Creating A Culture That Empowers Employees in High Growth Businesses with Jim Tolbert

Are you struggling to develop or align company culture in a high-growth, M&A or VC-backed business environment?

Jim Tolbert, CEO of Adelante Education Group joins us to provide his thoughts on how to drive employee motivation, build trust, deliver customer service success, and laser-focus decision-making across any business landscape.

From Wharton School of Business to Morgan Stanley M&A to McKinsey & Company, then entrepreneurial ventures in post-secondary, for-profit education — Jim has key advice for leaders to help them unpack the complexities of nurturing a culture that empowers employees to excel in high-growth and rapidly changing environments.

Jim shares the challenges faced while steering a rapidly growing organization, emphasizing the delicate balance between expansion and maintaining the company's core values. We also explore what strategies helped Jim cultivate a motivated team to ensure integrity remained at the heart of his culture - even in the most challenging scenarios.

He provides crucial lessons for venture capitalists, angel investors, CEOs, and any high-stakes leaders entrusted with delivering ROI on organizational performance, retaining talent, and boosting bottom-line revenue.
 
This episode is for leaders seeking to foster a robust, employee-centered culture that stands the test of time and delivers growth.

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Transcript

William Gladhart: 0:00

Welcome to the Leadership Levers podcast. I'm your host, Will Gladhart, cmo at the Culture Think Tank. Our Culture Think Tank community is committed to advancing workplace culture and well-being. We're a virtual hub for authors, investors, leaders, managers and employees worldwide to connect, engage in candid discussions, share ideas and explore resources for cultivating a healthy work environment. We're here today to learn about the actions leaders have taken to address cultural change. Our guest today is Jim Tolbert, CEO of . Thanks so much for taking the time to join us. Excellent. I thought we would start by having you share with the audience a bit about yourself, your organization and your background.

Jim Tolbert: 0:47

Sure be my pleasure. I grew up, I started my career in a very traditional sort of business school MBA path. I went to Wharton undergrad. I worked for Morgan Stanley's Mergers and Acquisitions Department for three years. I went to the University of Chicago and got my MBA and had the incredible privilege of working for McKinsey and Company for six years in their financial institutions group.

Jim Tolbert: 1:15

It was after six years at McKinsey that I decided to pursue a career as an entrepreneur and the area that I got into was education for-profit post-secondary education and while that is somewhat of an esoteric industry, I grew up in that business. My dad had schools in Baltimore, Maryland and that's sort of where I got my exposure and it was through that and the work I had done at McKinsey and financial institutions that I left to start a company with some backing of venture capital to provide financing to students that went to trade schools and for-profit colleges a somewhat niche of the higher education space. That led me to actually working with a private equity group to invest in a school in Birmingham, Alabama, virginia College. After a very successful exit from that investment, I went in to start my next company as the CEO and founder of another post-secondary education group called Education Futures Group which in turn did business as Vista College, and we had quite a run over 17 years at Vista College.

William Gladhart: 2:30

That's a great background. I know some of our audience members that are in the VC Angel Space, and also fellow CEOs, will really appreciate some of your thoughts. So we'll be discussing three questions today as a warm-up to start our conversation. Would you share while you believe that healthy culture is critical?

Jim Tolbert: 2:47

Absolutely. I think there's several reasons, but the primary reason is that the both the owner as well as the managers of a company cannot micromanage every activity of an employee, particularly when that employee is in a situation where they're not being closely supervised. So you hope that that employee is going to make the best decisions for the company, which ultimately means making the best decisions for the customer, or usually means that. So I think of several examples where you can set a culture and, into the extent that that culture gets embedded in the organization, you have a higher confidence level. Your employees will conduct themselves professionally the way you would hope.

Jim Tolbert: 3:33

You know one is honesty. If you have a culture of honesty and integrity, even when you're not overlooking those employees, you will have a higher confidence level. They were act that way, whether it's customer service. If you have a high culture of customer service, again, you can trust that the employees who are not being directly supervised will pursue and make decisions in that. The other reason why I think culture is important is for motivating employees, motivating the team. In today's incredibly competitive job market, having a motivated team that is working in the best interest of the company and will stick with you is key to success.

William Gladhart: 4:11

I love that you brought up micromanaging. It's the top requested Stop behavior we see quite frequently, both from managers but also from leaders, so you're spot on in mentioning that. So what do you see as the biggest challenge leaders face when addressing cultural change within an organization, or maybe share what specifically challenges you faced in your own organizations?

Jim Tolbert: 4:32

You know, from my perspective, I think the biggest challenges that we had with culture was managing culture through a high growth environment and in the situations I was in, we were growing very rapidly and that meant a couple of things. One was a an evolving culture that, whereas you know, we may have had a very entrepreneurial seat of the pants approach early in our corporate life as we grew larger, by necessity we had to create systems and processes, and being able to sort of evolve a culture of an organization going through high growth without losing what ultimately is the goal of the organization is key, and a big part of that is particularly in a high growth environment. You're adding a lot of employees and, while you may have had a older group or tenured group core group of employees that got the culture as you expand significantly, both the number as well as particularly in geography I think that provides a tremendous challenge for maintaining a culture of an organization.

William Gladhart: 5:32

Again, spot on with thinking about not only locations, high growth, you know, in that high growth and mid-sized company, it's where you know we tend to find or discover the most challenges. You know, at the manager and leader level is just, the company was 50, 12 months ago and now it's 150. And who is everybody? You know, who are all the rest of the people on the team. So what do you think that leaders can do to address the challenges they're facing, or what have you done?

Jim Tolbert: 6:01

Well, I think there's a number of things.

Jim Tolbert: 6:03

One is you know, to the extent that you can communicate the culture, don't sort of take it for granted. This is who we are. There's plenty of opportunities for leaders to be out there talking with the team and being very deliberate and saying hey, we have a culture of. In my case, we had a highly regulated business and we said compliance and integrity are absolutely the key to our success and the lack thereof would be the destruction of our company. So we were incredibly deliberate in communicating that at every opportunity. And the other one that I think is frankly going to go without saying is you know, walk the walk. You know it's one thing to say we are a culture of blank. You know, integrity, customer service, what have you? But everyone's looking to the leaders of the company and saying Are they demonstrating those activities that they're, that they're proposing? And so I think leaders of an organization have to be very cognizant, sensitive to the fact everyone's looking to them, not only listening to what they're saying, but watching what they're doing. Thank, you.

William Gladhart: 7:07

Is there anything else? Some parting thoughts that you'd like to share for other leaders?

Jim Tolbert: 7:13

You know this is also sort of a tried and true observation Cultures great companies have very strong cultures. There's no one size fits all. This is the culture you need to be at circumstance dependent, at situation dependent. But I think those companies that have been tremendously successful have decided what they successful strategy they need to have and have done a great job of incorporating that throughout the organization.

William Gladhart: 7:42

Jim, I've enjoyed having you on our Leadership Levers podcast. Thanks again for your insights. My pleasure, thank you. Thank you for joining us on the Leadership Levers podcast. You may find all our Leadership Lovers episodes in our Culture Think Tank community at www. culturethinktank. ai. Join the community at no charge and tune in weekly as we invite leaders to share their experiences in strengthening culture, one action at a time.