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Leadership Levers
This podcast spotlights leaders' actions so they may enhance their organization’s performance and culture.
We feature CEOs and industry-recognized Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) who share their experiences and insights on three key challenges: people, performance, and profit.
If you are a leader who wants to learn from your peers about improving performance and financial returns, please join us.
Leadership Levers
The Impact of Culture on Company Performance & Financial Success with John K Moore
Curious about how your company's culture plays a pivotal role in impacting your bottom line, performance, and overall financial valuation?
Join us for a conversation that promises to reshape how you think about workplace culture and its impact on performance. We sit down with John K Moore, President of The Culture Think Tank's Client Performance Solutions Division.
John's background includes stints at Arthur Anderson, Accenture, and PwC - problem-solving culture and operational challenges with a wide variety of CEOs & COOs.
In this episode, John doesn't just walk us through culture theory; he shares examples of how to transform the abstracts of 'culture' into actionable items. He discusses the impact of leadership behaviors that influence employee connectivity, performance and retention - revealing the importance of aligning these key elements to drive business revenue and growth.
John also discusses the challenges of cultivating a 'healthy culture' that supports an organization's unique goals and the difficulties of aligning diverse departmental cultures under one umbrella.
With his expertise in change management, M&A, and equity portfolio performance, John provides several robust strategies for leaders navigating evolving cultural landscapes, while guiding their organization to financial success.
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Welcome to the Leadership Levers Podcast. I'm your host, 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 John Moore, president of the Client Performance Solution Divisions at the Culture Think Tank. Thanks for making the time to join us. You're welcome, warren. Thanks for the opportunity. Appreciate it. I thought we would start by having you share a little bit with our audience, a bit about yourself, your background and, of course, our organization as well.
John K Moore:Yeah, certainly.
John K Moore:Well, I've been in management consulting for a long time.
John K Moore:I actually got scooped up by a little firm called Arthur Anderson and Company right when I got out of grad school and for the next 20 years or so I kind of wove my way through their organization, Anderson Consulting Accenture, and then finally into the partnership at Anderson, and so I spent a few years with PwC and a couple other firms, but I've been very blessed to have been exposed to a wide variety of industries during my tenure with those companies, everything from strategy development down to process improvement, organizational behavior and then technology, so being able to identify how they all align with each other and really just serving clients and solving problems.
John K Moore:And so right now I focused on really the most complicated and challenging issue in businesses, which is really around people, and so everything around culture and change, management, organization, alignment, things like that they all come together. So it gives me an opportunity to focus on some of the most challenging problems, because the problems always continue to change as well. So it's a subject that I've got a lot of passion around and love to be able to help clients solve theirs.
William Gladhart:Great well, thanks for sharing that. We'll be discussing three questions today as a warm up to start our conversation. Could you share why you believe a healthy culture is critical?
John K Moore:Why a healthy culture is critical. First, I think what's critical is being able to have a good definition of culture, and then what a healthy culture actually is, and believe it or not. Well, I mean, culture is one of those topics where you have a lot of executives that know it's important, but if you ask them to point to a definition, it's very tough. They always kind of fall back on the traditional definition that has words like values and beliefs and norms, and I asked many of these executives go ahead and point to a norm in your organization where you have norms documented.
John K Moore:It's just it's really amazing to see the results. So I think it's important, you know, we've simplified the definition of culture to really focus on employee behavior. It's how employees and leaders treat themselves, how they treat each other and how they treat customers. It's a simplified way. It's one employees and leaders treat themselves, how they treat each other and how they treat customers. It's a simplified way. It's one that people can really understand that a little bit better.
John K Moore:And then, in terms of healthy, it really depends on the client's organization, right?
John K Moore:What's healthy for one organization may not be healthy for theirs, and many times there's a company-wide culture, but you also have subcultures that go on within the different departments, and some may not agree to that. But all you have to do is just think about the culture in an IT shop and then the culture on a sales team and take a look at the differences. Those are not the same cultures, and so a lot of times when I bring that example up, I get a smile out of a lot of people. So again, I think it's healthy to be able to align the employee behaviors with the business goals, and those business goals may be at the department level, maybe at the company level, but again, I think that's really the most important aspect, and that's what we help clients do is focus on those behavioral yeah, I love that you help close the loop of the definition that links to performance to the bottom line of the organization as well, as you know, helping leaders understand the value of healthy and healthy may be different things to different people.
William Gladhart:So what do you see as the biggest challenges leaders face when addressing cultural change with an organization, or what have you maybe specifically faced in a past organization?
John K Moore:Well, I think one of the biggest challenges is really to get them to agree that something needs to be done and that there's value in it.
John K Moore:The reason why I bring it up is because there's an ROI that you can determine when you're investing in any type of cultural work. And so if you tie these behaviors to a certain business goal and I say business goal but it could be a growth objective, it could be a value driver, an investment thesis, whatever those objectives are that has value, but there's certain assumptions that you can put around that and then be able to identify what's the monetary value on a year over year basis. And then, when you get a price tag from us or from anyone to be able to make that happen, you can look at it and say, wow, if I invest the X in these guys, I get X plus Y in return, and I think that makes a very good business decision is because you're really making an ROI equation out of this and any assumptions that you use to determine that monetary value. Use those as metrics that you can track on an ongoing basis and do some trend analysis and course corrections and things like that.
William Gladhart:Yeah, I think that's a really important point you addressed of being able to have an ROI on culture and the value of your human capital. Because we all look at our sales numbers, we look at our P&L, we look at all the other pieces of our business, but as leaders, sometimes we forget to look at did the investment we make actually make a return on all the learning and training and all the next steps, and do those next steps align with our business? So what do you think that leaders can do to address the challenges they are facing, or what's something you've done?
John K Moore:Well, it really starts with again the objective. Where do you find the biggest pain point? Which business goals aren't being met? Because it may not just be skills.
John K Moore:It may be the lack of attention on behavior, because remember anything around culture and that topic again, once you get the definition, you're looking at a process that typically is not owned by anyone in the organization, like who's responsible for it? Is it HR? Is it the CEO? If they are accountable and responsible, what's the repeatable process that they're following every quarter, every six months? What metrics are being tracked? You take a look at traditionally, culture is a question, not an employee satisfaction survey, and the number, typically on an annual basis, comes up around 4.5.
John K Moore:And everybody looks at it and says, oh, okay, great, and then they wait to see what the number is next year, and that's really the extent to what it comes down to.
John K Moore:So I think really just making the choice to focus on the hard issues and if it's around people, those are very challenging for a lot of executives to want to dive into that Very sensitive topic.
John K Moore:There's a lot of do's and don'ts and a lot of lessons learned, but really comes down to what do you want to achieve and some fundamentals that you can put into place in terms of a change management approach, a training plan, a communication plan, just some very fundamental type approaches to really help improve the chances of success. And the reason why I bring these up is because when we started designing our culture work and our offerings, we really took a look at all the research around why culture work fails and then why does it succeed. And we took a look and for every one of those points, identified some type of a response in our operating model that would help us either overcome the challenges or support the things that enable success. And so we feel we've got a very well-rounded set of offerings because we've taken a look at that research, we've taken a look at the lessons learned and we've identified specific tactical responses that we're going to put into place to avoid problems that others have had in the past.
William Gladhart:Excellent, those are some really awesome insights. I love that you again have defined culture for leaders, also shared some of the value of ROI and why that's really important to the organization, looking at process and next steps and how those pieces align. Is there anything else you'd like to share or add for other leaders in our audience? Give me a call.
John K Moore:Schedule 15 minutes. We can explore some possibilities, some pain points. I can walk through many different options. This is not just a one size fits all, but it's some very unique approaches that we can put together to really make an immediate impact, and so companies can start seeing results very, very quickly. It's a 15 minute phone call and if you can't invest in that, then your pain isn't that great, right, absolutely.
William Gladhart:So, John, I've enjoyed having you on our Leadership Levers podcast. Thank you again for your insights. Thanks Will Thank you for joining us on the Leadership Lovers 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.
