« Return to Blog
Leadership-Featured

Culture-Building Best Practices from A to Z with Simon D’Arcy (Ep. #72)

The BetterManager Team
Building Better Managers Podcast Episode 72 - Simon D'Arcy

Building Better Managers Podcast Episode #72: Culture-Building Best Practices from A to Z with Simon D’Arcy

Your company’s culture is either a headwind holding you back or a tailwind helping push you forward toward greater success and productivity. Which is yours? And if it’s not headed in the right direction, what’s the quickest way to turn it around?

Our guest today, Simon D’Arcy, shares culture-building best practices from A to Z, including: why company culture and culture “fit” is so vitally important; the right time to start thinking about company culture; what a great culture looks like and who is responsible for it; creating a culture committee & culture champions; and the importance of gratitude, recognition, and appreciation.

In this episode:

Meet Simon D'Arcy

  • Simon D’Arcy is a speaker, author, executive coach, Founder/CEO advisor, and partner at Evolution, a coaching, consulting and investment firm, where he focuses on helping companies scale without losing their soul.
  • For more than 25 years, he has been part of company-wide culture transformation efforts at Fortune 500 companies and has helped early-stage startups discover and cultivate cultural identities from their earliest days. 

What Is Culture?

  • Culture is the "how we relate" to pretty much every interaction. How we collaborate, how we make decisions, how we respond to breakdowns and conflicts, how we work out differences, how we onboard, how we hire. Culture is the how, it's the right way of how any particular company is functioning.
  • And therefore culture is either a headwind or a tailwind. And there's can be a big difference between what you want your culture to be (the words you may have thrown down on some slides, or on some posters) and the actual day-to-day living of it. The difference between what we aspire to and what's actually happening every day is an exercise that leaders and managers must go through to continually bridge that gap.

What’s the Right Time to Start Thinking about Company Culture?

  • There's a false belief out there that people have about culture as if it's just another thing to be planned or scheduled and then rolled out, done now, but not later, and that it's another box to check, but is not actually that useful.
  • But the fact is that culture is happening all the time. It's no different than profit or accountability or productivity where the right time is always or anytime you can.
  • It's the same for culture. When is the right time? The earlier the better!

What is a Good Culture Code?

  • A culture code is the articulation of your culture, a guide for leaders, managers and employees. to, to then be culture builders. Netflix famously came out with their culture deck and many others followed. You can call it your company's "DNA." It's the why we exist, what's important to us, our core values. But having it documented or codified is important.
  • There are at least three things that your code should have.
  • First it needs to feel authentic. It feels like us, like, oh, yeah, that feels true.
  • Second, it should energize your staff. It should inspire people maybe even make them want to be a better person! It should feel fresh or new in a way that engages their motivation.
  • Third is that it needs to provide specific guidance. If it's too vague or abstract it won't be very effective.
  • A fourth might be that there's no corporate jargon - stay away from the cliches.

The importance of Gratitude and Appreciation

  • Neuroscience informs us that you get a shot of dopamine when somebody calls out and says, "What you did there was really great for our  organization!" Don't keep those things under wraps, make these positive callouts public - it's not only great for productivity, but it also can build credibility in case you do have to have any difficult conversations later. It's effective on multiple levels.

Who’s Responsible for Culture in an Organization?

  • One of the biggest myths that really hamper a lot of culture building efforts is that there's one person responsible for culture - it's the CEOs job, or the Head of People's job, or the Head of Cultures job (there are lots of different names for that role these days). But that's just not the case, it's not even possible.
  • The truth is that it needs to be every manager's job to be a culture builder. Every manager is a culture builder for their team.
  • Every manager, every executive, the C-Suite - it needs to be every person's job because we all are constantly shaping and making choices about how we interact with each other. When that is intentional, aspirational, and in line with the culture code, it become self-perpetuating. So it must move from one person's job to many people's jobs in order to have the greatest effect.

Next Steps

  • If you've identified that culture is a big opportunity for your company, then having one of your top five OKRs focused on culture is a very smart idea. It puts the full organizational might behind it and keeps it really visible for folks. Some examples would be Engagement Surveys or Pulse Surveys.
  • But even more important is to have a team of people that are stepping back, taking time out of the working "in" the business to work "on" the business! There has to be a process of evaluating those OKRs from quarter to quarter and following up with real-world recommendations to improve those metrics.

Downloads & Resources

Follow Simon on LinkedIn, Twitter, and at Evolution.team.

Subscribe to our podcast on your favorite podcast platform!

Check out our blog articles on Leadership here.

Simon D'Arcy

Simon D’Arcy is a speaker, author, executive coach, Founder/CEO advisor, and partner at Evolution, a coaching, consulting and investment firm, where he focuses on helping companies scale without losing their soul. For more than 25 years, he has been part of company-wide culture transformation efforts at Fortune 500 companies and has helped early-stage startups discover and cultivate cultural identities from their earliest days. 

Episode Transcript
(Click to open & scroll on the copy revealed)
BetterManager raises up Executives & Managers at every level