How to Operationalize Our Work Culture to Support Employees w/ Garrett Delph
Home > Podcast
In this episode of Relationships at Work, Russel chats with ClarityOps founder and CEO Garrett Delph on why we need to operationalize our work cultures and how to make it a reality.
A few reasons why he is awesome — he is the founder and CEO of CarlityOps, LLC, helping business operations become better, faster and smarter – including around cultural debt. He has more than 25 years of experience in building multiple worldwide scalable businesses, with 12 of those spent on building and managing both on-premises and remote international teams.
Connect with Garrett, and learn more about his work…
LISTEN AND SUBSCRIBE
“Typically, bad culture symptoms—complaining, high stress, gossip, backbiting, infighting, high churn rates—come up because expectations weren’t managed. And why aren’t they managed? Because there’s a lack of control.”
Garrett Delph
Russel Lolacher: And on the show today, we have Garrett Delph, and here is why he is awesome. He’s the founder and CEO of Clarity Ops, LLC, helping business operations become better, faster, and smarter, including around cultural debt. Hold on to that thought which we’ve talked on the show about before and I have a feeling it’s going to come up again.
He has more than 25 years of experience in building multiple worldwide scalable businesses with 12 of those spent on building and managing both on premises and remote international teams. Looking you up, I saw the term on prem. I’m not going to say it. That sounds too corporate for me. Corporate speak, but I’m thrilled to have you here, Garrett.
And today it’s all about that culture I mentioned, welcome to the show, sir.
Garrett Delph: Russel, really great to be here. Thanks for having me.
Russel Lolacher: Of course. Garrett, before you get into what we’re discussing today, which is operation, operationalizing culture, I’ll have to warm up my tongue a little bit still. Let’s get into the question I asked all of my guests, which is, sir, what is your best or worst employee experience?
Garrett Delph: It’s a great question. And funny enough, recently I’ve been, narrating a lot of the bad experience that I, bad experiences in both operationally and with employees. so I, I’m going to, I’m going to put a twist on this and go, go with the… or I’ve been talking about the worst ones. I’m going to go with the best ones here.
And about a year ago, we had a director of HR that, that left and, and it was all good. We were happy for him. He got this really great opportunity to go with a large gaming company to go lead a subsidiary company, a company of theirs. And after he had been there about four months, he called me up and said, Hey, I just wanted to tell you that everything I learned in working with you over the last five years, I applied out of the gate to this company and by and large turned it around and in that short three and a half, four months made them profitable. And he said, it works. The system works. And I was a proud parent. It was maybe top three up there in terms of validating, everything I’ve been working on my entire career. So that was, that was pretty great. That was pretty great. That’s, that’s definitely up there with the best.
Russel Lolacher: It sounds fantastic too, because I think we forget that, what’s the term? Leaders are humans. I think we forget that a lot of the time and just assume all the praise and encouragement and power should go to teams and staff, which they should, but us as leaders need to hear that too. I mean, we, we know we’re doing a good job, but maybe it’s been a while since we’ve heard it.
We, we know our results work. But we haven’t got that reinforcement in a long time. I love that you illustrated that.
Garrett Delph: Oh, yeah. Thanks, man. What’s, what’s the old adage? Heavy is he who wears the crown? And I’m with you, boy, just as long as it’s authentic to, to get some encouragement here and there is it’s, it’s pretty great.
Russel Lolacher: And it’s, it’s so funny. Cause people are like, Oh, they know, Oh, they know. You know, they they know they’re doing well. And I mean that executive, middle management, like it doesn’t really matter the size of the crown. To, to, to really lean into your metaphor. I think everybody as a leader, you just, we don’t get that.
I mean, as much as there’s so many problems with training leaders, as it is, there is also a lack of praise and encouragement when we do get it right, because, and, and as you sort of illustrated before you told me a great story and me being the host of the show, we always hear the negative. It’s always the lessons learned.
It’s always the, they’re easier to talk about. They’re usually top of mind. And it usually takes us a bit more time to go, no, no, no. Good things happen, too. We just don’t voice them as much.
Garrett Delph: Uh, you know what, Russel, I’m totally inspired by your thought there because when we do executive coaching, what are we always saying? We’re saying, make sure you praise your people, respect your people, take care of your people, obviously hold them accountable, but we’re, we’re never going to the rest of the company and saying, Hey when your leaders do a great job, give them a high five, send some applause their way. I love it. I think it’s really healthy.
Russel Lolacher: Yeah, I mean, they’re employees, too. I mean, and we, we obviously, we always talk about employee engagement. So leaders are employees!
Garrett Delph: It’s true. So…
Russel Lolacher: They need all the help and support they can get. So let’s talk about culture. Cause that’s really what we’re dipping our toe into right now, just even with this conversation.
So when we were started this conversation about getting on the show and talking a bit about it and you were going, you know what, let’s talk about operationalizing culture. And I’m like, Oh, I’m super curious about that. Cause that gets me into so many other realms, but we can’t go further without defining things.
It is a key piece to my conversations with leadership, which is let’s get to the same song sheet first before we dig into a topic. So, Garrett, could you define what operationalizing culture means to you?
Garrett Delph: Yes, I can. So my hypothesis is that culture is operational, meaning the, the outcome of culture is a result of all of our behaviors that came from, when I say behaviors, I mean, I mean both how we behave around people, but also we behave, how we behave when we perform. And those are rooted in values, which need to be defined. So now we’re talking about instructions. Those are rooted in performance process, which should be documented, should be instructive, should have guidelines, should have rails. They’re also rooted in, what the business stands for, like vision, for example. And so when you collect these sort of three buckets I just mentioned, really, what you’re talking about is a set of guidelines, processes, and instructions that guide the behavior of the people. And that, that’s, that’s my definition of, of, of culture and that is why I believe it, it is should be operationalized because then you can control it.
Russel Lolacher: So I’m going to push back a little bit and ask you to find operationalizing because culture is an interesting one and I get it, but what are we actually meaning when we say we’re going to operationalize this day to day, month to month, year to year.
Garrett Delph: Yeah. Okay. So let’s do, let’s do brass tacks. Let’s talk about a bad culture. You may or may not agree with me here, but I think symptoms of a bad culture are complaining, are fret, high stress, I’d contend gossip, backbiting, infighting, high churn rates, high employment churn rates. So I won’t go on. There’s six or seven there. And typically those symptoms come up, why? Because expectations weren’t managed. And why aren’t expectations managed in business typically, it’s because there’s a lack of control. My experience in running businesses and consulting businesses is typically there is a lack of control because you don’t have two things.
Number one, processes, documentation about what the business stands for, what people do, and the expectations around when they do it, how it should be performed. There’s that. And then the other is accountability. Where the business didn’t say, Okay, now that we’ve defined what we want, we’re actually going to make provision to make sure we measure it and hold it accountable so that it actually does what it’s supposed to do.
Russel Lolacher: It’s so funny we, you mentioned accountability. It’s a reoccurring theme on the show, but it’s also one where I was having conversations just yesterday with this gentleman who’s just starting at, well, actually he’s been at this job for four years and he’s been screaming at the organization to have a plan because, and I’m talking when it comes to culture and expectations, like for instance, when are you supposed to show up?
When are you supposed to go home? Like even baseline things aren’t defined. So if we don’t do that, we can’t discipline people because we haven’t told them what the framework is.
Garrett Delph: You’re spot on. You’re spot on. I have actually a perfect example. My partner and I just finished up an engagement in L.A. with a large hotel. And their goal is 100 million in revenue, right now they’re at 50, and they believe the reason they’re struggling is because of their customer NPS. It’s in the 40s and they believe that is a direct correlation to why their business is not growing.
So, we went in and lo and behold, guess what we found is the reason they have such a low NPS is because their customer service team actually does not have facts and scripts and methods of solving customer problems systematically. Very large hotel doing great business, but even their C suite management didn’t have the gumption, they didn’t have the wherewithal to say there’s a route to the reason that you guys are failing. And it took, to your point a basic plan, this isn’t rocket science, right? But like if you go to my site, you’ll see there’s a little caption there, which is we’re emotionally neutral when we work with you, because most businesses are just too freaking close to very easy problems to solve that even the simplest solution doesn’t come to mind, right? So anyways, that plan thing, it’s it’s real.
Russel Lolacher: So you kind of touched on it there. Now I’m kind of curious as to what our organization’s doing now, because if you’re recommending that we operationalize culture and this is the way forward…
Garrett Delph: Yeah.
Russel Lolacher: Obviously there’s a problem we’re trying to fix.
Garrett Delph: There is a problem. I won’t speak for you, but maybe I’m speaking for you. Yes, there is a problem we’re trying to fix, and that is stop doing business the old way, Gen Z will not put up with it. And the old way is chasing revenue at all costs, at the cost of the hearts and the minds and the jobs of the people.
The old way is, buying the lie that doing business in chaos and without order is just how you do business. I guess one could contend maybe it’s not a lie because that’s how most businesses operate. But my goal is to, is to make a dent in the statistic 9 out of 10 businesses fail, by challenging a new narrative in the business domain that actually the stuff is solvable and it’s not rocket science.
It just takes commitment and the decision that, okay, we don’t want our people to live in chaos any longer. And we don’t want the business to live in chaos anymore any longer. Whatever it takes to do, we want to do it.
Russel Lolacher: I always find it interesting when, and, and no finger pointing here. I always find it interesting when people say, but it’s the old way. I’m like, no, no, it’s the current way. It is way people, there are too many people doing it now. It has roots in the old way, but the problem isn’t a past problem. The past is like, it’s a current problem.
And then on the flip side, we’ll talk about the future of work and name all the things that we want now. And have wanted for the last 10 years, but like the future of work is remote. I’m like, no, no, it’s now. It is, it is now is remote work.
Garrett Delph: Yeah.
Russel Lolacher: It’s just you are not adopting it.
Garrett Delph: Yeah. Yeah. Russel, I, I accept that challenge. I appreciate that. It, it is, maybe, maybe it’s not the old way, it’s just status quo.
Russel Lolacher: And yet in the next sentence, those same executive will talk about being innovative. And I’m like, Hmm. You hypocrite, you can’t talk about innovation and then claw back and back to the 1950s.
Garrett Delph: Yeah.
Russel Lolacher: That’s just not how this works. It’s hypocrytical.
Garrett Delph: Yeah. And by the way, for, for all of the executives, founders, CEOs, C suite listening to your podcast, I just want to make sure I draw the line in the sand here. I’m not vilifying leaders that are operating this way, like it’s a big problem and so I think in general, most leaders and businesses want to be great in general.
There are some jerks that they just want to be jerks because they are, but I think that’s the edge case. Most really want to do a great job, but business is complex. Business is complex and they get caught up in the complexity of it and, and so that’s why I’m thankful for being on podcasts like yours to begin to challenge that narrative and shed light on the fact that you don’t, if you don’t want to live that way, there actually is a path forward that is better. It’s more profitable, it’s more happy, it’s less stressful and it scales better.
Russel Lolacher: And as much as I challenge leaders on the show, and I agree with you, it’s not about vilifying. It’s, it’s about addressing and being honest about the challenges that leaders go through. They’re never trained. They’re focused more on fixing problems. It’s about results, not about the process to get to that result, which include the humans and then they’re buried in work.
So they’re too busy because the person above them has the same problems and is modeling this behavior. So it’s a systemic problem. And so I’m not here to also vilify leaders at all,
Garrett Delph: Awesome, yeah..
Russel Lolacher: But, but starting down this path, if we want to operationalize a culture, and we haven’t even clarified good or bad cultures, how do we operationalize a culture? First, that’s the first question I have before we get down into the improving…
Garrett Delph: Okay.
Russel Lolacher: of culture. How, where are the steps? Where do we start?
Garrett Delph: All right. So, I would start with caring for the people. That’s where Clarity Ops has a framework called PPP or P3. You care for the people. And then you do that systematically. And once you build those rails, then you build process for the people, which are instructions, guidelines, methods.
And then you make provision to manage and hold accountable the performance that is, that sits on top of those processes. So culture part is people. And here are some examples of how to operationalize culture. If there isn’t one already, I highly recommend that the founders, cEO declare a vision. From there high… because, Jeff Weiner of LinkedIn, ex CEO, he said his primary role as the CEO is to be the Chief Reminder Officer.
And he said there’s two things that I must do every day. Continue to remind the people of where we’re going, and continue to remind them what we stand for. And so for me, vision, next is values. Like, what do you value? Because what we value is then, sort of cascades into our belief system, which cascades into our decision making.
And so, some, some human values are, do you value praise of your people? Do you value, do you not stand for lying? Do you not stand for gossip? Do you give permission to people in your core values to say, No I disagree with that, or that’s too much for me, or you’ve overloaded? These are human value stuff.
Operational values, do you value accountability? Do you, I’m talking about published and putting on the walls. Do you value measuring? You cannot manage what you cannot measure. So here are some examples of values and actually living by them. Some other operationalized contributions to culture would be things like career pathing. Huge. Businesses typically want to hire great people. And if you’re going to hire great people, you probably should plan, going back to your word plan, to keep them and motivate them through pay and opportunity. Most businesses don’t have career plans, career path planning. Some other things you can do for the business, which as relates to the people, is succession plan, right?
People will leave inevitably, inevitably. And when really important people leave that have a, heavy bearing on the success of the business and they don’t have a knowledge transfer mechanism, right? Then that puts a tremendous amount of weight on everybody else that’s not going to pick up the slack. Right? Also when you have succession planning, you plan for somebody’s departure and that backlash doesn’t fall on the people also. So there’s just, four or five examples of operationalizing culture for the people, demonstrating to the people that you care about them. A couple of other ones are employee guidelines, handbooks.
It’s amazing how often that’s missing in a company that helps employees understand who to go to for what, what the policy is around vacation, what the policy is about calling in sick one day without any notice, these sorts of things. Leadership agreements, another great way to operationalize culture, get the leaders together, the core leaders and get, lock them in a room and make them agree to how they’re going to behave and operate.
Which should be hooked into the core values.
Russel Lolacher: I want to thank you for that. I really appreciate that because it gives some tangible sort of, okay, that’s what operationalizing looks like. But , what if you don’t have a great culture to begin with?
Because you’re talking about some things that absolutely should be done, but if it’s an organization that already hasn’t been doing that.
Garrett Delph: Yeah.
Russel Lolacher: And suddenly down, going down this path of operationalizing it, what are they, what’s the benefit? Like, isn’t there needing to be a bit of a cultural audit before we get to that point?
Garrett Delph: Yeah, there would be actually another great use case. We’re working with a construction company up in Orange County, California, right up the, the freeway here. And they, they got hit hard like many construction companies did from COVID and their culture deteriorated. They had a great one. So it’s almost like they’re starting from scratch.
And one of the big things they had to do is circle the wagons with all of their key leaders and say, we’re broken. And to get back to being the culture that we had, we are going to have to restructure, reorganize and initiate change, which is going to be painful for you. And we want to give you the opportunity now to recognize in order to get healthy again.
In order to get back to scale and increasing our gross profit again, we’re going to need to evaluate the things that broke, redefine who we are, and then all lean in to get back there. So I think it goes back to leadership has to recognize that it’s missing, and then they need to go delicately to the leaders, help the leaders understand where they want to go, let them participate, create buy in. And then from there, get to work,
Russel Lolacher: To your case study there. I’m kind of curious, you, you mentioned a few times to get back to the culture they had, was that a feeling, was that documented, like in order for you to talk about something I’ve seen too many leaders go, Oh, it was better. I’m like, prove it. Like other than the warm, fuzzy feeling you had, it was good for you, obviously, but it might not be good for everybody.
Garrett Delph: So that they actually had, they actually did a good job. They had a culture where they defined their values, defined their KPIs, which is not cultural necessarily, but it is performance related. What rolls up. And they stood for things and they constantly stood for those things. When COVID hit, they had to lay off a bunch of people and they went into this mode of everybody wears 17 hats so we can survive and make it through.
And that’s, and that’s what broke. So so on to your, to your point though what about the, the use case where you have companies that actually somehow made it through you startup phases and got to decent sizes of revenue and 100 plus employees, but there’s still a train wreck internally.
Well, I would contend it’s the same process. It’s just a longer process because there is no foundation whatsoever. And even leadership doesn’t have any roots into, into starting from scratch and building from there. So it’s a, it’s a longer play, but I think it goes back to on the culture side, the top needs to say we want change. We want change and we’re going to commit to change so that we can get this right as we move into the future.
Russel Lolacher: The examples you gave for, for moving into an operational type of culture, format and initiative seems very project focused. I’m not saying they’re not, but it’s very much like a, okay, knowledge transfer. Okay. That’s, that’s a program we need to focus on or a project we need to focus on or a process we need to focus on.
Garrett Delph: Yeah.
Russel Lolacher: Which is great, very valuable. But I’m also curious as to how you transition into more day to day, like how is a culture looking reinforced, rewarded, punished from a day to day operational standpoint, because employees shouldn’t have to wait for the next town hall to see an example of what culture may or may not look like.
Garrett Delph: Right. Well, so I think the business owes it to the people to almost market to them and demonstrate to them that these things are being built, that they’re active, both present and behind the scenes, so that they don’t have to wait for a monthly town hall update, or they don’t have to wait for a quarterly memo from the CEO that goes out to everybody.
That would be my recommendation. Part, part of building operate, operationalizing culture, by the way, I think it is also rooted in how you architect the org chart. So, we have a thing called a Quad Core Management System. It’s a framework system. And what it does is load balances historical roles that get clubbed into one.
Typically what leaders do is they see superheroes on the teams, right? And they go, okay, you’re really great. You’re really smart. You’re really fast. So you’re going to run strategy, you’re going to manage people, you’re going to build process, and you’re going to project manage, right? They do all these and destroy people, especially their superheroes.
So I always lobby for load balancing your key players, have your strategy people live in strategy. Have your people who manage people, manage people and not get tied up in strategy or in process building. Have dedicated process builders and have dedicated project managers and then use those as levers with force and strength and agility.
And the reason I bring that up, Russel, is because when rebuilding a culture and when you seek to operationalize it, I think that sort of load balance becomes critical path. So you need to have a process builder that comes in and helps, operationalize the culture and helps build these new components be in charge of owning and building and facilitating and coordinating your new core value playbook. And your new succession plan and your new career path planning and your leadership agreements. And we could go on and on and on. And it’s their job. And you don’t end up slowing down your strategists or slowing down your people managers. You don’t slow the business down. You just allocate dedicated focus resources to chip away at these things operationally as a culture.
Russel Lolacher: I love the breakdown of that. And I’ll tell you why, because I’ve long championed that we ignore the, we ignore the missing middle. So generally we always go to the superheroes and the rock stars for work. Or as leaders, we deal with the problems. We ignore 60 percent of staff who are in the middle. Who are doing their jobs, but maybe they don’t put their hand up all the time. Maybe they’re introverts. Maybe they are like, there’s so many different reasons why somebody in the middle would not be… and then they don’t get the opportunities. They don’t get the professional development because the leaders are not leading, to be blunt. So by doing this and operationalizing the culture, I think you’re breaking it down to, levels of ‘You’re a strategist own it.’ That’s empowerment. You’re in responsible, like it breaks it down to levels where there are always going to be people that overperform. Absolutely.
Garrett Delph: Totally.
Russel Lolacher: But this allows that missing middle find ownership and empowerment and opportunity within the ecosystem of work.
Garrett Delph: 100%. Yeah, 100%. I would add to that a thing we call Flex Goals. Because with those focused lanes, typically what you end up with is because you have focus and now strength as a result, you become more efficient and you end up with people end up now with some, some elasticity, some free time.
And that’s a great time to do things like, learning and development, Russel. Giving people a chance to grow and, and be better at a craft with some side time, side opportunities. But also, with that, this new found free time, give people a chance to maybe participate in other functions or pick up a little tiny side hustle internally, to help out is aligned with their skill sets and their capabilities, right? Let them flex out. And so I like your, I love your idea and I want to make sure, I think that’s a nice little add to that, that flex code component.
Russel Lolacher: So you mentioned off the top and I got a little excited about it as you can kind of note that you mentioned about cultural debt. Now I’ve done a mini-episode of the show on that because I saw technical debt and I’m like, Hmm, same thing with cultures. We’re just ignoring things and pretending they go away.
Garrett Delph: Yeah.
Russel Lolacher: I feel like this can help with that.
Garrett Delph: Are you talking about this as in operationalizing culture?
Russel Lolacher: Yeah, maybe first, let, before we dig into that, maybe let’s let you define cultural debt, maybe because I have my own perception of it. So hell, I did a whole podcast about it, but I’m curious about for you, from your perspective and your experience, how would you define it?
Garrett Delph: Well, let’s see. Great question. And I’ve never formally defined it, but I’m going to, I’m going to swing at it here.
Russel Lolacher: Go! ! Go.
Garrett Delph: I’m going to swing at it. I, I’d say when you have a consensus in the company that things are not right. And whatever these things that are not right, and most people agree, there’s a buildup of, frustration, judgment, there’s a buildup of dissatisfaction, there’s a buildup of lament, and unhappiness and angst, and these things turn into bad performance, missing the expected outputs, unhappy customers, high employment churn, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera,
Russel Lolacher: I see it as the pizza party problem. This is where they keep doing the pizza party. Oh, I’m sorry, you want more money? Here’s a pizza party. Oh, I’m sorry, you want more flexible hours? Pizza party. Your leader doesn’t respect you? Pizza party. Like it’s just over and over not addressing the problem until people are freaking out at an organization-wide town hall and, or a survey company wide and… it wrote, I mean, it’s, I basically just, I put a bumper sticker basically answer to your much more eloquent, longer answer.
Garrett Delph: Yeah, yeah. Succinct is a great play, by the way. I, I wasn’t succinct in my answer, but I, I agree with you. I, I totally agree with you.
Russel Lolacher: And operationalizing it, I feel like that can, at least if, if people, and I’m thinking of values, we talk a lot about values cause we put them on posters and we put them on websites, so they must be important. Where, and I’ve talked to another guest about this, where they operationalized values by having leaders reward employees based on their modeling of the corporate values. So anytime they did x, they were rewarded with, I don’t know, anything, really anything, just to identify and reinforce the behavior.
Garrett Delph: I love it. Reward and recognition. That, that’s kind of the classic HR term. But I’m, I’m a big fan and, and doing it publicly. Doing it publicly..
Russel Lolacher: How do you, how do you know this is working? We, you sort of touched on measurement there, but if we’re operationalizing culture, as you’ve explained, like knowledge transfer and, and everything along those lines, how do we know as leaders that these efforts are working or not?
Garrett Delph: Yeah. Yeah. You have to do employee and performance evaluations. And when you do your what we call eNPS. Those should be there’s eNPS, which is a single question, but then there’s kind of classic employee happiness surveys. And those should be guaranteed without a shadow of a doubt, anonymous. That’s how you do it. You guarantee anonymity and the business has the responsibility to ensure that they’re anonymous. And then you go out to the team quarterly and say, ‘Are you happy? Tell us what you love. Tell us what you hate. Tell us who is abusive. Tell us who’s a rockstar.’ Man, I think in my last company we spent 40 grand on building a bulletproof employee survey that included eNPS, and it had to have been the best investment ever.
And we got so much value, valuable feedback. So that’s how you know in my opinion through true anonymous surveying. And then for the small few, they’re allowed to read that stuff a promise and a guarantee that they will be responsible to respond accordingly.
Russel Lolacher: I’m, I’m always on the fence of anonymous, cause it worries me and I’ll tell you why.
Garrett Delph: Okay.
Russel Lolacher: if employees are only feel like they can be honest, if they’re anonymous, isn’t that a broken culture?
Garrett Delph: Okay, good. I’ll play devil’s advocate.
Russel Lolacher: Please, please.
Garrett Delph: Yeah. I, I don’t think so.
Russel Lolacher: Okay.
Garrett Delph: I, I think you can have a culture of let’s say a perfect culture of transparency and anonymity when it comes to serving about how you feel with a company, I think still is great. It’s just because there’s, there’s no harm, no foul there. Like I, and maybe I’d ask you, what is the downside risk or the unintended consequences of anonymity in a perfect culture? Especially if the culture is about face and very public about all of its goodness.
Russel Lolacher: Fair. And I guess if it’s public facing and you’re worried about what the customers might think. But at the same time, I’m like, if you can’t put your name to a comment that you say about executive or the organization and its culture and stuff like that, isn’t that a broken culture that doesn’t allow for psychological safety for you to be feel safe enough that you can put your name against it?
Garrett Delph: Well, maybe that gets into the why behind the company that’s promoting the survey. Like, I think if, if the company is fearful, then maybe.
Russel Lolacher: It’s just, it’s the fear of retribution is like, I need to be anonymous because somebody, it might be career limiting if somebody finds out who I am, that that’s the part that scares me a bit when it comes to anonymity and, but I’m happy to be proven wrong. I’m happy to be, I’m happy to be challenged on it, but yeah,
Garrett Delph: Yeah.
Russel Lolacher: It always worries me from a psychological safety perspective. But I also know that anonymous surveys are more, are, are more successful,
Garrett Delph: Yeah.
Russel Lolacher: I just want to look at it more of as a canary in a coal mine. I don’t think it’s an absolute, but just…
Garrett Delph: Yeah.
Russel Lolacher: Why, why do you feel you need to be anonymous?
Garrett Delph: I feel like it’s, it’s worth camping. I mean, if anything, if you go true anonymous, you have a risk of your score being worse, than better. So if you have 100 percent anonymity and your scores are coming out in the nineties, then to the flip side, I’d say that’s a very positive thing. You had people that were willing to not disclose who they are and you still get rave reviews for the company. That’s interesting.
Russel Lolacher: Absolutely. I don’t know if that ever happens.
Garrett Delph: Yeah, we hit, we hit 87,
Russel Lolacher: Okay.
Garrett Delph: 87. So that’s,
Russel Lolacher: That’s something.
Garrett Delph: That’s up there, you know. But then I think also what you can do, is you can correlate other data to validate. So you can, for example, you can look at your people in culture cases that are coming in. You can look at, any claims of abuse or any claims of bad behavior.
You can look at your employment churn. I think always is a great indicator of are people happy at the business. Typically, the more people unhappy, the higher spike in your your churn curve.. Also I think CSATs are also a great indicator of employee happiness. What’s his name that wrote, he wrote the book, Shake Shack.
Oh Setting The Table! Danny Meyer, Danny Meyer, Setting The Table. He talked about how, he disagrees with Jeff Bezos. He thinks employees are first, customers come second. Because when you make your employees first and you care for them, your customers automatically get taken care of. And that’s why I think that that tie to a CSAT also is a good indicator. So I’m not suggesting that you just lean on your survey, but I do think it’s a great way to, to at the very least, get some drill in immediately and see is it working? Cause that was your question, how do you know if culture is working?
Russel Lolacher: How do you address this with subcultures? Because we talk about culture a lot, we talk about corporate culture a lot, but there are about a thousand subcultures within a lot of organizations, with varying degrees of healthiness in varying to different degrees of strength of leadership.
Garrett Delph: Yeah.
Russel Lolacher: So, operationalizing leadership, we’re talking about it from a corporate level. Does that work? Does that is that, does that work enough to foundationalize the subcultures or is there a different way of looking at it?
Garrett Delph: Yeah. So, I actually, I am a fan of subcultures as long as they are not cliques, right?
Russel Lolacher: You’re going to have to differentiate that.
Garrett Delph: Oh, yeah, sure. So, a subculture should never and can never in the name of health say we’re better than you because we’re different. But what a subculture can say is we’re different from you, but we’re equal. And that for me is the, is the marked difference between healthy and unhealthy. Like, for example, you could have a subculture of C suite people in the C suite they, they just live at a different level than the Genba. That is a subculture in itself. And the moment the C suite. It looks down and frowns upon people below them, you have a subculture that’s unhealthy. But if you have a subculture in the C suite akin to the Toyota way, which is we actually value everybody below us in the org chart so much so that we purpose to serve you and understand you and help you and support you. Now you have a subculture because it’s we get it but it’s healthy.
It’s healthy and that would that’s how I view that.
Russel Lolacher: I’ve always loved the idea of flipping org charts of making at the bottom, be the executive and cause it makes it look like more foundational and supportive as opposed to you’re literally drawing a photo of us looking down on you.
Garrett Delph: I love it.
Russel Lolacher: Like, what, what are you? I’m a communications guy. That’s what you’re communicating
Garrett Delph: Uh huh
Russel Lolacher: Is that I’m better than you because I’m higher up in an org chart.
Garrett Delph: Yeah.
Russel Lolacher: So to flip it, it even communicates support.
Garrett Delph: It does.
Russel Lolacher: It commmunicates things that I don’t think we really think well enough about.
Garrett Delph: I love it, dude. I… so funny. I was just thinking the other day about like, the old guard and you know back in the day actually that’s what they meant. We’re at the top and we’re better than you and you know that that just, it’s wrong. It’s wrong. It doesn’t work, And I love the idea of, of flipping that. We use a little infographic. It’s an apple tree. But in the same way that the vision and the values are underneath in the soil. And, and then it, it inversely stacks up and so in the end, as performance and execution goes up into the tree, you have fruit. And the business should be in the business of inspecting fruit, which is ultimately your outcomes. You want ripe, juicy, red or green apples that taste amazing and everybody wants to buy them. They’re so good.
Russel Lolacher: A good metaphor. You’re making me hungry but it’s a good metaphor. So . who’s responsible for all this? Cause we’ll say executive, but then guess who ends up having to do it? HR. So who’s responsible for operationalizing culture, Garrett?
Garrett Delph: Well, so I may have said this earlier, so forgive me if I’m repeating myself. The green lighting of operationalizing culture has to come from the top. And it needs to be, communicated clearly with purpose and passion. And it needs to be green lit from a budget perspective. So there’s that. Because it’s going to cost some money to build this out. And then the next layer of who’s responsible, then I would vote, briefly, get your strategy involved and have a project manager and maybe a process builder collaborate on what the strategists and the key leaders decide they want to build. And that’s really delicate. That’s really delicate. But, there should be a, a process of buy in for what for this, this, this build. And then ultimately it becomes the process builder and the project manager. They begin to architect these different components of caring for the people and all of the different ways we’ve talked about so far and more.
Then there’s another layer of responsibility. And that is, once the stuff gets built, you campaign, you literally campaign internally, and you campaign the new us. And that campaign takes forms in lots of different ways, but the end result to that, and which is the, I think the best answer to your question is, we’re all responsible for the culture.
Everybody’s responsible to uphold and be a guardian of the culture and what the business stands for. And if you don’t like what the business stands for, I think that’s okay. You you, either lean in or you leave, but at the end of the day, I’d say that’s the path to ownership.
Russel Lolacher: And I think, and thank you for that. I completely agree about the responsibility piece. And I’m just thinking about this because it’s coming up for me over and over again. And we, we started talking about this was accountability.
Garrett Delph: Yeah.
Russel Lolacher: Now we can say the organization is responsible for its culture, but who’s accountable because if we’re measuring, obviously, and it’s not working we have to point. I don’t want to say point fingers, but the whole organization isn’t accountable for a failing culture that has to come from leadership.
Garrett Delph: Oh, yeah. Yeah. So I always like to say, if the business succeeds, it’s because of the people. If the business fails, it’s because of me.
Russel Lolacher: So what’s getting in the way of all this, Garrett? We’ve solved all the problems. We’ve operationalized it. It’s done. We’re fixed. So what’s getting in? What’s what’s a blocker? What’s a challenge for us to get to this promised land?
Garrett Delph: Well, I think the challenge is people, people. People are always peopling. And the problem with people peopling is we’re, we’re we’re we’re incomplete. We’re, we’re, we fall short a lot. We’re, we have a ton of blind spots. We we have shortcomings. And so I would say like, even with the perfect plan and the most well intended business and well intending leaders, this still is not going to be easy.
Like it’s, it’s not a silver bullet. And so that said, that said, the upside to trying and continuing to try and iterate, move forward and then try again and iterate and move forward is exponentially better. And again, I would contend this shows up in your profits, it shows up in your scale, it shows up in your growth, it shows up in high happiness and low stress, it shows up in efficiencies, it shows up in employment, sure.
Like all these benefits, right? And so what’s stopping us? I think education. Frameworks that I think this is the biggest problem. That’s why I launched ClarityOps is because I don’t think there are frameworks out there that people can just lift, shift and drop in. I don’t know if you listened to the podcast How I Built This with Guy Raz.
Russel Lolacher: On occasion. On occasion. Yeah.
Garrett Delph: Great. Just recently, one of their new, his newest podcast was on the Banana Republic story. Such a great story. And it’s about this like husband and wife that had no intention of being entrepreneurs. They build Banana Republic, long story short, they built it up. They get eight years in and realize they’ve created a monster of a mess because they never invested in culture. They never invested in scale. They never invested in infrastructure. I don’t mean I.T.. I mean process as it relates to people. And they said, we it almost took us under we did because we we never did it because we didn’t know how. That was, that was the point. And I think that is what what most businesses fail, fail with. They just don’t know how to do this stuff. That that’s into education, I think, is the play. Talk about it. Talk about it. Talk about it. And then the last part is, the bit when I’m gonna say the business, so let’s just say that whoever’s making the business decisions need to raise their hand and say, we want that.
Like, we want that. I think that is, like, anything worth achieving in life, you have to want it, and you have to be willing to go after it.
Russel Lolacher: And have a budget for it.
Garrett Delph: And have a budget for it! You do! But you know, that budget varies, right?
Russel Lolacher: But in the business world, nothing serious until there’s a budget attached to it. And before that it’s a dream. It is a dream.
Garrett Delph: Yes, man. Yes, yes, yes.
Russel Lolacher: Well, thank you so much for this, Garrett. I appreciate this immensely. I find culture to be a fascinating topic because there’s so many ways to approach it. And definition of culture tends to change from person to person based on their own experiences.
Garrett Delph: It does.
Russel Lolacher: So operationalizing it is an interesting one.
Garrett Delph: Yeah, yeah, well, thank you, man. This has been, it’s like Disneyland for me, talking about this stuff.
Russel Lolacher: You’re not off the hook, man. I got one more question for you. What’s one simple action people can do right now to improve their relationships at work?
Garrett Delph: Well my answer to that is remember that measuring is the key to all things managed and all things success in business.
Russel Lolacher: That is Garrett Delph. He is the founder and CEO of Clarity Ops, LLC, which helps business operations become better, faster, smarter. I feel like the 6 Million Man every time I say that. Thank you so much, Garrett, for being here.
Garrett Delph: Russel, thank you so much, man. Really, really appreciate the conversation.
