Why Cultural Values Drive Leadership Behavior

Why Cultural Values Drive Leadership Behavior

Sean: How did they make this alive? Because too often do we see core values, mission statements, and purpose statements plastered on the wall. And that’s all they are.

Michael: They’re espoused. They’re not lived. I can’t tell you how many organizations I go to in and out of education where folks can tell me what their core values are. They have them, but nobody can tell me what they are. It’s just that’s a big problem.

Sean: Exactly. So, it’s beyond just thinking about it and putting it somewhere. What did these organizations do to live them out?

Michael: Yeah. So, one of the things we talk about in culture is we talk about this term called dust collector leadership. And it’s for all the people who have a shelf filled with books on all these different leadership strategies and techniques and all those books are doing is collecting dust because they’re not actually doing the stuff that the books say to do. Right. The first thing that’s at the heart of this, Sean, is around something that we call fear forward. And I can’t think of one example where somebody created a system and then did not implement it where there wasn’t some level of fear that was blocking them from the execution right now. One could argue like folks are bad at scheduling their time. So of course, their vision is espoused and not lived because they don’t have time to reference it repeatedly. Like all that stuff from my experience comes from a fear of owning I am the leader here. I am going to repeatedly message what matters. I am going to hold people accountable for what matters. This stuff doesn’t happen organically. You know I bet many of your listeners know this. This stuff must be intentionally engineered. So, beginning every single staff meeting or 1 to 1 meeting with conversations about the vision and values, having the weekly email or the weekly staff meeting begin with conversations around shouting out colleagues who met the values for that week or however long it’s been since you are all together. Referencing them in 1 to 1 meeting, right? Having consistent conversations. In some cases. We have leaders inside of education and outside who we have them meet, shout-out protocols. How many people today are you going to give a shout-out to? Three people, depending on the size of your team. If your team is 500, might have to do more than three people a day to get to everybody over the course of a week or a month.

But all those shout-outs are grounded in values, grounded in vision, right? And so these are intentionally engineered opportunities. But it all, Sean, must start with all these rebel leaders having one thing in common. Regardless of industry, regardless of experience, regardless of skill set, they all are willing to put themselves out there, to be vulnerable, to look foolish, if their thing bombs. People don’t like that feeling and these folks don’t like it either. They’re willing to do it. There’s a willingness. We call it a rebel culture. We call it fear forward. We don’t talk about overcoming the fear of rebel culture. That’s not a thing we don’t believe in that. Social media will tell you that and reality television will tell you that you can overcome your fear. Nothing gets overcome. You learn to live with it. You learn to act despite it. Right. And that’s what these folks do. They still feel the same fear of the 50 sets of eyes on them in the staff meeting or how that email is going to be received. They fear forward, they act anyway because they know it’s in the best interest of their organization.