Your Culture Iceberg is Melting - Rebuilding Company Culture & Performance with Burt Rosen

Is your culture iceberg melting - and no one sees it but you?

Join us with Burt Rosen, CEO and founder of Hold On to Hope, as he shares his insights on rebuilding organizational culture and improving employee performance.

Drawing from his transformative work at Knoxville Area Rescue Ministries (KARM), Burt reveals the powerful link between a healthy work environment and mission success. He tackled financial and cultural crises head-on, inspired by leaders like Tom Pratt, to create a space where employees felt safe, heard, and valued. 

Walking around the organization, listening to staff needs, and asking questions helped Burt identify the challenges of cultural rot and lack of staff performance - created from a culture of fear and inaction - discovering he had to meet the challenges head-on and take dramatic steps. 

Discover the performance impact of his "Iceberg Dialogues" strategy - developed from Our Iceberg is Melting by John Kotter - and the crucial role of core leadership in steering and driving positive change.

Inspired by Patrick Lencioni's Death by Meeting, Burt highlights the urgency of cultural transformation, prioritizing values, and making tough decisions for the greater good - which drives down into who is being served, customer satisfaction, and talent retention/ attraction. 

This episode is packed with actionable strategies for continuous cultural assessment and reinforcement, including a discussion of "necessary endings" to create a thriving workplace. 

Tune in for an enlightening conversation that promises practical tools for leading and sustaining cultural change in your organization.

Connect with Burt on LI

Hold on To Hope Website & Support Resources

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Chapters

• 0:00 Cultural Change Challenges and Solutions
• 9:57 Building a Strong Organizational Culture

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.

William Gladhart: 0:30

Our guest today is Burt Rosen, the CEO and founder of Hold On to Hope. Thanks for taking the time to join us.

Burt Rosen: 0:38

Hey, W ill, thanks so much for giving me the opportunity to join you this afternoon.

William Gladhart: 0:42

Not a problem. I thought we'd start by having you share a bit with our audience, a bit about yourself, your background and your organization and some of your past organizations also.

Burt Rosen: 0:52

Sure, I have been married to my childhood sweetheart, Carolyn, for 51 years. We were fixed up on a blind date when we were 16 years old. Wow! Grew up in Miami, Florida, and we have moved around a little bit, moving from Miami to Louisville, Kentucky, then to Washington DC, then Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and for the last 21 years, we've been here in Knoxville, Tennessee. We've got four grown children two boys and two girls Matthew, Jeremy, Anna and Rebecca and an 11-year-old grandson, Isaac, career-wise.

Burt Rosen: 1:25

With the exception of five years in manufacturing, I've spent the last 50 years in nonprofit work with three organizations, the last 20 of which was as president and CEO of Knox Area Rescue Ministries, also known as CARM and you'll hear me make reference to that providing services to the homeless, poor and needy of East Tennessee Daily.

Burt Rosen: 1:43

We're home to about 400 men, women and children and serve just over 1,000 meals every day, and we did all this without any government funds. Just before retiring from CARM, Carolyn and I co-founded an organization called Hold On To Hope, which is where we spend our time now. We come alongside families who, like us, have a missing loved one, and sometimes you just need someone to help you hold on to hope. We don't do searches, though sometimes we can assist on that. But if you're listeners and you could imagine having a son, a daughter, a loved one who went missing, and as time goes by, hope begins to wane and sometimes you just need someone to help you hold on, someone to talk to someone, to listen, someone to understand, and that's what we do today.

William Gladhart: 2:30

That's really cool. Well, thank you so much for sharing that. We'll be discussing three questions today as a warm-up to start our conversation. Would you share why you believe a healthy culture is critical?

Burt Rosen: 2:40

Sure, so many have written so much about that particular topic, but, in short, my experience has been that there's a direct correlation between cultural health and fulfilling the mission, whether it's productivity, customer satisfaction, employee engagement. When the culture is healthy, it permeates everything else that you do and, conversely, when it's a sick culture, you see the exact opposite of that. Well, someone once said culture eats strategy for lunch. I have found that to be true.

William Gladhart: 3:20

Very true. So let's begin with our first question. You alluded to it a little bit and we chatted about it during our conversation, but what do you see as the biggest challenge leaders face when addressing cultural change, or what was the specific instance that you faced in an organization?

Burt Rosen: 3:38

I had been with Prison Fellowship Ministries for 17 years. This was the organization founded by Chuck Colson, who spent time in prison for Watergate-related offenses after serving in the White House with President Nixon, and we had a culture that reflected who Chuck was and how he operated - very efficient, very professional. And then I came to CARM and I was surprised by what I found when I joined the organization. I started in May of 2003. We are July-June a fiscal year, so 60 days left in the fiscal year that we're about to finish. Just shy of $700,000 in the red, a half-million dollar r line of credit, all but exhausted. Employees just kind of pretty much doing whatever it is they wanted to do.

Burt Rosen: 4:25

And I began looking at this and I said what on earth have I got myself into? I quickly began to put into play something that I had learned from a guy by the name of Tom Pratt. Tom was a senior vice president for R&D at Herman Miller and he had become president of Prison Fellowship, and one of his words of wisdom to me he said Bert, always remember that every sound of the sail means something to the sailor. He was a yachtsman and did a lot of sailing off Lake Michigan and he said walk around a lot.

Burt Rosen: 4:52

And so that became the first thing that I began to do walk around, look, listen and begin to get a feel for what the sails were telling me inside the organization and begin to get a feel for what the sales were telling me inside the organization. And it became very clear that not only did we have some significant financial challenges, we also had a culture that was very sick. And it was that sick culture that was also contributing to what was really problematic inside the organization.

Burt Rosen: 5:19

And I remember having my meeting with the board of directors and saying to them I don't know how to tell you this, but the Titanic, which has been around since 1960 and referring to CARM, this is now 2003, the Titanic is going down if we don't do something dramatic. And that really became the change for what we did.

Burt Rosen: 5:37

But the number one thing that I saw was no sense of concern, no sense of urgency. People were permeated with fear. They didn't want to ask questions. In fact, they were told pretty regularly you're not here to ask questions, you're here to do what I tell you. I being T he COO who was in place then, who did not remain a COO very much longer after I got there-

Burt Rosen: 5:59

yeah, I think that's a great story, but also an example of a leader not knowing what they were walking into and then having to take the time to observe, listen but also start to understand what the major hurdles and challenges were, I think when you and I had chatted previously. I think your Titanic example is fantastic because everyone remembers in the movie that the musicians are playing along as the boat is sinking and it's just the last hurrah and that's what it sounds like it was at the organization when you first stepped in as a leader.

Burt Rosen: 6:45

mentioned

Burt Rosen: 6:46

.

William Gladhart: 6:46

Yeah, that's amazing. So what do you think leaders can do to address the challenge they are facing? You mentioned a couple of things that you did specifically, or what did you do as either those next steps or facilitating that change. who

Burt Rosen: 6:59

One is, I think, that the leader whether you've been there a while or you're new to the organization, like I was you got to meet it head on. You can't bury your head in the sand and pretend that it doesn't exist. And that starts with the top leader and the senior leadership team. And if we assume there needs to be a culture shift, the entire team has to be on board in order to set the tone. Now, in our particular case, my wife is indirectly responsible for what happened. She bought me this book by John Cotter out of Harvard called Our Iceberg is Melting, and so I picked the book up. I read it from cover to cover and I thought to myself I think Karm's iceberg is melting.

Burt Rosen: 7:41

Now the storyline in the book it's all about changing and succeeding, and in that he outlines eight steps. I won't take the time to go through them, but he outlines eight steps in there that are absolutely necessary to produce needed change. Now it's a great story about a colony of penguins who are living on an iceberg that they don't think will ever melt, and they can just keep doing what they've always done the way they've always done it, and everything will be fine, except for one penguin named Fred, who suspected that maybe there was a crack. He ran a little litmus test, and when he did, he discovered that the test verified that the ice could have a crack, the iceberg might melt, and if it did and they did not know how to adapt to change, if they didn't change the way they did things it could be the end of the entire colony of penguins At CARM. I became Fred. Now the book is wonderful because it has a variety of characters and every character has a personality, but the one character that I noticed most prevalent inside the walls of CARM was a character called No-No, and, as you could surmise, the answer to everything whether we have a problem, is there something wrong in our culture, anything we need to correct Nope, nope, everything is fine. And so when I tested that out with our leadership team, I discovered that most of them were no-nos. Everybody thought everything was just fine, and so I gave all of them a copy of the book, and that led to what became known as the iceberg dialogues, and we met before hours every Monday morning, chapter by chapter, and we began exploring whether or not the Karm iceberg might be melting.

Burt Rosen: 9:20

And then, once we acknowledged that it did, the next question becomes what are we going to do about it? He actually does his first three steps in that. Number one create a sense of urgency. Number two pull together the guiding team. Number three develop the change vision and strategy. And so we started with that senior team.

Burt Rosen: 9:40

And now, if you take another cue out of good to great, get the right people on the bus and get them in the right seats. We had to determine if the people on the senior team were the right people to have on the leadership bus bus, because they were going to be the ones that owned the strategy and drove the strategy forward. We then gave the book to 20 other directors and managers inside the organization. We expanded the iceberg dialogues and we brought everybody into it. That really began the evolution of change. And we kind of coupled that with Pat Lencioni's book Death by Meeting, where he or the Advantage he's written both of those, but one of those forces you to answer the question what's most important? And so for us, recognizing that our culture needed to change, doing that with a degree of urgency because the Titanic was going down, and then focusing on what was most important, and that really became the approach we took that ultimately led to what I would say was a cultural revolution inside the walls of karma.

William Gladhart: 10:46

Yeah I love that you shared that it started with the core leadership team Iceberg, and the Iceberg started to grow and grow and expand out. And who would have thought the Iceberg Diaries would be a next step for a nonprofit organization to ultimately transform the entire culture of the organization itself, but transform the work of the mission as well?

Burt Rosen: 11:13

of the organization itself, but transform the work of the mission as well, yeah, and so the one byproduct of all of that is that it pushes down, and the ultimate recipients of that are the people that are coming through our doors every day, or, for others, it's the customers that are coming to your business every day, and when the culture is healthy, it reflects in those you serve and it reflects in how customers respond to your business and it attracts others, because word gets around. This is the team I want to be a part of.

William Gladhart: 11:39

Yeah, I think that attraction, retention, performance, alignment of vision and mission is absolutely key, and what a great testament to your leadership to be able to step into that and affect that change over " time. Now I know that this is a short story, but this was a much longer journey because a lot of leaders forget that. They're like oh, it was an assessment, oh, we did a one-time thing that's going to fix it. I think your story reflects a much longer journey of putting pieces and processes in place, so I appreciate you've shared those elements. Is there anything else you'd like to share or add for other leaders?

Burt Rosen: 12:18

I would say leaders should give nonstop attention to your culture, reinforce it at every turn. And it goes back to that quote from Tom Pratt, " Every sound of the sail means something to the sailor. As a leader, pay attention to the sounds of the sails. There's no such thing as an irrelevant comment. There's no such thing as an email that doesn't say something. The meetings, everything tells you something about your culture. Every sound of the sail means something to the sailors. And then, when you notice the sounds, act. This is not one of those. Take a one-minute manager approach and address those things there, because if you don't, it can have a snowball effect. And the next thing you know you're trying to push that proverbial Indiana Jones ball uphill, because the culture is snowballing downhill and it's too late and usually the casualties there are good employees leave, business begins to trail off, and so, leaders, you got to pay attention to that every day You've got your vital statistics, you got your P&Ls, you got all that other stuff.

Burt Rosen: 13:22

But every day check your blood pressure, check your vital signs and don't miss a day where you're not checking that. And then find every opportunity you can to reinforce the things that are good in your culture, but also to speak publicly inside your organization about the things that are counter to the culture you're trying to create. People will get it eventually, and if not, then Maybe not the right people Well it could be.

Burt Rosen: 13:46

Henry Cloud wrote a great book called Necessary Endings, and the gist of that book is sometimes there are necessary endings in organizational life, but the wise leader has to know when you're there and who you may need to ask to step off the bus for the sake of saving the bus.

William Gladhart: 14:04

That's a really great point. Well, Burt, I've enjoyed having you on our Leadership Levers podcast today. Thank you so much for your insights.

Burt Rosen: 14:11

And thanks for the opportunity, Will. I hope it's a blessing to have people who hear it.

William Gladhart: 14:15

Thank you for joining us on the Leadership Levers podcast. You may find all our Leadership Levers 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 experience in strengthening culture, one action at a time.