Culture Is Not a Ping-Pong Table

Today we're doing things just a little bit differently. I am going to be using the services of The Pacific Institute's, CEO. Richard Resnick is going to be co-hosting with me today. He'll be sharing a story, uh, during the process today that talks a little bit about some of the culture that he's experienced in his career in the past. And we'll both be available for questions there at the end.

As always, if you have any questions at all, please feel free to put those in the chat. Those can go in at absolutely anytime you'd like. We'll do our best to address those. Anything that we miss in the chat, you can expect an email from us later on. Some of you I can recognize you've seen those emails coming me afterwards.

But without further ado, we are going to get up and running One more request that if you are here and have the ability to turn your camera on, Richard and I love to see smiling faces. It gives us energy, it gives us the opportunity to give some of that energy back so we understand if you're in a weird spot or you're driving in your car and you don't want us looking up your nose. But otherwise we'd love to see you on camera. We'll keep you muted so we don't have to worry about any barking dogs. But to get us kicked off, I'm actually going to start off by just turning this right over to Richard to let us explain, let him explain just a little bit about The Pacific Institute.

Wow, this is such an honor to co-host with you, Kevin. I'm delighted. Absolutely delighted. You could just build, um, the, the text in the slide. Please appreciate it.

So many of you have been to a Beyond Limitss before. Hope that you come to more of these. Um, you're probably here because you know something about us already. Change is a chain reaction here at The Pacific Institute. And so the way that we do that, it's just one person at a time.

When we can help an individual to really change how they see themselves and raise their self-efficacy and that individual has groups that they surround themselves with, like their family or their teams at work, then we can help these teams. And when we can help these teams, then the teams really drive organizational growth. So there is a reason for that flame on the left hand side. And I didn't know this. I've been a 15 year user of The Pacific Institute and I've been the CEO for um, a year.

So everything is my fault now. Totally. Uh, it's my dream job. I cannot believe I get to run this amazing organization. I didn't know the symbolism of the flame.

Does anybody know? I know you do, Cheryl. Good. I'm glad you do. So listen, here's the school thing.

This is logo that was developed a long time ago that we have absolutely just doubled down on. It's beautiful. That little spot right in the middle of the, of the bottom most thing. Thanks Kevin. Is, that's like the seed of an idea.

Like hey, I can change myself. And what happens is when we do that and we create lasting change, it spreads from me to we to us. Now, Kevin's lied this thing up so that the.is me. I like to think that the.is the seed of an idea that maybe I can change, maybe just, maybe I still have something left. There's some new thing.

And then that first flame is me. But we fight about everything including that. And you can just see how these fights get very, very violent. Kevin, thank you. I'm delighted to join you.

Thanks for letting me introduce The Pacific Institute. Everyone, thank you so much for joining us back to you. Thank you very much. Richard's going to be providing quite a bit of color commentary today because he has worked with quite a few organizations in the past and seeing the impact of The Pacific Institute. So he will be acting as my exclamation point today from time to time, which is wonderful.

Mm-hmm. And here's a quote that we've all seen lots of times if you've been to these sessions before, you've seen this from me. But as Richard mentioned, we all believe that everything starts with beliefs. Much like Ted Lasso says. It all starts with beliefs.

Here's a quote from Seth Goodin that we use a lot. And that's that people don't believe what you tell them and they rarely believe what you show them. They usually believe what their friends tell them, but they always believe what they tell themselves. And one of our beliefs here at The Pacific Institute is that we don't interact with the world around us as it actually is. We interact with the world around us as we believe it to be.

And what we believe to be true creates how we behave and act in the world around us. So when we talk about culture, one of the core components

that we always talk about is that belief. And we're going to talk a lot about that today. But let's get some practice using the chat right off the bat. There's a, there's quite a few folks in this room, a lot of big thinkers. How would you define organizational culture?

Those of you that are tempted to use ChatGPT encourage you to try to answer on your own. How do you describe organizational culture? Lemme give everybody just a minute or two to put a few answers in there. And Richard, by all means, count out any good ones that you see. Oh, I see some great ones.

Commonly held beliefs and practices. Kathleen, no surprise, what's expected around here. Sense of belonging. Oh, who said the way a team acts when people aren't looking love it. That's exactly it.

Working within accept. Well, this is great you guys. You must be, you must have worked for companies before a uniform message or belief in understanding of behavior. I like to say it's that which is rewarded and that which is punished Looks good. A lot of real good answers we've seen folks before put an answer in is it's not what you tell people they're allowed to do, it's what you let them get away with.

Yeah. So on that same note, the second question is another variety of the same. What kind of words or phrases would you use to describe, describe your culture. You have a culture that says we only hire from within the perfume. I wear lingers in my company when I'm not there.

That is so clever. It just gets a heart. It's so fascinating that people are really excited to define culture but not so excited to define their culture. Oh, here we go. Here we go.

Scrappy Described as scrappy. Yeah, I like that. Mission driven and supportive. Wow. There's a culture leader at Steve Sutton's place I that person's powerful.

One of the more common job titles from last year was that chief people officer, which is that that's what they do. Excellent. So lots of good answers that are trickling in here. And you can tell some folks are thinking of their culture as positive and others maybe are thinking of it as maybe not as positive. Today's focus, what we really want to focus on is getting underneath what culture really is.

So not just the perks, not just the personality, not what's on your, your events calendar, but the belief driven behavior that actually drives performance. The thoughts that run through our heads that then guide the actions that drive us forward. So what we've found is that most companies, when it comes to culture, they're, they're kind of asking the wrong questions. They're not asking the right things. Most of the time culture conversations within organizations, they end up being a little bit more like are uh, fraternities and sororities.

They want to know, are people happy? Are they smiling? You know, happy workers are good workers, right? Are we collaborative? Do we work on teams?

Are we working together? And they ask questions like, do we offer perks or flexibility or connection? I've worked for some Silicon Valley startups before that had some amazing perks, flexibility, like you could work from home as much as you want. Or perks. Like there was an onsite masseuse or free healthcare or kombucha that was on tap that went with the cold brew.

Wonderful things that made it an entertaining place to go to work. But these factors aren't really the drivers of performance. Those are not the things that drive individuals to perform in a better way. Those are just surface level things that look good. Hmm.

So a question that you can put in the chat. I'd love to see some reflection. I'm going to give you about 90 seconds or so to answer this one. Have you ever seen a team that appeared to be happy or collaborative or maybe using some perks but they were underperforming?

And if so, what do you think created that gap? We'll play a little music and let you think on this one. Eric leads the way with free lunches as a perk. Great answers, real good call outs here. Unclear leadership of the team.

Lack of follow through or clarified expectation, not knowing the quote, why real strong. I did not have a clear goal or required expectation. Great example. Cheryl puts one in there in the comfort zone. Go.

Uh, so comfort zone with no goals to strive for. Mm-hmm. What do we call that, Cheryl? It's uh, low in the saddle, middle of the pack, staying out of the way. Lack of clarity.

No connection to a higher purpose. So we've seen it before. I see a lot of nodding heads as Richard and I are reading these out loud. We've got a lot of dog on the dashboard. Everybody's nodding along.

So we've clearly seen this before. In fact, I would argue that most people have seen a team or a subset of a team or an organization in the past that looked like they were kind of having a good time, but the business wasn't doing well, they weren't performing well and maybe things went downhill afterwards. So what we like to talk about is the difference between a social culture and a performance culture. And oftentimes when folks talk about culture, they gravitate towards the things that we consider to be social culture. Some of those examples are going to be things like morale, perks, optics, right?

Do we have an open floor plan with nap pods in the corner where people can relax? Do we have the ever so important ping pong table that proves that we're a fun loving organization? Maybe even a tabletop shuffleboard table if we're just a little better? Do we go real big on our parties no matter what? Everybody knows what the social calendar looks like.

When is the next flamingo themed after work party going to take place? Things that are measured are surveys, but not culture engagement surveys. Just how do people feel? Are we having fun and five checks to see? Are those engaged?

How many people are showing up to happy hour? Is it a, is it a good or a bad culture? Fundamentally, in the failure mode, people are happy but they're unfocused. So when it's failing, they're still having a good time. It's kind of like kids in the back of the bus, but they're not driving, they're not moving towards anything.

So those are fun. Those are good. And little splashes of social culture are welcomed and they're good, but they can't be the cornerstone. 'cause the cornerstone of a performance culture is focused on the beliefs, the behaviors and the decisions. The signals of that are the execution and the accountability.

Do I hold Aaron accountable to his job? Does he hold me accountable to mine? The measures are things more like outcomes. What's our bottom line? Are we making our numbers yes or no?

Leadership norms. What's expected of leaders? How are we supposed to act when we get promoted into a leadership position? And then the failure mode, it ends up being more like burnout or misalignment, right? And we don't want to go to that route.

So what do we do? We want to try to blend these both. It leads to confusion and it leads to stagnation. So looking at these, which side of the chart do you think

that your organization leans towards? More social or more performance? If you think it's social, you write the word social, which means your work is probably fun. Erin, I've worked in some very, very, very social environments and a lot of times performance goes, okay, so we're seeing kind of a split between performance and social across the two of 'em here. A little bit of both.

Somewhere in the middle. So here's what we believe culture is. What we believe culture is, is defined as the beliefs, what people take, what people believe it takes to succeed around here. What are the expectations? What's the belief?

The behavioral norms, what gets reinforced, tolerated or ignored? What's okay to do around here? Is it okay to show up five minutes late to every meeting? Or is the behavioral norm that we're like the Green Bay Packers that we show up 15 minutes early to everything collective self-talk. Another way of saying that is the internal voice of the organization.

If you walk into an organization's break room and they didn't see you walk in there, what's the conversation sound like? What do people allowed get away with? What are they saying to one another? So as we said before, it's simply not your events calendar. It's what people do when nobody's watching.

So in your organization, what gets rewarded, even if it's not intentional? What unintentionally have you seen get rewarded in your organization or maybe in one in the past? What are the accidental things that get rewarded? Jessica leads with what I think is the number one answer to that question. Working a lot of hours, but not accomplishing any critical outcomes.

Hustle, culture, long hours. The badge of honor that I worked a 14 hour day, Kathleen, that's a good one. What gets rewarded unintentionally? Staying quiet. Mm-hmm.

Some people think squeaky wheel gets the grease. In Japan, they say the loudest dug duck gets the stick. It's just the opposite. So some people believe if I speak up, I'm going to get yelled at. Sean has got a great one culture of hey ourselves to take vacation or not.

Do we allow ourselves to take weekends or not? If Richard as the CEO sends me a public email copying the entire organization commending me, staying up until 11 o'clock at night to send emails, that is very much rewarding unhealthy behavior. Mm-hmm. Don't do that Richard. I'll stop.

I will stop. So let's talk a little bit about humans. Raise your hand wave at the screen. If you were at our last session. Hey, waving at a lot of people, good to see you all.

So this is the more simplified version. We talked about that taric quotient, but we really talked about the science of human engagement. And behind the scenes going on inside of our brain, there's this crazy little mechanism that as much as five times every single second is scanning our environment asking a simple question, is this safe or is it not? Does what's taking place represent risk or reward? And when it's safe, five times a second.

So we do this often. When it is safe, we feel like we can show up and contribute and stretch. We feel good, we feel okay. We feel above that horizon line that says, okay, better than not. Okay.

If it feels risky though, if it feels like it's something that takes away our autonomy or if it threatens our rank or it takes away our belonging, people tend to protect themselves. They tend to retreat, they tend to disengage. And that's not what we're looking for in the workplace. What we want is for people to engage in the job itself, not in the happy hour, not in the social portions, but in the actual performance aspects of the organization.

Mm-hmm. So this is a repeat of some of the questions that we asked last time in the last session, but what's a behavior that you've seen either in your organization or another that comes from leadership that makes people feel safe, that makes people want to lean in? Jessica must just have a little book of good answers. 'cause that's another one. Sharing their weaknesses.

Absolutely. Vulnerability based leadership. I love Christina's answer. Short and sweet gratitude. Absolutely.

There's a flip side of that, but we're talking positivity today. I like that answer from Lori. Treating questions all questions is good questions so that individuals are not afraid to ask them. Creating a psychologically safe environment. I love it.

I like Kathleen's too, acting on employee feedback. So in other words, you do a survey and then you take their responses and then you react accordingly. What a novel concept. So let's talk about some examples. Story time.

We won't be using the chat here for a minute. So if you want to kick back, myself and Richard are going to tell a couple of stories. So first and foremost, we want to talk about two organizations that we all know. Everybody has heard of. Netflix.

If you don't have a Netflix account, you will in the next year. It's pretty popular. Most people have heard of WeWork. Maybe some of you were young enough to have been new to the workforce or didn't pay close attention to what was going on in the uh, early 2020s. But we want to compare side by side what took place between two cultures of two very sizable companies from just the last couple of years.

So WeWork, the organization that created those shared workspaces. Raise your hand wave at the screen if you've heard of a WeWork. Keep waving if you actually worked in one during COVID. I'm going to wave with both hands 'cause went to a whole bunch of those. They got real popular for a while.

In 2010, WeWork started and they started with a really lofty mission statement. If you've ever worked for a startup company, something like this probably sounds familiar, we elevate the world's consciousness through shared workspaces. Nice big lofty statement. Who could possibly argue with that? Just nine years later.

By 2019, they had over 500 locations, over a hundred cities were represented. They had a private valuation of just under $50 billion, $47 billion. And they had over 12,000 employees. So we can comfortably say they were a pretty large company and they were looking to become a privately held company. They were looking at paying off their investors and paying off their employees.

So what they wanted to do is they had all that startup energy open bars, they had kombucha on tap. They would run these big shared parties, organizations that signed up to work on long-term contracts with WeWork. Those contracts would include X number of parties and happy hours and other ancillary things. Nothing that actually drove work. They just made people show up and smile a lot.

And they had those elevate the world's consciousness written all over the walls. What happened though was just before 2020, they attempted to go public. They decided it's time to cash in. We're ready to start making some money, let's pay back the investors and the founders. And what they discovered was because there was a lack of performance focused in their organization, they were massive losses that were being hid, that were being hidden.

There was really weak governance that was taking place at the leadership level. The executive team was completely unclear and unaligned. And because there was no clear expectations, there was no accountability, nobody was holding each other accountable. So within months, their valuation dropped from 47 billion down to 10 billion. And when I say months, I mean six to nine months.

They dropped faster than they grew and they grew like a rocket ship. The co-founder was ousted. He was kicked out thousands, literally thousands were laid off. The company was rescued in a small way by a bank

and that did absolutely nothing. By 2023, WeWork filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy and absolutely everybody in the organization was gone. When we do autopsies on companies, we find a lot of the same things. A lot of times what we'll find are things that we discovered. When we did the autopsy on WeWorks, we discovered that their beliefs were that success came from charisma.

And it was all about puffing your chest out and saying what big great things you were going to do. All about promoting the brand, all about social buzz and making sure that were talked about, that were on social media, that people knew who were and what were doing at WeWork. But there was really not a whole lot of belief in operational discipline and in doing the day-to-day things that make an organization successful, therefore the behavioral norms was that hype was rewarded. Anybody who would say the biggest thing was rewarded. Leaders were promoted because they would offer lofty statements without any evidence supporting that they were going to be able to do the things that they said they would do.

So decision rights were really vague. Leadership tolerated inconsistency, and they sidestepped accountability. And as a result of that, they were running really fast, but it was a ship without a rudder. And when everybody runs in a different direction, you don't go anywhere. So while they did have a collective self-talk, is that we're transforming the word world of work, the internal dialogue was totally different.

The internal dialogue had a lot of folks saying, I'm not really sure what we're doing. I don't know where we're headed. I'm not sure what to do next. And the only people that get promoted around here are big and loud and quite honestly lying. So the result was the culture looked magnetic.

How the heck do you get 12,000 employees to come in from the outside? You make it look like a fun place to work. But on the inside there was not a lot of alignment. The market was tested and the beliefs and the behaviors could not hold up. And even though they had what looked like a nearly $50 billion organization, what they really had was a party with not the right things going on in the background.

So the, the takeaway from that is these things don't necessarily equal performance culture, these other factors that they were paying attention to, they're, they're really good for belonging and comfort and social connection, but they're not good for performance. They're perfect for your fraternity and sorority, but not so much for your business. So a performance culture requires system and structures. Things that will reinforce clear behavioral norms that are tied to results, tied to the actual behaviors that are going to take place, that are going to move this company, this team, this organization. Forward consistent accountability and key outcomes.

So clear KPIs, clear things that you know, clear rocks that you know that you're going to hold yourself accountable to. And then of course a leadership focus on expectations and feedback and skill development because those are human beings that need to have constant feedback and constant growth and an understanding about what's in front of them. So we worked, innovation and perks were kind of effective at first as far as creating social energy. They were really good for recruiting and bringing folks in. But as far as sustaining and running an organization, it simply didn't work.

It was not a performance driven culture. So what does it look like when you flip that culture? Moving on to to Netflix, another company that started at a similar time. They got their start in the late nineties, but they really kicked off when they moved to doing things through the mail, which was the early two thousands. And that was the Netflix that we all fell in love with.

And when Blockbuster made the silly decision not to buy them, they decided to transition to streaming back in 2007. Now, in order to compete with companies like Blockbuster and some of those other big ones out there, Netflix had to do things on kind of a bootstrapped budget. They needed every person who was working in the organization to do their job exceptionally well. If you thought of the rowers on their boat as each having an important job, they all had really heavy oars to pull. Every person was very much relied on and the ship would not move forward.

If not, each and every one of those rowers could pull their weight. So by 2025, Netflix, 260 million users, 50 plus countries, absolutely everybody on earth has heard of Netflix and they're seen as one of the most admired companies for culture and innovation. So there's a key source. They had a document that they released in the early two thousands. Now this document is a Netflix culture deck.

It's free, you can download it online, you can find it anywhere. There's really good YouTube summaries and I recommend them. It's been downloaded a lot. 15 million people have gone through this and read the Netflix culture deck that laid out an unapologetic performance culture centered

on radical honesty and extreme clarity. Now I'm going to put up one of their key quotes and at least one of you is going to think there's something wrong with it. The signature line from their deck was adequate performance gets a generous severance. I'm just going to leave that one and let that sit for a second now. Now some of you heard that and went, oh heck yes.

And some of you thought, well that's unfair. So I want to be clear. Their generous severance was six to 12 months. They did not say, if you don't perform well, you're fired. Pack your crap and go home.

They told people when they started in this organization, you need, if this is grades in a school, we don't settle for AEs. We need everybody to get an A in order for us to be successful. If anybody in this organization is trending towards an A minus or a B plus, we're going to need to move that person out so we don't sync the entire organization. So they were not saying the expectations were unrealistic, they were just saying, in order for us to be successful, to do what we need to do, we need to have people here who want to excel and do exceptional. So this one phrase said that, look, people are adults and they can be expected to act like owners.

And there is no tolerance for mediocrity or average or anything that's even close to well-liked or good enough. And they made it very clear that we're not a family, we're a business. So their beliefs were that success comes from high standards, direct, honest, open feedback and individual accountabilities. When I can look right at Richard and say, Richard, you didn't do what you said you were going to do last week, how can I help? We can be a lot more productive.

The behavioral norms of speaking the truth, calling it out when you see it being the one who can actually say, Hey boss, I think we're headed for a cliff. Also, speaking that truth and that it was an intern, I've told this story many times, but it was an intern at Netflix who once voiced in a meeting, why don't we do it through the mail? Wouldn't that be easier? And that's what really kicked off that organization. And when you're in an organization where only the big shouty ideas like WeWork get promoted, that person stays quiet.

And that idea never happens. So understanding that performance is more important than harmony. And the last one I really liked, we're a team. We are not a family. And this was what shapes the mindset of trust and excellence and responsibility.

The result was they scaled without diluting the core. They kept a theme and a culture of high performance. Their culture became sharper. It did not get softer. And the alignment between beliefs and behaviors and what all those individuals said to themselves, it all aligned.

And when those things align, you become more resilient, you become more persistent, and you become more high performing. So thinking about just these two examples, and I'll turn it over to Richard here in just a second. What's something that stood out, either a negative example from WeWork or a positive one from Netflix that caught your attention? Let's see some answers in the chat that some of the positive things you could learn from the good folks at network and maybe the cautionary tales that we learned from the rise and fall of WeWork. First answering from Laurie says that net Netflix telling people that when they're hired to expect top performance and that they won't settle.

Many of us have seen organizations that talk about having these really high performance standards, but when everybody is allowed to perform below those standards, that really is your standard. Mm-hmm. Like James says, happy talk goes nowhere. A lot of us present company, very much included have worked in organizations that like to say things like we're a family. And that sounds real good to a certain extent, but I would never hold my children to the same standards of work as I would hold a coworker.

It's just a different relationship. So Richard, I'm going to turn it over to you for a moment and your smiling face.

Oh, well thank you. I'd be so happy to share a couple stories. I've run a bunch of companies, um, and some have been very successful and others have been utter failures. The first thing I'd like to point out is that we have to upgrade that picture of me on the slide because I appear to be a little younger in that picture. Now it's gone.

Thank you. Appreciate it. I'll tell you a couple stories. The first one, I was an engineer, a software engineer at a college working on this thing called the Human Genome Project. And I didn't know really anything about what that was.

Um, um, I walked into an office at MIT, pretty good at writing software under people that are famous that you names that you would know. And the culture here was we are on a mission to decode humanity. It is literally the most important thing that humans have ever attempted and we will succeed. And then there was some, the healthy competition as well with Soro, which was sort of a for-profit startup that went against it. I'll tell you, we won, right?

The genome has been sequenced, we've learned a ton from it. That was definitely a culture of performance, no doubt about it. That's where I cut my teeth. And I as a social butterfly, I kind of hated it. I didn't like it very much.

It made me work harder than I wanted, but they got a lot more out of me I think, than I would've otherwise given them. I went on to start a company, anybody here alive and working during the.com boom. Good. So if you were, uh, and you started a company that had a.com at the end of it, you were going to just do fine. Like literally these companies were getting funded and getting sold with absolutely no value.

So I started a little consulting company about nine, 10 years into my career and it got bought pretty quickly and suddenly I was working at another larger startup.com. The CEO was a man named Manny. Manny was magnetic. This guy could talk and you would just fall down listening to him. He's so fascinating, brilliant, smartest guy in the room.

Harvard educated, $70 million of investment into the company. And it's full of ping pong tables and shuffleboard and lots of beer drinking and all that sort of stuff. So guess what you think that company lasted? Manny was out there talking to all the VCs, getting more money, getting on stage, being really impressively important. And our job was very clearly to have fun and to make sure that we could make, find as many spotlights for 'em.

You can't talk your way to value, right? You actually have to do something. And that company was a massive failure. It ended up being a zero. Um, I give you one other one, the last company I was running was in healthcare.

And listen, like we teach this stuff, but that doesn't mean that we're all experts at this. We all fall into these cracks, we all slip, right? I'm sure that each of you is looking at this and feeling pretty good about your own relationship to these topics. But then if you look at your team right now, your team right now today, not even your company, just your team, what is it like, judge it, what's your contribution to that? Right.

So here I am, I'm a CEO and I'm running a healthcare company and uh, I've moved through a lot of industries. So I don't really know healthcare very well. It takes a couple years to learn healthcare in the United States. And I was on that learning path 2000 17, 18, 19. And all of a sudden, I mean it was at 20 people, uh, we all worked in a single office.

It was a lot of fun. We did the things that Richard Resnick likes to do, which is to really deeply get to know each other, to deeply understand ourselves and to really like, you know, have a sense that there's a team that together is trying to do something that's important. So that's the way that I ran that company. Uh, and it probably would've died except for COVID. Suddenly COVID happens and we're in New York City.

It was not a good place to be. I mean, we saw the trucks being loaded with dead bodies. We were in healthcare, working in, in and around the world of medication management, which is just, you know, most folks, you get

to a certain age and you take pills. Some of our patients were taking 30 or 60 a day, you know, not very safe. So were a bunch of pharmacists and pharmacy technicians that were trying to solve for that problem. And COVID happened and everything stopped. And you know, there was a culture that was a little bit more social than performance, I think, and that was due to me and my sort of natural tendencies.

But suddenly it was really clear. And this, like most of the companies that I've run venture backed. So there was a lot of money in it from wealthy individuals and corporations. Suddenly were going to die. It was, you know, March 7th and 2020 and it was obvious were going to die.

Every single prospect in our pipeline was a healthcare organization. And they all said, sorry, we're super interested. Don't call right now. We cannot handle it. Healthcare just blew up.

And so what did we do? It was clear that there was no hope. I wasn't going to be able to raise any more money. We were going to die. We were, we.

So I looked at my board and I said to them, I mean, you just have to draw yourself back to that time to understand this and be in New York City maybe to understand it more deeply. It felt like the world was ending everyone around. I had an employee who's father just got COVID and died. You know, like it was, everyone knew somebody N New York was a, was a nightmare. So I looked at this board and I said, we are going to give our services away to keep people out of hospitals and do phone triage as much as we can and it's going to kill us and I don't have another option and you're going to let me do this.

Um, and they could see by the tears in my eyes that they didn't really have much of a choice. Nobody knew what to do. Suddenly this little company had a purpose, right? There was a purpose and we, we had a purpose statement before suddenly it was like, oh my gosh. Well guess what happens?

All of the social energy that had connected that group of humans, it remained. But were there on a team fighting for the life of the city, the country, our, our, our self-respect. It was a really immediate, dramatic change. And it reminds me of something that one of our partners, Donka sometimes says humans, the way that we behave in teams, we've been behaving this way since humans have been at least a hundred thousand years. And he's done all this research, all this anthropology, to look at humans over time to look at what the code of how teams work is.

Yeah. And there's some things that are primal about humans that are really part of our biology. And one of them is you need a battle cry, right? If you have a battle cry, if they're, and powerful people throughout history of understood this, right? To create religious wars to, I mean this is what you need is a battle cry.

And what Don would say to you if he were here is, would you rather be on a team? You, you're out there in a battle, you're fighting, right? That's kind of, that's the metaphor. That's what we're doing in all of our companies. We're trying to achieve some sort of a mission and the world's out to get us.

Yeah. And if you're in a battle, on the one hand you're going to pick your team. Okay? You can even put it in the chat. On the one hand, team A is a bunch of people who really like each other, who are expecting that you're going to be continuing to make them happy.

And team two is a group of people that are willing to die for the cause that you've taken on right now. Obviously two's the answer there. It doesn't always have to be life and death, but the idea of a performance culture versus a social culture is like a real cousin, a kissing cousin to uh, having a saga that's about a purpose worth fighting for. Imagine showing up at Netflix and hearing, okay performance and if I'm adequate, I'm out. Like you've really got to say I buy into what it is that we're trying to do here.

It's going to be good for humanity.

Yeah, I guess I'll stop there. Thanks for letting me talk. I like all three stories. My favorite is the last one because I enjoyed the pivot and I've been part of organizations in the past as well, that when there is a battle cry like that, it makes a big difference. And sometimes it comes for really unusual reasons.

I was working in an office one time where the leader of that office had a health problem, just had a health concern come up out of nowhere and there was the option that the organization, our team could have been rudderless or we could have rallied around that. And it became very focused on the performance. Let's make sure that this person has a job when they come back. And it just became a heavy focus. We still had fun, we still got along, were still friends.

But when there was a pivot to more of us taking the team, accountability for the responsibility of that team so that the leader that we cared for had a job to come back to, it changed everything in how we worked. And suddenly individual's personal level of minimum expectation raised to a higher level. And that's kind of what Netflix was doing. They just said you can't be adequate. So the moment you feel yourself slipping towards adequate, that's the time to course correct.

And if you know anything about The Pacific Institute, that's when we pattern interrupt and we talk about what we're going to do the next time. You get my screens back up. So here's what happens when culture becomes too much of a feel good exercise. When it's more the former stories, not the ladders. Accountability starts to fade, right?

Because we're too busy focusing on, well yeah, but as long as we're still cool at happy hour later on or I don't want to have any difficult conversations, feedback starts to disappear. Certainly not going to let Richard know that his performance is slipping because we gotta go to office happy hour later on and I want to make sure he's on my foosball team Strategy and behaviors start to drift apart. So the strategies that are set start deviating from the behaviors. 'cause people are focused on the wrong things and not the bottom line performance. Not what do you have to do to put the or in the water to move this ship forward.

So when morale becomes more the metric, the performance starts to slip. So we'll take a look in the chat here, another opportunity to put some answers in. It's been a little bit, where do you see a gap between what's celebrated and what actually drives results in your workplace or in others? Where do you see a gap between what really gets rewarded or celebrated and what is actually driving the organizational result? Mm-hmm I like Steve leading with an honest answer.

The desire to keep reports happy. This is another one of those examples where sometimes too much hustle is rewarded and you're overly celebrating those that are choosing to stay late, work long shifts or come in on the weekends. Richard, put a good one in there. You know, was a meeting enjoyable or did you get something accomplished if we all leave the meeting smiling, but we didn't accomplish anything. It was a feel good exercise.

I like Eric's answer, vanity metrics without real outcomes. Good stuff. So here's the questions that we think really matter. We know that those beliefs, behavioral norms, the internal dialogue, I'll send out the slides afterwards. There'll be a QR code in just a moment where you can request it.

But these are the questions, beliefs like what do we really take? What do we think it takes to succeed around here? What's running in between my right ear and my left ear that really sends a message of what do I take to succeed? Is it being well-liked or is it being productive?

Is it being the person who invites everybody to the company holiday party? Or is it the person that drives the results or behaviors? What behaviors do we need to repeat, reward, or allow and invert that a little bit of what are we not willing to tolerate? If you choose to run your team like a family, there's also things that you won't tolerate. So those behaviors are going to be true across the board, but what behaviors do we need to repeat, reward or allow dialogue?

Self-talk. What is going on in people's heads? What's the internal and external dialogue about change, about leadership and about pressure? How do we talk and communicate about the principles of pressure? How do we lead, how do we communicate?

And then alignment, are our beliefs actually aligned with the outcomes that we want? Are we actually aligning our day-to-day beliefs with the activities that are actually going to align with the outcome that we've said that we want? Or are we just taking steps to try to do what we have to do to make me feel a little bit happier? Which one of these questions, let's see your answers in the chat about beliefs, behavior, dialogue or alignment. Which one do you think you see yourself checking with your team in first?

Cheryl, what a wonderful answer. Great organizations don't win because their people are happy. They win because their willingness to grind through it together for a great pause. A lot of folks here are saying that they want to check on beliefs. I see some for behaviors.

I think alignment's winning in terms of a raw count and alignment is such a good one because it alignment lasts as uh, until the meeting's over kind of right? It's a constant fight for clarity around the alignment. And as you might even think there's alignment, but there's somebody that uh, right, so alignment's one that we come back around to every week. I always laugh about alignment because people oftentimes say, well, I said it clearly, but oftentimes if you were to ask another person, you'll have a conversation that I've got a 14-year-old. So he likes to say, yeah, yeah, yeah, I got it.

And I say, okay, what did you get? And whatever he repeats back is invariably not at all. But there isn't alignment even though there's the illusion of it. Until we get clear, until I can say, wait, wait, wait, hold on, but what did you just say yes to? And when that happens, then we get real alignment.

And to Richard's point, it sometimes only lasts as long as the conversation. So we have to do it often and often. And you can learn a lot from handling teenagers. Uh, repetition is one of the things that you'll learn a lot of. So here's what we do.

What we do with this is we help organizations rewire those belief systems. We don't just say, Hey, believe this now beliefs take a while to rewire. We're not all lucky enough to have an instance that's so drastic in our life that makes us change our beliefs instantly. Most of the time if we want to change a belief, it takes some time. So we use the mental technology, we've got the systems and the processes to be able to help individuals rewire those belief systems and replace the negative ones with positive ones that help them.

We help cultures align to outcomes so that you can have all the fun that you want to have 'cause Richard and I have a darn good time here at The Pacific Institute, but things are very much tied towards specific outcomes, very much tied towards that. And we get to continue to have fun as we, as long as we work towards those outcomes and we help build performance through mindset. We help people get the right message between their right ear and their left ear. That creates the right type of mental imagery that creates the right type of emotion that makes you magnetically drawn towards the actions that drive success. And with that, we're able to deliver leadership and performance workshops, one, two and three day in-person and virtual workshops, ongoing coaching and consulting through our team of facilitators, coaches and consultants and scientifically validated culture assessments.

So when you want to find out exactly what you have, it's not just the surface level of another engagement survey where you find out if people want to work there are going to refer you. But we actually go deeper to find out what's the culture of your organization, what are the beliefs of the individuals that are driving the behaviors? In other words, what really is the health of your culture? And with that, we're able to support long-term reinforcement, sustained growth. Our goal is not to be here to just inspire.

Yes, our workshops tend to be inspiring. Folks leave in a good mood and they're happy and we have a lot of fun. But we're here to help install performance that allows you and your organization to scale. One question for you before we part ways here. What part of your culture, what's one part of your culture that maybe needs a little bit of rewiring, not just refreshing, what's something about your culture that you thinks, you know, if we could rewire this, it might make a big difference.

See some answers in the chat. Thanks Aaron. Accountability. Huh? I Kevin, thank you very much for that.

Isn't it cool how we even here at The Pacific Institute, right? There's things that we're rewiring all the time. Internally, I am very comfortable saying that my absolute favorite Pacific Institute client is us. That's good deference at the expense of productivity. Yep, There's some good stuff going in here.

Now, as we said, beliefs are hard to change. Sometimes they happen in an instant, but most of the time it takes a lot of practice and repetition to be able to change those beliefs. And if you're looking to try to be able to change those beliefs and you want some help with that, that's exactly what we're here to do. If something happened today that sparked, if any of the things that have been taking place in this executive briefing series that we've now been hosting for the last year, today is our 12th one of these, we're offering a couple ways for you to engage with our team. There's going to be pretty heavily discounted.

So if you scan that QR code, there's a few options in there. As always, you can get ahold of our copy of the slides and offer any additional feedback. And you can tell Richard that he doesn't look that much older than his picture and all those types of things. Please do. Or, but you can also list in here, we're going to do a couple of open sessions and those of you that have worked with The Pacific Institute a lot, we are bringing these back.

We're going to do virtual sessions starting this fall. We'll be hosting four, two hour virtual sessions as part of our Invent Your Future Program. So for those of you that have the ability to log in for two hours at a time and would like to experience some of our curriculum, we'll be doing that this fall. Also, this fall, we're picking a miserable location called San Diego, California to host an in-person session. And if you've never been to San Diego in the fall, let me tell you about nice weather.

So we're going to be hosting an in-person session here in my hometown of San Diego this fall as well. So for those of you that would like to get out of the office and try to see the uh, in-person experience, we'll be doing a one day in-person session here as well. So on that QR code, there's a couple of opportunities where you can express your interest and as always, there's going to be an email in your inbox in just a couple of minutes from yours. Truly, if there's anything interesting in there, you can simply reply to that email and we will follow up right afterwards. But that is our time for today.

We are finishing just a few minutes early as promised so that if anybody has any questions for myself or particularly for Richard, especially about his stories, we are going to stick around here to answer those. If this is the end of your time with us, thank you for being here. We will see you again next month. Thank you Richard, for your contributions today. And thank you everybody for being here with cameras on and participation in the chat.