Episode Overview
What if your company’s culture isn’t something that happens to you—but something you build, intentionally, every day? In this episode, Colin D Ellis joins Luke to share how he went from flunking school to becoming a sought-after culture expert, all grounded in one truth: culture is a choice. From the earliest days of managing transformation projects with zero formal training, to shaping high-performing teams in the private and public sectors, Colin’s experience is both hard-earned and deeply human.
Together, they unpack Colin’s three-part framework for cultural transformation: leaders commit, managers build, and employees own. With honesty, humour, and real-life examples, from union workshops to Premier League football clubs, Colin shows how culture lives and dies in the daily behaviors of managers. If you’ve ever wondered why your change program didn’t stick, or how to finally help your teams thrive, this one’s for you.
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The Genesis of a Culture Focus
Luke: So Colin, let’s jump in then. When we were speaking before, you said that you’ve described culture as the backbone of all of the work that you do. Will you tell us a little bit about you, your journey, and how you ended up fascinated about this space?
Colin: I won’t give you the whole journey, Luke, but basically, I started… I flunked school, started at the bottom rung of a ladder. And as soon as I got into work, I kind of felt at home. I felt part of something, whereas I never did at school, if I’m being perfectly honest with you. Anyway, I always felt that I had something to contribute other than the job, and I wanted better for myself. So I used to kind of write notes about the managers that I had and what they did that I liked, and what they did that I disliked, and really start to form my own opinion of what this thing called management looked like, even from a young age, even from like 18 or 19, I would say.
And then I got my first managerial job when I was 27. And at that point, I was tossed straight into the deep end. I was asked to project manage these big transformation programs and I had no idea what to do. Literally, I had no idea. I was selling advertising space at the time, and my boss said, he said, “You know all those things you do as part of the team in your telesales shop?” I was like, “Yeah.” He said, “So I want you to do that, but leading the team,” which was of absolutely no use to me whatsoever.
Anyway, I was a project manager, so I used to go to the library (giving away my age here), used to go to the library at the weekend to try and study and understand what project management was. And then I had all these notes that I’d kept about what good managers do. And so that really was the genesis. That was the late 1990s. That was the real genesis of my interest in teamwork. We didn’t call it culture then—teamwork—and being an efficient team. There are many speed bumps along the way, Luke, but I always think when I look back, because we as a team were able to create the conditions for success (and of course, I’m downplaying my role a little bit, a little bit of humility there, in being the catalyst for that), that’s the thing that drove me on. That’s the thing that gave me the success that I had. So, I went from this project manager to a senior manager and ended up working in senior director roles in the private and public sector. I never lost sight of the fact that teamwork is the single most important part of being successful. And obviously, I maintain that to this day with the work that I do.
Luke: Indeed. Well, let’s talk a little bit about the work that you do because I think you’ve done a wonderful job in distilling the elements of culture into kind of three core components. And we talked about leaders commit, managers build, and employees own. And I think those as principles, at least to hear or read, make an enormous amount of sense. But in practice, you and I both know that they’re quite hard. So, do you want to tell us a little bit about what they are? And then we can work through a little bit more about what they actually mean in practice.
The Three-Part Culture Model
Colin: Yeah. So one of the things that I’ve been talking about for 10 years, Luke, is the fact that you get the culture that you choose to build. Culture is a choice. And there are lots of people that talk about culture, and they say culture is the most important thing, our employees are the most important thing, but they don’t ever really know how to start. So we end up making excuses. “Oh, culture change is hard to do. Culture change is difficult.” And of course, there are some elements of culture that are difficult to address, usually the behavior of individuals. But culture as a concept isn’t that difficult to understand.
And so the work that I do is to help organizations to understand it so that they can pretty much do it for themselves. So, as you mentioned, it centers around these three principles.
The first principle is that leaders need to commit to culture. They need to recognize that it’s the most important thing. And of course, I rely on all of my research, all of the statistics about culture being the number one determinant of team and organization success. And most leaders, when you present them with the facts, will say, “Well, yeah.” When times are good, that’s when we’re our most successful. But often, it’s accidental. When times are good, it’s just like, “Well, what was it that made it good?” “Oh, well, we achieved results.” “Yeah, but how?” And it’s all of those things where organizations aren’t intentional about culture design. So, these three elements are all about intentional culture design. Leaders need to commit to it. They need to recognize that they don’t own culture. They are the role models for it.
The second principle is that managers build it. And so it’s a management responsibility day to day to actually instill, motivate, inspire the people in order to not only deliver the tasks that they need to deliver, but also to make sure that it’s done in line with the organization’s values as a contribution to the vision and all of these kinds of good things. Whenever you read feedback from an employee engagement survey and they talk about that day-to-day lived experience, managers are usually at the heart of that. Most managers will tell you that they don’t have the skills to build great teams. Most employees will say, “Yes, our managers don’t have the skills either.”
Then the third thing, and when you do it right, when you do it intentionally, is employees recognize that they have agency over their own culture, and that’s where belonging lives. It’s when employees feel that they can contribute to their team culture, when employees feel like they have a say, when there’s no fear of speaking up. That agency then is the difference between someone staying in bed and going, “I just don’t feel like working today” and someone showing up with the right attitude, the right mindset, being a good teammate to get the job done.
Luke: Yeah, it’s fascinating. We do loads of work in culture too, and the thing that I often find is that you walk into leaders, you give them the stats or the stories, and most people can resonate in some way, somehow, with the fact that it makes sense. Give the same research about managers. For some reason, people just skip that step and go straight to leadership development and don’t realize that so much of that variance comes down to the line manager, and therefore it’s not a top-down forcing of culture change. It’s much more of an enablement job. And I often wonder if it’s that that makes it the thing that gets skipped over—enabling other people to do it becomes an influence thing rather than a control thing, and therefore it’s more complicated. But what’s your experience? Why do you think so many organizations skip over that manager build piece?
Colin: It’s cheaper to do, Luke, is the honest answer.
Luke: Okay.
Colin: It’s cheaper just to invest a little bit of money in some people who could lead. Most of those leadership development programs don’t even actually measure whether those people go on to be leaders. McKinsey found this. They found that US companies alone spend $15 billion a year on leadership development programs, and yet only 7% of them ever saw any return on that investment. And yet, what we know factually is that managers are the difference between success and failure. And actually, if you give your managers a common language, a common skill set, and if they are then kind of managed themselves on the kind of culture that they create for their teams, it’s a massive game changer.
I’m working with one global organization. The month after we trained managers, they had record sales, and the leadership team were like, “We should have done this sooner.” It’s like, “Well, yeah, you should have done it sooner,” because all of a sudden, managers have got the skills that they’ve been absolutely crying out for. But when I say to people, “Right, we take your managers off site for two days,” immediately, Luke, that becomes hard to do. It’s like, “So what? So what do you want to do? Do you want to talk about culture and send a few special people who are always going to succeed anyway because they just have that kind of mindset about them? You want to do that? You spend a little bit of money, but it’s really no inconvenience. Or do you want to have a little bit of inconvenience, spend a bit more money, and actually create a continually evolving environment of success?” Because that’s what happens when you actually train the managers.
Luke: Yeah, it is fascinating hearing you say it that way because it is a bit of a cynical view, but it’s probably very true in the boardroom when you look at the cost and you give consideration to the operational impact of taking managers out. Why do you think they’re so pivotal? Managers so key to success?
Colin: Because they are the people that have influence over the day-to-day experience of employees.
Luke: Okay.
Colin: One hundred percent. You think about the people that you interact with as an employee. If I think back to my former self, I would see my manager or hear from my manager every single day. And if they don’t have the skills to either motivate me… I remember speaking to one CEO, and he’s like, “Oh, employees shouldn’t need motivating.” I was like, “It’s never worked that way.” If you want to go to a flat structure, there are many great organizations who’ve moved to a flat structure. They generally pay their people more, it takes them longer to recruit, and they have absolutely no tolerance for poor performance or poor behavior.
So, if you want to have a hierarchical structure, if you want to have people in pay bands (and obviously in the public service, that’s the way it works), then managers need to have the skills not only to motivate employees, but also to build teams that people actually want to be part of. And for that reason, they are pivotal. But I often talk about it, Luke, as it’s like a layer of tar. Senior leaders will recognize this: they send messages down and they get stuck or they’re applied inconsistently. Employees send messages up, and they either get ignored or they’re applied inconsistently. And it’s all because managers don’t have the skills, and any managers on this call, I don’t blame you. Most of them have never ever had the training and development that they need to do the job properly.
Luke: Yeah, they’re the stats that fascinate me most. I’m sure I saw something that very high percentages of first-line managers have never had any career training. I think it was almost as high as 80%. You probably know the actual stat.
Colin: From two years ago, only 3% of managers who were interviewed said that they had the skills to do the job effectively. Three percent!
Luke: Wow.
Colin: You look at the best, you look at the best practice and some of the organizations that I work with, it’s upwards of 85% who have got the skills. You’re always going to get 15% of people who… you’ve got this super, super high engagement, and then you wonder, “Well, why are these the most successful companies, and they’re not making billions of dollars?” I’m working with a dentist, and they are the most successful dentist in their area because they’ve actually got people in positions of influence who are doing the right things in the right way at the right time. Everyone loves working there. They project that outwards. More customers are joining, which makes everyone happier and the business more successful.
Luke: Yeah, exactly. What are those skills? So, if I am a new manager listening, or I’m a leader in HR or a CEO thinking, “That probably sounds about right for my organization,” it would be great to get a sense of: what are the skills, and then what does it look like once you’ve got those skills to actively build culture in your team?
Colin: Well, I always say these are the basic skills. There’s nothing basic about how you practice them, Luke. I can teach them in two days, but obviously, it’s up to the managers to then go and do it. And it’s about stepping outside your comfort zone. So, it’s simple things like: How do you build relationships between people? You can have relationship building as a line on a program. It’s pretty difficult to do. Empathy—we talk a lot about empathy. It’s pretty difficult to do. How do you develop a relationship with someone who’s not like you, who sits in a different part of the organization structure? But of course, these are all skills that can be learned.
How do you communicate a message so that everybody understands it? We learn how to communicate from our parents, and I don’t know about you, but mine weren’t the best example of that, but you know, teach them how to communicate. Again, it’s one of those skills that we can teach and people can learn. How do they set expectations? This, for me, is one of the most important ones. I remember my boss when I was 27, he just said it to me, and I wrote it down, and then I created a model for him. It’s something I use still to this day: how do you actually set expectations so people can deliver to them?
How do you actively listen? How do you have courageous conversations? How do you give and receive feedback? How do you prioritize work? These, Luke, are all of the basic skills, as well as understanding what is culture and then how do I bring people together such that we collectively can create the environment where we want to show up every day, do a cracking job so that everyone wins.
Luke: I think a lot of this is in the active part of building the culture—it’s likely just flexing those skills. But changing behavior is tough, right? You know that if you want to get fitter, you probably go to the gym and you might read a little bit and learn a little bit, but as you get into practice and you get into the environment, those things need to happen. What do you see makes and breaks the difference between those that get it and it lands and the skills become practiced, and then they become more advanced in them, and then they become expert managers that really yield the results that come?
Colin: It’s those who have a growth mindset, Luke. It’s those that actually want to excel at management. We still promote people to managers based on length of tenure—”Colin’s been here 10 years, it’s his turn next,” or technical skill—”Colin’s the best at that. We can’t pay him anymore. Let’s make him a manager.” Rather than promoting people with either the capability, the people-leading capability, or else the growth mindset, who really want to excel in the role. But that’s not to say… I’ve worked with some real fixed mindset people. I remember I worked with an organization, and one of these guys managed gardeners, right?
Luke: Okay.
Colin: And he had a team of 12 gardeners. It was for a local council, one of the most fixed mindset people you can ever imagine. He said to me, he’s like, “I hate doing stuff like this. Will it be over quickly?” Obviously, by the end of it, I had him completely fired up, and he wanted to be the best manager ever. And he said to me, he said, “I needed all these skills 30 years ago.” He was like, “All I wanted was an opportunity to demonstrate that I could do the job, but no one ever gave me anything. It was always just assumed that because I was the best gardener, that would make me the best manager.” So again, it’s one of those things that really always stuck with me: if you give people practical skills (listen, there’s got to be a little bit of theory so they know that it’s grounded in good practice), but if you can give them stuff that they can immediately use, that’s the difference often between success and failure.
Building Team Rituals and Quick Wins
Luke: We often find actually, so we do a lot in team habits, rituals, and routines, which will have natural crossover. The amount of managers that come into an organization and adopt a ritual that they had in their last organization because it worked with that team, but the level of cultural misalignment that you get if you are doing something here that worked in the last place but is completely disconnected to the context of the new organization. And you see people hanging on to the things that worked, which might not be the right or relevant things for the situation that they then find themselves in. So, in some of your work, how do you get people to understand where they are now and what some of the simple, small changes are that they can do?
Colin: So one of the things I talk about, Luke, is the fact that you can’t copy culture. It’s not a cut and paste. What you do is take the things that have worked and offer those up as suggestions to the team as things that you could do. But actually, what you are interested in is what the team are actually interested in.
I remember back in, yeah, 2007 I think it was, I read a Harvard Business Review about Toyota, and they used to have these morning calls. It’s called a choi—10 minutes. And I floated this idea to the team, and they were like, “Cool, but can it be 15 minutes?” And of course, then it became their ritual, and it was something that they did even when I wasn’t there. So, my job is to not only help them be creative about these things, because there are so many good ideas (and it’s one of the beauties of the internet as it is right now, is people share their ideas on LinkedIn and everywhere), go and have a look for different ideas in different industries and how you’re working. I’m working with a Premier League football team, and one of the things that we’re looking at is, “What do they do in American football? What do they do in baseball? What do they do in Greece, where it’s the national sport?” What are those rituals? So, anything that you can do to kind of invite expanded learning and get people thinking about how it could improve is always going to be beneficial.
Luke: Okay. No, that’s super helpful. And is there anything that seems to be universally true? So, if I’m a first-time manager, step into the role, maybe I’ve gone from the team and elevated to a manager, which I find is often the hardest because you’ve gone from everybody’s colleague or peer or mate even to their manager. Is there anything you would say, “Here’s the top five things that are a good place to start to ensure people have clarity. They’re clear on expectations. You’ve got a standard playbook, if you like, for managers?”
Colin: I have, and it’s developed off my own playbook when I became a manager, Luke, and I still think it’s relevant to this day. And that’s the first thing that you should do is understand that what you are aiming for as a manager is ultimate respect, not friendship. I think too many managers, because they don’t really know what to do, go in thinking, “Well, I’ll create harmony here.” That’s the best thing that I can do. And of course, harmony is the enemy of productivity. So, it’s about a mindset. It’s a recognition. Usually, if you’re being paid more, more is expected of you, so you have to take a step up yourself, and you have to really think and educate yourself.
The next thing is all about building relationships. That’s the crucial one: get to know your team members. Get to understand what’s important to them, what their fears are, what they’re capable of, what their strengths are, what their opportunities for improvement are.
The next thing is to understand how they like to be communicated to. We still communicate based on our own preferences, rather than thinking about, “Well, what’s the best way that I can motivate you?”
The next thing, I would always bring the team together and say, “Okay, well how do we want to work together? How do we want to collaborate? What tools do we use? What are the things that kind of really bum you out about work?” Usually meetings is a great one, because we have agency over what we can change here. So, what do you want to change? So, really invite creative ideas.
But the last one, which is always the most important, is you be the role model for everybody else to follow. You know, I was talking to… I’m working with one team, and I talked to the senior manager after a meeting. He checked his phone in the meeting. I’m like, “You basically just gave permission for everybody else to do that.” And it was just like, “Oh, well, my phone buzzed.” I’m like, “Well, you asked at the start, because I told them to put their phones on silent. Put yours on.” I was like, “Even when it buzzed, you still checked it.” I was like, “It’s the little things. You have to remember, it’s just like a parent. You have to be the role model, and you want people to look up to you and go, ‘That’s the way to do the job.'”
Luke: That’s great advice. I think as a very simplistic principle, be the role model is very, very helpful. What do you find gets in the way? Like, why do companies go, “We’re not going to, we’re not going to invest in that?” And is there anything that you find is often the insight or the hook that gets them to see what they’re moving away from or what they’re moving towards?
Colin: More from an organizational standpoint, first, if you don’t mind. Yeah, yeah, no, that’s fine. Short-termism is usually the thing that gets in the way. People want instant gratification from the development of people. And in order to get any kind of gains or any kind of value from an investment in people management or culture, it generally takes between three to 18 months, depending on how bad your starting position it is. More often than not, you know, we see the value in around about six months. If the organization’s got a really strong cultural foundation, you can see it almost immediately. So that short-term view is the thing that gets in the way. “Oh, we don’t have that money,” and yet there’s usually a pet project going on draining OPEX or draining operational expenditure that could easily be used for the development of people. Also, that’s always the first thing to go when money is tight. “Money is tight, let’s remove all of the things that actually could help us rebound once this difficult period is over.” So that’s generally the thing that gets in the way.
Luke: Okay. Interesting. And what do you find gets in the way of the manager then? Let’s say the company has made the investment, and you’ve got a group sat in one of your sessions, and like the gardener that you… I’m sure you’ve seen thousands of these now. Like, what gets in the way of people’s commitment to change?
Colin: It’s an unwillingness to step outside the comfort zone, Luke. And that might be a legacy of the way that the organization has treated people in the sense that they don’t feel that they’ve had the support, they don’t feel they’ve had the skills. And so when you put them then in an environment where we’re teaching them new skills that we want them to apply, some of them are just a little bit like, “Well, why should I?” And which, you know, I empathize with because I’ve been in that position myself, and I kind of get it. But actually when you can demonstrate to them that they’ll become happier as managers when they’re able to develop the skills, and then the way to do that is by being 5% outside of your comfort zone, then helping them to do that. And this is where the role of the people team coming in, kind of having coaches, accountability groups, internal mentors, that can really help these guys to stay out, you know. Because I talk about the comfort zone is where we grow. The comfort zone is… outside the comfort zone is where we succeed, but only 5%. If you are 10, 15% outside of your comfort zone every single day, Luke, that’s where anxiety, stress, that’s where they live. And so it’s just by doing things a little bit differently every day, these then become learned behaviors.
Luke: I think that’s often the problem I see on the investment of organizations in cultural transformation, is the very nature of transformation feels significant. Whereas the marginal changes in a very localized team environment, you can get that instant gratification because you can see the change. You might not be able to monitor the change, and we’ll talk about measuring outcomes and activities in a minute, but you can see it have effect far, far quicker than the transformation effort that often people perceive is required to unlock performance. I just, before we jump into measurements, I’d just love to get a couple of practical examples. You’ve said some great names: Premier League football teams, I think Red Bull you’ve mentioned either in this conversation or our last one. It’d be great if you could just share a couple of stories for us, maybe your favorites or maybe the ones in which you’ve seen the biggest transformation, in the spirit of the conversation that we’ve just had, about how an organization has set about driving change and how it played out.
Colin: The one I’m most proud of, Luke (I’m very proud of all of my engagements, but they’re all partnerships, so it’s never me doing the work on my own; I say I’ve got the easy bit, I just teach them how to do it, they’ve then got to go and do it), but it was an engineering organization, and the lowest performing group, surprise, surprise, was the engineers. Because these are all highly technical people, and all they wanted to do was fix stuff.
Luke: Yeah.
Colin: So we brought 350 people together for two days, the undertaking together. But that was… leaders were committed to that. So that was fabulous. It was a great example where the leaders were like, “We want to fix this. Let’s do it right.” And so that was one of those occasions where I had someone come up to me at the start and said that, you know, they were unwilling to do this. They’ve done stuff like this in the past that never changes anything, but I’m really interested to see what you do differently. We… there were a couple of side conversations right at the start, so I had to step outside my own comfort zone and shut those down. And these were union employees, so that was always a little bit tricky. So, I was in a little bit of fear myself, but then essentially at the end of the two days, everyone had the same information. That guy who said that he hates those things said it was the least shit thing he’d ever done. So I took that as a compliment. And they had the best improvement in engagement score in the next three months, their engagement score went up 30%.
Luke: Wow.
Colin: Based on the things that they did when they left the room. And it was then… every member of staff held themselves to a higher regard. The organization did its bit as well. There were two senior managers whose behavior was pretty appalling, and they were put on performance management. One of them was suspended pending investigation, and again, that sent the message to the team. Again, that’s part of that leadership commitment. And then all of a sudden, we had everybody at the ground level. There were employees who felt like they own the culture stepped up and created something that they all wanted to be a part of. I heard from one of them recently actually, who’s just changed jobs, and he said he’s taking everything that he learned in those two days to his next job, which is obviously the ultimate compliment.
Luke: Absolutely. And then when we talk about transformations that big, it can feel daunting. If for anyone that’s listened, that’s taken on a new team that’s like, “You are walking into this, and it’s not in a great place,” you know, you just feel the energy drop out of you to be like, “Oh, God, here we go again.” I think helping organizations and those leaders that have given their commitment (and often it is wholeheartedly, because they need to drive change in the performance, because you are pushed to a point in which there is a catalyst for change, right? And therefore it becomes higher stakes because it has to pay off) and getting to that point, you want to know that you’re going to see some quick wins. So, how do you help organizations take this big, daunting task into something that they can break down into managers and teams and see some quick wins?
Colin: So you meet people where they’re at, Luke. I just had a discussion just before this call with a software company who I’m hoping to work with, and I said, “What’s top people’s minds right now? What are they most unhappy about?” For knowledge-based organizations, it’s things like meetings and emails, and yet they’re some of the simplest things that you can resolve. So, a classic one would be, you know, let’s take meetings as an example. Meetings generally are 60 minutes and 30 minutes. Why? Because the default times in Outlook. You can change those at two mouse clicks, and you can make every 30-minute a 20-minute meeting, every one hour, a 40-minute meeting. You can do that right now. You don’t need permission to do it. And I guess part of that is the way that it’s delivered. So, I always talk about following the herd. I’m like, “Don’t be average. Average people do average things. Don’t do that. You can be different. You can set the tone, make the way that you do things slightly differently.”
So you give them lots of these simple things that you can do. So, don’t copy everybody into an email. In fact, just stop using it. And people always say, “Can I do that?” I’m like, “No one’s forcing you to copy people.” “What if my boss asks me to copy them in?” “Just copy them in.” It’s simple things like, “When you reply, don’t reply all, just reply to the person that sent it.” So, it’s simple things like that. And you make it easy to do and then give them permission to do it. And, you know, there’s no senior leader who mandates that every meeting should be an hour. I worked with one senior leadership team. They were like, “It’s fundamentally changed the way that we interact as a leadership team. All of a sudden, we’ve got time.” And I’m thinking, “Did you need me to tell you that?”
Luke: Yeah.
Colin: Fine, I loved working with them. Sometimes it just needs somebody external to remind you.
Luke: Yeah, it is often that, I think of it as socially sanctioning because you just conform. The desire to belong as you join a new organization often means conformity to standardized practice, right? And therefore, you’re in a position in which you just bend, you just lean into the way that it works there. But actually, even if you think it’s mad, you almost then need someone that is of perceived authority to say, “Do differently.” It’s the leadership for me. I know you talked to leadership commitment, but leadership is the one that goes, “I’m going to do this differently because it doesn’t have to be that way,” and nobody’s really said it’s not contracted anywhere that it has to be that way. And that’s often the jarring effect that causes change to catalyze, right? Is the belief that it can be different.
Colin: Yeah. And the other thing that I always say, Luke, is as a leader, if you find a manager doing something different, elevate, don’t admonish them. Elevate what they’re doing to challenge the status quo in a way that’s positive. That’s a leader’s job is to elevate others.
Luke: Yeah, indeed. And what about if leaders have to be in a position where these things roll through, right? And they, they’ve backed them. They’ve supported them. They’re starting to see quick wins. What, what does commitment mean in its fullest form to you? It’s not just the start, right? It’s not just the commitment of budget. What does it look like on an ongoing basis in terms of leadership commitment?
Colin: So culture change isn’t a project, Luke. Culture evolves all of the time. What that commitment looks like is what a technology company, Cisco, do. They bring their senior leaders together every year, and they talk strategically where they’re going to go, and then they talk for a day culturally about, “Okay, well what do we need to change? What do we need to evolve?” And it’s not change for change’s sake, but the development programs don’t stand still. The things that they invest in don’t stand still. Red Bull’s global Learning and Development team constantly looking at ways that they can evolve their management development program. And people wonder why this massively successful company is… it’s because they take culture seriously. Yes, the leaders are committed to it 100%. They talk about how culture is key to everything that they do, but then you go down to the managers, and they’re all invested in it, and they recognize that it doesn’t just change overnight. Every year, they need to be doing it.
There’s this thing called the sigmoid curve, where before performance starts to dip, that’s the time to introduce change. Most people will know it as the Tuckman’s team performance model, which is kind of the storm and norm and form and performing. When you get to performing, just stay, you don’t go, “Right. Well, that’s that. We’re done with that.” The best organizations are constantly looking, and it’s not exhausting. In fact, it’s exciting work. It’s like, “Right. What can we now introduce to build on the foundations that we already have?”
Measuring Culture and Future Threats
Luke: And then when it comes to measurement and sustaining culture, we talked a little bit there about timings of interventions, but what about the leaders that the organization perhaps hasn’t dealt with and is going, “I get all of this. I’m bought in, I am committed, but help me make it more tangible because there aren’t often direct measures of culture.” What do you say to those leaders?
Colin: There are direct measures of culture. Every result you achieve is a result of the people and the environment that you create for them to work in. Gallup published this every other year, Luke: 78% reduction in absenteeism, 21% lower turnover, 23% higher profitability, 18% higher sales, 70% more thriving employees, 63% fewer incidents. All of the statistics are there. All of the research is there. Culture is the number one determinant of organization success. I can give people all of these research papers. It’s just easier to say, “Culture’s hard to measure” so that they don’t want to spend the money on it. And you said earlier, “That’s the cynical view.” It’s really not. That’s the practical view: that’s what people say. They say that because culture feels too big. It feels too difficult to understand, but it’s really not that hard. Leaders commit, managers build, employees own. And once you understand the work that needs to be done in each of those areas, all of a sudden culture becomes easier to do and all of those metrics become easier to achieve. But a simple one that leaders can do is when they’re speaking to people, ask them how happy they are in their job. If you want a real measure, do a happiness score. Timpson said, “Happy employees make the organization money.” Who doesn’t want that? And so they go out of their way to ensure their employees are happy. How do they do that? They build a culture and environment in which people can flourish.
Luke: Yeah, this is the irony that I often find is that people avoid the investment in culture, but will hands down acknowledge that you can’t change outcomes. You have to change the actions or behaviors to lead to changing outcomes. And it’s like, well, that’s the same thing, just a different set of words. Like, surely you must see that, but very often people don’t. And therefore, they’re like, “Okay, let’s, let’s send revenue up.” And you’re like, “Okay, well how are you going to do that?” And by the time you’ve asked the, “How are you going to do that,” you’re back to culture pretty quickly, right?
Colin: Yeah, the classic. “How are we going to do that?” “Oh, we’re going to do more with less.” That’s not possible. What’s your next idea?
Luke: Yeah, exactly. And when that doesn’t work, what are you going with? Exactly. Let’s look forward a little bit then, because I don’t think I’ve had a conversation on one of these without AI coming up, and there’s a whole bunch of other challenges that organizations are facing. I would love to get your thoughts on what are the biggest challenges facing organizations from a cultural standpoint at the moment, and how are you seeing some of them tackle it?
Colin: Not well. Let’s answer the second question first. I’ve done so much reading. I’m an early adopter in most of these things. I haven’t yet seen the value that AI has brought. That’s not to say that it won’t add value, but “taking meeting minutes”—really? That’s the kind of best that we can do at the minute. “It’s going to take all of these jobs by this.” We’re still in the propaganda phase of AI, and people need to recognize, if they don’t already, that the goal of technology companies is to make money. It’s not to make life easier; it’s to make money for themselves. Of course, there’s a little bit of making life easier, but unfortunately, we use technology really badly right now. Most people can’t manage a calendar, let alone use AI in a way that generates an outcome. So, organizations need to be deliberate about how they use AI. They need to think about how they’re going to drive value. Also, they need to think about the perception externally of removing people and replacing it with AI. I think there are still too many people who are trying to do… Duolingo was a great example: they sacked a hundred people, and then people stopped using Duolingo. And so, at some stage, Luke, there may be a pushback on AI when people realize, “Okay, well, if we don’t feed it the information, then it won’t take our job.” So, organizations have got to be deliberate. So, working groups, think about the value that they can gain from it, such that it adds not only to the bottom line, but also to the reputation of the organization.
Luke: Yeah. Okay. Interesting. And if managing and navigating really the introduction of new technologies like AI is one challenge, what others do you see?
Colin: You know, it’s really interesting you asked me that. Someone asked me, “What’s the biggest challenge facing an organizational culture?” Smartphone addiction for me is front and center.
Luke: And why?
Colin: Because people just can’t be without a device. And so it impacts their ability to get in any kind of flow state, which interrupts their train of thought. It leads to mistakes being made. We’re not at the classic productivity measure. Productivity is just having the best day that you possibly can and getting through the work that you’ve got. And yet, technology is constantly distracting us from the work that we do. And so I see this addiction as, for me, one of the key threats to workplace culture. The other one is leaders who jump on bandwagons. And, globally, we have a lot of movements, often driven by politicians. And what we need is for leaders to be stoic in the face of that and recognize what’s best for our business from a perception perspective of the people that we’re looking to serve. You always want to build a culture that is representative of the people that you serve. So, I would say the two things.
Luke: Yeah. Okay. And you seem like a candid chap, but if there was a scenario in which you were speaking to a leader, think of this maybe not the last prospect call that you had, but another customer, maybe even a difficult one that’s stuck in a bad place from a cultural standpoint, and you could give them a message around driving change in organizational culture and the value of it and so on. What would you say? How do you help, but what’s the message that you would love them to leave with?
Colin: So, change is possible, and you get the culture that you choose to build. Culture is a choice. I started the show with that, Luke. Every leader that I talk to… I worked with one organization, their engagement score was 18%. They said, “We don’t know where to start.” I was like, “The key is just to start.” Let’s look at what’s in front of us, and let’s look at what’s going to give us the greatest bang for our buck. Most organizations will try and pick off the quick wins, and the quick wins really don’t materially change things. So, I always say, “Let’s look for the hard things first. Let’s start to address them so at least it feels like we’re getting traction.” But there are organizations globally, and I’ve got a list of them, who have been in a sticky situation just like you, and they come out of it the other side by focusing on the right things at the right time to build a culture that you need to be successful. It’s always a choice.
Lightning Round
Luke: Great. Very good. We’ll transition now to the last little bit for us, which is in two parts. One is around a past guest question, and then we have a quick lightning round. So if you’re happy, let’s jump into the past guest question. They had no context who you were going to be, and this is kind of the fun of it. I enjoy these all of the time. So this question is: How do you differentiate between championing somebody and mentoring somebody? To unpack that a little bit, because I had to read the question a couple of times, there are mentors who can mentor a lot of people. But if there are people within your organization that you think are fantastic, you are championing them to take the next move. And I think it’s that balance between how do you pick somebody and provide the path for them because you care about their outcomes versus how do you mentor and guide? I guess, in many respects, processing the question as I’m talking to you, you act as a mentor to many managers in some respects because you’re guiding them through a tough period of change. So, the difference between that and then being in a position where you are championing the cause of somebody’s career, how do you separate or do you even need to separate those two things?
Colin: Well, yes, because mentoring for me is pretty much giving… coaching is helping people to see what they already know. Mentoring is giving them a toolkit that they can use to solve a problem that they face that they don’t have the answer for right now. Whereas championing is really about elevating an individual. It’s providing feedback, it’s about providing recognition, it’s about encouraging them to be resilient. Keep going, keep going. You know, and a lot of the people that I work with, particularly heads of culture and heads of people who really struggle to kind of sell a message to the leaders, is, “You’ve got the answers. Just keep going. Just keep going. This work matters. That work needs to be done. Now, the right time is always now to address the culture.” And it’s really helping them to see that what they have is good enough and who they are is good enough. Whereas mentoring is giving someone a bit of a toolkit to help them to be better and to grow and to help them to understand that, you know, just by applying that just outside their comfort zone, that’s where growth lives.
Luke: Much better answer to the way that I asked that question. Well done. Good work. Lightning round then. So, one tech tool that you can’t live without.
Colin: Oh, for me, as an individual, probably Canva. I use it to design all my flashy slides.
Luke: Perfect. The moment that you look at with the most amount of joy from your entire career.
Colin: Oh my goodness. It’s probably that, as interesting as it is, is that guy telling me that it’s the least shit program that he’s ever done. I got so much joy from that, that he enjoyed it despite himself.
Luke: Perfect. A thinker, author, or a book that’s influenced your approach to organizational culture?
Colin: It’s a manager. And it was my boss in 1997 who assured me that we could achieve anything if we built the right teams. And then he was just a great mentor to me, and I captured so much of what he told me and turned that into something that became repeatable.
Luke: Amazing. A culture trend you are most excited about right now.
Colin: Workplace culture, of course. We seem to be going backwards on a lot of things. There seem to be a return to the hustle culture, so I’m not particularly excited about that right now. I am excited to see how technology can evolve us to be more productive. And so, I’m just waiting. I’m waiting for the tool that enables that.
Luke: And then I know who the guest is that’s coming next, and this is going to be a goodie, I’m sure. So, what’s your one question that you would love the next guest to answer on the podcast about driving culture change?
Colin: Thinking about your own behavior, what’s one thing that you have to change?
Luke: Okay. Good question. Tough question. Exposing question for lots of people to hear the answer of, but…
Colin: But…
Luke: Self-awareness and reflection is absolutely, absolutely. Colin, it’s been an absolute joy. Would you mind just telling everybody where they can find you and anything else that you’d like to talk about that you think they should know about you?
Colin: They can find me at my website, which is colindellis.com, LinkedIn, I’m all over that, Colin D Ellis. And if they’re interested to find out where their culture is right now, they can take the quiz, which is www.fiveculturesquiz.com.
Luke: Perfect. Thank you ever so much for your time. It’s been a joy.
Colin: Thanks, Luke. Pleasure.
