How to engineer culture from the inside out

If individuals are cells in the superorganism of humanity, companies are its organs. Let’s make sure they are healthy.

In today’s newsletter I’m talking about how to create a company culture that drives better results and amplifies the best version of you and your team:

• The value of mental health in your company design
• How to Do Your Best to Create an Epic Company Culture
• Four personal benefits of designing your company culture from the inside out
• The Consequences of a Culture Without Coherence (What Fallon Did Wrong and What You Don’t Need to Do)
• Company benefits from intentional cultural design

Earlier this year, in response to the rising statistics of stress and mental illness among founders, over 100 venture firms and several hundreds of individual investors announced their dedication to incorporating mental wellness into their portfolio companies and founders’ journeys. Signed the Founder’s Pledge.

Meanwhile, the authors of Play Bigger (most emphatically, Christopher Lochhead🏴☠️) argue that the design of a company culture is based on three primary areas of focus required for a business interested in taking 76% of the market in its category. Is one of.

Creating mentally healthy, stellar company cultures is the way forward.

Game of Life Rule #8: Put your kingdom and well-being first.

Let’s think about designing company culture as part of your whole life.

You have the cultures of nations and states, at home and at work.

Every culture influences and influences you.

Most are not designed to support you “being your best.”

The solution is to start cultural design from the inside out. In fact, start from within.

While most people wait for a win, or wine, or a warm sunny day to feel good, you change the primary driver of your state (colloquially, your mood) from the environment (stuff out there) to the personal (stuff). ) want to change to. under your control). In this case, the things you control are your operating conditions and noticeable parameters.

Here’s a reminder:

Freezing your experience of the world through control over your own muscles and senses gives you control over your reality in a way no one else can.

As part of mastering this deeply stable way of being, you become increasingly coherent.

Consistency is the hallmark of high performance. And this happens because the process of stabilizing this fundamental way of being is a process of getting every aspect of your mind, body, spirit, behavior, emotions, values ​​and thoughts to work in an integrated and coordinated manner.

This is the starting point of building culture from the inside out.

Design your company culture by starting with what you do best. Identify like this:

• What do you value?
• What goals do you want to achieve?
• How will you know when you’ve achieved them?

keep it simple. Get in tune with your best inner feeling. Add 3-4 core values ​​by which you want the culture to live and die.

culture is the company , Christopher Lochhead

Remember, behavior engineering is an approach to intrinsic well-being and culture of well-being and performance that you can measure, modify, optimize, and perfect.

The cost of doing this is:

1. Direction. If you don’t know where the finish line is, how can you win the race? Most cultures and most people are fragmented and full of various kinds of inconsistencies in the way they organize themselves, their beliefs, behaviors, and life. In turn, most cultures are inconsistent and perform poorly. Defining what you want culturally gives you a north star toward which to aim. The only way to ensure optimal and reliable results from your culture is to design it with intention.
2. Decisiveness. Running a business is hard. You face difficult decisions on many fronts. Indecision results in increased stress, which is the death knell for health, happiness, and internal and company well-being. Knowing the culture you want and the mission you’re on creates decisiveness and direction.
3. Contagion. Consistency and confidence come to the fore. They give you a different identity and create attraction towards you. They come through your words, your voice, your posture and beneath it all, permeating everything, your energy. Consistency or inconsistency is the fundamental thing on which you are always communicating.
4. Amplification. As you create a culture that aligns with your own internal well-functioning state and the values ​​you prioritize, the orientation, habits, and behaviors of the people within that culture will evolve into an ecosystem that supports those values. Supports and strengthens.

A recent Rolling Stone article described a “toxic” work environment at The Tonight Show, apparently fueled by the erratic situation and unpredictable mood swings of the show’s host, Jimmy Fallon.

This resulted in:

• Constantly Changing Leadership Teams – Nine Listeners in Nine Years
• Seven former employees claim their mental health has been affected
• “A tense and ‘pretty sad atmosphere’”
• A piece in Rolling Stone that I can only imagine is pretty embarrassing for the network, and most of all for Fallon himself, who generally seeks to bring joy to the world through his affability and charm.

I wasn’t there, and I have no interest in evaluating Fallon. Rather, I want to point out the simple truth: Based on the stories, it is Fallon’s own inconsistency that led to the cultural issues.

Culture flourishes through leadership.

In a similar but contrasting manner, both John Oliver and Stephen Colbert praised Job Stewart for the unusually kind and supportive culture he created at The Daily Show.

Because culture emanates from an organization’s leaders, and inconsistencies in leaders spread like a virus through the culture, it’s important to design your culture with intention and start by prioritizing its internal well-being and coherence, which means internal Identifying and resolving discrepancies. ,

Let me say this even more emphatically: For a high-functioning, healthy culture, it is essential that leaders:

• Put your mental fitness and the stability of your operational state at the center of your life
• Adopt this approach to life and business at all times (Stand by your word)
• Support everyone in doing this by creating corporate (and family) cultures that place each person at the core of being their best.

• Healthy, high performing humans create healthy, high performing companies
• Radically improved mental health and fitness of all members
• Deep cultural and mission alignment
• Better production and increased performance
• Better communication in all directions
• Better alignment and performance in achieving KPIs

Joe interviewed over 100 Navy SEALs over six months and discovered the unique challenges they faced.

Next, to support that community through those challenges, he created The Honor Foundation, a career transition program for U.S. Special Forces.

The Honor Foundation helps special operators transfer their distinguished military service to the private sector. Before THF, the job offer rate in this community was very low (somewhere in the teens). Through THF, his job offer percentage reached the high 90s.

The 12-week program provides a bridge between some of the world’s most distinguished people and some of the world’s top companies.

After hearing Joe’s story and THF’s story, I immediately offered my time to be one of the mentors for a group coming through the program.

They accepted my offer, but decided that I would best serve the organization as their advisor.

During this time as a consultant I got a masterclass on culture.

Here’s what he did:

• Understand the community it serves from the inside out and the key challenges they face
• An organization formed to serve that community and its needs
• Brought in a behavioral engineer (me) to ensure my mental fitness and high performance
• Established a mission, a vision, and a why that was compelling to everyone who heard it (for example THF’s mission: We exist to serve others with dignity throughout life. So that their next mission is always clear. Be and continue to impact the world.)
• Ensured that every decision made supported the mission and the culture it was creating
• THF consistently promoted the problem it was solving, the community it served, and used the language of service and respect to communicate this.
• Accomplished your goals and the organization’s goals

What came next took the culture to the next level.

A year into my role, we were developing a new aspect of the program aimed at creating a deeper cultural match between the personalities of the graduate fellows and the companies we were connecting them with.

To do this, we dug deep, visiting these companies and talking to leaders, so we could get a feel for the culture and the driving values ​​and personalities behind those cultures.

• Facebook, with its campus-designed-by-Disney experience and everything on-premises, had a different feel than Google, with its primary colors and cycles (and everything on-premises).
• Google’s main campus was different from their experimental branch Google
• OpenGov felt its mission more limited and narrow with its software-for-government
• Palantir, Big Tech’s answer to the military industrial complex, was intense due to Big Tech’s happiness being much lower than that of the rest of the companies.

This is exactly the kind of thinking that creates deep, long-term value for everyone involved. Mapping out a company’s culture and ensuring it resonates with each person’s personality ensures synergistic results that improve the performance and well-being of everyone involved.

No culture is perfect, it is just perfect for the right kind of person. And when that resonance is there – it’s magic.

I partner with founders and leaders of high-impact companies in intensive 2-day settings to build unique company cultures from the inside out, empower top performers to overcome challenges, achieve holistic success, and create a legacy that shapes a brighter world. I work with leadership.

motiv If you want to bring out your best self and create a work environment that brings out the mission-driven best in each person, come check us out.

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Source: evolvinghumanity.medium.com