Culture: Second Priority of The CEO Six
How do you know if you have a great culture or not? Here are a few measurable ways to know:
Employees stay for a long time at your organization.
Employees demonstrate high engagement at work.
People publicly celebrate their role with your organization.
Your employees promote your organization to the people in their personal lives.
Employees report feeling a sense of purpose.
Employees report feeling like they belong.
CEO’s can be so spread thin that worrying about culture is the last thing on their minds. Often I hear CEO’s talk about “a feeling” that something isn’t right and they aren’t sure what it is or how to determine it. Culture is where toxicity lives. In order to understand the health of our organization’s culture, we must invite feedback about our organization from the perspective of our employees and other stakeholders regularly. This process is successful when we are curious, open-minded, willing, and responsive. If we ask our teams for their feedback but don’t truly listen, we risk our teams thinking we are falsely interested in the employee experience, or inauthentic. And worse, if we don’t ask at all, we form untrue narratives about what our teams are saying and feeling, and those narratives can shape our own poor decision-making. Our teams also form untrue narratives in our absence and those narratives can shape poor decision-making throughout the entire organization. Toxicity cannot exist in a culture where you and your team are connected and transparent.
With so much going on, how do CEO’s take the time to be curious with their teams in an efficient way? Often CEO’s say to me that if they take time to listen to their teams, they will be buried in the millions of problems their teams reveal. To this I say, what a gift. The fact that your teams want to tell you about their challenges means you have a healthy relationship with them. Should you be the one to address the problems they reveal to you? Absolutely not. Delegation is critical here. Even though you are delegating, you are still using the feedback you get from your teams. You want to look for patterns and themes, and you want to identify the messages that aren’t serving the organization and those that are. It’s this level of information you can use to shape future staff meetings and retreats. It’s this level of information which helps you analyze and think big picture about the state of the organization.
Here are a few tried and true strategies for collecting feedback from your team and taking action:
Create a survey which asks for employee feedback.
Ask for anonymous feedback during a meeting in order to launch a rich discussion in real time.
Meet with your team 1:1 and ask for feedback.
Create a culture committee and empower them to collect feedback and collaboratively take action with you.
Whatever you do, make sure to report back to the team at large about what you learned from feedback collection and how the information is being used.
There are an endless number of ways to build a healthy culture at an organization. When we ask our teams what they want and need, and then take action, it shows up in the health of the culture.
Healthy cultures are defined by the people in them - not the leader. The first step to create a healthy culture is simply to be curious.
Want to go deeper into The CEO Six?
The CEO Six Overview: Priorities that Matter Most