winning culture, standards not just values

Summary

how do you build a winning culture? not by being feared. not by being liked. by being respected. and respect is built one way, you tell the truth and you live what you preach.

1. core values are necessary but not enough. integrity, excellence, transparency, those are beliefs. they aren’t actions. day to day, your team needs standards. standards are how core values get lived.

2. standards beat values. one of my standards across every company is try harder. defined: give an attempt in which failure is unreasonable. not impossible, unreasonable. that’s actionable. someone can show me what they did and we can both judge it.

3. another standard, don’t complain. simple, brutal, important. complaining is contagious and it kills culture faster than anything else. if you let it slide once, you’ve set the standard.

4. you only need two or three standards. not a wall of them. pick the few you’ll actually hold the line on, then hold it.

5. building a winning culture is hard. building a losing one is easy, just don’t give feedback and let anything slide. the hardest part of leadership is having the conversation no one wants to have. if you can’t, try harder.

Transcript

respected, not feared or liked

The most impactful business is the business that genuinely improves another human, a better human business. And to grow a business like this, you have to continually improve yourself. This podcast is a documentation of that thesis, scaling businesses and also personal growth. My goal is for you to shortcut this journey.

So if you’re ready to try hard, subscribe. If you like what you’re hearing, please share and enjoy. How do you build a winning culture? How do you build a culture on your team where everyone wants to win? They want to push forward. How do you do that? This is the better human business podcast. I’m Jerred Moon.

And today I want to talk a little bit more about that. I just got off a call with several pretty high level entrepreneurs interested in this same topic. So I thought it’d be good to bring it to the podcast, building that winning culture. How do you do that? It’s a difficult thing to do. I’m going to break it down into a couple of different ways.

core values vs standards

But the first way is going to be with you. You have to be a solid leader and you don’t need to be a feared leader. Some people take that approach. They’re super hardcore and scary. So there people are afraid of them. That’s a leadership style. I don’t think that’s how you build a winning culture. On the flip side to that, some leaders, they just want to be liked that I let a lot of things slide.

They’re going to be a pushover. And what that does is it makes a lot of people like you because you’re giving them the paycheck and letting them do whatever they want. And so you’re liked, but that’s not building a winning company culture. That’s building a don’t rock the boat. I don’t like conflict culture and it will destroy your business.

I don’t want either of those things. I don’t want to be feared and I don’t want to be liked. I want to be respected. That’s what I want. I want to be respected by my team. And how you earn respect is no different in your job, in your business than it is anywhere else in your life. You just have to develop trust.

the try harder standard

You have to get another human being to trust who you are, what you stand for. They have to know that you live and breathe the core values of your company and that you will always tell the truth. Not that you are going to fabricate some sort of lie, but that you tell the truth, that you give the hard feedback, but you’re giving that feedback in the interest of improving the person you’re giving the feedback to.

That’s how you become respected. Now a lot of companies talk about values, core values, and there’s nothing wrong with core values and I think that you should absolutely have them, but I think people stop short because values in a company are just the beliefs, philosophies, and principles that drive the business and people will pick one word or maybe a couple of words that will be something like accountability or integrity, transparency, excellence.

These are core values that people have in their company, but they’re not really day to day actionable items that someone can live up to. How you live up to something like that is a standard. Let me give you an example from my time in the military. So there are core values in every branch of the military.

snuffing out the negative

I was in the Air Force and the core values are integrity first, service before self, and excellence in all we do. Great core values in my opinion, but core values are not standards. So if we go down to a PT test, so taking a physical fitness test in the military, in the Air Force, we can look at the core value of excellence in all we do, so we want to be excellent in the PT test, but there’s ultimately a standard, you have to pass it.

Let’s say that’s 80% out of 100 is passing it. So that’s the standard Air Force wide, but there are hundreds of thousands of people in the Air Force, but then when you go down to the team level, the standards can change. You can be on a really high performing team, let’s say in special operations, and the standard might just be you get a 100% on the Air Force PT test.

That’s it. There’s no other option. You get a 100% on the Air Force PT test, and that’s because you might be a part of a smaller team that is a higher performing team, and that’s what I’m talking about when we’re talking about standards. Okay, so when we dive down, we go from these great core values that aren’t super actionable, but are absolutely necessary.

the hardest thing in business

So don’t think I’m taking a crap on core values. Core values in your company are huge, but then you want standards below the core values, and I think this is really where the winning company culture comes through. So one of our standards in all of my companies, if you haven’t guessed it already, is trying hard.

Try harder. Right? And it’s defined. It’s defined, and I’ve defined it on the podcast before, but I’ll define it again. So try harder is to give an attempt in which failure is unreasonable. Not to give an attempt in which failure is impossible. You give an attempt in which failure is unreasonable. That’s trying harder across all my companies.

That’s how you define it. If I were to bring that example to swimming real quick, and say you told me you wanted to swim, and so you jump in the water, you can’t swim, you get close to drowning, lifeguard pulls you out. You come to me, you’re like, hey, I need advice on how to swim, and if all I do is tell you to try harder, you might jump back in, kick the legs harder, flail the arms harder, and see if you magically float this time, but you won’t.

You’ll sink again, and the lifeguard will pull you out. So once I define that the standard for trying hard is to give an attempt in which failure is unreasonable, I would have to ask you after you jumped in that second time, if you had no preparation, no planning, no plan at all, is it reasonable for you to jump back in and basically drown and have to be pulled out by the lifeguard again?

Yes, it’s absolutely reasonable because you had no plan. You had nothing in place. But now that you know the definition, you know the standard, and you know how this team operates, I tell you to go swim. What are you going to do? Maybe you hire a coach. I got a coach once a week teaching me how to swim.

I’m going to swim two days a week on my own just to practice what the coach teaches me. I’m even going to read a book on how to be the best swimmer I could possibly be. Now we meet up in one month. I see if you can swim. If you can’t swim, at that point, I would not be angry. I would just ask, what did you do?

What was your attempt in which failure was unreasonable, and you’re like, well, I hired a coach. I practiced twice a week, and I read a book. I’m like, well, that’s quite unreasonable. You should be able to swim now. But more than likely, you are going to be able to swim. So when you jump back in the pool and you’re swimming, it’s very obvious why you’re swimming.

You’re swimming because you gave an attempt in which failure is unreasonable. You see how I tell a quick story like that? I can tell a story like that to my team so they understand the standard of trying hard on my team. So we don’t have to have just a core value that’s something like excellence in all we do because that’s a little bit vague.

Now when you come to me specifically about a task or something you’re working on, I can tell you to try harder, and you know what it means. You know what that effort is. Another standard that you can have in your company is something like don’t complain. Don’t complain. Like just don’t complain. Don’t do it.

Don’t allow it. And if you see it coming, if that’s one of your standards, hey, the standard here is we don’t complain. You see how this is different than a core value? It’s just a standard for how you show up on a day-to-day basis, and if you pick the right standards in your company, you’re going to have high-performing individuals.

You’re going to have people who are striving to get better. Maybe you want people in your company to have a growth mindset, and so that’s a company core value to have a growth mindset. Well a standard could be what are you reading? What books are you reading that give you that growth mindset? So as a boss, I can ask you what you’re reading, and we can go over it.

We can see if you’re actually getting better, if you’re building new habits. What are you learning? Those are the questions I ask next. So I truly believe if you want to build a winning company culture, you have to set standards, not just core values, and you have to hold yourself first to those standards, and then everyone else to the same standards, and you don’t need a lot of them.

Two or three, that’s it. That’s all you need. Set the standards. And the last thing I’ll say, because sometimes this happens too, building a winning company culture is hard. It’s very difficult. It takes a lot of time. Building a poor, losing company culture is incredibly easy. All it takes is for a leader to not act, to not give feedback, to not have the hard conversations, to let employees come in and complain constantly about whatever it is.

The fact that they’re here complaining about a customer, complaining about basically their job. Lots of people do that. And it’s probably because they saw their parents complain about their job their whole life, and so now they complain about their job. Whatever it is, if you see that stuff and you don’t want it to be a part of your team, you need to have a standard.

Don’t let people do it. So you need to snuff that stuff out. If you see any negativity, it will go through a team like wildfire. People will think that’s the standard. Oh, he’s complaining. I’m going to complain too. So if you’re the boss, don’t complain. Don’t complain around your employees and set the standard that, hey, we don’t complain.

And that doesn’t have to be one of your standards, but it’s the things that you don’t want people to do. The things that you don’t want people to do just as much as it is the things that you want people to do. So you don’t sit around here and complain with me. Don’t give me half ass effort. Try harder, right?

That’s what you want. This is the team that you want to build. If you can do these things, you will be on your way to building a winning company culture and it will make your business grow faster than anything else that you could possibly implement from marketing strategy to hiring a coach to anything else.

A winning company culture is absolutely everything, but it is the hardest thing to actually do because it requires you to be a good leader. And if you’re not a good leader, try harder. Go. Go. Go.