Building a Behavior-Based Culture with David J Friedman
Watch/Listen here or on Apple Podcast, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts“I believe as the leadership team goes, so goes the rest of the company. So if you don't have that consistent and significant sustainable growth, you've got some work to do.” — Mike Goldman
David J. Friedman is an author of Culture by Design and developer of the CultureWise Operating System. He’s conducted over 750 workshops and keynotes, focusing on creating and sustaining high-performing organizational cultures.
Key Characteristic of Effective Leadership Teams
Ego-Free Leadership: Leaders must check their egos at the door to avoid dysfunction and foster honest communication.
Leadership behaviors at the top level set the tone for the entire organization.
Defining Organizational Culture
Behavior-Driven Approach: Culture is defined by consistent behaviors, not abstract values or mission statements.
Example: Behaviors like "honor commitments" and "practice blameless problem-solving" are actionable and measurable.
The ROI of a Strong Culture
A well-defined culture directly impacts:
Employee performance.
Customer service quality.
Collaboration and innovation.
Employees adapt to high-performing cultures, elevating their productivity and engagement.
Values vs. Behaviors
Values: Abstract concepts like respect, integrity, and innovation.
Behaviors: Observable actions that can be coached and operationalized.
Behaviors provide clarity and are easier to teach and implement.
Leadership’s Role in Defining Culture
The CEO and senior leadership team should take ownership of defining desired behaviors.
While input from the team is valuable, the CEO must ultimately guide the culture.
Creating Rituals to Reinforce Culture
Rituals ensure behaviors become ingrained, such as:
Weekly focus on a specific behavior across all meetings.
Discussing behaviors actively in meetings to keep them top-of-mind.
Hiring for Cultural Fit
Focus on recruiting individuals whose intrinsic behaviors align with the desired culture.
Interview techniques should elicit genuine insights rather than leading candidates to provide expected answers.
Evolving Fundamentals
Fundamentals should be revisited every 3-5 years to ensure relevance while maintaining consistency.
Changes, if any, should reflect the core, unchanging principles of the organization.
CultureWise Operating System
A structured methodology for defining, teaching, and sustaining desired behaviors.
Includes tools like software for embedding rituals and a systematic approach to rolling out behaviors.
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Mike Goldman: David J Friedman has written two books on organizational culture and delivered over 750 workshops and keynote programs for business leaders. His second book in particular culture by design is the definitive how to manual for culture building.
David is the developer of the culture wise operating system. And with this proven practical system. His company helps organizations create, drive and maintain high performing cultures. I've been hearing about David for at least the last three years. As I do workshops, I'm a something called the Vistage certified speaker, and I was telling David, before we started the show that, half the groups I speak to ask me if I know David and ask me if I know culture wise. So I said, at some point I got to get to know this guy. And I guess the podcast is a great way to do that. So David, thanks for coming. Welcome to the show.
David J Friedman: Oh, it's a pleasure, Mike. look forward to spending time with you.
Mike Goldman: So after all, this is the better leadership team show.
The first question I always ask is David, from your experience, what do you believe is the one most important characteristic of a great leadership team
David J Friedman: I think, Mike, that, the characteristic of a great leadership team is that each team member is able to check their ego at the door. And when I say check the ego at the door, I mean that there are so much, when I look at companies I've worked with and so many, and I look at when I see organizational dysfunction. And I know you see a lot of that because I do, that to me, the biggest cause of organizational dysfunction is people's egos. When we're more worried about who looks good, who looks bad, who's getting credit, who's not getting credit. When we're afraid to have honest conversations because you're worried about hurting people's feelings or things like that.
When ego gets in the way, creates dysfunction. When people are able to set that aside and just say, what's going to be best for the team, we end up being a lot more successful.
Mike Goldman: and David, how do you see that? What, when that happens at the leadership team level, what's the impact on the rest of the organization?
David J Friedman: everything that happens at the leadership team level, Mike, you know, flows to the rest of the organization. So if I've got a bunch of leaders who one are afraid to, let's say they're afraid to acknowledge a mistake, cause that's an ego issue. I don't want to look like I'm stupid. So I'll stick with something I said, because that's what I said at once.
Even when new information tells me it's wrong, when I'm afraid to acknowledge and own up to that. then I'm going to pass that right down to my team because they're going to be afraid to speak up about something and they're going to, you know, hold on to something they once said, even though it is no longer relevant and all the behaviors that I exhibit are going to flow right down to the rest of the team.
Mike Goldman: So so no shock that your answer is going to flow very nicely into a conversation about culture.
So before we dive in deep in culture, I want to get your definition of the word because culture there, there are a lot of words in business that people use over and over again, but they don't really know how to define it or define it in different ways.
Like strategy is one of those words. Culture is another one. So how do you define the word culture as it pertains to organizations?
David J Friedman: to me, Mike, the culture and organization is the set of behaviors that define how they do things. So forget about the stuff that's on the website. Forget about the stuff that's on the walls. If I walk into an organization and I watch how people do things, how do they actually relate to each other?
How do they accomplish their work? That set of behaviors, written or unwritten, is really the culture to me. I, you're going to hear this, you'll hear this throughout the podcast. I am very behaviorally oriented. And so I don't really care about all the stuff people say they value or the stuff they believe. What I care about is like, what shows up every day. That's the real culture.
Mike Goldman: And this is going to sound like I'm a nonbeliever in culture and I'm not, but I, but playing devil's advocate, because I know there are a lot of leaders that think this way is, does the culture really matter or the behavior matter as long as we're getting results? Like, why is it important to build a specific culture is there an ROI to doing that?
Or is it just about the feel good part of it?
David J Friedman: To me, it's not about the feel good part about it. It's about the results. So for that leader that says, you know, well, I really care about the results. I would tell you the culture drives the results that the culture in any organization, I don't care whether it's a company or it's a sports team, or it's a family, or it's a group of friends, that the culture has this enormous influence in shaping how people do whatever they do. And so When we understand how much influence it, it has in shaping the way people operate, it's going to affect how much pride people take in the quality of the work they're doing. It's going to affect our ability to attract and keep the best people. It's going to affect how people deliver customer service. It's going to, it's going to affect. How collaborative people are within the organization. It's going to affect, you know, how innovative they are. I mean, every part of the organization, the way people show up and do their work is profoundly impacted by the culture in which they're operating. In fact, I'll take that even a step further.
And I would tell you that same people will perform differently. In different cultures. In other words, you take that same human being and you put them in a high performing championship, amazing culture, and a culture of high expectations. And we're not talking about, we have pizza parties every Friday.
And, you know, we get to bring our dogs to work. I'm talking about high performing culture. You put somebody, you put the average person in a high performing environment. they're going to look around and figure, I guess that's how they do it here and they'll raise their level of play. And you take the exact same people whatever their skills, talent, knowledge, ability experiences, you put the same person in a low performing environment and most of those people will sink to the level of the people around them.
So I would tell you that the culture profoundly affects every aspect of performance, which is why it's the direct leader to the results. It's what creates the results.
Mike Goldman: how do we define our culture? I mean, we've all seen the set of values on the website or the poster on the wall. And I know you've got a little bit of a different view,of values versus fundamentals behavior. S
o I want you to dive into that is to how do you define culture and talk a little bit about the fundamentals.
David J Friedman: that's a great question, Mike. and again, this, you're going to hear my very much behavioral orientation to all of this. So the way you see most leaders define culture is through the traditional set of vision statement, a mission statement, some set of core values. And while candidly, that always looks good on the website. Most of the time, it doesn't bring enough clarity to exactly what you expect because at the foundation, and I'm going to go deeper on this, but as a foundational statement, if you can't tell me what culture you're trying to build as a leader, you're not going to be very successful building it. And so the more clarity you can bring to what is it that I expect of my people, the more successful you're going to be. So my experience is that there's a really big difference between what I call values. And what I call behaviors and the difference is more than just semantics. So let me explain what that difference is. And to your question, why is this such an important issue? a value to me is typically. An abstract concept.
So examples of values are things like quality, integrity, loyalty, respect, teamwork, passion, commitment, innovation. These are ideas, concepts of behavior though, an action. It's something I can literally see somebody doing. So some of the behaviors that I teach in my own company, just to give you an example, are things like. Honor commitments. That's something you actually do. Practice blameless problem solving. Get clear on expectations. Be a fanatic about response time. These are actions that people do. So a value is typically an abstract idea where behavior is an action. Now, you Why does this matter? Why is this not just semantics? So here's why this is such an important issue. The problem in my experience with most companies, not all, but most companies traditional looking set of core values is that they sound really good and they look wonderful on the website, but they tend to be so broad and abstract and nebulous that they mean too many different things to different people. And they therefore become very difficult to operationalize. In any really substantive kind of way. So let me give you a really simple example. One of the core values that I see in many companies, and maybe some of your listeners will have this in their set of core values is I'll see companies that have the value for respect. We should all respect each other who would argue with that, what does that word mean? It means a lot of different things to different people. If you grew up in an inner city gang, your definition of what it looks like to respect somebody or to diss them. Could be completely different than what it means in your family. Or some parts of the world, you look somebody straight in the eye when you talk to them, that's being respectful. parts of the world, it's terribly disrespectful to do that. It means so many different things to different people. So to simply say, one of our core values is respect. It sounds good. But I'm not sure it's that helpful. Behaviors because they're so action oriented are much easier to teach, coach, guide, give people feedback about. It's very difficult. You do all this work with teams and building great leadership teams. It's very difficult if I'm a leader to coach somebody about their values, but I could coach them all day long about what I see them doing. Or maybe not doing so ultimately to me, it's much more useful to define our culture in terms of what are the behaviors that you as a leader or leadership team say, if we could get our people to do these things more consistently, we'd be kicking some butt in our marketplace. We'd be delivering those results we're looking for. I have the name for those behaviors are just my nomenclature. I happen to call them fundamentals because I think they're. Fundamental to success. So the first thing any company has got to do is get way more clear on what they want their culture to be defining the culture in terms of a set of behaviors instead of the typical values.
Mike Goldman: I like this so much because what I see in a lot of organizations and I think the reason why they get caught up in words like respect and collaboration and innovation and things like that. and I have come across companies that do that. Some of my clients have that, but then they've got the specific behaviors.
You know that describe it and that's better, but I think I, but I think the trap organizations fall into is they think of core values as a way to brand themselves on their website and when they fall into that trap, they wind up with these. I have one client that happens to be in the solar industry and one of their core values was sustainability.
How does someone behave? But like, does that mean I recycled that my cans when I'm finished? You know, so what is it? So that's, so I love it. And the question I have is normally when I see those core values, there are three, five, six, you know, some manageable number. Is it the same with behaviors? Are there typically five behaviors?
Might there be 37 behaviors? What are we talking about?
David J Friedman: Yeah. my answer is going to surprise you and let's make sure we come back to your point about having a set of values and unpacking them into behaviors, because I want to give your audience a twist on that thought, but to answer your question, this is going to surprise you and your listeners that first of all, the right number of behaviors doesn't matter. whatever we have is. What we should have. I've done the process that I teach with well over 800 organizations. So that's a lot of data points. The least number of behaviors I've ever seen is going to surprise you. The least I've ever seen in one of those 800 and some companies. Is 18, it's the only one I've ever seen less than 20. The most I've ever seen is 40 and the sweet spot usually ends up somewhere between about 25 and 30 in my company. I have 30 and that sounds pretty crazy. And many of your audience will hear that and say, ah, that's never going to work. That's got to be, people aren't going to be able to remember that. and I always say, you know, you're right.
They're not going to be able to remember that. But here's the question I always ask. what's your goal? it's the goal to have something all of our people can recite? Or is our goal to have our people live the behaviors? That drives success in our company, it's the latter and there's more than three or four or five behaviors.
I mean, if you looked at my list of 30 I was kind of jokingly say this to people, but seriously, if you were to look at my list of 30 fundamentals and you were to say, I only want five, I would ask which 25 of these do you not want to teach in your company? And so you'd be giving up a lot of pretty important stuff when I show you and we'll talk about this as we go deeper when I show you how we use these behaviors, these fundamentals, as I call them. That's where you'll understand why the number doesn't matter. So we'll come. We'll come. We'll get to that later. But let me come back to your point you made earlier that. A lot of your clients, you know, have a list of core values, but then they've sort of unpacked them and described the behaviors that helped bring them to life. there's nothing wrong with doing that. And yet at the same time, I'm going to share with you a different way to think about that. And so having worked with hundreds and hundreds of companies, helping them to more clearly define what they want their culture to be. What I've discovered is, first of all, I want to be clear about this for your audience. There is no right way or wrong way to do this. There are many different ways, and you could do this in a lot of different ways. And yet having said that, some are just more effective than others. And there's at least two methods that I've found to be pretty effective. The first method is what you described. We could take our core values and we could unpack each one of them by describing, well, What are the behaviors that would help us to live to? or sustainability or customer service or whatever the value is. And that sounds like a very logical thing. There's another approach, which is what I do in my company and most of our clients.
And this is going to sound a little crazy at first, but I'll show you why it's important is I say we could just skip the whole darn core values discussion and go right to the behaviors. Cause at the end of the day. Isn't that what I want people to do something? So what do I need all that other stuff for? that sounds a little crazy And because everybody else in the world other than me says wait a second, you know, you've heard it many times Maybe you've said it you can't run your company without defining your core values and I say I don't know about that What I know is you need the behaviors because that's what you want people to do. what's interesting about that is I used to say to people that either approach is equally fine. I mean, as long as you get your behaviors, what difference does it make? But what I came to understand, and I don't say that anymore, is that if you started with that set of core values, the list of behaviors that you would come up with would be different from the list of behaviors that you start that you came up with, if you didn't start with your core values and the reason for that is that when you start with your core values, you are immediately introducing a limiter or a constraint to your thinking because the only behaviors you would ever think of are the ones that tie directly to those values, but there might be other behaviors that are really important to driving success in your company. that you would never even think of. They wouldn't even come up in the conversation because right from the beginning you narrowed your scope so tightly that you eliminated a whole bunch of good things. And that's why I say I'd rather just go right to the behaviors because at the end of the day. That's all I really care about.
I mean, what difference does it make what that other stuff is? I just want people to do things
Mike Goldman: and how would a leader or a leadership team, you could help me if it's one person or a team, if it's a grassroots effort throughout the organization, but how should a leader think about coming up with what those behaviors are?
David J Friedman: Yeah, so great question. And first thing I would say, you know, and it gets to your question Is this a leadership group? Is it the leader? Is it the grassroots thing?
And so one of the biggest mistakes, let me describe a mistake that companies make and give you the alternative. The biggest, one of the biggest mistakes that companies make in my experience in doing this is that too often. We make this too collaborative a process, we get asked everybody in the company, so what do you think the values are around here? there's a lot of problems with that. One is we might end up with the lowest common denominator. We might end up with group think we might end up diluting it. We might end up with people influencing it who aren't the kind of people that we want. the bigger issue here is. This is a leadership function. If I'm a CEO, it is my job. It's my responsibility to be the author of where this company is going. That's what leaders are supposed to be doing. Now, me add a little bit of nuance to that statement. The first thing I would say is that. If I am large enough and most of your listeners probably are that I have a leadership team, since that's what you teach, I'm a big advocate for the inclusion of the senior leadership team in this process, but I'm going to be very specific. in my language for this. And so notice how I say this. I'm a big advocate for the inclusion of the senior leadership team for their contribution to the CEO's thinking. Notice how I said that for their contribution to the CEO's thinking. In other words, if I'm the CEO, it's my responsibility to be the author of where this company is going, but I'm going to include my leadership team, not to make them feel good.
I'm going to include them. Cause they're smart, I got some smart people in that team and they got a lot of good ideas and their ideas could influence mine. at the end of the day, is not a majority vote. This is not a consensus. This is not, let's make sure everybody in the team got a little of what they'd like.
No, it's what I want the company to be about, but I'm influenced by the smart people on the team.
Mike Goldman: And to your point, I don't believe that's just because it's the CEO and it's their company. I mean, yes. And. What I have found is if the CEO is not modeling the culture, it dies right there. So I don't care if the whole leadership team says, this is a behavior. If the CEO doesn't buy into it and model it, it's going to die.
David J Friedman: Yeah. I say all the time, Mike, that in my experience, the single biggest, the single most important ingredient. the success of any culture initiative is what I call CEO sponsorship. It starts at the top, the man or woman at the top has got to say this is important to us and to your point, model it. I want to add one other piece, just because a lot of your audience members may be thinking about this. The there's a good reason that companies tend to over collaborate about this. And the reason, as you might guess, is to get buy in on the part of the organization. And buy in is important. It does matter to get buy in. The mistake in the thinking about this, at least from my experience, is thinking that the only or best way to accomplish that buy in is to get it done. Is by everybody being co authors of it. We get unbelievable buy in a hundred percent of the time in how it gets rolled out into the organization in highly interactive, engaged work sessions that every employee participates in and they eat it up and they love it. And they weren't the authors of it. So buy in does matter. It is important to get buy in. There are just other ways to get it than having everybody be authors of it. At the end of the day, what does the leader want this culture to be? Not what does everybody else want it to be?
Mike Goldman: when we define the behaviors, are these non negotiables we behave this way, or you don't belong here? Are these aspirational? We hope one day we could all act this way or behave this way. Or is this somewhere in the middle?
David J Friedman: Well, I would say it's somewhere in the middle, Mike. is absolutely aspirational in the sense that to build this amazing company. I mean, when I hear people debate, should this be aspirational or should it be a description of who we are today? To me, absolutely. It's asp, that's the whole point.
I'm trying to win the Superbowl, you know, we're not there right now in order to get to the Superbowl, there are certain things we're going to have to do. And we probably do that a little bit now, but not as consistently. And that's what we're going for. Why would I be describing what we are today? The whole point is to be better. And so to me, absolutely. It's aspirational now. As we say, it's aspirational again. There are probably a lot of things that we do well today and some of these aspirational things we do, but maybe not as consistently as we'd like to do it. And the really important thing. We always want to use our fundamentals as I call them, excuse me, as a coaching. Tip as a coaching opportunity. So when we fall, when we see each other fall short, it's not, Oh, see, I caught you, Mike, you weren't doing it. a coaching opportunity. it's a chance to say, Hey, we're not perfect. And let's help and coach and support each other to be this way more consistently. And the reason that ties very directly to this whole issue of whether it's aspirational or not, the reason that some companies. Instead, we'll try to describe what they are today is because they worry if I describe something that's aspirational, are my people going to call BS on me and say, Hey, you don't do that all the time. We don't have to worry about that because I'm not saying we do it all the time. I'm saying, this is what we're trying to get to. And let's coach and support and help each other to get there. So I don't have any credibility issue about that. I'm not claiming we're perfect. So yeah, the whole point is to design the amazing company we want to be and help us work on getting there.
Mike Goldman: how do you, and I think you just mentioned coaching, coaching may be part of the answer here, but you have defined your behaviors.how do I make sure we are living and breathing? T
hat is an organization. how do I bring that to life and make sure we're focused on it?
David J Friedman: Yeah. And that's really the foundation. So there's a framework that I teach of how you build a culture and there's eight steps to it, but there's two steps that drive. Most of the impact. The first is what we've been talking about. I got to define with enough clarity. What exactly is the culture we're trying to create? The second is really the answer to your question here. Okay. It's nice that I have clarity, but who cares how clear it is. The point is to get our people to do it. If I can't get our people living it, then I don't care how clear it is.
So we do that through a really simple, but profound concept that I call creating rituals. So a ritual to me is some behavior. that we do over and over again until it becomes baked in. You get up in the morning, you brush your teeth. When we go to, when we were kids in school, we used to say the Pledge of Allegiance every day. Some people say a prayer before a meal. It's just a routine. The reason that rituals or routines are so powerful and so important is that most human beings are not very good at sticking with things. Whether it's the New Year's, you know, new resolution we're going to set that won't last more than a month or whether it's the program we created at work that we rolled out that later became the flavor of the month. We're not very good at sticking with things. When something becomes a ritual, It's not hard to do. It's just what we do. So the way we use that really simple concept is we take these behaviors, these fundamentals, we roll it out to all the staff in a highly interactive engaged sessions. And then we begin to focus. one fundamental each week through a series of rituals and I'll give you an example to illustrate what I mean.
So week number one, everybody in the company all week long is thinking about working on focusing and practicing fundamental number one. The week after that, everybody's focused all week on number two and number three and so on.
When we get to the end of the list, we go back to the beginning. And we do it over and over again. So here's a simple example in my company and in every one of our clients, every meeting that we have in our company, whether it's a project team meeting, a leadership meeting, a zoom meeting, my company's remote, all of our meetings were by zoom, meeting that goes on in my company this week, the first agenda item of that meeting. Is the fundamental of the week and we spend the first three to five minutes talking about it. So my fundamental in my company this week is called share information. It's about recognizing that, you know, you just learned something. Is there somebody here who would benefit from knowing that? Is that it's just keeping it to yourself. So every meeting everywhere in our company this week. The first thing we do is we spend a couple minutes talking about that. We don't want to take over the meeting. Then we're going to move on.
But every meeting we're talking about next week, every meeting starts with fundamental number two and the week after number three and so on. And we cycle through them over and over again. so think about you or any of the people audience listening to this right now. And I want you to picture your companies and imagine, think about all the meetings. As you listen to this podcast, think about all the different meetings That may be going on in your company this week.
And imagine if in every single one of those meetings, every single one of your employees was talking about the exact same principle. Think about the power of that as a teaching opportunity. So that's an example of a ritual. We create a number of rituals like that give people lots of opportunities all week long to think about work on focus practice this week's fundamental. And if we do that this week with number one per se, and next week with number two and the week after with number three, and we cycle through them over and over and over again, you know what happens? These fundamentals become internalized in people. You can't even help it. It becomes your language.
It becomes the lens through which you look at the world. It becomes the way we, it's just how we do things. that's the whole point. It's such a simple thought.
Mike Goldman: So when you are, I want to dig into that a little bit. So, so the first fundamental ship was it share information? Is that what it was? Share information. Sowhen someone's talking about that at the beginning of their meeting, is it kind of redefining what that means? Is it talking about, Hey, where are we doing that as a team?
And where aren't we doing that as a team? What does that conversation typically look like?
David J Friedman: Yeah. That's a great question. And there's a lot of ways to do that, but you want to, the best way to do it is you want to get people really interacting around the fundamental of the week. And the best way to do that is to share. Ask questions to engage somebody. So if I stand up in front of the room and I read this week's fundamental, eh, all right, it's not really going to do a lot. If I ask questions to get people participating, it's more likely to be effective because I get their brain working, they're engaged in it. So what might that look like? Well, best practice for this, I'll say this and I'll show you what I mean is to ask a specific question of a specific person. In other words, if I'm leading the meeting and I say, so this week we're on share information. Does anybody have anything you want to say? Crickets. Nobody says a thing. If I call him by somebody, I say, Hey Mike, let me ask you a question. Where, how do you decide? When it's appropriate to share and when something might be confidential now you're going to think about that.
Well, I guess here's what I, and then somebody else jumps in and they answer and then they say, that's a good point, Mike. I never thought about it. And all of a sudden everybody's talking. We've got a good conversation going. So at a certain point, I don't really care where the conversation goes.
Sometimes somebody might talk about their kids or something happened to the supermarket yesterday. It's just that we're raising into our consciousness and awareness of, yeah, You know, the more I'm thinking about sharing information as I go throughout my week. The more likely I'm conscious of that and I'm doing it. So it's just a simple question. And there are questions you could ask somebody that are very specific to a fundamental like the one I just illustrated. There are generic questions you could ask about any fundamental. For example, you could kick off the meeting and say, so this week we're on sharing information. do you think when we were putting together our list of fundamentals, why do you think this one was important enough? To make the cut. Who in our company do you think is the best one at practicing this? do you think the impact would be in our company if we were all like 10 percent better at this? What would be the impact if we sucked at it? What's one thing you're going to do this week to up your game in how you're sharing information? I mean, those are generic questions you can ask about any fundamental, but that's what it looks like. And you go three to five minutes. You don't want it to go more than that.
You cut it off after that. But if we're doing that every single meeting, every place in the company this week, We're going to start sharing a lot more information.
Mike Goldman: I want to shift from.
From defining the culture and the ritual so important to now you've got to hire new folks into the organization. And, you know, I guess you've got a choice you could, and maybe,maybe there's something in the middle, but you can hire people in and assume we're going to hire in really talented people and then train them and coach them on our fundamentals, or we can.
Make sure in our recruiting and interviewing and evaluation and hiring process, we are doing our best to hire people that are already behaving in this way. Where, how should we be thinking about it?
David J Friedman: Yeah, my, my experience is that we should be thinking of it closer to the latter. other words, one of the things I say all the time is that when people show up to be potentially interviewed or hired, they're usually largely fully formed humans by that point, value system, their way of looking at the world has mostly been established, typically largely influenced by their upbringing, their family, you know, your family upbringing has an enormous influence, good or bad at shaping how you look at the world and then your other experiences further mold that.
But by the time they come to your door and you're interviewing them, mostly a fully formed human. And the, and what I mean when I say that, and the impact of that is you're not likely to have a lot of luck taking somebody who's not a fit in your culture and hoping to do some sort of an intervention and convert them into becoming a good fit. So we have to broadly speaking, hire people who are largely a good fit for the culture we're trying to create. Now, to add a little nuance to that, when we think about fundamentals, I don't break them into these categories, but we could think of them broadly as some of them are more learned and some of them are more intrinsic. And so let me give an example, practicing blameless problem solving is largely in my view, a learned behavior. You know, maybe you grew up in places, maybe your family, your parents blamed you about everything or your previous employer did. And so I don't think you're born as a learned person. You know, as somebody who blames a lot of people or practices blameless problem solving, it's something you learned.
So I could take somebody, as long as they're not too deeply ingrained in that, and I could teach them, hey, this is how we do things around here. are other behaviors that are much more intrinsic. You know, I think that, I think great customer service is typically an intrinsic thing that I could take somebody who has a real heart for service and put them in my environment.
And I could have that trait flourish in ways it might not anywhere else, but I can't take somebody who's missing the genetic code, there's missing the DNA for customer service. And turn them into a, you know, a customer service maniac, just not going to happen. So I think we can look at the behaviors that are more intrinsic and we can actually write interview questions around those to try to assess, does this person have this in them so that we can do a better and better job at bringing in people who we believe will be a good fit for the culture we're trying to create.
Mike Goldman: So I want to take an example of that and I'm digging in because I've seen this screwed up so often
David J Friedman: Yes.
Mike Goldman: I'm going to take that same share information behavior. What I've seen folks do on an interview. Is they'd say, well, one of the things that's really important, one of our core values, or in this case, one of our fundamentals or one of our behaviors is, it's all about sharing information.
Tell me about a time. And it's like, really? Like you're giving somebody the answer to the test. And if they have a brain in their head, they're going to give you what, tell you what you want to hear.
David J Friedman: Yeah.
Mike Goldman: how do you ask a question? And maybe it's not always a question. Maybe it's just observing
David J Friedman: Mm-hmm
Mike Goldman: throughout the interview, but how do you come up with a question where like for share information where you're not giving them the answer to the test?
David J Friedman: Yeah.
So that's a great question and I try to think about that and so I'll give you an example off the top of my head from a different fundamental, and then we can think about sharing information. But because it's just a good illustration of your point. So if I were looking for, let's say I was looking for somebody that was team oriented. And you could have good people that would rather work on their own and people would rather work in teams. So rather than ask them, so do you like working on teams? That's pretty important here. You know, I might ask them, tell me about a project you worked on in your last company that you were really proud of.
Like what happened? I didn't ask anything about teams. If the story they choose to tell me is a story about, you know, I got a chance to finally be solely independent. I could work on my own. I did this amazing stuff. They could be a fantastic person, but they're probably not team oriented. If the story they chose to tell me is was a time they worked, you know, in collaboration with people from other departments.
And it was so exciting because I got to understand perspectives I never saw before. And they're all excited. They're probably a more team oriented person. So I think I try to look for things like that. I always want stories. Tell me about, give me examples. Because I don't want to know what you think about something.
I want to know what you've experienced. And then even there, I'm looking for, what are they revealing in that? I'm looking for how animated they are. If they're really excited about something they tell me about, yeah, there's probably more to that than if they're very dispassionate or objective in the way that they describe that.
Yeah, it's probably more of an intellectual answer for them. So that's the kind of stuff I'm looking for.
Mike Goldman: How often do fundamentals change? Do you create them once, and those are typically your fundamentals for the next 10 years, or do some every year kind of come and go?
David J Friedman: Yeah. Generally speaking, they're long lasting. And my answer to this has actually changed in the last few years from what I've always said and written about. So that's checking the ego at the door. You got to be able to change your point of view if new information arises. So historically the way I've always answered that, Mike, is I've said that we should work on this with what I call an intention of permanence.
And what I mean by that language is we're going to put the effort into it, that we want this to last a long time. You know, we're not thinking about every three months we're coming out with a new fundamental. It's an enduring set of principles. I call it an intention. Because it's not like you're not allowed to change something.
I mean, it's yours. You have the right to change it, you know, make it work for you. And so generally speaking, this is a long lasting thing. And when people sometimes just some people in your audience may hear that and think, well, wait a second, David, I mean, don't we need to be responsive to the rapidly changing world? My point of view about that is we do. causes the change, our product and service mix, our strategies, this year's initiatives. But not the core of who we are, like what would change in our world? That would have me say that blameless problem solving thing I was talking about before, no way we got to start blaming
Mike Goldman: Yeah.
David J Friedman: this is a new marketplace where sharing information, totally outdated, keep it all to yourself. Now, I mean, these are such foundational principles. That they stand the test of time. Now, having said that I said before, I've started to change my point of view a little bit on this. What I've noticed is that some of the clients that I've worked with that have been doing this for five and 10 years, it's actually a useful thing to maybe every three to five years, not every year, but maybe every three to five years to gather the leadership team together and just ask ourselves, Is there anything we want to update? goal isn't to change anything. The goal is just to ask ourselves, should we? And typically when we've done that, we end up dropping a fundamental or two, adding a fundamental or two, tweaking the language a little bit and fine tuning it. So it's probably 90 or 95 percent the same, but just this little bit of updating. Seems to just kind of re energize people and we roll it out again and they get refocused and they're reminded why this was so important. So I wouldn't have necessarily said that originally, but I have found that if every three to five years we do that, it's actually a pretty helpful thing, but it's still generally speaking an enduring set of
Mike Goldman: Okay.
And it reminded me of a question I asked earlier that I didn't follow up on, and I want to make sure to do it before we start to wrap up, which is, we were talking about creating the fundamentals and you had said it's driven by the CEO, you're including getting feedback,from the leadership team.
If you've got a leadership team, but you own it as the CEO. Is there a specific exercise. is it the CEO sitting down and just saying, Hmm, what behavior should I add to this list? Or is there a specific method you find works pretty well time and time again?
David J Friedman: Yeah, there is a good method that I think works well. And so first thing is we've got the whole leadership team together and we are brainstorming together versus. I as the CEO came up with them and said, Hey, what do you guys think? Because you've just stymied all their thinking. They can't get out of their head what you've already written down. I find it better to have everybody think of them together to brainstorm together. But everybody's clear that after we do this brainstorming, I as the CEO, I'm going to make the final decisions. And as long as you let people know in advance, that's what we're doing. They're totally fine with that.
The problem is if you don't tell them that Then they feel like, well, why'd you bother asking? You weren't gonna listen anyway. But if I say, look, here's how this is going to work. I really value your opinion. It's really important. That's why you're here. And at the end of the day, I'm going to sift through that, all of those opinions and make the final decision.
They say, thank you. I appreciate the chance to contribute. So I find that's usually the best way. To come up with them.
Mike Goldman: And is it just, Hey everybody, let's brainstorm what these behaviors are, or is there a trigger question that you find?
David J Friedman: There are some trigger questions that I find are pretty helpful. So some of my favorites, all right, I'll ask a group. So what are some of the things that you guys are always saying, geez, if we could just get our people to do this more consistently, oh my God, we'd be so much better. What are some of the things that drive you nuts? All of us as leaders have things that when you see that going on in your team, it drives you bonkers. Well, what's the opposite? If I've got, if it drives me nuts, I got some energy about it. What's the opposite of that? Or one of my very favorite questions is I'll ask a group. So typically in every department of our company, we have at least one or more people who we wish we could clone. The people say, if I could get three more women like Josephine, we would be unbelievable. Well, what does Josephine do that makes you say that? Well, you should see her. She does this and this. Those are probably some pretty good behaviors. Sometimes if we picture a person, it helps us to imagine it instead of it being such an abstract concept in our brain.
Mike Goldman: Helpful, really helpful.
tell me about the CultureWise operating system. What is that?
David J Friedman: So the culturized operating system is really just a series of tools and a methodology that I created to help a company do what we've been talking about. So. simplest form, I say all the time that if you want to drive a set of, if you want to drive behavior in any organization, I don't care what kind of organization it is. It's just, it's so obvious to me that you would dramatically improve your probabilities of success. And I always say it that way because you don't control humans. They do weird things. We're just trying to stack the odds heavily in our favor. That we would heavily stack the odds in our favor if number one, we were crystal clear about exactly what we expected, which most people aren't. And secondly, wouldn't we further dramatically improve the probabilities of success if we not only were crystal clear about what we wanted, but we had a structured Systematic way to teach those behaviors over and over and over again. That's just obvious. I've taken that simple idea and just developed a whole set of tools around how to do that.
So the culture wise operating system is a method to help a company define those behaviors. Decide what the right rituals are, roll it out to their teams and get them practicing this stuff every week and include software and other tools. But it's just, it's a methodology for doing what we've been talking about. If we could define the right behaviors and we could roll it out to our people, we can get them practicing them over and over and over again. They're going to live those behaviors. And I've just created a system to make it easy to do that.
Mike Goldman: Beautiful.
and, where, if people want to find out more about you, more about CultureWise, where should they go?
David J Friedman: so our website is culture wise, like the word culture w i s e
and right on that website, you can read all about, there's lots of videos there. there's a whole description. We're very transparent about pricing. So our products and pricing are right up on the website. my last book is culture by design.
There's two, actually two editions of that book. The second edition just adds, it has everything that's in the first edition, but the second edition also adds information about remote and work remote and hybrid workforces. so you want to look for the second edition and those books are on Amazon and they're in hardcover or, paperback ebook and also audio book.
So for those that like listening to books on audible culture, my designs available on audible as well.
Mike Goldman: Yeah, and I suggest you go there. I mean, it's not often, I've been doing this For a whole lot of years. I've been coaching and consulting for 35 years. I've been working with leadership teams exclusively the last 17. And when it comes to culture, while I've read some good books, I've seen some good speakers, most people I see just kind of reinforce what I already knew and maybe add a few tidbits here and there.
But David, you in this. 45 minutes or whatever it is we spent, you've changed a lot of my thinking on it. And that says a lot. Cause I've been doing this a long time thinking one way. So, pisses me off a little bit because I've been doing it one way and now you're going to make me change some of it,
David J Friedman: Well,
Mike Goldman: but I love it.
So I appreciate it. And I always say, if you want a great, if you want a great company, you need a great leadership team. So David, thanks for helping us get there today.
David J Friedman: Oh, it's completely my pleasure, Mike. It's great to be with you.