n<\/p>\n
4bed10d7-3915-f48a-3dc5-7e7582b56daf.mp3<\/p>\n
00:00:00,000 [Music] Well, today I am absolutely delighted to welcome back for
\nanother set of punishment for Colin Ellis. There’s a third time it’s been on the show. Colin is<\/p>\n
00:00:15,720 one of the world’s foremost authorities on workplace culture. He’s a
\nglobal workplace culture expert sought after by organizations around
\nthe world to help build vibrant high-performing cultures and he’s an author of full box culture<\/p>\n
00:00:31,120 fix how to create a great work, I need new glasses and we’ve got him
\non how to create a great place to work and award winning project book
\nthe complete guide to consistently delivering great projects. He’s a regular<\/p>\n
00:00:46,400 speaker at conferences and events around the world and has featured in media outlets such as Harvard Business Reviews, Sky News and the
\nBBC and he’s latest book which is going to talk to us a little bit about today is detox your<\/p>\n
00:00:57,920 culture, deliver results, retain staff and strengthen your organization’s
\nreputation and it’s literally out last month, that’s what picture of him
\nstood by a sign recently so I know there’s evidence there. He takes a highly<\/p>\n
00:01:10,760 successful and unique approach to culture, building by teaching employees how to build and evolve it themselves and today he’s
\nworked with almost a hundred different cultures in almost 20 different countries from Red Bull in<\/p>\n
00:01:23,400 Austria to the US House of Representatives to the Dutch Olympic team
\nand IAG insurance in Australia. That’s a long intro calling welcome to
\nthe show. That’s longer than the podcast and I do. Thanks for having me, I hope you enjoyed it. Goodbye.<\/p>\n
00:01:38,840 Yes, thank you again for coming on again. For those who may not have heard you on the show before, have very dear listeners you should
\nhave. Tell us a little bit about your background, I think something might have picked up an accent there. Yes, a little bit
\n00:01:56,360 of an accent. Yeah, it’s like Peter K. Or Parkinson, your Parkinson, by
\nthe way, I’ll be Peter K for this. As long as you know, I’m, what’s the
\nname of Oliver Reed? Yeah, no, not Oliver. I’ve had by time as Oliver Reed but definitely not now when I was a<\/p>\n
00:02:12,040 lot longer growing up in the mean streets of Liverpool, although somebody accused me last week of not having a proper Scouse accent
\nbut that’s what happens when you live outside Liverpool for 17 years, you know, especially in Australia,<\/p>\n
00:02:25,040 they beat it out of you. So a little bit of background, a little bit of
\nbackground, I mean, just on a 50 minute intro. So I’ll tell you where my
\ninterest in team work arises from and this is something that we talked about in a previous podcast is my first managerial role<\/p>\n
00:02:42,480 was as a project manager for year 2000 projects and at that stage my remit was to build what we would now call a high performing team to
\ndeliver year 2000 projects over a three year period. I was working for what was then the Trinity newspaper group. And so I became<\/p>\n
00:03:00,560 really interested in how do we build these really great team cultures in order to deliver and, you know, as I’ve talked about in previous
\npodcasts, I really wanted to master the our project management, which for me was all about leadership, culture, methods, but a lot<\/p>\n
00:03:17,920 of the emphasis was on the method. And so, you know, kind of over
\ntime, we moved to, we re-emigrated to New Zealand in 2007. I took up a public service senior management role in 2007, had not project departments moved to Australia in 2013 to, to head of projects<\/p>\n
00:03:36,160 and government there as well. And I’ve been working for myself in
\neither for the last eight years, I mean, you just mentioned all of the
\npeople that I’ve worked for in the countries that I’ve worked in, which has probably only happened in the last six years to be honest,<\/p>\n
00:03:46,760 because Cook’s is one of those things that people love talking about,
\nbut they don’t actually really invest in it that much, other than sending
\neveryone on a diversity equity and inclusion, training program ever now and again. So, yes, so I’m, you know, I’m in London at the minute,<\/p>\n
00:04:01,560 this is where we’re in the process of moving back to the UK, because
\nthis is where our kids want to study. And you’re, as you said, I just launched the new book, so that you got a little bit about it.
\n00:04:10,400 What’s the name? So, obviously you’ve given three books on culture, 00:04:20,400 two books on culture before. So, why do we need another one?<\/p>\n
Yeah, actually this is a fourth, so, it’s just before, the first, you know, the
\nfirst book I wrote on culture, I, I wanted to buy a book that told me how
\nto build a really great team and there wasn’t one. There was some good culture books, I’ll get me wrong, there<\/p>\n
00:04:36,960 was the culture code by Daniel Coyle, there was the culture map by Erin Mayer, but there was no how-to guide. And so, I decided that I
\nwould write one, you know, I would deconstruct culture. So, that was
\nmy first book. The second book then was all about, well, here’s some<\/p>\n
00:04:53,800 little hacks that people can use, you know, because people often find it
\nhard to do culture and they’ll say it’s to culture, culture changes too
\nhard. So, I just did like, you know, a different hack every fortnight from changing your email to running an off-site. The third<\/p>\n
00:05:09,160 one was all about hybrid work, kind of post-COVID or during COVID,
\nand when I was just flat out busy helping organisations to redefine their cultures. And so, I kind of solarised how to build a great hybrid
\nworkplace, and this one is, is all about how to avoid kind of slipping into<\/p>\n
00:05:27,760 a toxic culture because it’s never been more popular in the media, toxic
\nculture. So, I really want to help organisations to avoid it because not
\nonly does it have a massive impact on human life, you know, and I’ve worked with organisations where people have committed suicide,<\/p>\n
00:05:41,240 unfortunately. But also, it has a massive impact on company results. So, you think, you think senior leaders would want to do something about it. So, I provide some, you know, kind of case studies, some examples of things that have gone wrong, but also it’s a real risk management<\/p>\n
00:05:55,840 book I like to think, you know, is here’s a bunch of things that if you do
\nthese things, you’ll avoid the conditions for toxicity. Well, I think, I
\nsuppose it’s thinking of people who are kind of cultures, kind of, what<\/p>\n
00:06:12,680 can I do about it? I can’t do anything about it. I’m a project manager in a team, maybe I’m portfolio director of programme manager, I’m in an organisation that’s several thousand people. I’ve got a team of 20 people here, I can’t do anything about that board. But I know
\n00:06:27,920 obviously culture is kind of bottom up in some ways, but what do you, if
\nI said to you, how do you define culture in the context of what we’re
\ntalking about, what would you say it is? Because obviously culture can be, yeah, country can have a certain culture, and then, you can<\/p>\n
00:06:49,080 agree with in there can have a certain culture. What do you, what? In
\nyour context, in industrial business, what do you define that as all? How
\nwould you describe it? So I was describing culture as a day to day lived experiences of employees. Now those<\/p>\n
00:07:04,720 employees, as you rightly say, could be working on a project Nigel, they
\ncould be working in a country, they could be working in headquarters,
\nthey could be working for HR, they could be engineers in the field, they could be a football team, all of whom I’ve worked with.<\/p>\n
00:07:18,600 And I think what we try and do, and culture by the way is 100% ground up, and work organizations often get it wrong is by trying to make culture pop down. And so if leaders tell us what the culture is, it
\nimmediately disempowers us, it erodes the sense of belonging because<\/p>\n
00:07:36,720 people are telling us what it is, rather than encouraging us to define
\nhow it should be. And so if you’re a project manager, if you’re any kind
\nof manager, culture is the thing that you will become known for. Now I recognize this in 1997 and it was down to the fact that<\/p>\n
00:07:57,800 a really good boss, you know, he said to me, he said the way that we
\ndeliver these projects is by working as a team, which is kind of standard
\nfor what everybody is told as a manager. And then he said, and it’s your job to work with them to define what that looks like. And<\/p>\n
00:08:14,520 they were his words. Now this is my first managerial job. I did most
\nmanagers. I didn’t have a clue what I was doing. You know, I now run a basic management program because organizations are still rubbish at this. But I didn’t have a clue how to be a manager. But that stuck<\/p>\n
00:08:28,000 in my head. Oh, it’s up to me, it’s up to me to make sure that I work with
\nthe team so that we can define what that culture looks like. And you
\nhave certain guardrails. So for example, now you have a set of values. And there are things that you have to link it to.<\/p>\n
00:08:45,040 There are certain policies, particularly around things like diversity, equity
\nand inclusion. You want to make sure you’re saying the right things and
\ndoing the right things by people. You want to acknowledge the kind of neurodiverse nature of our work, for example. So this is
\n00:08:59,200 part of the management education. But actually as a team, if you come
\ntogether and define how you want to work, then immediately there’s a
\nsense of responsibility for it. So everybody wants to pitch in, everybody wants to safeguard it. You know, I worked with a pharmaceutical<\/p>\n
00:09:13,000 team recently. And I’d worked with another team in their organization
\nwho’s engagement score had gone up 30 to 27%. 27%. I think it was in less than three months. And they were like, well, we want to do
\nwhatever they did. And so, you know, my job is to facilitate a process<\/p>\n
00:09:29,680 whereby they make agreements with each other. And then when they
\nleave the room, they’ll pull those agreements. It sounds simple. It’s
\nreally complicated, not a lot, obviously. But it’s a simple process during the two days. And their engagement score went up 10%. And<\/p>\n
00:09:43,600 I was talking to the senior management recently. She was like, said, I
\nonly just realised after she said about three weeks afterwards, I’m not
\ntelling anybody anymore that we have to be better as a team. She said, if anything, they’re telling me and my leadership team,<\/p>\n
00:09:58,760 all of the great stuff that we’ve done that we should do too. So I think
\nthat’s the nature of culture. You know, it is ground up, but it is, it’s what managers will be known for providing they do it in the right way.<\/p>\n
00:10:10,640 It’s interesting. It’s just one of those things. I’ve heard the phrase before now is your reputation is what people say about you when you’re not
\nthere. And it kind of, it makes me think of that in the fact that, if your team behave autonomously without a manager<\/p>\n
00:10:30,880 there, without that director, but have that principles. And we may have
\ntalked about this before the Southwest Airlines. I must have mined the book. Forget the guy’s name. The book, that book about the way that they approached empowerment with their team and the fact that<\/p>\n
00:10:52,360 they could go out. And another one I listened to recently was an
\ninterview with the guy who started Pratt, and very early on one of the
\nthings they wanted to dig a, was to disable anyone can give someone a
\nfree coffee, whatever at one point is kind of what, give them a free<\/p>\n
00:11:10,240 coffee, give them a muffin, give them a whatever, whatever. And you
\ndon’t need a reason too. If a customer comes in and looks at give them coffee, make their experience better, because you had independent managers who would have directed to be achieved goals, achieved targets,
\n00:11:27,400 profit margins, or whatever, they kind of stopped people doing it. And
\nthey got to the point where they had to get a button on the till square,
\nthe staff who gave some away pressed the button, and then they would see and they built, go to these managers and say, well, you’re<\/p>\n
00:11:41,000 not giving away stuff. Why aren’t you giving away stuff? Because otherwise they didn’t know. And in order to help them build that
\nexperience, that kind of, I wonder whether that’s a, that feels like a, a
\ncultural thing as well as about change, getting enabling the individual<\/p>\n
00:11:59,120 on the shop floor to engage with the customer in a way that they wouldn’t do otherwise, unless you told them they could do. And that
\nwould be expected of. Yeah, you know, I just, I just sort of blogged a little about, I went to Ronnie Scott’s Jazz<\/p>\n
00:12:14,240 Bar in London for my birthday recently. And the experience that they
\nprovided towards as a customer was a masterclass in culture. And so I captured all of these things. And I always talk about the fact that inspiration for employee culture lives everywhere. And I think<\/p>\n
00:12:32,000 if there’s one, not that I want people to stop listening to this podcast
\nright now, but if there’s one lesson or one, or one, one thing I want people to take away from this is that you really have autonomy over your culture, not, notwithstanding the guardrails, the<\/p>\n
00:12:46,520 values and, you know, whatever’s been defined that you have to work
\ntowards. But you really have this opportunity to define the experience. And it’s what I became known for, you know, when we immigrated to New Zealand in 2007, I remember my, my, my boss in New Zealand, I was working<\/p>\n
00:13:01,600 for a state on enterprise. He’s sacked his entire leadership team. And
\nhe brought a bunch of us in. He’s like, I want something different. I want
\nsomething different. I remember after three months, he said to me, he’s like, Colin, remember we had the conversation when we started.<\/p>\n
00:13:14,160 And I said, I wanted something different. I was like, yeah, Jim, he was
\nlike, I just wasn’t expecting it to be this different. And I, you know, me
\nand my team, we just agreed to do some, just stuff that people weren’t doing in government. You know, he said, oh, am I paying?
\n00:13:29,480 I’m like, no, it’s just, it’s taxpayer paying. No. He’s like, why are you
\ngoing go-cart in on a, you know, a Monday afternoon? I’m like, because we had a really good week last week. We want to celebrate success. And I’m paying for the team to do something a bit of a<\/p>\n
00:13:42,840 drenneling. And the team had decided that that’s what they wanted to
\ndo. I wasn’t telling them. And he said, can I come? I was like, no, it’s a
\ncelebration of all the team. But, but, but, but I would only do that if, you know, if we were achieving our targets. And at that time,<\/p>\n
00:13:59,520 you know, the previous year, we delivered the company delivered 47%
\nof projects on time to budget. And we transformed that in a year to 76%
\nand there’s someone who works in projects. You know, it’s really hard to deliver a portfolio or projects on time to budget three quarters<\/p>\n
00:14:14,480 of them when the conditions change so frequently. And we were in a
\ntelecommunication, so it’s changing all the time. But we just did little
\nthings. We did gratitude days before they would even became a thing. We found different ways to use technology. We didn’t deemail each<\/p>\n
00:14:28,920 other. That was the day of black breeze, the black breeze were a thing.
\nI had a fruit bowl and made people put their phones in fruit bowls so
\nthey wouldn’t check them. It’s in 2007. People still aren’t doing this now. So all of those little things, no, I told all of these things<\/p>\n
00:14:43,680 contribute to the culture. And you’re absolutely right. Culture is what
\npeople say about you when you’re not in the room. Also, cultures, what happens when you’re not then. I think my proudest moment as a manager was when I found out about, found out about an issue<\/p>\n
00:14:58,520 in the team maybe three weeks after it had occurred. So I mentioned
\nsomething. I kind of looked at them quizzically. I’m like, what you’re
\ntalking about is like, oh, you don’t need to worry about it. We dealt with it. We didn’t need to get you involved. And you know, what they<\/p>\n
00:15:11,200 did, my team was they held each other to account. We had really high performance standards. You never have to shout, never have to bowl, never have to raise your voice because we just knew what we wanted
\nto get done. And we set the bar really high and jumped over it pretty<\/p>\n
00:15:24,760 much every time. It’s interesting because that holding each other to
\naccount and I find it quite difficult with high performing examples for
\nteams where I’m in an organization where I’m an out of working multiple different organizations. And there are people there who are
\n00:15:45,440 really passionate about the organization. There are people there who
\nare okay, they like the organization, enjoy working there. There are
\npeople who are just transitional for them. And there’s the odd person who doesn’t like being there. And I suppose it’s similar, but<\/p>\n
00:15:58,920 you kind of look at sports teams and then you’ll have all military groups
\nthat work together to sell something amazing or all of this. And there’s a
\nbig disaster when people come together. And sometimes they sit there, they’re like, it’s, it’s, that shared goal or like football teams.<\/p>\n
00:16:20,320 I’m down the road from mix, I’m obviously rick, some at the moment I’ve
\ngot a culture there that’s being created by that team. And you watch
\nthose teams, they’ve got that shared goal and it’s really clear what that shared goal is, win this game. And you will see the situation<\/p>\n
00:16:41,440 I think where you will have team members absolutely ripping into someone else on the pitch. And I’ve listened to a couple of sports
\npeople talking about the fact, but yeah, but that’s fine on the pitch. And that’s what we do because you’re holding that person to account for them<\/p>\n
00:16:59,040 making a mistake, selling you a bad pass or not doing what they should
\nposition or whatever. And, but it’s that ability to hold each other to
\naccount and move forward. And I find it more difficult to translate that kind of thing into an office scenario where you’re delivering<\/p>\n
00:17:17,840 a project and it’s going to happen and it’s not particularly exciting. It’s
\nnot, you know, I mean, it’s not, you can imagine getting excited about
\ntrying to win a football game and get a promotion. You try it. See how in, engaging it can be, though maybe it’s me, maybe<\/p>\n
00:17:38,440 I’m not pulling there, but for doing something in a military sense or
\nemergency services, no sort of things. There’s a shared goal of getting
\ndone and you just get, you get it done and you all pull it. It, this less intensity in the office environment is there to the implications<\/p>\n
00:17:58,960 of someone not doing something on time is much smaller and therefore
\nmore likely to happen. I just think about how you, how do you translate
\nthat? Like performance culture in that is, in an easier environment in my mind because you’ve got a golden ticket of, we’ve got to win
\n00:18:19,240 the game at all costs. That’s, that’s, that’s, that’s, that’s the win the game at all costs. How do you translate, how do you move those
\nbetween organizations that are fairly straightforward paper, paper, mail company selling paper? Yes.<\/p>\n
00:18:33,960 Yeah, I’ve done the bit. Yeah, just remember in the office, that’s why that was immediately in my mind, if you wanted the US, I’m talking
\nabout paper. Yes, which I’m talking about, can you tell you all that stuff? And it’s just like that, that’s, that kind of popped into me as<\/p>\n
00:18:48,440 being a tangential one. So what, I, I, somebody asked me an interview
\non today, I told how to prepare for podcasts and speeches. I said, I
\nalways watch comedy. It just puts me in the right frame of mind. High performance, right? Let’s, let’s<\/p>\n
00:19:01,480 talk about high performance. High performance is what you make it.
\nAnd for me, there’s no distinction between Manchester City, Rexon, or a project delivering, I don’t know, a new switch in the far north of
\nScotland, right? Let’s say there’s a team of six people working on that. My<\/p>\n
00:19:19,760 brother’s an infrastructure engineer, so I’m giving him a little mention
\nthat. It’s, it’s about what you make it. And, and I think the, the work is, is often as mundane as the people around you. And so when you actually take the time to build something that you’re<\/p>\n
00:19:36,920 excited to be part of, now when I say excited, I mean, there’ll be, there’ll
\nbe planning a skeptical cynical people on the, on the podcast, no doubt
\nsaying, oh, well, how do you get excited about work? Well, you know, we spend a third of our lives with the people<\/p>\n
00:19:49,720 that we work with. So why wouldn’t you try and create the conditions for
\nsuccess? You know, I did, my biggest client is probably Red Bull. The
\ndrinks company mentioned them there in, in Austria. You know, we, one of, one of the projects I worked with them last year<\/p>\n
00:20:05,680 was to actually, because they wanted something different, right? I think often what we do within our workplaces is we do the same thing over and over again, but we expect a different result right? That whole
\ndefinition of insanity. And when I work with Red Bull, you know, the,
\n00:20:20,560 the remit from the CEO of Red Bull was, we want people to think about,
\nculturally, definitely we want them to talk about it. Definitely, we want
\nthem to take the excitement back to the office with them. So we brought like a hundred people together in Austria, you know, and<\/p>\n
00:20:33,400 I, you know, I worked with the learn and the global learning development team who are awesome and we designed this program,
\nwhich I then delivered about getting people excited about culture. And I was speaking to, I was speaking to one of the general managers recently, and<\/p>\n
00:20:46,080 he said, we still love talking about culture. He’s like, even, you know, even though we’re coming to work and you’ve got people working on
\nbrand and marketing and sales and people are out driving minis, giving cams of Red Bull, people are excited about what they can co-create<\/p>\n
00:21:02,320 together to actually get the work done. And so, you know, I, I, I spoke to
\na former teammate of mine recently. She’s, she’s got her own podcast.
\nShe was like, Oh my God, she’s like, I used to love our work together. And it was awesome. And all we did was just random little<\/p>\n
00:21:19,800 things Nigel, to get people excited about our interactions on a
\nday-to-day basis. Now, often people will say, Oh, well, COVID changed
\na lot. Hybrid work changed a lot. It only changed it for the people who liked creativity. It only changed it for the organizations that it<\/p>\n
00:21:35,560 didn’t actually redefine the culture either during COVID or immediately post-COVID. You know, a lot of people said, Right, OK, the cultures changed. We’re going to implement Microsoft teams rather than write what’s on new value set, right? OK, what’s our behaviors? How do<\/p>\n
00:21:50,440 we need to train managers in a different way to make sure we set in a whole people’s expectations? You know, as we’re recording this,
\nAmazon are just announced they’re bringing their staff back to the office five days a week, which might be right for them. You know, I’m not going<\/p>\n
00:22:02,360 to judge them one way or the other. For me, though, it’s, it’s failure of,
\nof not redefining the culture for the modern working world. Yeah, but
\nthat’s, that’s just me. So I think, I think high performance is really what you make it. And if you work together as a team to define 00:22:21,720 what high performance means for you, and it’s always a, you know,
\nprofessional sports team limit. And then you actually take the time to
\nmake the decisions and set, start saying no and bring the energy and
\nthe intrinsic motivation to your job on a daily basis. It can be just as exciting.<\/p>\n
00:22:39,000 Interesting challenge on that. Interesting. Sometimes I need to think
\nabout, I think, I think, what I, I sit there sometimes and think, maybe I
\ndo think about the culture when I’m delivering projects, but I don’t, I think a lot of people do, but the transforms into the face of,<\/p>\n
00:22:59,720 you think about what we do, I think, I think, it’s set going in, I heard, talk
\nabout this is, it’s kind of things of what, what people like us do things
\nlike that, that’s all people like us are like this and that, and we all have that little bit in us. And that’s where the,<\/p>\n
00:23:21,400 me is a project manager, portfolio manager, the way we do portfolio manager project management, we do this, we always do these things.
\nAnd there’s certain things that I always do there, and I always put into place with my teams that I’m getting involved in my trade-a-builder<\/p>\n
00:23:37,720 relationships with people and this certain cadence that I like to build in.
\nI’m supposed these are all things that create an element of the culture,
\nbut you don’t realize that how you influence your, those daily behaviors. And I don’t think of them in as I’m putting,<\/p>\n
00:23:55,560 and I’ve got a project, I’m putting a culture into this project, which is on a Monday, at halftown, we all get together, we have a conversation
\nabout where we are on progress, we agree what we’re going to do, you know, in all whether it’s daily stand-ups or whatever those<\/p>\n
00:24:08,920 things are. I wonder whether there’s a way that I can do that and with a
\nmore culture focus, to think, oh yeah, I’m doing this, I’m doing it for
\nculture, actually, is that going to create the culture I want by doing it? Because I don’t think I proactively do that. And do, do, do, do,<\/p>\n
00:24:29,080 do you get down to that level with some of these organisations about
\nyou and people, the individuals really, to challenge them on how they,
\ntheir actions and think about their actions affect the culture. So I’m
\ngoing to, I’m going to keep talking about culture until it kills me, one of my friends
\n00:24:43,640 that said to me recently, they, there’s like, I just don’t know where you
\nget the energy to keep talking about the same things. The reason that,
\nso let me just make a couple of statements, so culture is the number
\none determinant of organisation success, right? So it has been proven time<\/p>\n
00:24:58,360 and time again, and all of the research I use in all of the books, right?
\nThat if you put time thought money and effort into building culture, you
\nget the results, you hit your project milestones, you achieve your sales,
\nyou achieve reputation, all of these things. But Nigel, and it’s, it was the same<\/p>\n
00:25:16,280 for me as it is for you. No one teaches you how to build culture. No one
\nteaches you what it is, no one breaks it down. The owner says on you
\nto go and buy a book like Culture Fix, where I broke it down, or you can
\nbuy detoxure, culture, which repeats some of that stuff, and learn it and then put it<\/p>\n
00:25:36,120 into practice, or you do what I did when I was a manager, you used to
\nhave a little book, and I used to write down all of the good things that I
\nsaw people doing and all of the bad things that I saw people doing, you
\nknow, one of my managers threw a stapler across the room, right? And I wrote in my book,<\/p>\n
00:25:52,200 “Don’t Throw Things”, right? I was running which one, who’s just going
\nto go into it? Yeah, it had it been in Liverpool, it would have been a
\ngood thing, but it was. Yeah, it was a term that did, but when someone
\nthrows a stapler right here in Liverpool, “Oh, you did that for me!”<\/p>\n
00:26:05,080 And no one teaches you Nigel, no one teaches you, and so this is my
\nissue, right? Whenever an organisation wants to work on its culture,
\nwhat they do is more top down activity, right? So they’ll either send you
\non a DI course, right? Which is, again, that’s not a bad thing to do, but that’s a guard rail,<\/p>\n
00:26:27,720 it’s not the culture itself. Rather than saying, right, what we need is a brand new management development programme to help out a man,
\nbecause middle managers are the difference, right? Leaders are too far removed from the day to day work, and we don’t want them in the day to day work
\n00:26:41,640 anyway, because the surge up to make strategic decisions about the future and make sure that they deliver the outcomes and either show hold of value or public service value for money. So middle managers
\nare the difference. I worked with a council, a local council in Australia, and so one of<\/p>\n
00:27:00,360 the things I hear all the time is we’ve got money for culture, I’m like, all
\nright, well, you report yourself, right? You get the culture you choose to
\nbuild, and if you’re not choosing to build it, then you know, you want to
\ngo to yourself to blame. This company paid six figures, right? To work<\/p>\n
00:27:14,600 with me, to train all of their managers, and they want an award, they
\nwant an award for one of the best cultures in Australia, right? Now, not
\nno kudos to me here, all I did was teach them about culture. They have
\nto do the hard bit of actually implementing on a daily basis, they have to motivate themselves,<\/p>\n
00:27:34,200 that to motivate each other, they have to have difficult conversation,
\nthey have to set expectations, they have to, they have to define the
\nbehaviours that they were going to demonstrate within their small team
\nin relation to the values that the organization had, they had to stay focused on<\/p>\n
00:27:48,920 the targets that they had to make decisions in line with that. All of these
\nthings, right, a part of a basic two-day management program. One guy
\nsaid to me, he said, “I’ve been a manager for 30 years, he was retiring,
\nI’m a little, he’ll have retired now.” And he said, “I could have done with this 30<\/p>\n
00:28:04,920 years ago.” So it’s exactly the same as what you’re saying is no one teaches you, and then no one gives you the autonomy to say, “You
\nknow what Nigel, you’ve got the knowledge now.” As long as you build
\na great team culture in line with our values, and as long as you and your team stay focused on the<\/p>\n
00:28:21,000 milestones that you’ve got to deliver, the outputs that are expected, and the outcomes that you know, the company needs, well good. And then
\nthe values and the vision become the heart and the core of the culture, and this is how you get consistency across an enterprise, because everybody
\n00:28:37,880 builds their own subculture in line with the values of the organization.
\nSo you see the values everywhere, you just see them in different ways,
\nbecause different people have different roles. Yeah, that’s interesting,
\nbecause it’s the top down the middle management of it, and looking at<\/p>\n
00:28:56,120 organizations of it, it’s kind of, I’ve been in different project teams in
\ndifferent areas, and I’ve noticed a different, it is different, and I said to
\nyou, right before I moved different roles over a couple of years or so,
\nand you do have to reset, rethink, but there are some, but then there are<\/p>\n
00:29:18,200 some common things that you see played across those, and there’s, I
\nsee the expectations, and I don’t think of it as culture after time, I just
\nthink it was, and I perhaps changing my mindset to think about that,
\nthinking actually, yeah, I’m in a new culture, actually is this, and we’ll probably get<\/p>\n
00:29:36,040 onto the toxic culture, is this a positive approach to things, is this as
\nnegative, and I probably take it from a focus from me, and how it affects
\nme, rather than looking wider at the organization. And I think there are some, some interesting conversations I’ve seen before, now where people<\/p>\n
00:29:54,760 would be very robust with each other, and people knew to that culture,
\nI’m not used to that robustness, and I’m kind of, that’s a bit of behavior,
\nyou’re holding something to really high, you’re holding someone to your personal values, and to your personal,<\/p>\n
00:30:13,000 what you think is to be done, and I’ve kind of said to him, you need to
\nbe kept, we need to think about the other people, and not everyone is
\ngoing to have the same work speed, work pace, work ethic, work, think about it, and you need to be, because this person, I know,<\/p>\n
00:30:32,600 would get frustrated, lack of progress, with lack of doing everything that he would have done, or they would have done, and I kind of talked
\nabout it, and I’m thinking now about the fact that where I’m looking at is
\npart of the challenge there, and I was learning to interact with that person,<\/p>\n
00:30:50,920 and other people who were part of the challenge there is that as you
\ncome in new, if that’s the culture they’re used to dealing with, and
\nyou’re new into that culture, it isn’t actually someone does that, it’s a case of that agreement,
\n00:31:03,560 that that’s how we behave as a team, and in a project team you can see
\nthat when you have a team that’s working and clicking it, don’t really
\nwell, one person leaves, and you bring in a new person, and suddenly
\neverything, the gears are crunching, and it’s that, and sometimes it’s those inferred<\/p>\n
00:31:22,840 agreements between that team of how we do this, John always does
\nthat, Julia was that’s that, one of those goes out there, this person
\ncomes in, well I’m not doing that, and then you’ve got to really negotiate
\nwho does what, and you do those things, and it’s just, just making me think there that<\/p>\n
00:31:40,600 might think you should have been around the lines of actually what we’re a group, we’re on a call every day, what is our group’s
\nbehaviours, and we did start doing a bit of that actually because there
\nwas certain people expecting a response on something, but then this is on a different project, but<\/p>\n
00:31:58,200 people expecting responses, and they weren’t getting as quickly as they
\nwere expecting, and then everyone said well, well not everyone can do
\nthat quickly because they’re doing other things they may not see it, but
\nokay so what do we agree? Well if you haven’t got a response, stick it on the board,<\/p>\n
00:32:13,000 if stick it on the board, on this, do you a board or whatever, stick it on
\nthe board as being a query, and then in the daily calls we go right what
\nare the new queries? Oh, GMAS, Julia, this, Julia, oh I can’t do it, I’ll do that on Tuesday, and then you get that, that Mogas operandi that we<\/p>\n
00:32:33,240 have a kind of if someone’s responded to a query quickly using different
\nteams tools, so again this is in a culture as well I think where the team
\nwe decided what’s the best way to do it, and I’m not thought of it in the
\nfact that we were building a culture of that delivery team. It’s really interesting.<\/p>\n
00:32:56,600 So I have a number of responses, affiliate links in the way that it’s set
\nup that have kindly enabled to share their services really. The first one has my clean, and my runs PM on my PM courses, and it is a great
\nresource for getting those fundamentals of project management trained,
\n00:33:28,360 reasonably priced, and Mike presents it in an accessible and clear manner. You can check out some of his videos on his YouTube channel
\nand kind of give you a view of where they are, but so the code for that,
\nif you go to nodulacreset.com\/onlinepmcoursesall, all one with the look case, that will redirect you to it.<\/p>\n
00:33:55,720 There’s very different levels that you can buy, you can buy individual
\ncourses, you can buy pathways, as well if you like, and I get a kickback
\nof those, my kindly shares me that, so if you do jump on and use it, I hope you find it really useful. I think yes, money back guarantees,<\/p>\n
00:34:15,960 and that as well, so it is a throw-in in a ticker risk on that, so jump on
\nthat, and that again is nodulacreset.com\/onlinepmcourses, and enjoy! [Music]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
n 4bed10d7-3915-f48a-3dc5-7e7582b56daf.mp3 00:00:00,000 [Music] Well, today I am absolutely delighted to welcome back for another set of punishment for Colin Ellis. There’s a third time it’s been on the show. Colin is 00:00:15,720 one of the world’s foremost authorities on workplace culture. He’s a global workplace culture expert sought after by organizations around the world […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[187],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-984","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-transcripts"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nigelcreaser.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/984","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nigelcreaser.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nigelcreaser.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nigelcreaser.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nigelcreaser.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=984"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.nigelcreaser.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/984\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1202,"href":"https:\/\/www.nigelcreaser.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/984\/revisions\/1202"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nigelcreaser.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=984"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nigelcreaser.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=984"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nigelcreaser.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=984"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}