Evaluating Employee Cultural Fit & Leading by Example with Tom Ragen

Are you concerned that removing a top performer, despite their disruption to your company culture may negatively impact your bottom line? The outcome may surprise you!

Discover the core principles of developing a strong company culture with Tom Ragen, CEO of Color Communications. Tom shares his views on developing the building blocks of a positive company culture, emphasizing the necessity of communication, continuous learning, and well-structured reward systems.

Tom shares a critical leadership lesson - leading by example and valuing cultural fit over individual performance. Exiting a top performer who was assigned to a top revenue-generating customer was a difficult move - several years later, the company is reaping the reward of that leadership decision with stronger sales, enhanced employee performance and improved staff collaboration. 

This episode with Tom is a testament to how the actions and behavior of a leader resonate throughout an entire organization and team.

We touch on a few culture strategies that leaders can immediately take action on, such as nurturing teams toward resilience and collective success. You don't want to miss this critical conversation.

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Chapters

• 0:00 Fostering a Healthy Workplace Culture
• 8:18 Leadership Lovers Podcast Community

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 Tom Ragen, CEO of Color Communications. Thanks for taking the time to join us. Yeah, I appreciate you having me. I thought we would start by having you share a little with our audience, a bit about yourself, your organization and your background.

Tom Ragen: 0:48

Sure, Color Communications is an international company that makes color marketing tools for largely architectural paint companies. So you think Bayer, Benjamin Moore, PPG, Sherwin Williams folks like that, all that color material when you walk into the store to buy paint. That's the product we make. We pride ourselves on innovation, so peel-and-stick have the labels in Sherwin Williams. It's a patent that's over 20 years old for us and we continue to look for innovative products that can help our clients sell their products.

William Gladhart: 1:25

Great thanks so much for sharing that. So 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?

Tom Ragen: 1:35

Well, I think every executive that I've ever heard give a speech or talk in any depth, they always say our people are our most important asset, and so the next question is so what? What are you doing with that asset? And I think you have to have a plan for managing those assets and a metric per scene if your plan is working. And a lot of companies don't do that and I'm not talking about associate satisfaction surveys, those are to me, those aren't a metric, not saying they lack value, they can be of value, but I think you have to have a metric and the company has to be rallied around that as a key product indicator, process indicator.

William Gladhart: 2:23

Absolutely. What do you think that leaders can do to address the challenges they're facing, or what is something specifically that you've done?

Tom Ragen: 2:29

Well, I don't want to oversimplify it, but I'm a fairly simple person. To me you have to have a communication plan, a learning plan and a reward plan around your people and around the culture.

Tom Ragen: 2:43

When you talk about the makeup of a company and culture, to me the three things that feed culture are structure, process and the people that are in it. Once you identify what those three things are and you put a communication plan, a learning plan and a reward plan that foster and develop and support those three things, then that essentially becomes your culture. The culture is a byproduct of all that effort. Again, it goes back to do you have metrics and a plan around improving that culture. To me, the other element of why it's important and again it's a simple thing, but if you work a 40-hour a week, you're over 2,000 hours a year in this culture If it's negative, you can't produce, you can't be effective and efficient and do the things that your clients need you to do- yeah, I think that's a really great point about the communication, the awards, the acknowledgement of staff, and everyone always says that you have a culture, whether you intended to have one or not.

William Gladhart: 3:51

What are you doing to foster it? What are you doing to acknowledge your people? And also, what are you doing to take the next step? You shared a couple of really key ideas. Do you think there's anything else that leaders can do, or what would you share with other leaders that have helped you along the journey?

Tom Ragen: 4:09

I think the hardest part for a leader when you talk about culture is being willing to sacrifice what's hard for you to feed the culture. So I'll give you a story. When I got to this company and I'm a bit of a professional vagabond I've tended to move around a little bit every seven or eight years. It's not intentional, but it just works out that way. So I got here it'll be six years ago this April and the culture was pretty bad. I'll just leave it at that. Excellent performers were allowed to behave however they wanted to behave and that included bullying people and inappropriate, unprofessional behavior. And I made it clear from day one hey, we're not going to tolerate that. That's no longer acceptable.

Tom Ragen: 4:59

And I had one person in particular who was client facing and the client absolutely loved this person, but this person was a bully to our people and we tried to work with her to try and manage that. I personally gave her feedback that it needed to stop. We documented it, we went through all the good professionals practices that you would go to, even send her outside the company for some training. We are important to us, right? You're an important asset. You're really good at your job. We want you to stay here. Here's how you need to behave when you're here.

Tom Ragen: 5:33

And she just couldn't stop herself and so we had to let her go. And the client was not happy, and it is a big client, it's a top five client and they were really upset with me and people, the some people, not so much people in the plant, but but the salesperson that was in charge of the count was not happy with me, but the reality was it had to happen. And so now fast forward five years, four years. We actually have more business with that client today than we did then and our metrics are in that group, are as high as they've ever been and continue to get better with each passing year.

Tom Ragen: 6:11

So that that period when, when I made that decision, you know you have to sacrifice for the team, and that includes you too right, you have to lead by example, and that that's. That's not. That's not easy, and because there is so much going on and you have so many headaches and Running a company is a complex thing, it's easy to say, well, I'm just gonna accept that behavior, it's okay. You know they're good at what they do and you can't.

William Gladhart: 6:42

I really appreciate you sharing that story because I think it's a lot of leaders can relate to that, where you know they kept a staff member that eventually you know was a detriment to the company or cost the company even more. But you know now, obviously, hindsight is a wonderful thing where you can look back and go. You made a really tough choice at the time, but it was the best decision for the organization, for the culture, for our people and and now you have more business than you'd ever hope to with this particular client. So that, There's a great testament to leadership, but also your vision to Leading a culture and helping transform that in a company. So anything else you'd like to add before we wrap up today?

Tom Ragen: 7:23

Well, the cool thing about that story is this is less about me and more about what the folks, how they responded to that adversity. When that person was let go, I had a number of people come say to me how can I help, what can I do, how can I step in? Hey, I have this idea that can make this simpler and better, right? So it actually strengthened the culture, because everyone said, hey, this guy is, he's serious about what, what we're gonna do, and we like what he's gonna do, so we're gonna make him look good. And so it was, because there's no way I would make myself look good. And and so they, the team, did a great job. And it's really that. That's what you want, right. You want the team pulling together, recognizing the moment when they need to do that, and and it was, it was really a great moment for for our company.

William Gladhart: 8:07

Yeah, that's really fantastic because it showed that not only it's full smart culture, but it sparked innovation. It sparked ideas and other opportunities that might not have been thought of. So, Tom, I've enjoyed having you on our leadership lovers podcast. Thank you again for your time and insights. Yeah, yeah, thank you, and I appreciate you got having me. 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. c Culture think tank. 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.