Dr. Phillip Meade talks about business culture change and his company’s Missing Links culture change model. He joins The Savvy Entrepreneur Show to share insights on how humans naturally resist change, but also how Gallaher Edge‘s Missing Links culture change model can help organizations create and follow an effective blueprint.
The Missing Links model has four strands: Maturity, Diversity, Community, and Unity. The Maturity piece is particularly interesting, as it deals with our many human defense mechanisms that resist change. Phillip points out how an entrepreneur or owner’s attachment to their business as “their baby” directly leads to challenges in scaling the organization.
Meade also talks about the upcoming book that he authored, entitled “The Missing Links: Launching a High Performing Company Culture,” available at Amazon or Barnes & Noble. The book, he says, is intended to both be an overview of business culture, as well as a resource for those who want to attempt culture change on their own.
What follows is a transcript of the show interview. But if you’d prefer to listen to the on-demand podcast version, click here.
Doris Nagel 0:42
Welcome to The Savvy Entrepreneur show!
We’re broadcasting here on WLCB 101.5 FM based in the Greater Chicago Milwaukee area.
If you’re an entrepreneur or small business person or are thinking about becoming one, this show is for you.
I’m Doris Nagel, your host for the next hour. I’m a crazy entrepreneur. And I love helping other entrepreneurs. I’ve counseled startups and small businesses over the past 30 years, and helped start or started at least nine different businesses. And boy oh boy, I have seen mistakes, and I have made mistakes.
The Savvy Entrepreneur show has two goals: to share helpful information resources, and to inspire you. To hopefully make your journey as an entrepreneur faster and easier, and maybe just a little bit more fun.
To help with that, I have guests on the show every week who are willing to share their stories and their advice and their expertise.
This week’s guest is Dr. Phillip Meade. He is the co-owner of a company called Gallaher Edge. Some of you may remember that a few months back, I had Laura Gallaher on the show, who is the other co owner of Gallaher Edge. Philip joins me this week to share some additional information about business culture, as well as talk about their upcoming book release. And the topic of business culture is so important in my opinion that I think it’s worth continuing to revisit the topic as companies just don’t spend enough time focusing on it.
Gallaher Edge applies the science of human behavior to organizations to create highly effective cultures. It has helped numerous C suite teams successfully take their company to the next level.
Dr. Philip Meade, or Philip as he says we can call him, is a USA today and Wall Street Journal best selling author. He focuses on organizational development, improving teamwork and team cohesion, organizational design, process engineering, strategic planning, leadership, communication, and cultural change. He’s led teams and organizations for 30 years. In a variety of capacities following the space shuttle Columbia accident, he developed a plan for the organizational and cultural changes necessary for return to flight at NASA.
He’s developed a strategy and led the implementation at an integrated and comprehensive framework for change management, and he shares that in a new book that he’s co authored entitled, “The Missing Links: Launching a High-Performing Company Culture.”
He lives in Florida and is married with three kids.
Phillip, thanks so much for being on the show today. Welcome to The Savvy Entrepreneur.
Dr. Phillip Meade
Thank you, Doris. I’m so happy to be here. I appreciate you having me on.
Doris Nagel
I’m glad you’re here! As I said in the introduction, business culture is one of those topics that, having worked with a lot of small companies and startups, is something that often is just an afterthought. Startup companies are often very fixated on trying to make a buck, make ends meet and, and, and the company culture sometimes gets short shrift. So I think it’s an important topic for entrepreneurs.
And we’ll get into that. But first, let’s talk about what Gallaher Edge does. What exactly do you do, and who do you help?
Dr. Phillip Meade 4:10
We apply the science of human behavior to organizations so that they can get a competitive edge and achieve their goals and enjoy the journey along the way.
We help leaders by guiding them through a unique collection of experiences to align the self along with their teams and the culture from the inside out. We use something we call our Missing Link Culture Model and also use our missing link culture survey to identify areas of strengths and weaknesses within organizations.
From there, we make recommendations to our clients on how they can improve their culture and their leadership. We work with leaders one on one to enhance the communication leadership skills, especially in difficult conversations or conflict situations.
All of our sessions are really meant to increase self awareness and to provide leaders with an accountability partner that can challenge the way that they think about things, which then will help to bring a new view of the world and their self as well. And that will help them to bring new approaches to yield greater results and to transform their organization.
Doris Nagel 5:25
I definitely want to dig more into your process in just a little bit. But first, tell me about your role in the company, and what you do versus what Dr. Gallaher or Laura does, and how the two of you connected and became co owners of the company.
Dr. Phillip Meade 5:45
I’m the chief Chief Operating Officer for the company, whereas Laura is the CEO. Within the company, we have complimentary roles there. I help her with the running of the of the company. And then we jointly lead the work that we do with clients. And so we both do the consulting work. I probably do a little bit more of the strategy work with clients.
We believe that when we work together, we really have a very powerful combination. She has a psychology background, and I have the engineering and the systems thinking background. When we partner and work with companies, we bring both of those perspectives together. It really provides a very powerful combination of insights at the personal, interpersonal, and systems and organizational levels. It really helps diagnose how everything works together to produce the performance of the organization and to solve problems and figure out how to optimize things.
Doris Nagel 6:52
You didn’t mention how you and Laura met, but I’m going to connect the dots. In both of your bios, you talk about NASA and the Columbia shuttle incident. I’m guessing that’s where you first connected?
Dr. Phillip Meade 7:09
It is. After the space shuttle Columbia accident, I was asked to lead all of the organizational and cultural changes for return to flight. The accident investigation found that the culture at NASA was as responsible for the accident as a piece of foam that hit the leading edge of the wing.
So NASA was not actually allowed to return to launching shuttles — we weren’t allowed to fly again — until we proved to Congress that our culture had been changed, and that we had fixed the organizational and cultural problems that had created the accident in the first place.
It was a powerful mandate. And it was pretty frightening, honestly, to be asked to do that.
Because NASA was a really great organization. In a strange way, it would have been better if there had been a whole lot of problems with it. But just the previous year, it had been voted as the best place in the federal government to work. So it was challenging to figure out how to identify what leads to an accident like this, and how culture can be to blame but at the same time be a great place to work. That work led to a lot of what underlies our culture model.
Doris Nagel 8:45
That’s a very interesting knife’s edge there. Did you find that most of the people at NASA were were pretty humble in working through this, or were some of them a bit cocky, what with all the brains and massive amounts of intelligence at NASA?
Dr. Phillip Meade 9:10
Honestly, it was a bit of a mixed bag. And that’s why I hired Laura and other organizational psychologists to work with me on this problem.
Because on the one hand, people very much were interested in helping to solve this problem. They cared very deeply about fixing the issues and ensuring that this never happened again. But at the same time, the root cause of the issues — at the very deep personal level — were created by defense mechanisms at the subconscious level.
Some of the individuals weren’t aware of the things that were happening. There were cognitive biases and other things happening that people weren’t really aware of. So it wasn’t intentional. These were great people that were very hard working and were very dedicated to what they were trying to achieve. But that’s why the psychology of human behavior is so important here.
Doris Nagel 10:11
Well, it’s interesting to listen to you talk about NASA. I suspect maybe entrepreneurs at first blush would be think, “Well, NASA is a huge organization. I’m just a little startup company, or I’m a little mainstreet business. So how is that relevant for me?”
But what you just said about the cognitive biases and people being not aware of them, and being very focused on getting jobs done is completely relevant. From that perspective, that would certainly apply to law startup businesses that I’ve worked with. Because most small businesses are absolutely focused on trying to get a product out the door, or satisfy a customer, or find a customer, or find funding — whatever it is. And a lot of stuff just sort of happens by however it happens.
Dr. Phillip Meade 11:03
Yes, absolutely. And that’s, that’s a lot of what, what I discovered in terms of really, truly learning how organizational culture works. And some of this is what Laura talked about in her podcast with you: the emergent nature of organizational culture. You can’t look at things in isolation. You can’t just say, “Well, these are great people,” or “They’re really hard working,” or “They’re really smart people.” All of those things are often very, very true.
But there are also these organizational factors and these environmental factors that are part of the broader system that they’re working within. And that’s true in startups as well. There are startups out there, obviously with very intelligent people and very hard workers that are very dedicated to producing whatever it is that they’re trying to do. And there’s also a lot of extreme pressures that they may be under to try to get a product out the door or meet a deadline. They may feel that if they don’t get a particular product to market by a certain deadline, that the company is going to go out of business. They may feel just as responsible for that particular product, or for their company’s success as the NASA engineers did for the shuttle.
So, they may feel a similar sense of ownership and pressure. And consequently, there may be similar cognitive biases that kick in and drive defensiveness and other behaviors that they may not even be aware of that cause some problems with the business’ culture.
Doris Nagel 12:43
You’ve mentioned cognitive biases. Talk a little bit more about what those are. How do you know them when you see them?
Dr. Phillip Meade 12:53
One of my favorite examples that I like to use is this: if I were to take you up to the top of the Empire State Building, and there was this beam that was stuck out in midair hanging out up there, and I had duct taped $1,000 to the end of this beam. And I tell you, Doris, if you walk out to the end of this beam andgrab that $1,000, you can have it. Would you be willing to do that?
Doris Nagel
No.
Dr. Phillip Meade
Most people wouldn’t. And we were talking before before the podcast started and so I know you have one child. Now I tell you, “Doris, your child is out at the end of that beam. You need to go out and save your child.” Now would you walk out to the end of the beam to save your child?
Doris Nagel 13:44
Whoa. I don’t know. I guess yes. I think I would call them to come back!
Dr. Phillip Meade 13:51
But if your child was young enough that he couldn’t save himself, then you probably would walk out there to save your child, right?
And that’s like decision-making in businesses. Decision making is a risk trade-off that we’re making in our head. And when we take one side of the equation and we basically elevate it to infinity in terms of value, we are challenged to make a good risk assessment.
And that’s what was happening for some of the engineers for NASA. They were in an environment where the shuttle for them was like their child, it was their baby, because they cared so much about the shuttle program and they were so dedicated to seeing it succeed.
Add onto that that they were in an environment at the time where there was a constant threat of program cancellation. So they felt like they were constantly in a position of having to go to great lengths to save the program.
There was also a lot of scheduled pressure. There was a countdown clock that was actually created as a screen saver, and it was on a lot of engineers’ computers at the time.
So there were a lot of different environmental factors combining to create all of this schedule pressure. Many there believed that they had to go to extreme measures to save the program.
And the same thing, as I said, could be true for entrepreneurs and for their workforce. If entrepreneurs or their team feel like they have to save their company, or they have to save the product. And if they don’t go to some sort of an extreme measure in or if they don’t do this, that it’s going to die that the company is going to go bankrupt or that the product is going to die, then the the extent or the extreme that they’re willing to go to in order to, you know, to make that happen, now all of a sudden, the risk reward trade off starts to get elevated.
In this situation, they’re willing to take on more and more and more risk. What they’re willing to do, or what they’re willing to accept, starts to get pushed out of whack. And this is where we start to see people’s work/life balance starting to get out of whack. The way that they start to treat other people starts to get out of whack — what they’re what they’re willing to accept in terms of what’s okay and what’s not okay, even ethics starts to get out of whack in some cases.
With all of these things, this is the result of cognitive bias. Now, all of a sudden, if they have this strong emotional tie to this product or goal, they’ve started to equate it to a child, and they believe that they have to save it.
And that’s really what is going on for them cognitively. Some crazy stuff starts to happen. Defense mechanisms kick in. And the crazy thing is, it’s all subconscious. They’re not aware of this. They’re not thinking to themselves in a logical way up in their prefrontal cortex. If you talk to them, they’re not going to sit there and tell you, “Oh, I’m behaving irrationally.”
But on a behavioral level, if you looked at them, this is what they’re doing.
Doris Nagel 17:05
It’s almost like you layering on this whole “This is my baby” pressure on top of all the ordinary stress of work. Even just ordinary stress can sometimes take a big toll on people – at least is sure does for me, even when I don’t feel the pull of something being “my baby.”
I mean, look at what COVID has done to people and to civility and to politics. You know, sometimes some pretty strange things come out of people’s mouths. And objectively, some people have started to lose perspective about things.
Dr. Phillip Meade 17:47
You know, one of the one of the examples that we used in our book was actually from COVID. Do you remember the toilet paper hoarding?
Doris Nagel 17:55
Oh, I remember it quite well.
I have to tell you a funny story. I was one of those people early on who didn’t believe people were really hoarding TP. My brother in Texas had told me that the toilet paper shelves there were empty.
I brushed it off, thinking, “Well, people in Texas are silly. People here in Illinois are way more sensible than that.”
But then I went to the grocery store. And I went to the Target and the Walmart. And then Amazon. And there was no toilet paper anywhere.
The funny part of the story is that I ended up finding some of those giant, scratchy restaurant-size rolls absolutely dirt-cheap. You know, those ginormous roles that you see in the big dispensers in restaurants and other institutions. So there really wasn’t a shortage of toilet paper. What there was was a shortage of the roles that people use at home. At the same time, there was a surplus of were these giant industrial rolls, because all the restaurants and offices and buildings were closed.
So for like $36, I ended up getting a year and a half’s worth of toilet paper. I didn’t realize how ridiculously long those rolls last when you just use them at home. But it was literally a year and a half worth of toilet paper. We have finally finished the scratchy rolls!
That’s a total digression, but a funny story.
Dr. Phillip Meade 19:07
Well, it’s another good example of what we’re talking about.
Sometimes when people are under stress and they start to feel out of control, they search for an area of their life where they can have control. And so, if I’m out of control, I can’t control COVID, I can’t control this pandemic that’s raging out of control, maybe one area that I can exert control over is the amount of toilet paper that I have. And I can afford toilet paper, right and so it makes me feel like I have control.
So I will exert control in some area of my life that that makes me feel like I’m now in control of something, even though it’s completely irrelevant to what really the problem is. It’s subconscious. But it’s one way that my brain is using a psychological defense mechanism. My brain is trying to protect me psychologically, so that I don’t focus on what I feel out of control about and don’t feel comfortable with. It will create this psychological smokescreen, telling me, “Oh, let’s look over here. You can control that; look how much toilet paper I have, I’m really super in control, I have more toilet paper than anybody on my street.”
Doris Nagel 20:24
You know, that really underscores our subconscious level. We as human beings want to think of ourselves as so evolved, but there we are, responding at a pretty primal basis. When our first thought about stress and the pandemic is to go to something involving bodily functions, that should tell you there is there is a serious crocodile brain at work, regardless of what is coming out of our mouth about how sophisticated we are.
Dr. Phillip Meade 21:05
Yep. So, let’s bring this back to the startup or to organizations. Because we see the same thing within organizations as well. Sometimes, the most important thing that a CEO can focus on is organizational culture. And that’s really where they could get the biggest bang for their buck.
Culture is really what is holding them back, especially as companies are trying to scale. We see a lot of times as companies are trying to scale, they hit a they hit a ceiling or a wall. They can’t scale anymore, because their organizational culture is just holding them back. They start to run into people problems. Their processes aren’t there to support it. They don’t have the management, their managers don’t have the skill set to be able to do what they want to be able to do. They don’t have communication in place. And the way a lot of different things are structured doesn’t support scaling.
And rather than then focus on the culture, because the CEO or the leadership team don’t understand it or how to control it, they will focus on other things that they do know how to control. They will pour their time and energy and money into what they already know how to control, rather than what is most important, because they don’t feel competent in that area to really control it.
Doris Nagel 22:26
I want to explore that a little more with you. What are the kinds of things that start to happen when a company scales? How does culture start taking a hit?
Dr. Phillip Meade 22:42
There’s usually pain points that we start to see. We call them the Dirty Dozen, because there’s usually about 12 different pain points that we start to see poke out.
A lot of times it’s around the ability to enjoy the journey as we call it, which deals a lot with the interpersonal problems and issues. Another is the inability to truly execute strategic goals and get things done as an organization.
And so, we’ll hear things from CEOs and leaders like, “You know, I just don’t enjoy going into work as much as I used to. I spend too much of my time dealing with the people problems, I just wish people would get along. I don’t understand why people don’t understand this stuff. I’ve told them a dozen times.”
Or we’ll hear, “It seems like like our strategic initiatives take so long for things to get done that we’re never going to get there. Our processes and systems just, they just seem like they’re not going to get us there. I worry that my leadership team doesn’t have what it takes to get us to the next level.”
Those are pain points when we start to hear things like that. When we hear when we hear leaders say things like that it eats usually a sign or symptom that, as they’re scaling, their culture is starting to get in the way.
Doris Nagel 24:07
You know, it’s funny, I just I had an entrepreneur guest on about three weeks ago, and he was talking about how he missed so much being in the garage with these two other guys and that they it seemed like they made decisions kind of like a single organism. And it was simple. And they played rock music while they worked. And now everything was very formal.
I’m hearing his voice say this as I’m listening to you talk about the pain points. There’s an example right there.
Dr. Phillip Meade 24:44
Yep. It’s exactly what happens.
It’s a lot easier when it’s smaller, when it’s five individuals in a garage. Communication is easier. There aren’t departments, you’re not worried about handoffs. There’s no need for formalized processes. The CEO/ founder are able to keep their fingers on everything.
But as it scales, and it becomes a larger organization — usually, there’s a magical point around 30 employees where the organization gets too large for the CEO to really continue to be involved in everything. Now you’ve got more specialization — which you need to have. You truly need to have individuals or departments that are in charge of functions, because that’s the reason that you hired them. They need to be able to understand what they’re doing and be able to go off and essentially do things on their own and be able to work somewhat autonomously. And you start to have this division of duties, which then means you need to be able to have handoffs between these departments — you need to be able to have communication flows. Now multiple people need to understand the strategy and if they don’t, then you start to have people working at cross purposes.
Doris Nagel 26:15
Right. You need to be able to have new people come in and pretty easily fit into the new role. And you can’t do that if there’s all this institutional memory on “how we do things here.”
It’s funny how you’ve talked about projects and goals as being your baby. But the company is often the CEO’s/founder’s baby, and that why it’s so difficult for some CEOs, particularly if they were involved with the founding of the company, to let go of parts of the company. Because it’s like letting your letting your kid grow up. You’ve got to be able to recognize that your business isn’t a baby anymore. It’s an adolescent, and you need to change your MO. I’ve seen people who were great entrepreneurs, great at starting a business. But they may not be the right leader to scale the business if they can’t let go.
I believe some people can’t let go. They either can’t make that transition, and I personally believe some of them subconsciously just don’t want to. And if that’s the case, then sometimes it’s time to change leadership.
Dr. Phillip Meade 27:31
Yes. We believe it’s a choice, and that we have tools that we use to help CEOs and leaders to see the effectiveness of those choices. Because if you’ve scaled to a certain point, you know that as a CEO, if you are still reaching down to the lower levels of the organization to make decisions, it makes people if people start to feel micromanaged. It slows the speed of the organization down because there’s a limit to how fast one person can make decisions.
We look at decisions in terms of the criticality. How accurate does this particular decision have to be? How quickly does it have to be made? How broadly does it affect across the organization?
Different things like that affect what level should it be made at. If a decision has to be made frequently, and quickly, and it only affects a narrow swath of the organization, why on earth would you want to make that at a high level of your organization? That’s either going to consume all of your executive’s time, or things will constantly be lagging and being bogged down, because your executives aren’t going to have time to make it as frequently as it as it calls for. And so it’s going to be creating a bottleneck.
Doris Nagel 28:53
As somebody who’s worked in a large organization and who worked for a micromanager boss, I have to tell you it quickly became quite demoralizing. You never felt like you were good enough, you never felt like the boss really trusted you, you never felt like there was a place for you to really grow. And I ended up leaving that position fairly shortly thereafter. And in fact, there was a lot of turnover in that department because of that person’s management style.
I suspect a lot of people listening, maybe even who aren’t entrepreneurs, are probably thinking, “Boy, I can relate to that.”
Dr. Phillip Meade 29:35
Exactly, exactly. That’s why our Missing Links culture model has four strands in it. And the four strands are: maturity, diversity, community and unity. The unity piece is really a lot about the organizational systems that create that unity within an organization. You can’t separate all of the different pieces and parts. You want to create that engaged employee at the self level, that feels empowered and feels truly engaged in and a part of something special. But you can’t do that within an organizational structure where they at the same time they feel micromanaged and undervalued because there’s a boss or supervisor who they feel is constantly coming in and doesn’t trust them to make decisions that they feel like they were hired to make.
Doris Nagel 30:36
You’ve mentioned a couple of times the Gallaher Edge culture model called The Missing Link. You shared that it has four elements, I believe. Talk a little bit more about that process in detail, and how you developed it, and how you use it.
Dr. Phillip Meade 30:55
When I was asked to lead the culture changes after the Shuttle Columbia accident, it was a challenge for me because NASA had what I thought was such a good culture. It was such a great place to work. But I discovered that there’s a difference between a good culture and an effective culture.
For us, an effective culture not only creates a high level of employee engagement, but it’s also one that that helps the company to execute its strategy. So an effective culture is one that is aligned with the strategy the organization.
For a company like NASA, obviously, that means producing a high level of system safety. What does a company culture that produces that look like?
When we started researching and looking into it, we came to the conclusion that that a truly effective culture has four traits to it: it has a maturity. It has a culture of maturity where employees have the ability to work together with a high degree of individual maturity and, and produce. It has diversity, where employees have a high degree of differences and work together well. It has the community, and then it also has unity.
So those are the four different strands that our Missing Links model has. All four of those must be present within an organization. And so when we work with companies, we evaluate the degree to which all four of those traits are present. And where they aren’t, we help them to develop those. And we do that by through our Missing Links model. And the missing links are how we connect the employees together in the organization to create those four traits.
For example, maturity is created by connecting employees in an organization together through the characteristics of self acceptance, self awareness, and self accountability. When you have employees that are connected together with those three traits, it really produces a high level of maturity within your organization.
Doris Nagel 33:20
So why are those so important? How did you decide on those? And can you give me an example of an employee who might exhibit those and one that might not?
Dr. Phillip Meade 33:33
As I always say, it’s all about the science of human behavior. When you begin to peel back the onion and look at what makes human beings tick and how they work, it’s amazing how those three things at the core of us as human beings create a heightened degree of effectiveness.
First, we start with self-acceptance. When I accept myself for who I am, both my flaws as well as the things I’m really good at, it gives me the ability to then truly see myself.
When I don’t accept myself, then I will actually hide things from myself, which decreases my self-awareness. I’ve mentioned the term “defensiveness.” We all have this psychological immune system that protects us from feeling pain associated with thinking things about ourselves that are less than desirable. When I think something about myself that is undesirable, it doesn’t feel good. And I don’t like that. And since we’re all motivated as human beings to avoid pain, our psychological immune system kicks in and won’t let me see things about myself that are painful. Because I’m trying to avoid pain.
But when I have high degree of self-acceptance, it allows me to see more about myself. Greater self-awareness allows me to see more areas where I can improve myself, areas where I can be more effective. It also allows me to see clearly the things that I am good at, so I can optimize those and really double down on those.
The last piece is self-accountability. Because self-acceptance and self-awareness are great, but unless I do something about it, it’s all just academic. Self-accountability says that when own my own actions, when I believe that I can influence the world, when I recognize the ways that I contribute to my own world and take action to change that, I can actually do so.
We like to think of these three things in terms of a Venn diagram — you know, where three circles that overlap. And in the cente, where the circles overlap is where you have all three working together. That’s where the magic happens. You get someone with a high degree of maturity — an employee in your organization who is has a high degree of self-acceptance, a high degree of self-awareness and a high degree of self-accountability — that’s the type of individual that if you go to them, you’re able to have those difficult conversations with.
Becuase if they have that high degree of self-acceptance, self-awareness and self-accountability, then you can you can go to them and you can say,”You know, I think we could do better on this particular product.” And they won’t freak out on you, because they have high self-acceptance. They’re still going to be okay with themselves because they are self-aware enough to see the places where this product could be better. And they will have self-accountability to take ownership for the ways in which they can they contributed to its current state, and how they could make it better. That’s nirvana for an employer, right?
Doris Nagel 37:08
I’m thinking back to at least one business that I worked with. You could be all those things, but unfortunately, you were never rewarded for it. The people who rewarded were the ones who went around talking behind people’s backs and got people in trouble for all sorts of stuff. It was like grade school.
There wasn’t any accountability, so the type of employee that you’re talking about either starts to alter their behavior and question themselves, which is unhealthy, or they end up leaving, because that kind of organization doesn’t deserve an employee like that.
It also occurs to me to what you’re talking about probably also has carryovers into people’s personal lives, too. If you live the traits you’re talking about, you’re probably also a better marriage partner, or a better friend or sister or brother, too.
Dr. Phillip Meade 38:13
Yes, we get we get comments all the time from the individuals and companies that we work with about that. One of my favorite stories actually involved an individual we worked with. And at one of the conferences that we did out in California, my partner happened to run into him and his wife. His wife ran up and hugged her!
So it absolutely makes a difference in people’s lives.
You know, I want to go back to what you just said. Because something I didn’t say that I wanted to, is that leadership is what holds the whole model together. Just like you were pointing out, it’s great to have individual employees who have the maturity, the diversity, the community and the unity – all of these things that we want to create.
But leaders are the ones who create the organizational culture. So if the leaders aren’t modeling it, if the leaders aren’t actively creating it, then the organization’s culture is not going to have it. It’s not just about the employees creating it from the bottom up. And it’s not just about the leaders doing it from the top down. We want this happening from the whole system perspective.
Doris Nagel 39:31
I’ve always wondered whether it’s possible to truly change the culture of a business. But I guess it sounds like you would argue, yes, it is possible. How does a company startup trying to do that, if that’s what they want to do?
Dr. Phillip Meade 39:42
Yes, it is possible. It’s about being intentional about it. And deciding what you want your culture to be, and being open about it.
It’s a team sport, As we say, you have to crowdsource it.
The leaders have to own the culture change, and, and it’s a crowdsourced effort. But the leaders must want to own it. And they will want to get input support and buy in from the employees to help with it. So it’s not just done by the leaders, it’s with the involvement and support of the employees. And so really getting that true buy in and support from everyone within the organization to create it is essential.
But I say this a lot: “You can’t you can’t hit a target that you can’t see.” So the first step is deciding what you want our culture to be. What does it look like? And then you must become intentional about creating that.
Doris Nagel 40:47
Is it possible for companies and business leaders to see themselves clearly enough to change the culture themselves? Or do most companies need some kind of external support and a mirror held up for them occasionally?
Dr. Phillip Meade 41:06
I think it’s possible to do it yourself. But I also think it’s extremely useful to have external support. That mirror is very, very useful, whether it’s someone else within your company, or whether it is an external consultant like us.
I also want to stress that it’s necessary to have a model for organizational culture in order to be able to manage a culture change. Having done culture change for many, many years, I don’t personally know how I could do it without having a model to guide me along the way, because there’s just so much to it.
That’s one of the reasons why we love our missing links cultural model so much. It’s very useful to us and our clients for guiding the process.
Doris Nagel 41:52
If a company is looking to change its culture, how should they go about finding the right external support? You might say, “Call Gallaher Edge,” but realistically, evem if every business that was thinking about changing their culture called you, you couldn’t help them all. So, what’s your advice for companies who are looking for external support? What are the kinds of questions they should ask? And how should they go about finding the support that’s the right fit for them?
Dr. Phillip Meade 42:28
I think there’s obviously a lot of trust involved in the relationship when you hire someone to help you change your culture. It’s very much a relationship. So I think that that’s a big piece of it. So they would want to find someone that they that they are comfortable with and that they trust, but also someone that they that they trust understands organizational culture and how it works and has an understanding of how to work with companies on organizational culture.
There are certainly different models for organizational culture — obviously, I’m particularly fond of ours! But there are other ones. And so I would say, take a look at the model that is used by the company you’re considering and decide whether or not it makes sense to you. Decide whether you like it and whether you’re comfortable using that. Make sure they can explain it to you in a way that makes sense that you, because that’s probably what they are going to use to guide the work within your organization.
So, that’s the way that I would evaluate an external culture change company: (1) the relationship, (2) their knowledge, experience, credibility, and (3) the model that they use.
Doris Nagel 43:51
I know that your website features prominently your upcoming book. Talk about it. What’s it called? Where can people find it? What led you to write it?
Dr. Phillip Meade 44:10
The book is called “The Missing Link: Launching a High Performing Company Culture.” It’s a great resource for taking an initial look at how organizational culture works. It will be available on September 7 through Amazon or Barnes and Noble.
We wrote it to document our model and how it works, how we arrived at it, and why we do things the way that we do. If someone is thinking about cultural change, or wants to learn more about organizational culture, it’s a great way to learn more about it. Even if you don’t want to use Gallaher Edge, it would be a good way to begin to learn about organizational culture. It will help you be able to evaluate other culture models and other companies and compare how they change culture versus the way that we do it.
And if you want to try and do it yourself, there’s a lot in there. We wanted to offer a lot of value to readers in it, and so we tried to put a lot of content in there. Our editor was constantly trying to pull us back from making this book “War and Peace.” It was very difficult to winnow things down, because we wanted to offer as much value as we could throughout the book, because we’re very, very passionate about the topic.
Doris Nagel 45:49
There’s a lot of books about culture that are kind of fluffy, but it sounds like this isn’t one of them. What led you to write it? What are you hoping to accomplish? After all, writing and publishing a book is a lot of work!
Dr. Phillip Meade 45:58
We wanted to talk about our view of organizational culture. We believe we see organizational culture in a rather unique way because we take a systems view of the organization and combine that with the psychology and the science of human behavior. We wanted to document that and get it out there for people.
We also felt like our book is unique in that there’s a lot of books out there that focus on a specific aspect of organizational culture. But because culture is so big and so complex, we wanted to talk about a complete model for organizational culture.
I think we accomplished that. Our model is a holistic model one that organizations can use for how address organizational culture, instead of just teamwork, or engagement, or one particular aspect.
Doris Nagel
Philip, it’s been great heavy on the show. How can people reach you in case someone’s listening who would like to talk to you about the book, or maybe engage Gallaher Edge, or maybe brainstorm about business culture? What’s the best way for people to reach out to you?
Dr. Phillip Meade 47:33
You can find us on the on the web at gallaheredge.com, where we have blogs, and you can listen to some of our podcasts. We have a podcast called “The Evolved Leader.” And you can also sign up for our newsletter.
We also have a great membership site called Insider Edge that that people can join and get access to featured videos of the week. There’s also a large library of over 100 videos about organizational culture, including different topics and q&a sessions. And you can sign up for that at our website as well. It’s a great resource for people who are just wanting to learn more about organizational culture and would like to dip their toe in it.
Doris Nagel 48:36
Your site sounds like a veritable treasure trove of information about business culture and changing company culture. Remind people again about the book — when it’s coming out and where they can find it.
Dr. Phillip Meade 48:52
Our book is called “The Missing Links: Launching a High Performing Company Culture.” It will be launching on September 7 [2021], available through both amazon.com and Barnes and Noble. We hope you’ll pick up a copy. We think it’ll be a really valuable resource to anyone who’s interested in an organizational culture, or leadership in general. There’s a lot of great resources in it. And anyone who buys a copy will have access to a lot of expanded content through our website, as well as through our Insider Edge video platform. You’ll get three months of free membership when you buy the book.
Doris Nagel
I know I’m going to look for it when it comes out. And I look forward to reading it.
Phillip, thanks so much for being on the show this week. It was great having you and talking about the great work that Gallaher Edge is doing, and the important topic of business culture. So thanks again for being on the show.
Dr. Phillip Meade
Thank you, Doris. I appreciate it. I really enjoyed it.
Doris Nagel
I did as well.
Thanks so much for listening, and thanks again to my guest today, Dr. Philip Meade, Co-owner of Gallagher Edge, talking about business culture.
You can find more helpful information and resources on my website at globalocityservices.com. There’s a library there of free blogs, tools, podcasts and other resources.
My door is always open for comments, questions or suggestions or just to shoot the breeze. Email me at dnagel@lakes radio.org. I’d love to hear from you.
Be sure to join me again next Saturday at 11am Central noon Eastern.
But until then, I’m Doris Nagel, wishing you happy entrepreneuring!
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