Culture Is a Power Grid - Chip Higgins on the Energy Behind Organizational Performance

What happens when your culture functions like a power grid — and one small disconnect shuts down momentum across the organization?

In this episode of Leadership Levers, Chip Higgins, founder of Bizzics and a former 40-year banker, explores why culture and process failures create more organizational heat, friction, and performance stalls than any financial constraint ever could.

After decades advising owner-managed businesses, Chip noticed a pattern: companies rarely fail from lack of capital — they fail from lack of energy. 

Drawing from concepts in his book The Bizzics Way, Chip explains how culture acts as the “power grid” of an organization, conducting the energy needed for alignment, velocity, and execution.

Chip walks through:

• Why culture acts as an energy system — not a slogan or morale booster
• How one small breakdown in communication or process can cripple momentum
• Why systems fail when people aren’t included early in the design
• The hidden “heat” created when automation solves compliance but undermines execution
• How local ownership can transform process redesign into cultural strength rather than cultural erosion. 

For leaders navigating automation, growth, system rollouts, or operational change, Chip’s insights offer a simple idea: momentum requires energy — and energy only flows through a culture built for connection, clarity, and ownership.

Seeking to align your culture, boost performance & impact your bottom line? Let’s chat—no sales, just real talk about your challenges. Not ready? Join our PL3 Community for free insights & connections.

Chapters

• 0:00 Welcome And Guest Introduction
• 0:33 Chip’s Background And Bizicx
• 1:24 The Momentum Framework And Book
• 2:18 Culture As The Power Grid
• 3:41 People, Process, Profit Framing
• 4:01 Banking’s Shift To Automation
• 5:11 When Standardization Creates Friction
• 6:41 Safety Versus Customer Execution
• 8:11 Local Ownership Before Vendors
• 10:38 Case Study: Pausing Implementation
• 12:19 Culture As A Deliberate Investment
• 12:47 Closing And Where To Listen

Transcript

William Gladhart: 0:00

Welcome to the Leadership Levers Podcast. I'm your host, Will Gladhart, CMO at The Culture Think Tank. At The Culture Think Tank, we empower leaders with metrics that strengthen culture, drive performance, and return. We're here today to learn about the actions leaders have taken to address organizational change. Today, our guest is Chip Higgins, founder and author at Bizzics. Thank you so much for taking the time to join us.

Chip Higgins: 0:30

It's great to be here, Will. Thank you for having me.

William Gladhart: 0:33

Yeah, let's begin by having you share with our audience a little bit about yourself, your background, and also your organization and leadership.

Chip Higgins: 0:40

Yes, definitely. So I'm a 40-year ex-banker. I work for uh three large regional banks over four decades, and I'm mostly with owner-managed businesses. Yeah, I hate to say small because I never I never feel that way about them, but most people would say small businesses, but I always like to say owner-managed. I worked mostly with those businesses, and I think as my banking career progressed, I just became more aware of needs that were beyond capital. Just gravitated toward coaching. I became a member of the John Maxwell team in 2011 when he started the team as a founding member and tried to do some leadership things with small business owners and ultimately started physics in 2019. It's a coaching practice that really has a focus on momentum. So that's the concept is if we can master the equation for momentum and physics and apply it to business, I think that we have a pretty good framework. So that led to my book that came out in April of last year, 2024, The Physics Way, where kind of map out the whole formula. It's been a great ride. I mean, it's fun to be an entrepreneur at my age. I'm still as passionate as I've ever been about just trying to get people past that first five years. I think that's what I'm uniquely focused on is the failure rates really haven't changed in my banking career. And I think I think with a model or a mindset or a framework, I think there's there's a better chance than 50-50. And uh that that means a lot to me.

William Gladhart: 1:58

I really love that you share that. Uh I think simply because the numbers haven't changed. The numbers for either success, failure, whether that be a financial, business, etc., there's a lot of gaps in leadership. So I really appreciate you're looking to fill some of those with your expertise and experience. So we'll be discussing three questions today as a warm-up to our conversation. Would you share why you believe a healthy culture is critical?

Chip Higgins: 2:21

Yeah, so it's a very important part of my book, actually. Underlying that formula is mass times velocity, but uh, you really can't have velocity without energy. And the first chapter of the book is dedicated to energy. A lot of our energy comes from the gap between where we are and the vision for the company or for ourselves. It's a vibrational field. To me, culture is the power grid, and I don't care what size organization it is, you've got to have a structure that conducts energy from top to bottom, side to side. If you've ignored culture, you're gonna have a power outage somewhere. It's just it's just a matter of time. I say in some of my talks, even the smallest things can cause a disruption. I had a model train when I was a kid. When my parents would leave me in the basement alone and it would just stop. At first, I couldn't figure out what was wrong. And it turned out to be just one clip between two pieces of track had gotten separated. Right. And uh I I use that in my talks all the time as a demonstration. I think it's true in business too. I view it as a power grid. Obviously, the side benefits of having a great place to work, it's enjoyable and all that type of thing. But as far as making a business for you you get to have something that the uh that the energy runs on.

William Gladhart: 3:28

Yeah, I think that's a really valid point where not only is it from top to bottom, but also the information has to be communicated out, sent out, and returned back to leadership for it to be for it to be effective. So it's been our experience, and and you've probably encountered this as well in your many years of not only working with business owners, but in the finance industry, leaders tend to struggle with three key areas people, process, and profit. In your role, could you identify which of these three areas represented a cultural challenge, either for one of your past organizations or a current client?

Chip Higgins: 4:01

Yeah, I think the process part, I'm speaking mostly from my banking background. That's where most of my career was spent. But I think that looking at the banking industry, I started in '84. We didn't have email. We didn't have, you know, there's all kinds of automation that that came our way, but it was still very manual type of process. And you watch what happened to the banking industry over that time period and going from 14,000 plus banks to about 4,000 today. It became so process-oriented and automation-oriented. And I think that combination of things created just a lot of stress in systems. The curve of technology and the automation caused a lot of problems about changing systems a lot for processes and that type of thing. But I would say culturally, there are a few problems that stand out about building processes that make you more effective and efficient. And there's a lot of grief in it for a lot of people trying to standardize systems with people that have become masters. You're looked at by the company as like Chip really knows what he's doing on that topic. There's a company-wide initiative. You find out there's a lot of other ideas out there. And all of a sudden there's there's a system, kind of an invisible system, that is actually doing it different than you were. And I think that creates a lot of grief in the system, a little uh fear and anxiety. But I think the big heat comes from designing a system that ultimately doesn't work and has it feels worse than where you started from. That's where I find the most heat. It's like for all the best intentions of automating something that people were left out of the discussion. You find out all the really nitty-gritty nuances of what people do and how the automation doesn't support it. That's when people get mad. It's like they don't even know who to yell at. The system's not working. They'd rather go back to what they were doing before, the learning curve. I mean, all those types of things. Uh I've always felt like people were well-intentioned. Sometimes you have recruitment problems finding the right person for certain roles, but I would say by and large, the organizations that I work for, the process engineering and implementation was a real challenge.

William Gladhart: 6:00

Yeah, I think that's a really valid point, especially as leaders are looking at AI now and all other tools of looking to take people even further out of the process. But there were originally people and culture and some sort of element around that specific process or ownership or knowledge before there was a software or there was an artificial intelligence or there was some other solution. I think that's a really valid point thinking about how do you balance that people process piece, but also what's the right mix. As you looked at some of those challenges, were any of those something that you could share that negatively impacted the organization? And then we'll kind of flip and then talk about the positive side.

Chip Higgins: 6:45

I think that banking in particular, I'm sure this is true of every industry, but I just know banking works. You know, it's like we were trying to create systems that allowed for the customer interface to begin in the process and floil all the way through it to the back end where basically the bank examiners would come in. Did you get all the information? Did you follow procedures? Did you, you know, I mean all those types of things? I think for a couple of the banks that I worked for, there was a lot of emphasis on the back end where you would get in trouble with uh regulators, auditors, that type of thing, and not necessarily what the user interface would be like and what the people at the line uh would be dealing with. And so, you know, what I what I found was lulls and plateaus in business. Every business has a pipeline, you're trying to predict results for the market, you know, just finding that things are getting hung up and uh pipeline targets are being missed because the system was uh more designed for uh safety than execution with the customer. Yeah, I think that that's just a huge lesson of like how many people it takes to engineer a system and who you really need to pay attention to in the process. That's just such a sensitive thing. I mean, I I can talk about the business result of getting a plateaued pipeline where things aren't closing and you're saying, well, yeah, we're gonna get it next quarter or whatever, but you know how it is. Well, like right behind that are a lot of angry people. They're getting pushed by management. When's it gonna close? Why is it not gonna close? And you know, you start trying to share the truth about how the system is working, and you know, it feels like finger pointing, just kind of uh abdicating your responsibility for getting things done. And yeah, just it creates a tremendous amount of heat in an organization when it doesn't work. I would say I don't think that's uncommon. It always comes down to the results and the sales and throughput that you're hoping that that process is going to enhance.

William Gladhart: 8:31

Yeah, I I think that's really valid of having that open forum for either discussion or when there's a negative impact either across the culture or the organization, that you can, as a leader, can turn that to actually thinking about okay, how do I take that feedback, digest it, and then turn it to how do we take the next steps together? Instead of everyone feeling like they're either on a spinning disc or that things are out of control, nobody has a direction, no one understands the role clearly. So is there any one thing that you identify that helped impact culture and leadership positively as you work through those some of those challenges, or even with people you work with today?

Chip Higgins: 9:12

I really think it's when you're building a process, there has to be a high component of local ownership. You know, I think that most companies are not engineered to internally navigate a big process implementation. And usually somebody's coming in from an organization that has a platform or uh specific knowledge about how they're going to do that. I think when there's a gap between selecting a vendor and turning them loose on the employees for interviews and field audit, when there should have been an intermediate step, it could be really energizing for a culture to be that inclusive and asking questions. You know, I think that really doing a lot of work in-house before you engage the consultants or the implementer, platform provider, or whatever, it's really healthy culturally to vet all that out inside the house rather than having strangers come in and talk to people and then here's the system. And you don't even know if executive management is even vetted out and you're really pushed back on some of their assumptions and that type of thing. I think that it is a lot of work, but I just feel like it's such a critical cultural thing that you've got to have ownership of it in the company before you engage with a provider. It seems like an easy way to go, just like, yeah, yeah, come in and do the interviews. Right, right. I mean, right. Yeah, you'll do that too.

William Gladhart: 10:25

Yeah, you too take all the responsibility as um no, I think you're really in reinforcing that we had a case study that we did a number of years ago with a business that just as you were describing was an implementation. And what leadership discovered was one, management was responsible for 90% of the rollout, two, management didn't understand the why or wasn't able to explain to the workforce what was happening and how is it going to implement the whole thing, and literally they stopped the entire implementation for three months to work it out, and literally after that three months, everything blew through seamlessly because but prior to that, the level of anxiety was super high in the organization. Well-being had cratered the number of lost time requests or people requesting out of work. Yeah, what this can't do. There was a there was a uh there was a component and there was a operational impact directly to that organization. And once leadership figured that out, they put the brakes on everything, yeah. The vendor stayed out, and then they were able to resolve the challenge and move forward very quickly. I think you're pointing out something that's really important to think about, not only from a leadership perspective, but like also managers and the workforce really has to understand as a whole what your next steps is, and that impacts everything across the organization. Chip, as we wrap up today, is there anything else you'd like to share or add for fellow leaders?

Chip Higgins: 11:52

I would just say culture is an investment. It's a huge energy investment. I think sometimes we're deluded into thinking it's just gonna happen magically because people are together and you figure it out. I think the best organizations map it out before they start doing business. I mean, they they know the values and they know how they're going to demonstrate, reinforce, and evaluate people and values that ultimately to a culture. You know, sometimes for smaller businesses, especially in the startup mode, it's just like, well, I want to get my product to market, then things start moving fast, and you you find out it's a it's a huge gap that for all the energy you have, you can't distribute it. I mean, I go back to that principle. It's like, you know, you're you're really excited about it, but no one else is feeling it. I would just encourage people to really spend a lot of time on culture. It's been written up in so many books that it's it's the winning attribute of a company and it's really it really requires a lot of time, but the the payoff from that investment is astronomical.

William Gladhart: 12:47

Absolutely. Well, Chip, I've enjoyed having you on the Leadership Podcast.

Chip Higgins: 12:50

Well, thank you. Thank you so much for having me. Great conversation.

William Gladhart: 12:52

Absolutely. Thank you so much for your insights. Thank you for joining us on the Leadership Levers podcast. Find all our Leadership Levers episodes on the Culture Think Tank website at www.theculture think tank.com or listen on your favorite streaming platform. We'd love to hear from you about the challenges you have faced as a leader. Tune in weekly as we invite leaders to share their experiences in strengthening culture and performance one action at a time.