20 Mar March 20, 2020 – Facebook Fighting Covid 19, Culture Spark Jason Richmond and Love Factually Laura Mucha
“The audio file was removed when we switched hosts. Sorry. The cost was prohibitive. If you need the file, contact us and we will send it.”
Kang-Xing Jin “KX” – Head of Health at Facebook
Facebook is giving $100 million in grants to small businesses
worldwide. If interested go to Facebook.com/GrantsforBusiness
Kang-Xing “KX” Jin is Head of Health at Facebook. His team works on products to amplify positive social impact related to health as well as efforts to minimize the harms that can arise out of health-related product usage. He’s worked at Facebook for over 13 years, holding various roles in FB App, including the VP responsible for Facebook Groups and Workplace. He joined Facebook in 2006 as an engineer on the News Feed team, two weeks before that product launched. Since COVID-19 was declared a global health emergency, Facebook has been working closely with global and national health authorities to promote credible information to keep people safe and informed. On Wednesday, Mark Zuckerberg provided an update on the Facebook response to COVID-19 and launched the Coronavirus (COVID-19) Resources on Facebook.
Jason Richmond – Business Development Expert and Author of Culture Spark: 5 Steps to Ignite and Sustain Organizational Growth
People make important what is measured. You have to have
some metric built into your culture to make sure you are on track.
Jason Richmond, President/CEO and Chief Culture Officer at Ideal Outcomes, Inc., is an in-demand keynote speaker, widely recognized as a leading authority on using culture to build strong, sustained revenue growth. During his career of more than twenty years, Jason has assisted companies of all sizes in a wide variety of industries. He has worked closely with established Fortune 100 companies to create Leadership Development Journeys, but also provided thought leadership and innovative consulting services to a range of mid-size firms. Jason has guided numerous start-ups to build solid foundations that have enabled them to become industry leaders. His book shatters myths about corporate culture.
Laura Mucha – Author of Love Understood: The Science of Who, How and Why We Love
You don’t know at the time whether its passion, lust, or romantic
love. Its only with time that you get to know that. At the start,
its a biological process.
Laura Mucha studied psychology, philosophy and flying trapeze, worked as a face painter and swam in Antarctica before becoming a lawyer for an international law firm. Then, she was hit by a car aged 29, I decided to change career. Now, is she an award-winning poet, author, broadcaster, performer and speaker. She writes for adults and children, run writing workshops in schools and theatres, and has spoken / performed at venues such as the Royal Institution, as well as on radio and TV. She won two international poetry prizes (the Caterpillar Poetry Prize 2016 and the YorkMix Poems for Children 2019).
Highlights from Jason’s Interview
You need to proactively design culture for your organization, even from employee number one. Ultimately, it all starts with an organizational leader, an entrepreneur, someone driving a startup; culture starts with them, their vision, and what I refer to as cultural pillars. What does their organization stand on? They have to work very hard in making sure that everyone; from that first employee, to the 20th employee, to the 400th employee, actually has a voice in that culture has a part in evolving that culture.
My professional career consists of 20 plus years in organizational development, culture, consulting, leadership skill development; those types of things. Every organization I talked to, we got into culture conversations. “Why aren’t my people on the same page? Why do we look at things so differently all the time? Why are we stagnating?” So, I went out and spent two years and did nothing but interviewed hundreds of people across the globe around impactful culture. In the book, it really comes down to what we put together as a five-step process. The first step is defined, and that’s where a leader of an organization, the entrepreneur that is bringing his/her idea to the market, the C-suite needs to come together. It starts by defining, what do you want that culture to stand for? Do we want to be comfortable, open, share ideas, innovative? Then let’s all agree on that and let’s make sure, and to take a step further, start defining what those things mean. Several times, when I’ve worked with a group of department leaders or a group of C-suite, I always start out by asking the question one-on-one; define your company’s culture here. If I’m working with a group of six or eight or ten, almost always I get six or eight or ten different perceptions of their culture; and they’re not on the same page.
Have your culture pillars defined, and as you hire people, ask them about those and make sure they quote it back to you. We’ve got a whole section in our research and book about how important it is to recruit and hire for culture. Because if you’re not bringing those people in to fit those values, you’re going to you’re going to come across performance issues down the road. There are all kinds of ways you can test for it, but it’s not an annual performance review. We incorporate a lot of different diagnosis tools within our book and our research, and this is probably where I spend most of my work with organizations; in helping them really identify or diagnose, which is step two, their current culture. Step one is defining, and step two is diagnosing. For working with an existing organization, we got to have the definition on what our culture is, but now we got to diagnose where we are. We need to be able to identify what gaps do we have in our culture, where do they stem from? We have all kinds of different culture walk tools, culture committee tools, a lot of different engagements including a cultural assessment, to help an organization really get a clear picture of what their existing culture is. Because so often, there’s a disconnect of what our culture really is, at different levels within the organization.
Culture is more than posters in the break room. It’s how we live, it’s how we work, it’s how we act, it’s how we talk to each other. We work with a lot of manufacturing organizations, and one of the most important business metrics in a manufacturing climate is safety. There’s a lot of people that don’t relate or make the connection between culture and safety. In almost every internal meeting, board room meeting, conference room meeting, morning huddles, in that type of environment, they talk about the importance of safety. Well, there’s no reason why every time an organization meets, they shouldn’t be opening up those engagements or those meetings with the importance of our culture. That would be an example of something that takes very little to no time. That helps put more impact to our cultural pillars than just have them hanging on the wall.
We’ve all probably been in situations where we’ve worked at a place where they had a culture of kill the messenger, that’s a lack of safety. That is a huge lack of safety to share my ideas or my opinions. If you’ve got a culture like that, that’s soon going to grow into a culture of blame. That all comes down to me as a leader being very deliberate of realizing what type of culture I really do have, before I can even start to adjust it, tweak it, fix it, evolve it; whatever that is.
Then the step number three is to plan. I’ve worked with hundreds of organizations and they say, we do an engagement survey every year. You’d be amazed at how often those engagement surveys and things are not shared back to the organization. The plan to address gaps in our culture of organization aren’t really fully created to be executable or shared with the organization, so nothing really happens. So, the step three is really putting together and incorporating, departmental wise and role accountabilities, to actually evolve or change or create the type of culture you’re really looking for. None of this happens by accident. You will form a culture by accident, but that won’t be the culture you want. If you really want to be deliberate about a culture, you got to have a plan and it needs to be in the forefront; it needs to be talked about and executed. Step three is all about ways to create an actual culture plan that aligns with your people strategy, your compensation strategies, your market strategies; they all have to be in alignment.
The fourth step is to keep measuring and monitoring your culture. Allowed behaviors within your culture automatically over time are going to create alternative behaviors; which behavior is accepted and which one is not. You always got to be aware of that within your culture. We spent a lot of time on internal business professional conduct. It’s not only about defining or planning your culture, but then almost taking it to the next step and measuring your culture. If you just roll out your plan and you just do it and say, we got a culture now, and you don’t stay on top of it and you don’t put a little bit of measurement in it; do an annual culture survey, compare the different results, it wouldn’t work. When you define your culture, define the business metrics that you’re going to use to monitor; whether that is turnover, or customer satisfaction, or net promoter scores. What business metrics are you going to utilize to measure your culture? Customer satisfaction scores or net promoter scores is one of those key business metrics that a lot of organizations have the capability of using. Every employee at the enterprise understands the value and the importance of that. People make important what is measured. You don’t need 20 things to measure for your culture, that’s too many. It’s just like your organization doesn’t need 15 corporate values, it’s too many. But you have to have some type of metric built into your culture strategy that you can look at that continuously and make sure you’re on track.
The fifth step is about sustaining the culture. People say, I’ve got a group of 20 employees or maybe 200 employees, where do I start with this sustaining step? I always say, let’s really work with that middle level of leadership or management you have within your ranks. The reason I highly recommend to work there is because typically, they’re the mouthpiece of communication that goes both directions. They have the ability to bring the message up from the floor; from the individual contributors, up to the top. They also have the capability of taking those high-level leadership messages and bringing them down and communicating, and motivating, and inspiring individual contributors in the organization. Everybody in the company is responsible for culture, but in regards to sustainment, that is my starting point: which is to work with that middle level leadership management that has so much culture responsibility in sustaining it.
Culture is one of those things that if it’s not deliberate and is not made important by the organization, it will be reflected as flavor of the month or something that can just continually get pushed to the side. If you google successful cultures, you’re going to get millions of hits, and there’s some consistency. Even in my research, two consistent points that I keep driving home with organizations in regard to successful cultures is, they’re authentic and they’re transparent. Those are two key pillars within successful cultures that I’ve identified through my research and in the book: Culture Spark.
You can get Culture Spark on Amazon. You can find out more on LinkedIn: Jason Richmond, and all my blogs. You can go to my website “www.culturespark.io”. You can go get copies of the blogs, download blogs, ideas, concepts, the whole works.