s values, goals, and culture in every employee through regular communication and modeling: onboarding, newsletters, video updates, internal blog posts, team-building programs, and training.

Much of company culture is relational and based on good communication. It’s tricky to maintain any sense of solidarity among employees who rarely or never interact in person. It’s even more of a challenge if team members hail from different parts of the globe, as you have to account for different regional cultures and communication norms. Thankfully, modern technology can safeguard the way your team works together as you expand. If you think that you might struggle to expand by yourself then you could consider using Champions of Change to help you out. Every business relies on smooth running IT systems and this company is one that could help you with that.

1. Videoconferencing

Some messages are better delivered in person (like my example above). When face-to-face can’t happen, the next best thing is video conferencing. It allows people to put a face and personality to a name, pick up on nonverbal cues, and create personal connections. My company uses Zoom, but you could also try GoToMeeting, Skype, or Google Hangouts, among others. If one employee works remotely, everyone should call into a meeting virtually. Culture is about creating shared experiences.

2. Social Networking

Instead of only providing top-down communication, encourage employees to start a dialogue. Social networking and chat tools provide a great way for employees to interact with one another despite geographical differences. They allow workers to celebrate successes, create shared memories, and unify.

My company uses a tool called WeVue to post weekly updates, publicize birthdays across the company, and celebrate big wins for our teams. WeVue promotes culture through sharing pictures and videos of employees’ cultural experiences inside and outside of the office. You might also try Slack or creating internal Facebook pages for your organization.

3. Collaborative Tools

Workplace culture is partially a result of how work gets done. If you can find a way to work together — ideally in real time — you’ll inspire a culture of collaboration, patience, partnership, and coaching.

One tool we use is Google Docs, a service that stores and synchronizes files, allowing team members to collaboratively edit documents, forms, presentations, and more. We also use MindMeister, an online tool that allows multiple users to simultaneously capture, develop, and share ideas visually, enabling colleagues to brainstorm and plan projects regardless of location.

There’s one caveat: None of these tools is a panacea. You’ve probably already used some of these tools or at least heard of a couple. To be truly effective, they require leaders to encourage and reinforce their use — and to use the tools themselves.

So turn on your camera, drop your frequently used files into the cloud, and celebrate one another on social networks. Don’t rely on dated mediums such as email or the phone when another format would be more effective. The best tools in the world are useless if you avoid them. By successfully integrating collaborative technologies into your organization, your company culture can flourish — even across the world.

This article originally appeared on Business2Community.com.

The post How Technology Can Save Your Company Culture During an Expansion appeared first on gothamCulture.

One of the more challenging stages of the process is a business’ adolescence. It’s no longer a scrappy startup but not yet a full-grown business with established and consistent processes.

Cultivating a workplace culture that embeds the right norms and consistent operations isn’t easy during this stage. The environment is changing rapidly, and like any teenager, the organization is trying to figure out what it wants to be when it grows up. Your team is trying to understand what works and what doesn’t. Leaders are managing the tension between growth and stability. And the rapid pace of both internal and external change can take its toll on everyone involved.

These challenges are often amplified for tech startups. The rate of innovation and change in tech moves at breakneck speed, employee turnover is high, and these leaders are left spinning so many plates as their companies grow that one wrong move can mean disaster. It’s no wonder that only one-third of businesses make it past their 10^th anniversary.

Growing Up Fast

As an entrepreneur myself, I’ve seen this shift happen in real-time at my company, gothamCulture. Things change every day as we evolve and grow into a more mature and sustainable competitor in our space.

Jumping to the next bigger pond can be risky. It requires a lot to grow your organization to that next level of maturity and performance. You need everyone pulling in the same direction to see it through and it demands that leaders make some tough decisions along the way.

Charles Ramsey, CEO of San Francisco-based Sauce Labs, knows all about these challenges. He and I recently discussed how his team has cared for a growing tech company over the last nine years.

Customers come first. “I look at the world from a customer first and technology second perspective,” says Ramsey. “However, Sauce has a very strong engineering-centric culture and I really want to preserve that dynamic. In other words, great code that does not solve a fundamental customer problem is just not very important.”

Culture is not a static concept. “Today, we are enjoying market confirmation for what our founders defined as best practices for testing. Like most growing companies, however, the organization had to go through several cultural and physical iterations to get here.”

An intentional culture drives your strategy. “Culturally, we needed to change from being employee focused to customer focused. Further, we needed to move from selling to anyone and everyone to having an enterprise focus. Changes in both culture and market happened in parallel and it helped align the entire team’s direction.”

So, what can we learn? How can you care for your company culture through its awkward teenage years and set it up for long-term success?

7 Things Every Awkward Teenage Company Needs

1. Choose your clique carefully.

Is your client the primary customer? Is it your team? How about your shareholders? You may need to please multiple stakeholder groups as your company grows, and being very clear about your primary customer will help everyone in the organization prioritize their efforts.

2. Figure out what you want to be when you grow up.

Your teenage company may not know what it wants to be. Like a Choose Your Own Adventure story, there are so many possible directions it’s easy to get drawn down the wrong path.

For Sauce, this finding their direction meant maintaining focus on automated testing before the market had embraced it. “It’s about discipline and rigor in the planning process,” says Ramsey. “There are only so many things that any company can get done in a year and it’s critically important to remain true to the vision without being dogmatic. Again, this is a dynamic and fluid industry and as a SaaS company, we must deliver value or we are going to underperform.”

3. Manage the peer pressure.

As a leader of a growing company, you’ll often take on more future-focused activities while your team members are managing the day-to-day. This is okay. So long as you hire and develop a highly-skilled team that is clear about your intent, you can focus on steering the organization toward the future. Bringing people along with you is essential to ensuring folks understand what your role is and why you’re doing the things you’re doing. Some may try to stop you or change your course but it’s up to you to remain stalwart in your vision.

Ramsey adds, “We have a process that we utilize to track and evaluate market changes, competition and ‘where the puck is going’, as Wayne Gretzky used to say, over the next 12-36 months. It’s important to have a consistent process. We talk to customers and prospects regularly to course correct. And while that feedback is incredibly valuable, at the end of the day it’s not their business to tell us what to do. We have to make some hard decisions, with good but never complete data, and make those changes quickly.”

4. Run for class president.

Part of growing up is making hard decisions that allow the organization to concentrate on one, maybe two things, and do them very well. “Our ‘hard thing’ was committing to and focusing on what was required to be a great enterprise vendor,” says Charles. “To punch above our weight. It was a particularly challenging decision because when we made it, the majority of the software vendors and the investment community focused on low friction, low cost web and inside sales as the ‘model of the future.’ But there is no ‘one model’ and I am 100 percent convinced we made the right decision for our customers.”

5. Workplace culture: nature vs. nurture.

Your culture will happen whether you’re intentional about it or not. And if you dive into the work without first defining who you are and how you want to grow, your startup culture can quickly grow out of your control. Once it’s solidified in the company DNA, it’s a challenge to go back and break the mold.

“This is hard work that never goes away,” says Ramsey. “The filter that every employee uses to examine the company when it comes to the important things — like the opportunity for advancement, learning, fun and growth — changes continually. One of the hardest parts of being a CEO or leader of a team is that you own this and it needs to be examined religiously. If you don’t take care and think about these things, your employee’s next employer will!”

6. To thine own self be true.

“It’s important that Sauce employees believe in the market, the vision for the company, and the fact that we are solving a real customer problem,” Charles explains. “As an executive team, we focus on how we deliver that in an honest and credible fashion. Getting the team to embrace the challenges of building, marketing, and selling an enterprise product has been hard but healthy. When a customer pays 6 to 7 figures a year, they expect you to help them be successful. We are dealing with our customers’ careers. They are betting on us. And our organization needs to understand that it is more about them than it is about us.”

7. Let’s talk about your feelings.

As your organization grows, you as the founder will find it more and more difficult to keep everyone rowing in the same direction. Consider creating space for your leadership team to come together on a regular basis to align around what’s most important and help them develop the capability to communicate the message throughout the organization.

Enjoy The Journey

Taking care of a company as it grows up is no small feat. And if you’re one of the fortunate business leaders who has led your company through nine or ten years of growth, take a moment to celebrate. Everyone on your team is working hard to move the company in the right direction, so taking a moment to pause, reflect, and give yourself and your team a pat on the back can help boost morale during this trying time.

To steal a line from Ferris Bueller: Life in a growing teenage company moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.

This article originally appeared on Forbes.

The post How to Care For Workplace Culture Through Its Awkward Teen Years appeared first on gothamCulture.

Unfortunately, misconceptions about high performing culture develop from these stories, and many well-intentioned business leaders have tried to emulate these startups in their quest to improve their culture and performance.

Let’s dig in and dispel some popular myths about what you need to have in a high-performance culture:

#1: A “cool” vibe.

While it may seem that a waterslide snaking through your office will promote innovation, it usually just leaves you all wet. Many high-performing companies do have “cool” vibe cultures, but their sustained performance is attributed to much more than the free mocha coolatas.

Startup cultures tend to be manifestations of their founders and leaders — entrepreneurial, risk-taking, and intentionally provocative. And these outward characteristics predicate high-performance when they are founded in values of determination to succeed against all odds, an underdog mentality of never being satisfied, and a youthful exuberance that imitators just can’t match.

Don’t try to be something you’re not. Seek to understand what is truly valued in your organization and ask yourself how those values manifest themselves in the day-to-day. Are these manifestations going to help you or derail you from achieving your goals? “Cool” doesn’t necessarily mean high-performing, and trying to be “cool” when you’re not certainly won’t end well.

#2: A charismatic leader.

Another common myth is that organizations need a charismatic leader at the helm in order to inspire greatness in others. In fact, more recent thinking is quite the opposite. Highly successful CEOs tend to be those who shy away from the spotlight; those who are maniacally focused on the success of the business and who are never satisfied. If your charismatic CEO spends more time on the speaking circuit than in the office contributing to your organization’s success, you may be in trouble.

#3: A startup mentality.

While all organizations must be adaptive to meet the changing needs of the market (an attribute often associated with quick and nimble startups), this is not a prerequisite to success. It may be more challenging to turn the rudder on an ocean liner rather than a dingy, but mature organizations are still able to foster innovative thinking that keeps them competitive. It’s less about a startup mentality and more about understanding your objectives and how your organization’s culture is going to help get you there.

#4: Only leaders can create change.

Leaders can often institute change in existing systems and processes a bit more easily that others in an organization. But, I’ve met a great number of internal change agents over the years who affected sustainable change through influence rather than authority. By focusing their efforts on little victories and on influencing the thoughts and behaviors of one individual at a time, they were able to create a groundswell of support that catalyzed significant change.

Myth-buster bottom line: A culture of high performance is not necessarily a culture that seems catchy. The key is to clarify what you stand for and who you need to be. Execute on the vision of your organization in an authentic way that elicits the behaviors you and your team need to succeed.

Authenticity with who you are as a leader or founder can make all the difference for you and your organization. It helps you, as an individual, bring your best self to work each day and prevents the mental exhaustion that comes with pretending to be something you’re not. It helps others by setting clear expectations about what is and is not acceptable. It also helps set realistic expectations with potential employees as they assess the fit and alignment between their personal values and the values of your organization.

This article originally appeared on Forbes.

The post 4 Things You Don’t Need to Have a High Performance Culture appeared first on gothamCulture.

No matter your organization’s size or industry, however, a culture of innovation may be necessary to evolve and succeed in today’s constantly changing business environment.

We see this need for innovation every day. Digital disruption continues to change the way people work. Competitors are constantly on your heels. National and global events affect the way you operate. As the old adage goes, “the only constant is change.”

The Elements of Organizational Innovation

Best practice insight and technology company CEB recently identified three key elements of a culture of innovation, based on their research.

Environment: Giving permission to challenge assumptions, creating openness to new ideas, and giving freedom to experiment, fail, and learn.

Talent: Implementing training and development programs for innovation, setting and managing innovation performance objectives, and building diverse teams.

Process: Considering broad sources for idea generation and having a process to incubate innovative concepts.

Evolving your organization to better balance all three of these elements in a dynamic operating environment is a challenge, however. An organization can institutionalize processes or development programs, but still struggle to provide the right environment to support them. In fact, failure to support innovation most often stems from an organization’s culture rather than some true operational or resource constraint.

According to a 2016 Gartner Financial Services Innovation Survey, “The biggest threat to innovation is internal politics and an organizational culture which doesn’t accept failure, doesn’t accept ideas from outside, and/or cannot change.”

There are leadership challenges to consider as well. Many business leaders don’t recognize their own unconscious beliefs and behaviors that stifle the psychological safety needed for their organization to embrace innovation.

So, where do you start? How can leaders overcome these challenges and move their organizations toward a culture of innovation?

How to Shape a Culture of Innovation

1. Build Clarity and Alignment Around Innovation. Aligning your team around a common definition of the term ‘innovation’ is a first step. What is it? What isn’t it? How do we know we’re successful? Provide a common framework and language around the topic and ensure people understand that innovation is not simply ‘the act of coming up with new ideas’.

2. Create Psychological Safety. Taking an honest look at how people within your organization react to failure can be a very telling factor when innovation is the goal. If the culture of your organization is one that blames, shames and punishes, the chances that people will feel comfortable displaying behaviors other than sheer compliance are slim to none.

3. Encourage Dialogue. Honest and open dialogue can only take place once people feel comfortable to share their true feelings. Bring people together and create space for them to look each other in the eye and talk through their ideas. This will stimulate and reinforce the behaviors necessary to evolve toward an innovation culture.

4. Challenge Your Assumptions. It’s amazing to me how many people operate day-in and day-out using a fundamental set of “rules” that don’t actually exist anywhere. This is often the case, for example, in highly regulated industries where the regulation mindset bleeds over into every decision that is made. Regulations are in place for a reason, but they shouldn’t prevent you from challenging the rules you’ve put upon yourself over the years.

5. Invite Diversity. Bringing together a diverse workforce can really amplify your ability to innovate. In fact, research suggests that having a diverse set of experiences, perspectives, and backgrounds is crucial to innovation and the development of new ideas.

“Embrace the challenge,” says Jonathon Hensley, CEO of Digital Innovation Agency Emerge Interactive. In addition to the tips above, he suggests that leaders must “treat the root cause of a problem as a catalyst of opportunity. Confront your limitations and build innovation competence by identifying what you don’t know, and what must change in order to enable your organization’s success.”

Innovation is not only possible for your organization, it may be necessary if you hope to keep a competitive edge. But innovation only happens when organizations foster a culture where people feel safe to challenge the status quo, dialogue is encouraged, and leaders embrace the challenge.

This article originally appeared on Forbes.

The post Why Culture is the Heart of Organizational Innovation appeared first on gothamCulture.

A graduate of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, Sandbrook got his start as a leader in the cavalry, serving 13 years before leaving the service in 1992 to take a job with a building materials company.

Working his way up through the ranks in this brick and mortar industry, Sandbrook found himself eventually leading a company with a P&L of $5B and supervising over 22,000 employees across North and South America. In an industry known for hiring senior executives from the native countries where the companies are owned, Sandbrook understood that his options to move to a CEO role would be limited.

But, there he was, 19 years later, facing one of the biggest challenges of his professional career.

Bill found himself at the helm of a new Board and CEO of a struggling building materials company in a down construction market. And despite getting 3 months of reprieve from creditors, banks kept knocking on the door “offering” the support of their turnaround teams.

With only 3 months of runway to turn things around, Mr. Sandbrook had to act quickly.

Sandbrook and his team knew that they had to make some pretty significant plays in short order, but they were limited in their options since the concrete business works off of backlog. Meaning, most of their near-term work was already price-locked.

Sandbrook took to the field to get a full understanding of the situation, spending upwards of 90% of his first few months in the trenches of the operation. After this assessment, several key decisions were made that helped steer the company back into the black.

Here are several key lessons we can learn from this incredible turnaround:

Empower your people to make decisions that drive the business. Sandbrook discovered a culture at U.S. Concrete where field leaders were not given the authority to make critical— or even seemingly minor—decisions. For example, gravel trucks in quarries would sit idle, awaiting a part that would cost the company only a few thousand dollars. “The quarries were producing no product and the equipment was just sitting,” Sandbrook explains. But field operations were required to go through corporate for any and every decision.

“This lack of decision-making authority in the spirit of keeping the operation running smoothly created a culture where managers just began to sit back and let corporate figure it out,” says Sandbrook.

The decision was made to immediately empower managers in the field, many of whom had both decades of experience and deep operational knowledge to make sound decisions at the local level to help drive the company’s performance.

Connect all employees to the core business. Historically, U.S. Concrete was headquartered in Houston, over 200 miles from the nearest operating facility. High office space costs and the physical disconnect from the operation created many barriers. The decision was made to relocate the headquarters to Euless, Texas right next to one of the operating facilities. This move represented significant cost savings in terms of fixed facility costs for the headquarters as well as tax credits.

Sandbrook knows that people want to be a part of a confident and winning team. “When they are, they feel more ownership, they make better decisions, they are more productive, and they enjoy their work more.” The decision to relocate headquarters reconnected the corporate employees, who had never spent time in the field, to the operations side of the business, reducing friction between the two groups.

Acknowledge what you are and what you’re not. In order to get the team working together, they had to acknowledge the fact that concrete is not a sexy business. “It’s brick and mortar work,” says Sandbrook, “we’re not a tech startup.” The employee base had to acknowledge that they were a roll-up-your-sleeves company. Pretending otherwise wouldn’t get the company back to where it needed to be.

Focus on the real stakeholders. Instead of creating a dynamic where employees were required to hold a lot of meetings and prepare endless presentations, Sandbrook did his best to minimize such behavior. “Leaders need to understand that their behavior drives cultural norms. Requiring people to spend all their time preparing and delivering presentations just make people better at giving presentations. I am not the stakeholder people need to be focused on.”

“Rather,” he continues, “we all need to be focused on our real stakeholders: our customers and our shareholders.”

As his three-month reprieve from the banks came to an end, Sandbrook and his team were able to show the start of a successful turnaround and were allowed to continue with their plan.

By his own admission, timing is everything, and the upswing in the construction market added additional wind to U.S. Concrete’s sales. Still, the economy was not the only thing driving the company’s growth from $7M EBITDA to $141M EBITDA and lifting the stock price from $2 to $65 in a few short years.

Lessons Learned

When asked what leadership lessons helped shape his approach, Sandbrook replied, “The military provides you, as a young leader, with a structured process and approach to decision-making. Developing the ability to process multiple inputs and to make multiple decisions effectively requires leaders to work on several fronts at once.”

He goes on to explain that up-and-coming leaders should consider the following as they work to establish themselves in today’s business world.

1. Listen more than you talk. Take the time to listen to your team. Spending the time to sit down one-on-one with your employees and hearing about their day-to-day experience can uncover some powerful insights that would otherwise never come to light.
2. Don’t take yourself too seriously. We are all working in the best interests of the company, but oftentimes, leaders can unintentionally create a barrier between themselves and their team members if they let the power go to their head.
3. It’s okay not to have all the answers. No one has all the answers, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t find them out. Even when you can’t immediately solve a problem, taking the time to show up and research a solution will help establish trust among your fellow team members.
4. Seek out the opinions of others. Leading is a huge responsibility, but you’re not alone, and an outside perspective can help alleviate some of the pressure. Having a mentor or access to a mastermind group to help you think through tough decisions can make all the difference.
5. Avoid managing for the short-term to serve yourself and your compensation package. In today’s business environment it’s not uncommon to see executives making decisions that positively affect business performance in the short-term in order to lock in their personal bonuses. This is problematic when trying to make decisions that are better for the business down the road.
6. Understand the impact your title can have on others. The more senior you become in an organization, the more you must understand the impact of your words and behaviors on others. “There is really never a time when you can let your hair down,” Sandbrook explains. “Your people are always watching what you say and do.”

U.S. Concrete is not a Silicon Valley startup. They aren’t the pioneers of the latest revolutionary product that will redefine our very way of life (although they are conducting some interesting R&D in their industry). Still, they have achieved an incredible turnaround under the leadership of Bill Sandbrook.

No matter what industry you’re in or what you sell, we can all agree that leading a company through change is never an easy task. But stories like these can inspire us all to push through even the darkest of storms, and to steer the ship to calmer waters and strong tailwinds.

This article first appeared on Forbes.

The post Solid leadership: Lessons in the Art of the Turnaround From U.S. Concrete appeared first on gothamCulture.

Global expansion can have a dramatic impact on organizational design and structure, which often means a new centralization of resources. People who have been with the business since its early days may feel they’ve been pushed away from the center and are less in touch with what’s happening. This is especially common in companies that have headquarters in one country but distribute their functions globally. What employees used to experience as flexibility and empowerment now feels like being blindsided and out of control.

I often see this in my work with Fortune 500 companies. One technology company, for example, grew through acquisitions over three years. It needed to centralize its back-office functions — finance, human resources, and IT — to free up time for client-facing work. This shift in responsibilities away from local offices not only changed relationships and job descriptions but also brought up a lot of emotions.

Employees sometimes experience the five stages of grief when facing changes in the workplace. And it’s difficult to implement a smooth expansion if employees are angry or depressed, for example. In the end, change is adopted when people are part of the process. Employees buy into what they help create.

Investing in Human Capital

Whether you’re announcing expansion plans to current employees or building a workforce in a new market, human capital investment is critical. Do you need to transfer some select managers to a new location to build the brand there? Should you hire local talent? What’s the best strategy for connecting with the culture in your foreign offices? Evaluate your team’s strengths and decide which areas would benefit from further leadership training or fresh talent.

Whenever you talk about new hires and directional shifts, long-term employees get nervous. They want the company to succeed, but they don’t want to lose their jobs in the process. Even if you guarantee their safety, they still have concerns about how their day-to-day responsibilities will change. Their jobs are investments in their own futures, and they want to know they’re making a good bet by staying with your organization.

Here’s how you can retain a happy and productive workforce while your company’s market share and profits grow:

1. Communicate, communicate, communicate.

Don’t underestimate the number of times you need to share a message before it’s truly heard. Broadcast expansion details across different platforms, and partner with internal advocates who can relay the information to their colleagues. Be consistent in these messages, and create forums for people to ask questions and give feedback. As JetBlue Airways founder Dave Barger said, “When you think you’ve communicated enough, triple it.”

If you’ve already begun hiring new team members, make sure they receive accurate, up-to-date information as well. Translate any news into the appropriate languages so they feel in the loop, and adapt to the local preferred communication styles.

As the company grows, you’ll find it harder to connect with people individually, but you must stay visible. Leverage video conferencing, company newsletters, and chat services to maintain an open-door policy. Build your leadership bench, enlisting local managers to help deliver a consistent message in each location as an extension of the executive team. The more human touch you can put on the expansion, the more confident your staff will feel.

2. Give everyone a seat at the table.

Once you’ve informed every one of your growth plans, involve them in the initiative. If employees help create the change, they’re more likely to adopt it, so develop action teams or feedback systems through which they can contribute. Hold small meetings with employees, and observe who gets excited about which projects. Then invite everyone — come one, come all — to participate in upcoming strategies. The more voices, the better and more accurate your solution will be.

3. Help your employees grow, too.

Employees don’t want to stagnate in their present positions; they want to improve their skills and earning power. Global expansion presents a great chance for employees to sharpen their analytical, collaborative, and intercultural abilities. Offer continuing development opportunities, such as leadership training and skills workshops.

Employees are more likely to weather the changes that come with expansion if they see paths to advancement within the company. Rather than fretting about their futures, they’ll be excited to be part of a dynamic, growing organization. People want to feel useful, so nurture their desire to learn and let them drive your company forward. Want proof this works? Companies with engaged employees outperform those with low engagement by 202 percent.

4. Build a better mousetrap.

During periods of growth, companies tend to focus first on external targets such as customer satisfaction and market share. Many lag in how and when to bring employees and processes along. But expansion is an opportunity to move beyond the status quo, engaging your team to work toward continuous improvement at all times. Focus on doing things better, not just getting them done.

Hold regular meetings, in person or virtually, to share cross-discipline projects and keep everyone aligned on big-picture goals. This gives employees a chance to ask questions, offer ideas, and address problems that are holding them back. Even brief check-ins will keep employees moving, instead of letting initiatives stall because of a lack of direction.

Measure your human capital investments during your expansion and beyond. By tracking your people development and retention strategies, you can determine which have the greatest ROI and emphasize those in the future. Growth is hugely important in our increasingly globalized economy. But the only way to keep up is to stay connected with your people and let them grow alongside you.

This article originally appeared on Business 2 Community.

The post 4 Ways to Keep Employees Tuned In as Your Company Scales Globally appeared first on gothamCulture.

Throughout the meeting, there was a recurring response: “Steve, the new guy will handle that.”  It got to the point where someone asked, “How many Steve’s did we hire exactly?”

Humor aside, this type of situation isn’t uncommon. A hiring decision is made, but there isn’t much planning done in the interim before their start date. They show up on their first day to either be bombarded with tasks, or left without much to do.

Having spent so much of my career in small businesses, I’ll approach the onboarding quandary through that lens. In my experience, onboarding will typically amount to high level company and project overviews on the first day, followed by putting the employee directly on a project.

When this approach is questioned, the most common reasoning upper management will provide is, “there aren’t enough resources” to do a comprehensive onboarding process, and new hires need to get to work ASAP.

Can’t an onboarding program be comprehensive and light on resources, though? I believe the answer is yes. A small amount of resources can be invested up front that will save your project teams and your new hires time and energy in the long run.

Employee Engagement Starts with Onboarding

Employee engagement begins with onboarding, and shouldn’t start with technical tasking. By putting your employees immediately to work, you risk subjecting them to unnecessary stress and anxiety given they won’t have any understanding around company protocol and expectations. Not to mention that a mismatch of expectations right off the bat could cause a new hire to feel ostracized, and their coworkers to wonder if the right hiring decision was made.

A strong onboarding program should have everyone start off on the right foot. Show employees how company values come to life, and how your company culture plays into the way you do business every day.

You Aren’t in This Alone!

“Buddy” programs or simply having colleagues take the new hire out to lunch goes a long way towards forging bonds and acclimating to their new place of work.  The more comfortable a new hire is, the more productive they will be.  Encourage staff to reach out to the new employee, either in person or by email, to make them feel welcomed.  Gallup research shows that the most engaged employees are the ones who have strong connections to their colleagues and supervisors.

Provide a Space for Feedback

Especially in the first few months, it’s important to provide a space for employees to provide feedback on and ask questions about their work experience free of judgment and pressure.  This is also a great opportunity to gather feedback on your onboarding program, and what can be adjusted moving forward to better benefit new staff.

Don’t let what happened to Steve happen to your employees. Taking the time to walk new hires through how you do business from day one is in your best interest. They will be more engaged from the outset, be better prepared to adapt to the way your organization does business, and feel comfortable adding their own insight and experience to the team.

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But the most important event for me in 2006 was founding my company, gothamCulture.

Last month marked my company’s ten-year anniversary. And as I reflect upon my journey of bootstrapping and growing a professional services firm, I came to the conclusion that what I’ve learned might benefit other entrepreneurs out there who may be growing their own businesses.

I learned many of these lessons the hard way, and I hope they help you avoid the same mistakes.

1. There is a difference between being self-employed and being an entrepreneur. I learned this lesson from a mentor in 2009. It’s a difference that can be illustrated by answering one question: Do you spend your time working in the business or working on the business? Those who are self-employed tend to work in the business, delivering the goods or services that the company provides. Entrepreneurs, on the other hand, focus on growing the business and letting other professionals deliver to customers. It may seem like splitting hairs, but I can tell you from experience, this is a fundamental distinction that had a profound impact on the future of my entrepreneurial journey.

2. Hire the best people for the job at hand. This goes for employees as well as key vendors who can help you focus on the things you do best, like accountants or lawyers. You’re not an accountant, and while you may think that you’re being fiscally responsible by trying to do everything yourself, these activities are likely not something that you’re a) passionate about doing right and b) not something you have the right skills for. Having the right team enables you to focus on activities that have the most impact. Learn to rely on experts so that you can move the business forward in other ways.

3. Leadership is not role-specific. I’ve experienced this throughout my professional life, both in the military and the civilian worlds. I’ve also seen that it’s a terrifically underutilized resource. Just because someone holds a lower role in your organization doesn’t mean they don’t possess tremendous ability to influence others. The trick, I’ve found, is to identify these people and to develop them for roles where they can use that influence in the best interest of moving the company forward.

4. Demand excellence and remove roadblocks quickly. High-performing people often begin to resent those who don’t bring their A game every day. By creating a culture where exceptional performance is the goal and team members are mutually accountable, we’ve created an environment where people are free to raise challenges and concerns and work out solutions to roadblocks. If someone on the team doesn’t meet our mutual expectations, the message is clear and quick. If that person doesn’t get on board, they don’t last long. Your culture isn’t going to be for everyone.

5. Always have a contingency plan (or three!). Things very rarely go according to plan. Rather than rolling the dice and hoping for the best, I learned early on to be very intentional about planning for contingencies. They say in the military that your plan only lasts until the first shot is fired. After that you have to rely on your training. You must be able to adapt in very uncertain environments. Preparing for contingencies rarely results in you having a perfect plan for any possible outcome, but it does help ensure that you’re thinking critically about the variables and you’re not relying too heavily on your primary plan panning out no matter what.

6. It’s all about relationships. People do business with people they know, like and trust. I learned this lesson from a former janitor at the University of Michigan who went on to found and grow one of the largest janitorial services companies in the state. Developing and nurturing honest and mutually beneficial relationships is what makes the business world go round.

7. The structure of your compensation model has a significant effect on day-to-day behavior in the organization. Make no mistake, every system and process in your organization will have significant impact on behavior. I’ve become a self-taught expert on the topic of compensation planning over the years, as I have seen the unintended consequences of these plans play out in surprising ways. Take extreme caution when designing your systems and processes to ensure that they are reinforcing behaviors that align with your values.

8. Every decision we make in terms of our processes is made with the field consultant in mind. Everything we do must from a support standpoint must relieve our field staff from administrative tasks. While we’ll never completely eliminate administrative tasks from our folks in the field, we make every effort to design our systems so our team can spend their time doing what they do best: serving our clients. It’s surprising how quickly a bureaucracy can develop that saddles people with activities that add no value. It’s something you must constantly be on the lookout for. Give your team the tools and support they need to do what they do best.

9. Transparency allows for honesty and trust. My company is an open book. This transparency removes doubt and establishes trust. It also allows for honest dialogue that engages the entire team in providing their ideas and input in ways that have more impact. Because they understand the details of the business, they are able to inform their thinking and provide much better input to help drive the business forward.

10. No matter how well you think you’re communicating; myths will begin to form. These myths may hold people back if they aren’t surfaced and talked about. I make it a practice to listen very carefully to not only what my team says, but how they say it. Minor variations in wording can send clear signals that myths and fables are beginning to spread. This is my trigger to refocus my communication efforts to set things straight. If you don’t actively manage the collective narrative, you may wake up one day to a company that bears no resemblance to your intentions.

11. Play like someone else’s sole mission in life is to eat your lunch. I consider this lesson to be my personal key to success over the years (and it may have stemmed in no small part from some kid taking my lunch in elementary school). At its core, it’s really about passion and hunger. If I can attribute my personal success to any one thing, it would be that I never rest. I never stop to pat myself on the back and I never take my foot off the accelerator. This is because I realize that there are other folks out there who get up every day determined to stake their claim and put us out of business.

I certainly don’t have all the answers. The lessons I’ve learned over the years have come at a cost, but they have been invaluable. I’ve made mistakes (BIG mistakes!), but each one has taught me a critical lesson that I’ve been able to apply in the future.

There is no one right answer in the life of an entrepreneur. No one right path or recipe for success. And it’s exactly this fluidity that make entrepreneurship so appealing to me and others I’ve met over the years. What are your biggest lessons learned? I’d love to hear your own story in the comments section of this article so that we all might continue to learn from each other.

This article originally appeared on Forbes.

The post What I’ve Learned In Ten Years as a Bootstrapped Entrepreneur appeared first on gothamCulture.