Hello and welcome to The Growth Workshop Podcast. We talk a lot about culture on this podcast, right? And I think the culture is clearly a big part of this, but where do you start?
Culture is one of these words that is just so overused, I think, and people don't really actually understand what it is. What do we stand for? Actually, do we think the same thing? Do you think the same thing about the company values that I think about the company values? We operate off these myths and assumptions that because we all work for the same company, we all think the same thing. The reality is the complete opposite.
It doesn't matter how many coaching sessions you do of feedback, there's only so far it will take you. So what we need to go down to is actually the cohesion of the group and understand how well do we actually know each other to enable an environment that will allow for feedback to be given and received.
When you look at every successful sports team, whether it's basketball, whether it's football, whether it's rugby, the only thing they have in common is that their cohesion data is through the roof comparative to every other team. This takes a long time to build, you that you cannot reach a playoff match, unless your team have an accumulated 2, 000 minutes of playing together, and about 49 percent of them have come internally through the system.
So 2, 000 minutes of playing together isn't you've played 1, 000, therefore we've played 2, 000. If you've played a thousand, I've played a thousand, and this is the first game we're playing together, we've played zero. So two thousand minutes is two seasons. It's two and a half seasons. you have to dig in, and you have to build it. One way of viewing a team you can go and buy. You can buy a team, the best team. The other one's not for sale. You have to build it.
And this one we know from all the research and all the data is the one that's going to give you the long term sustainable, but how willing are people to dig into that?
What's the advice that you would give to your clients around either a new business that's quite young that doesn't have that depth or a business that's maybe gone through lots of changes and hasn't got a really strong basis or foundation?
So every bit of research out there in this space tells us that actually, the longer you can keep people together, what you get out of the back end of that is social cohesion. And that's where you get the performance benefits, because you build transactive memory, tacit learning, you understand each other. And we know that successful teams aren't built on what people know and what they can do.
It's built on the connection between a group of people and how quickly can you problem solve and how, honest and objective can you be that someone's ballsed up as opposed to just blindly not saying anything knowing there's an error and then six months later, Oh yeah, I thought that wasn't right. Why didn't you say anything?
Is there anything that you would recommend that people need to change to really buy into development?
There's got to be, there's got to be an incentive, there's got to be evidence. Someone's gonna go away and do something , on their own, and then prove the impact it's had, and how that actually helps the whole. So I've gone away and I've upskilled myself in this. By me doing that, actually, I've helped my team because I'm now more proficient in this. So I can better help this problem, which then helps the business as a whole.
Every one of our sessions starts with what we call cards on the table so marketing have to get out their view on the sales team, have to get out of their view. And what you'll find is in reality, there'll be a massive lack of clarity in what actually the two groups do. And everything will be based off assumptions, everything. The reality is once they're blown out of the water, what you get is this level of, Oh, I didn't realize that was how you operate.
So I didn't realize that was a challenge that you guys have to deal with, or whatever it is. So what you get is a base level understanding and acceptance of this is the reality of the situation.
So from the conversation we just had, We've got the stuff we want to keep, that's great, we need to know that because when you're trying to change or add anything into a culture or a system, that can only happen if we have this golden thread of consistency that runs behind that, which is the stuff we're already doing really well. Henry talks around his whole Little Big Things, name of his show is and the premise of that is He got given an 18 month goal to get out of the hospital.
So when he said that, he goes, cool, what do I need to the hospital? I need to get in a wheelchair. To get in a wheelchair, I've got to get out of my bed. To get out of my bed, I've got to breathe on my own. To breathe on my own, I've got to get off the ventilator. To get off the ventilator, I've got to be able to do breathing exercises. So an 18 month goal was reduced into a 5 minute breathing exercise every single day. That was it.
So the framing is, our high ticket items here, these are our 18 month goals, our 18 month get out of hospital goals. So what are your equivalent 5 minute breathing exercises every day that get you closer to it? And what always happens with these sorts of things, by knowing the objective and the ambition, but having that real clarity in, what do I do today? Almost every time, we achieve the thing much quicker than we thought we were going to achieve it.
Because we're able to adapt, we're able to flex, we're able to move, because we're in the moment and we're looking at it. If we're thinking too far up here, all our decision making process is based on that. So we take shortcuts and we make the wrong decisions and we do things for the wrong reasons. Whereas if it's in the moment, cool, I'm just doing this today. And I know that if I do this I'm moving the dial.
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