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“How will you reinvent your culture and your company?”
— Ron Mandel, DH Coachsultant

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If you want to be a different kind of company, if you really want to take your company to another level, and especially if you’re in a traditional field, the best way to stand out is in the way you live your purpose and values.

Most companies are clear about the “what”, their mission, but they haven’t defined a strong “why”, their purpose, or gotten specific about the “how”, their values and behaviors; this is what aligns and energizes staff. The key to defining “why” begins with the leaders first discovering their own personal why and then defining or aligning to the organization’s why.

Though profits are critical to sustaining an organization, a meaningful purpose is what motivates a person to want to come to work every day. 

To build a successful values and behaviors rollout, first allow functional areas to define the behaviors that make most sense for that group. That makes coaching those team members so much easier because their manager is supporting them to successfully meet and exceed the very behaviors that they said were important to them.

Defining a strong “why” and a specific “how” is the the difference between staff that just do their job and staff that care. When you have staff that truly care, you collectively see that it’s not about being the best in the world, it’s about being the best for the world.

Want to develop your company’s “why” and “how”? Schedule a call with us.

About Ron

Ron has been a coach and facilitator for more than 30 years where his focus is on building a values-based culture as the cornerstone to organizational success. Ron’s expertise is in leadership development – in reconnecting people to the leader within. In that capacity, he has consulted with multi-nationals in Canada, the US, Europe, China and India. He has lead change initiatives, conducted numerous sessions in Strategic Planning and Team Building, and designed and delivered programs in Performance Management. He has coached people from all walks of life – from executives of major corporations to youth.

As part of the Delivering Happiness Team, Ron has helped design the core program to assist organizations to transform and commit to creating a people-centered culture that focuses on employee growth, learning and higher purpose. Great organizations understand that their bottom-line success is directly connected to their willingness and ability to create an environment where staff can build a healthy relationship with themselves and others so that everyone can uncover and share their treasures. Ron has had the good fortune to help build healthy and productive organizations around the world.

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“Our success is driven from our culture. As we grow and move into new markets, we want our culture to be seen and felt consistently everywhere. DH helped us to clearly identify who we are today and who we want to be tomorrow.” 

— Nick Vega, Director of Training

This week’s WOW is Alamo Drafthouse, a cinema chain founded in Austin, TX with a passion to preserve authentic cinephile culture. Kicking people out of the theater for texting is as high a priority as serving a hand-crafted cocktail from their bars called “Half Full” (kindred spirits, are we).

With a vision to expand from 20 to 30 cinemas within two years, Alamo’s challenge was less about creating culture and more about clearly defining and maintaining a strong culture as they grow.

Alamo’s Goals: 

Kelsey is passionately curious about social global movements. Her purpose is to inspire a world where people are awakened to who they truly are and aligned to the work they are meant to do. Kelsey thrives at the intersection of: community and culture design, social innovation and entrepreneurship, and people and leadership development. Kelsey found her workplace tribe at Delivering Happiness, where she serves as both the Community Captain & Support Coach. As Community Captain, Kelsey leads DH’s global engagement through relationship building and marketing strategy. As a Support Coach, Kelsey co-facilitates and presents on the science of happiness applied to work and how to implement organizational culture change.

Catch Kelsey online: Twitter: @kelseykwong email: kelsey@deliveringhappiness.com linkedin: kelseywong

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Sunny Grosso
Culture Chief @ Delivering Happiness – tweet this

A strong vision is essential for any team’s success. Culture is no different.

Spark the culture visioning process with a few simple questions. Ask them at your next team meeting or post them in the break room to kick off a collaborative culture vision with buy-in and energy behind it.

1. What are three words to describe your current culture? (Ex. chaotic, stressful, uncertain)
2. What are three words to describe your ideal culture? (Ex. aligned, accountable, communicative)
3. What is one small action to close the gap?

A few examples of action steps: Sprinkles Cupcakes’ teams do low/high checkins every shift to increase support, Techstars does Happies/Crappiesonce a week to build relationships, and Evernote does a spin on office hourswhere the Executive Team team works the Espresso Bar.

What is your one small action with greatest impact? Share it @DHmovement and tag #culturetips.

About Sunny

Sunny is passionate about creating positive work cultures. She travels the world speaking and consulting on sustainable culture building. She is a happiness coach, a Zappos culture expert, and a thought leader in the culture movement. An ORSC and NLP trained coach with a BA in psychology, Sunny is a founding member of the Delivering Happiness consulting team where she co-built the model, developed the approach and led the coaching team. She brings an informed, lively brand of energy to her clients focused on revealing and transforming their best authentic culture from the individual to the team to the organizational level.

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Culture Tip from Javier Munoz,
Lead Coach-sultant and Happiness Alchemist – tweet this

Repeat after us: Culture is Your Co-Founder.

That’s right. Culture isn’t just that fluffy, feel good stuff that happens at company outings or happy hours, it’s an integral part of your business. When describing culture to clients we often say, culture is the stuff that happens when you are not in the room. It’s how your team communicates, solves problems, and treats one another daily.

As a CEO or Founder, you cannot outsource culture-building. You have to be involved and committed to truly making it work. The rest of the team will not commit to living the values if culture lacks consistency and people at the top consider themselves special or different and excused from living the values.

Creating a culture of happiness where people can thrive must be equally prioritized with building a profitable company or an enduring brand.

If Culture is your Co-Founder then let it weigh in. Nominate a cross-functional Culture Team, host a lunch, or create a “Culture” Slack channel and let your people chime in. Remember, culture doesn’t have to be complex! And you can NEVER care about culture too early. Little improvements each day will make a huge impact.

What are some of your favorite, super simple culture improvements? Share them and mention us @DHmovement!

Read more from my previous post on Culture is Your Co-Founder.

About Javier

In 1995, Javier started his first company, a Web design firm in Miami mostly focusing on providing services to small businesses and entrepreneurs. To do his job, he found himself asking questions about the founders, about their purpose, vision, values, products and services. In many occasions, he realized the answers to these questions were not clear. So, he found himself coaching customers on how to clearly define the fundamental aspects of their business. He did it even as he realized it was not supposed to be part the job. However, he enjoyed it tremendously! From these humble beginnings, Javier has built a career out of following his passion… helping people, and building tools to simplify their processes and create greater happiness at work.  You can follow Javier on Twitter @justaction!

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National Business Capital is one of the nation’s best known sources for business financing. This upbeat team had a tight-knit culture that was mostly undefined. Having doubled in size and planning to double again next year, their challenge was to define the magic behind their strong, positive culture so they could define and stabilize it as they scale.

DH was excited to facilitate an “Executive Alignment” session with NBC Leaders and a “Make Happy Work” session with the entire company. Meaningful outcomes included: solidifying the organic values into a formal draft, operationalizing the science of happiness’ three levers of motivation: Progress, Control, and Connectedness and, launching a nine-member Culture Leader Team.

As a follow up, we interviewed Kim Florio, Director of Operations at NBC to learn about their experience.

What were your culture challenges, what did the DH sessions address? Our culture challenge was keeping the tight knit, positive culture we have now, as we grow even larger as a company over the next few months/years.  We have doubled in size over the past 12 months, and are continuing to grow exponentially so really pinpointing why our culture is as strong as it is, and understanding how to keep it that way as we grow was very important to us.

What were your 2-3 key takeaways from the workshop?Tacking down our values as a company, Confirming what our mission is and focusing on internal team building activities to support our culture as we continue to grow.

How has this experience impacted you and your team? A positive culture has always been a focus of ours.  We are focusing on fine tuning our processes now even more, since we have completed the DH  “Make Happy Work” Workshop.   We have implemented a 9 member culture leader team to own the role and implement activities/ideas to keep our internal culture alive and we couldn’t be more excited about it. We have an already engaging environment and staff so this will be the cherry on top to make our existing culture that much stronger.

What is one concrete metric for how your culture has improved? Since working with DH on scaling our culture, we grew from 65 employees to 75 in less than 2 months and are SO EXCITED ABOUT IT! We also created our own WOW cards to reflect our values and promote recognition of those values being lived day in and day out.

What do you use your Value/WOW cards for? We use our Value/ WOW cards in collaboration with a Slot Machine for recognition. When we see an employee living one of the companies “values” on the floor – we will recognize them for it and the managers and culture leaders can give them the WOW Card that corresponds with the value they are showing, then the employee would come to me and I give them cash value for their cards *Depending on the instance they can earn up to $20 in cash to play in the slot machine  (the manager/CL giving the WOW card out decides the amount earned) – and  play the machine to win cash prizes!

We also implemented a GONG on the Right side of our office for employees to ring every time a deal funds, and a new hire was brought on! So FUN things are happening here.

The purpose of both the cards and the gong is to recognize the hard work everyone does day in and day out.

Would you recommend this workshop to others? Absolutely. Shereen and Sunny (and the entire DH support crew) were AMAZING to work with – they were responsive, attentive and really made sure the program was tailored to our company’s needs – Their excitement was inspiring and definitely left a lasting impact on our company.

DH Workshops:

[1] Executive Alignment – designed for Senior Leaders to align on the vision, inspire commitment, and spur the team into action. Takeaways include an understanding of the depth of impact culture has on the experience of work as well as tools to navigate organizational change. Most importantly, Senior Leaders will understand their role in launching a successful journey to happiness, engagement and fulfillment company-wide.

Together we will:

• Clarify the Vision for an ideal culture
• Plan the strategy to de/refine the Core Values and Higher Purpose
• Define strategies to embrace change
• Select and support members of the L&D or Culture Team
• Roll out strategy

[2] Make Happy Work – An interactive workshop that leads teams through the first steps to building a values-based culture in a sustainable way that embeds in your organization over time. Takeaways include: an understanding of the depth of impact happiness has on their personal lives, tools to begin building a culture of happiness, implementation strategies and most importantly, a vision to empower their journey to happiness at work.

Make Happy Workshop topics include:

• Happiness Through Science: understand the science of happiness, from its beginnings to how it’s driving business in organizations today
• The Three Levers of Motivation: learn to increase employee motivation through an understanding of how control, connectedness, and progress impact employee engagemen
• Culture Starts With Values; Values Start With ME: participate in strategic exercises, designed to uncover your team members’ personal values, and begin to build culture organically
• Purpose Beyond Profits: define the linkage between individual and company purpose, and how both play into creating sustainable success

To learn more about how happiness at work can help to start, scale, or sustain your company’s culture. Schedule a free Culture Call.

Kelsey is passionately curious about social global movements. Her purpose is to inspire a world where people are awakened to who they truly are and aligned to the work they are meant to do. Kelsey thrives at the intersection of: community and culture design, social innovation and entrepreneurship, and people and leadership development. As Community Captain, Kelsey leads DH’s global engagement through relationship building and marketing strategy. As a Support Coach, Kelsey co-facilitates and presents on the science of happiness applied to work and how to build cultures by design.

Catch Kelsey online: Twitter: @kelseykwong email: kelsey@deliveringhappiness.com linkedin: kelseywong

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Stand Up for Happiness at Work: It’s Time to Move!

We often think of happiness as a state of mind, but our physical bodies have a large impact on our well-being that goes beyond our physical health. Our bodies can either help or hinder our performance and well-being, on the job or at home, in more ways than are readily obvious.

Our well-being is tied to our bodies in more ways than one. Our physical fitness can affect our moods, our energy levels, and our mental performance. Consider the following:

• Research has shown that just 15 minutes of exercise a day can help increase energy levels. According to the American Council on Exercise, if a sedentary individual begins an exercise program it will enhance the blood flow carrying oxygen and nutrients to muscle tissue improving their ability to produce more energy [the chemical adenosine triphosphate].
•      Physical activity can help improve cognitive processes, such as planning and scheduling. This is due to our brain’s deployment of “miracle grow for the brain” [clinically referred to as BDNF, brain-derived neurotrophic factor], which has been shown to improve the function of neurons and encourage new neurons to grow.
•     Exercise can help reduce stress. When we exercise, our brain activity causes a molecular by-product, and much like the breakdown and repair of our muscles when we lift weights, our brains have a subsequent repair mechanism that strengthens cells.
•      Exercise can help prevent depression. According to Henriette van Praag, a neuroscientist at the National Institutes of Health, exercise is just as effective as medication at helping prevent depression.

What does this have to do with workplace culture? In the United States, employed adults spend about half of their waking hours at work. Research has shown there is more to the 3-5 workouts/week exercise equation than traditionally prescribed. While these workouts can help can build cardiovascular health, build muscle, and increase flexibility, this is not the whole equation. Recent studies tell us that sitting is the new smoking. Take note: too much sitting is something altogether different from too little exercise. Too much sitting can be very damaging to our health, quite possibly compromising our metabolic health.

Now consider the typical office environment where members of our team might stare transfixed for hours upon hours, propped in front of a screen. While any one of us might be a gym rat, a runner or a yoga guru, if we are sitting the rest of those non-gym hours, we might be suffering from what has been coined the active couch potato syndrome. We might be working hard at our exercise regime, only to potentially later compromise our health with extended sitting.  Many medical professionals are now warning that given the choice between merely interrupting sitting or doing the traditional idea of a workout, the interruption of inactivity may be more important for achieving health benefits. Merely standing up will activate big muscles in our bodies and trigger a series of physiological reactions. And we can trigger even bigger effects by moving.

It’s time to make a culture shift in workplaces to one of increased movement. Leaders can take an active role in finding ways to bring movement into your workplace. Individuals can look for opportunities to incorporate more movement into their everyday work routines. And perhaps you can influence a few coworkers along the way to join you since habits can be contagious in the workplace. Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler’s research has shown that behaviors [such as quitting smoking or exercising] can pass through our networks of people as if they are contagious viruses, affecting our health and habits.

Not sure how to start?

Here are a few suggestions for increasing a culture of movement in the workplace:

1. Just do it! You can start by modeling the movement you want to see.
2. Encourage standing. You can share information with your workplace team, inspiring just the consciousness of disrupting extended sitting. Or even better, encourage employees to take more walks to the coffee machine or deliver a message on foot instead of by email.
3. Have a walking meeting. When there are two or three participants of a meeting, a walking meeting can be effective and invigorating. Be forewarned though, with more participants, it can become difficult to hear everyone.
4. Encourage short bursts of exercise. If you are so inclined, and your work environment and culture allow it, you can take it a step further and intermittently try more vigorous movement – maybe a few lunges or jumping jacks. That can both move your physical health in the right direction and increase alertness.

So, at a minimum, stand up! And if you can, get your coworkers to stand up with you. Just stand up two to three times per hour. And if you can, add some movement. You might just find that while you reduce the risk for the metabolic diseases associated with inactivity [such as heart disease and diabetes], you  may find you and your coworkers feel a little smarter, moods a bit lighter, and a few more light bulb moments!

About Donna Hemmert

Donna Hemmert has been an executive in the Internet industry since 1994, driving marketing programs; forming strategic, multi-million dollar partnerships; and leading high-tech companies.  She has worked with both large and small companies, but is passionate about entrepreneurial ventures—especially those for which she served as founder. Donna is a co-founder of Positive Business DC, a 600-member organization dedicated to informing and inspiring leaders across the Metro DC region to increase well-being in the workplace. Donna has a Master’s of Applied Positive Psychology (MAPP) degree from the University of Pennsylvania.

References

Christakis, N. A., & Fowler, J. H. (2007). The spread of obesity in a social network-Reply. New England Journal of Medicine, 357(18), 1867-1868.

Ratey, J.J & Manning, R. (2014). Go Wild: Free Your Body and Mind from the Afflictions of Civilization. New York: Little, Brown and Company.


Ratey, J. J. & Loehr, J.E. (2011). The positive impact of physical activity on cognition during adulthood: a review of underlying mechanisms, evidence and recommendations, Reviews in the Neurosciences, 22(2), 171–185


van Praag, H. (2009). Exercise and the brain: something to chew on. Trends in neurosciences, 32(5), 283-290.

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At Delivering Happiness, bringing culture-minded people together is what we do and with 2016 around the corner, the topic on so many minds is: I get that culture is important, but how do you start, scale, and sustain it? To address that big question and others, we facilitated a discussion with organizational leaders from Airbnb, HopeLab, and Lyft and over 125 attendees at Galvanize SoMa in San Francisco.

Highlights:
[1] Three days of values, purpose, science of happiness, and building strategic culture roadmaps!
[2] Tour of Airbnb HQ and Q&A with Chip Conley, Head of Hospitality.
[3] Full house at the Culture Panel where we heard success stories and lessons learned from Jenna Cushner, Head of Ground Control at Airbnb, Chris Marcell Murchison, VP of Staff Development & Culture at Hopelab, and Ron Storn, VP of People at Lyft.

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At Delivering Happiness, bringing culture-minded people together is what we do and with 2016 around the corner, the topic on so many minds is: I get that culture is important, but how do you start, scale, and sustain it? To address that big question and others, we facilitated a discussion with organizational leaders from Airbnb, HopeLab, and Lyft and over 125 attendees at Galvanize SoMa in San Francisco.

A few of our favorite insights:

• “Focus on creating experiences at work where you get back as much energy as you give.” — Chris @HopeLab
• “Be yourself, create fearlessly, continuously invest, iterate and repeat.”— Ron @Lyft
• “When it comes to culture, show, not tell.” — Jenna @Airbnb

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Being Busy Doesn’t Equal Success

By Michael Seaver

Have you heard of the hedonic treadmill? 

According to Investopedia, the hedonic treadmill is “the tendency of a person to remain at a relatively stable level of happiness despite a change in fortune or the achievement of major goals.”

You may have also heard, if not personally practiced, the phrase, “If you’re not busy, you’re not successful.” In the knowledge economy, achievers tend to fill their calendars with meetings, events, projects, and other to-dos simply to appear successful. Consumer-centric societies push you to work hard, buy things you don’t need, and work harder next week to buy more expensive things you don’t need in hopes these new tangible signs of success will deliver happiness.

Does that actually help you to achieve your life’s mission?

As noted American singers Luther Vandross and Janet Jackson once said, “The Best Things in Life Are Free.”

Intuitively, you know that being busy doesn’t equal success [however you define it]. Happiness isn’t delivered through being busy. Being busy costs you too much – your health, unbalanced well-being, work/life disharmony, inefficient use of time, meaningless relationships, etc. According to personal branding expert, William Arruda, branding certainly requires a high level of visibility to decision makers and influencers. But visibility is only part of the equation, and it’s not the biggest part. Demonstrating and generating your value is key.

Also, Gallup has conducted research and found that being busy likely hinders employee engagement. According to their research, managers who maintain a strong coaching relationship with their direct reports and focus on employee strengths drive higher engagement.

Reflect on your organization’s previous year. What was the level of employee retention?

Instead of choosing a downward spiral of busyness, consider setting expectations and establishing ground rules for your team to ensure they step off the proverbial treadmill and into a company culture that is built on the pure joy of working together collaboratively, in support of your organization’s mission, and in the service of others.

Help your team manage their time and hold everyone accountable:

1. Hard projects first: as you calibrate your to-do list, complete the most important and difficult tasks first and early in the morning. If these get done, consider the day a success.
2. Block your calendar: eliminate all distractions that do not align with your organization’s mission and strategic objectives. In those select windows of time, complete tasks that are adding value to your stakeholders.
3. Emails: block 2-3 periods of time per day to tackle your inbox. Read the email only once and respond immediately. You lose too much time by reading content multiple times.
4. Say “No”: the most successful people are great at saying no to invitations/tasks that do not add value to the organization, its culture, and goal achievement.
5. Journal: a great way to reduce stress is to connect the day’s events back to your personal values. Identify your core values and then take time to correlate them to the day’s activity. You’ll learn more about yourself and find meaning in stressful situations.
6. Recharge: through reflection, meditation, or moments of silence, take time to find peace with the patterns of “yes” and “no” in your life.

With less wasted and more effective use of your time, you and your team can focus on more altruistic behavior. Humans love to help others who they feel a deeper connection to and tend to want to give in return to those people who have given to them. Within each of us, we wish to help others find their own cause of happiness. Remember that our hearts and minds need to be open and aligned to come together to drive the desired change. Through thinking, saying, and doing in harmony, we remember that all lives have equal value and can create change in the world.

Being busy doesn’t equal success. You can deliver more to your team if you pull inefficiencies out of your schedule and create an upward spiral of success through goal achievement, generating value, and engaging your team deeply.

Jump off the treadmill, be less busy, and help everyone find more meaningful happiness.

After all, the best things in life are free.

About Michael

Michael S. Seaver is a Certified Professional Behavioral Analyst (CPBA), a Senior Professional in Human Resources (SPHR) and a Thunderbird School of Global Management MBA graduate. He is the owner of Seaver Consulting, a career and leadership coaching practice and is the author of books entitled Fearing Mediocrity and Incorporate You. In November 2013, Michael was named one of Arizona’s top “35 Entrepreneurs 35 and Younger” by the Arizona Republic. He is also Vice Chairman of the Phoenix Business and Workforce Development board.

Prior to his current roles, Michael spent more than a decade in recruitment, training and development, operations management, and career coaching with organizations such as the Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts, Banner Health, the W. P. Carey School of Business, and the Thunderbird School of Global Management.

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Virtuousness as a Source of Thriving in Organizations 

Organizations with a culture that empowers employees to do the right thing tend to flourish. Yet doing the right thing is an often overlooked source of organizational happiness and contributor to positive company culture. There has been a recent resurgence of virtuousness in psychological literature with studies linking the virtues of hope, gratitude, wisdom, and others to the beneficial outcomes of job satisfaction, increased organizational commitment, and positive emotions. It turns out that using our virtues to do the right thing at work matters both for employee and organizational well-being.

What is Virtuousness?

Virtuousness is not simply following rules and regulations laid out in ethics courses. Ethics courses, while beneficial, are typically concerned with avoiding harm and preventing damage. Virtuousness extends far beyond prevention and promotes organizational excellence and the growth and development of employees. It’s not about mitigating harm; it’s about fulfilling your company’s mission. It’s about doing the right thing.

Virtuousness can be defined as the thoughts and actions employees take that are good for their own sake [Cameron & Caza, 2013]. Acting generously for the sake of being generous is virtuous, but ceases to be so if one’s intention is to get a favor in return. Virtuous actions promote the best of an organization and its mission. They lead to an organizational and social good. Virtuousness is parallel to excellence and is achieved by doing the right thing. For organizations, doing the right thing means fulfilling the mission.

Organizations that encourage employees to act virtuously tend to see increases in employee satisfaction, productivity, quality of work, employ
ee retention, and profitability [Cameron & Caza, 2013]. Research even suggests that virtuousness causes such organizational outcomes.

How to cultivate virtuousness in organizations:

There is a growing body of literature exploring ways to foster virtuousness in organizations. The following list is not exhaustive, but serves as a good starting point with three simple and effective practices to promote a virtuous culture in your organization.

1.) Be virtuous: Virtuousness has an orbiting effect. This means that virtuousness is contagious. When one employee acts virtuously, other employees are often influenced by his/her actions, making other employees more likely to act virtuously themselves. Individuals have an innate predisposition towards the positive, and by role modeling virtuous behavior, employees will co-create a virtuous culture.

2.) Communicate a clear mission and vision: To act virtuously at work, employees must know the purpose of their profession and how their role is integrated into the organizational fabric. Having a clear understanding of the organization’s mission and vision will provide greater clarity to how an employee’s actions contribute towards a social and organizational good. In order to do the right thing, employees need to know and foresee the desired outcome. They need to know what the right thing to do is.

3.) Consider what ends incentives are incentivizing: Incentives often produce beneficial and measurable results. However, incentives can also have a shadow side. Research suggests that incentives can lead to harm when they undermine employees’ intrinsic motivation to do the right thing [Schwartz and Sharpe, 2006] . External incentives, such as financial incentives, can shift employees’ motivation away from the internal ends of the profession. To create a culture of virtuousness, it is important to carefully consider what actions are incentivized and to construct creative incentives that foster a commitment to fulfilling an organization’s mission.

Virtuousness is an ancient concept that has relevance for even the most modern organizations. A commitment to virtuousness is a commitment to pursuing excellence and to fulfilling the organization’s mission. Who knew the source of a thriving organization would be simply doing the right thing?

About Danny

Danny Torrance is a social worker in a growing non-profit organization in Philadelphia and is a candidate for a Master of Applied Positive Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. As a social worker, he is passionate about helping individuals become more resilient, yet is eager use his MAPP degree to promote well-being in an organizational context. Specifically, his interests are in employee engagement, meaning, virtue, and generally, the idea of flourishing at work. When he’s not at his day job or working on papers at night, you’ll likely find him drinking coffee in a café, reading in a park, or if he’s lucky, out surfing with friends. Danny is fascinated with the intersection of positive psychology and business and believes that business can be a powerful force for good, both for the professional and the consumer alike

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As with core strength in the human body, a strong culture muscle is the central link in the chain that connects different parts of your organization. A weak core impairs movement and saps power; whereas a strong core cranks up power, enhances balance and stability, and prevents falls and injuries. A strong culture muscle will underpin almost everything that you business does. Where the first article in this series highlighted the importance of a strong culture muscle, this article will focus on some of the key elements and considerations in an effective culture core muscle building program.

In building a strong culture muscle, creating a program is a pivotal factor. It is important to identify a clear and attainable, yet ambitious program.

The first step in the process is to define objectives.  When doing this, consider the following:

• What does the ‘victory condition’ look like to you? [i.e: What does a strong culture muscle look like in your business?] It is important to have a clear idea of where you are going, and it is equally important to note your progress, as your view of the ‘victory condition’ will shift and change. As your culture muscle gets stronger and stronger,“training” will become a habit, you will realize that working your culture muscle becomes a way of life.
• Setting up an effective culture muscle building program requires some ground work. Some companies define their ideal culture in Culture Codes or Handbooks, such as Hubspot or Valve.
• What makes your company a great place to be from? As Reed Hastings and Patty Mccord of Netflix said: “Let’s create a company that will be a great place to be from.”
• What are the actions and behaviors that embody the strong culture muscle you are trying to create? This talk by Jay Wilkinson is a great starting point.

Once you have a clear idea of what a strong culture core muscle looks like in your organization, you need to plan your workouts. Only you know what the ebb and flow of work is like in your organization and how best to integrate culture workouts. Remember, whilst this program may be challenging in the short term – the long term benefits will be well worth it. Your culture muscle is the core strength of your business, building it needs to be a priority.

Some important things to consider:

• Consistency is key. You cannot build a strong and durable culture muscle without regularly and consistently working on it. If you dedicate a month to working on your culture muscle and go ‘full tilt’ for that month, your culture may look and feel great at the end of that month. But if you then sit back and think, ‘our work here is done,’ you can be sure that your culture muscle will atrophy, and you will have made no sustainable difference in your organizations culture.  
• When building your culture muscle you need to bring the whole organization on the journey. Be open and honest and  remove any barriers to entry that may exist. This culture muscle building program is for everyone, so solicit input and ideas from across the organization. Make it as inclusive as possible, letting people participate from the outset inherently creates ownership and buy-in.
• Your culture muscle building program needs to be adaptable to what you need and when.It needs to be nimble.

• Break down objectives into smaller, bite size chunks. A good exercise program is iterative, and the intensity builds gradually as your strength grows. If you work your culture muscle too hard initially, you will burn out and quite possibly injure yourself. These setbacks are easily avoidable by being realistic and conscious of the intended outcomes.  

A final thought. If you decide to do this, do it properly. Half-hearted workouts never get the desired results and we generally feel worse after them, rather than better. There will be times when you question whether all of the effort is worth it. I hear you, building your culture muscle requires a lot of work, but once it becomes a habit and you start seeing results, you will see how it was the best thing you could have ever done for yourself, your people, and your organization.  

About Andy

A firm believer that ‘Happy People Work Harder,” Andy is driving the movement towards great company culture in South Africa, helping companies become Companies Behaving Awesomely. Building up the business case for great culture is core to her objective, which means she gets to spend a lot of time with Companies (already) Behaving Awesomely, drawing out their juiciest insights.

Whilst her focus is in South Africa at the moment, she’s also busy with a Diploma in Spanish and a plan to take her work into other parts of the world in the not too distant future. As a sports fan and semi-adrenaline junkie, any free time not buried in books, is split between dancing (Hip-Hop and Salsa), Ultimate Frisbee, Yoga, and Krav Maga, as well as a recently discovered intrigue for rock-climbing. As you may have figured, she draws her inspiration from a pretty wide base!

The post The Culture Muscle Part II: Building a Program to Strengthen Your Core Business appeared first on Delivering Happiness.