When you start a business, you need two things: a vision and culture. So how do you build these two things? Stephen Jaye interviews the CEO of Management Insight, Todd Wheeler, on the role of leadership and communication. Todd also discusses the importance of community, learning to focus on the right things and understanding. Starting up a business? Or are you looking to improve an existing one? Then tune in and learn valuable lessons from Todd.
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Build Your Business Vision And Culture With Management Insights Founder Todd Wheeler
One important aspect of everybody’s lives or most people’s lives is work culture, organizational culture, the culture that we all spend a good part of our days in. These things are changing. The Great Resignation assertion of what a lot of people have been feeling for years, what they want out of their work culture, which is an organization that benefits, values them and is still pretty early into this whole transformation. We are going to take a little while before we see how this entire thing turns out.
However, there are a lot of interesting things going on in this field, hopefully leading us toward a better and more productive work culture in the future. My guest, Todd Wheeler, is the Founder and CEO and by CEO, he refers to as Chief Enthusiasm Officer of an organization called Management Insight, which helps high-level personnel, CEOs, etc., set the tone for the culture that their organizations are going to be employing.
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Todd, welcome to the show.
Thank you. It is great to be here.
Let us start with Management Insight is what you do with the organizations that you engage with.
Fundamentally, we like to create cultures of community and communication. We do this by basing things on acknowledgment and appreciation. If an organization does just those two things, it will be able to maintain and keep people. People need to be listened to. They need to be heard and appreciated. Oftentimes, I have gone into companies where they have an open-door policy. They have suggestion boxes throughout. Nobody ever reads the suggestions or does anything about them if they have read them. That is not an open culture. I have been working in and around culture for years and it comes from a space of trying to understand why things do not work in organizations.
The famous consultant says that culture relates to strategy anytime. If you don’t have the right people to execute with the right attitude, it doesn’t matter. Peter Drucker was who I was thinking of. Peter Drucker is the Founder of Organizational and Management Consulting. The whole idea behind it is you have got to have a lot of these things working in alignment. Culture, to me, is the foundation. I look at what I call the non-financial aspects of corporate performance, strategy, structure, and leadership style, all based on the organization’s stage of development.
With the culture piece added to that as a foundation, that is what is going on. I have always said that soft skills are the hardest skills. My tagline for my organization is it is simple, but it is not easy. If you have to hack your way through a jungle and you have a guide who knows where you are going and where the crevasses and rivers are and what you are going to need to get to the other side, it’s a lot easier than hacking your way through the jungle. Any organizations start without a clue about how to do what they need to do.
'I have seen an incredible shift in cultural appreciation and the importance of it. I was laughed out of boardrooms in the 90s, bringing up the importance of culture and how people feel and how you treat them.' Share on XYou start with a discovery. I have got this great idea. My generation and generations before and after what we were always told were put a plan together. My belief is that it is 100% wrong. If you come up with an idea and put a plan together, you are missing two key steps that have to be done with guidance and intention. The first step is discovery. You got an idea. What do we need to make this happen? That is the what. What do we need to do? What are the elements? We need finance, marketing and operations. Those are the big three and everything else is derivative of those.
Everything else can come under that. Of those things, who are the people we are going to need? How are we going to get it done? What is our timeframe? The second step is, once you have got all of these things and this can fill a wall with sticky notes is prioritization. What are the most important things we need to be doing? Prioritization has a time, manpower, finance and human component. All of these things need to be thought and talked about for you to assure the success of an organization. Now that you know what you are going to do and the priorities, they are being dealt with. There are historic things that show what should be done first.
I have the whole theory about that, but each organization is different. If it’s you starting a company by yourself, there are steps that you need to take. If it’s you who is starting a company, the first thing you want to do is build a team. There are steps that you can take. What are the roles and responsibilities? How do we want these people to come across? Who are the people? I don’t mean who is them, Steve and Jay that I need for this job. It’s what are the other roles and responsibilities that these people will need to fulfill? They have prioritization, which is a challenge and I find it to be, after working with Baby Boomers, Gen Xers, Millennials and Gen Y, all of these generational aspects of people and human nature. I’m a human and culture guy, but strategy and structure are also key.
Once you understand what those things are, you can then move forward. Once you have got the prioritization and got this figured out now and only now, you can focus. Focus is the third step. What happens is people say, “I am so busy. My plate is full.” One thing I do is I provide bigger plates, so things are not so full, but now that you have understood what you’re trying to do, what the priority is now and only now, can you focus because if you are focusing on the wrong things, you don’t get where you want to go. “We are making a great time, so don’t tell us we are going in the wrong direction.”
Do you typically engage organizations at this seed stage when people are beginning with their ideas or do you often find yourself coming into organizations that have already made good time but are driven in the wrong direction?
They could be making a great time to go in the right direction. They want to understand what the key elements are so they know what to be focusing on and how to do it. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of areas of focus that you can look at. Based on your question, I have worked with both. I have worked with startups, early-stage companies and growth-based companies. Five years ago, I was called out to Zappos. It has been renowned as the leading customer service company in the world. Their customer service ethos is very simple. Their customer service ethos is based on the most simple of things that will take anything back. That is their customer service. Not easy, but very simple.
They called me in because they wanted to redo their internal customer service platform. They wanted to know how to take care of their people better and build their culture so they could perform more effectively. I went out there and worked with them. I was only out there on-site for a few days, but we redid everything. I had a company called Colorado Concierge and Concierge Resource and we provided on-site and virtual concierge programs to hospitals, high-rise office buildings, gated communities, large organizations. We offered our program as retention, recruitment, productivity enhancement tool.
People spend anywhere from 20% to 35% of their at-work time or non-work-related activities that could be handled by somebody else. What we would say was, “We do what you don’t want to do, what you don’t have time to do, or what you don’t know how to do. You tell me half a dozen of those things and I can show you where we can save time and your employees or the employee themselves would not need to leave, focus, go online, drive somewhere or take care of things to do that.” You have discovery and overall concept.
Think about what you are doing. People rush into jobs. They rush into building businesses. The numbers have not changed since the SBA started doing the research. Since about the ‘60s, they have found that 60% of all businesses fail in the first five years. That number has not gone down. The reason you have higher numbers than that now is because more businesses are starting. Therefore, more businesses are starting, they are going to get more failures.
Are people more aware of that now than they were in the past because you have been at this for a little while? Are these trends moving in any direction or is it still the same? These are the things that people tend to ignore.
I don’t think people are any more aware of it at all. Let’s take the cannabis space, for instance, which is big in Colorado. They have an idea. They don’t have any idea what it takes to start and run a successful business. They think, “We have a product that everybody wants.” There is a long way from success between, “We have a product that everybody wants and having a successful business.” I have not seen any increase in the consciousness or awareness of the true things that are needed to start and run an organization.
Anyone out there reading who has an idea and you go through the Will It Fly exercise or anything else and decide I will pursue it, what is the next thing someone should be thinking about?
First of all, maintain the pumpedness and enthusiasm. Ratchet it back to keep that enthusiasm in line and not necessarily in check, but then start looking at the key critical component of building a business. There are only three elements to a business marketing, finance and operations. If you say, “What about distribution? Operations. What about manufacturing? Operations. What about finance? Finance. What about fundraising? Are we a VC target? Are we looking at friends, family or angel investors? How do we do it? Are we going to be funded? Are we going to try to do this bootstrap?” There are so many things in the discovery phase that you need to prioritize. The reason for doing discovery is to prioritize. The reason to prioritize is to go into the thinking phase, which is prioritization and focus.
You also talk about some of the things you are observing with the work culture and trying to set up the right culture. Is this something that people need to be thinking about right at the seed stage or is this something that organically develops that oftentimes you need to come in and make a transformation or reassessment as you start hiring people and grow?
It does not organically develop. It develops poorly. You have to have some idea of what you want. I break culture down into twelve specific types. I am not going to name them all, but entrepreneurial, sales, traditional, humanistic and political. There are a lot of things that are that work and don’t. You need to understand that I have heard so many people say, “I want my company to feel like a family.” I say, “Absolutely not.” Why is that? How many families have you ever been familiar with within your life that aren’t dysfunctional? Name one.
There are people that come to mind, but also from an outsider’s perspective, you don’t know the dysfunction of a family and if you are not part of it, you don’t even see it.
'How does somebody like to be acknowledged? How are they appreciated? You can't appreciate people the way you want to be appreciated.' Share on XIf you are a part of a company, are you part of the ability to see what is going on in the family?
If you are part of a company, you should be, but I honestly feel like there are some companies with certain hierarchies and bosses that feel like they are protecting their employees from things that those employees end up not even seeing what is going on at the higher levels of their organization.
Unless an open book policy, helicopter executives or helicopter moms. Culture needs to be understood. What do we want to do? How do we want to do it? How do we want our people to come across? How do we want them to feel when they work here? How do we want them to behave when they are here? How do we want them to represent our company?
One of the things that I create is what I call a service excellence manifesto or commitment. The non-negotiable things that you must do to be a part of this organization or family in a way that helps and allows you to move forward and gather the right people on your ship who are going to be rowing and pulling in the same direction, shared mission, vision and values.
Those are the things that you do in the opposite order. You need to establish your values first. What is important? What are the key non-negotiables? We then determine our long-term vision. The vision to me is to win the war. The mission is to win the battles. The mission is the battle. You can have multiple missions as an organization grows, but the vision will change over time. At first, probably not going to change if you have a real vision.
These considerations for cultures, I feel, are something that has been historically neglected or not thought about. Do you see any tide turning on that? Do you see more organizations? Especially with The Great Resignation and struggling to keep people having to rethink and say, “This is what our organizational culture is going to be or your manifesto. This is what you need to be on that ship.”
Let’s take that question into a couple of parts. I have seen an incredible shift in cultural appreciation and the importance of it. I was laughed out of boardrooms in the ‘90s, bringing up the importance of culture, how people feel and how you treat them. Are they acknowledged or appreciated? Those are the two big things. Acknowledgment and appreciation are huge. There are myriad things underneath each of those.
First of all, when you say acknowledgment and appreciation, how does somebody like to be acknowledged? Are they the guy that wants the trophy in the front of the room at the big award ceremony? Are they the guy or the gal that they want the CEO to come up and put their arm around and quietly go, “Great job. That was amazing.”
How are they appreciated? The second or third thing in the strategic manifestos was to ask. Ask your people. They will tell you. There has been an extraordinary shift in the value of culture. Has it changed much? I do not think so. As is evidenced by The Great Resignation, “I can work from home. I want to work from home. I need to have the flexibility and understanding that I can do this.” You better find a company that acknowledges and appreciates that and puts it into action. Otherwise, it’s a self-flagellation. You are not going to get anywhere.
People who want that acknowledgment and appreciation are where the idea that some people will say, “I want flexible work hours or not be micromanaged. I want unlimited PTO where people are not paying attention to every hour.”
The opposite, “I need to work with a team where I can come in and sit with six people every single day for two hours.” You got to realize there are both sides. One of the things that happened to Zappos a couple of years ago was that Zappos adopted a management system called holacracy. It is a flat organization, even flatter than it was. When they adopted that, they lost between 20% and 24% of their employees. That is not unusual. The reason is twofold. Some people need bosses. Some people need to have bosses. When you eliminate that type of hierarchy, the ones who need bosses don’t have them anymore and those who want to be a boss are not anymore.
Holacracy means no bosses and subordinates. Everything is completely flat.
You can have a new customer service guy sitting at an executive round table meeting.
Although there are some aspects of work culture that are toxic in any situation, there is no one right way. Are you saying that it needs more of this radical honesty that you talk about or there is transparency where people know what the work culture is and they know what they are getting into and find the one that meets those needs that you have?
Influence it, be a part of it, acknowledge and appreciate it.
My other question about acknowledgment and appreciation is for all those solopreneurs out there or people on whatever part of their quest is. Is that something that also applies internally? Do we need to acknowledge and appreciate ourselves?
A fish in the water who is thirsty needs serious professional help. Share on XA hundred percent.
How long have you been at the organizational transformation game? How long have you had Management Insight? I know you have had some other experiences before that, but it seems like you’ve had a good number of experiences where you can observe a lot of these trends that are going on.
I have always been in and around service businesses. I started Management Insight formerly in about 1996. I have always had an interest in organizations. People asked me when I started coaching. I was the kid in high school who had an extraordinarily good relationship with my single mom. We were eighteen. I realized that at a very young age, this was a woman who was smarter than me, who had a lot more knowledge than me, who was much more experienced than I was and who also happened to love me. Love is a very big deal. I trusted her completely. I had two arguments with my mom growing up. Two in my whole life.
She is a very smart, upper-middle-class, single, divorced Jewish mom in the ‘60s, which was unheard of. You didn’t get divorced. I was the kid in high school that my friend’s parents, once they would see me hanging around, see me with their kids and have conversations with me, they would ask me how and what can I do or how can I have a better relationship with my kids? “How could we have a relationship that would approach the relationship you have with your mom?” When I was first asked this question starting at about 16 or 17, I didn’t have a clue.
They say, “A fish in the water who is thirsty needs serious professional help.” I had no idea. I didn’t know how good I had it. We grew up one step above food stamps. She is a single mom. My mom became legally blind in the late-‘60s. We had a tough upbringing. I went back and I talked to my mom about it. Interestingly enough, that was the answer. I went back to my friends, “How do you have such a good relationship?” I would say, “Have you ever had a conversation with your kids about stuff, life, what their interest in, not making them better or driving them forward, doing what’s better for them.” They said, “No, because I’m the mom or dad.” I would go, “A-ha. Maybe that’s it.”
I am remembering what it was like being a teenager myself and hearing about other teenagers. Oftentimes, you are exploring the world. You want to talk about and explore it and be like, “I wonder why people act this way in this situation or I wonder why bullies are bullies.”
Bullies are bullies for one reason, insecurity. It’s not power or force. It is insecurity. I have done a lot of relationship work, not professionally, but I have fixed a lot of relationships and fixing them to being is ending them or helping them move forward. One of the two. You have to take into effect that if you have somebody who is very controlling in a relationship, they are typically not doing it from a position of power. They are doing it from a position of insecurity.
Is there a way to cure that? I had read maybe years ago that the top predictor of people’s employee engagement satisfaction at work is what is the relationship I have with my supervisor and do I have a best friend at work? It ends up being, what are my relationships with the people around me? Is there a way to fix those? If someone is insecure and they are acting out of insecurity, maybe they are taking it out on either coworkers or subordinates. If you want to talk about it in a non-holacracy sense, is there a way to fix that problem before more employees leave because they are not appreciating that behavior?
I’m going to answer that by referring you back to a question you asked before and that is when do you establish the culture of an organization after it’s too late, there are problems, you have tried to wing it and it doesn’t work? I would recommend this to any individual and organization. You need to write down, understand and clarify the absolute non-negotiable things that you want and don’t want in a company. You also need to understand who you are, the absolute non-negotiable things about you. When do you compromise yourself, sabotage yourself or get in your own way? That takes some chutzpah and guts to do that.
It feels like everything that applies to our relationships with one another also applies to our relationship with ourselves. “I’m not going to tolerate this for myself. I got too drunk last night and woke up in a gutter or something.” If someone is already in that position where they have already allowed this to happen, they are non-negotiables. Whether it’s with yourself or others in the organization, is there something people can do to turn it around or reestablish that like, “Here is my list? Here is what I want. Here is what I’m not willing to accept.”
You want to let it RAIN. R is Recognize. First of all, you have to recognize what is going on. Maybe put a real name on it. “Am I feeling angry, upset, overlooked or ignored?” That is the R. The A is Allowed. Now that you have recognized it and put a name to it. You have a little bit of understanding. Allow it to happen and wash over you a little. These are non-Buddhist, but these are meditative steps so you can work with these emotions and how these emotions work. The I is Investigate. Now that it is acknowledged and it is not gripping you by the throat anymore, you can investigate it.
You can start to say, “How is this affecting me? Why is this affecting me? Where is this coming from?” N is Nurture. Now that you have recognized it, allow it to wash over you and investigate it, nurture it. Nurturing it could mean you pull it up by the roots, you get rid of it and you move on to something else or you think about it more. You are working on it. It is a process.
One of the things that I have taken are years of sales core courses because it’s all about communication. To be able to understand the key things in a sales situation, it’s all about asking questions. Before we started, what did I do with you? I asked questions. What’s going on? What’s happening with you? That is who I am because I’m legitimately interested in understanding who you are and hearing your voice.
It is interesting that you talk about that with communications because a lot of readers out there will have the same experience as I do, where we still have people who go into sales mode on things and they go right into their pitch. Why do you think that is still so prevalent these days, even though there is evidence that it requires a different approach?
There is this magic little thing in our psyche. It is called ego. People want to be more important, perceived as more knowledgeable, perceived as having all the answers. There is nothing wrong with ego unless there is something wrong with ego. We used to say, if it is not broken, break it. It has a lot to do with the typical appraisal of what a salesperson is. I got to come in, say the answer and show you the solution. I’ll tell you a story about that, the headline where the stories that people don’t argue with their lists. When I had my concierge company, we were small. We were doing a couple of million dollars a year. It was a nice ten people. I loved it. It was great. It was exactly what I wanted.
I would go in and people would say, “What do you do?” I could not get in to see anybody. It was not a problem, but I would say, “We do this.” It turns out that the biggest things people need us is for, but if I were to say that to you, you would say, “I have somebody who does that. My wife takes care of that. My secretary takes care of that.” The great response that I learned about that was, “They like it?” I would have CEOs turn bright red and it is like, “They don’t like it and it’s causing me all kinds of problems.” “Tell me about these problems.”
To understand the key things in a sales situation, it's all about asking questions. Share on XRather than do that, what I would say to people was, “We do what you don’t want to do, you don’t know how to do it and you don’t have time to do it. Tell me some of the things in your life that fall into those three categories, which is everything.” They would tell me this and that. They would say, “I need this.” When I went in and I gave him my list, they have a place to argue. When I went in and asked him about their list, one of the biggest questions that I will ask you is, “What is important to you?”
I like to give my readers a chance to get ahold of any of my guests. If anyone is interested in having a conversation with you, what will be the best way anyone reading could get ahold of you?
I am a telephone guy. I would rather do it via telephone. I’m a Baby Boomer. I’m a little old school. I’m in Colorado, so it is (303) 883-8001. My email address is Todd@ManagementInsight.co. My word is my bond. If you call and you leave me a message or if I say I’m going to do something, I do it.
I also want to ask you a couple of other questions about communication, given how long you have been at this. Since the ‘90s, the time when you said when you were laughed out of these boardrooms for saying, “We should be worried about whether people feel acknowledged and appreciated.” We have had an explosion of new forms of communication pop up. There was already email by then, but we are talking about text messages, Slack, Zoom and social media. What do you think that has that done for our communications? Is there anything that is improving, getting worse or becoming different about how we communicate with one another?
I have spoken about this. I have had this conversation with friends and I have also spoken on this completely. I don’t think this is a connection device. What texting has done is, first of all, it’s destroying our language with all the abbreviations. We are forgetting about punctuation. Punctuation is critical. The opportunity to have enhanced the levels of communication is there. There was a song years ago about kids. What’s the matter with kids? Why can’t they be like we were? Perfect in every way. I grew up and all my telephones had tails. They were all wired to a wall. They had a wire coming out. When I moved to Colorado in the mid-‘70s, I was on a party line. Do you know what a party line is?
I assume that that is a party limo bus that takes everyone to the concerts at Red Rocks.
It is one phone number for five different households. There were multiple parties on one phone number because they didn’t have the technology back then. You would pick up your phone in your house and your neighbors would be on a phone call. I lived at the end of the street, way up in the mountains in the middle of nowhere. We had a landline, but so did our four neighbors on our landline.
One of the things we take for granted is that our communication is available at any minute of any day. You can reach everyone you want to reach via six different possible methods. Six is probably even underestimated. You could Slack, email, text or whatever. It is weird how we have become more disconnected. More people report loneliness and being disconnected than they did. Before all that, what does it mean to not have that availability?
Look at the level of depression, isolation and pharmaceuticals that people are ingesting because of that. The biggest thing missing from our society and society runs from the president of the United States to somebody cleaning your toilet. The thing that is missing the most is community. When the Indian tribes were around for 10,000 years before the White men came along, very few people in that tribe didn’t feel they were part of a tribe. I know a lot of people. I have a lot of friends. We know people who are feeling very alone, surrounded by people. A lot of times, people don’t want to admit that they need help. A lot of times, they don’t want to step up and say, “I don’t want to do this or I want to do this.”
If you can build a culture, community and communication. The culture of a community is even more important than what I have always called a culture of communication. The culture of communication and community is structured by acknowledgment and appreciation. I always learn as I talk and as I talk with people like you who have these great questions because that is how I learn. I don’t learn coming up with the answers. I learn by hearing the questions.
That reminds me of this image we all have of this idea that all these great ideas come from some guy sitting alone on a park bench and that light bulb suddenly pops in their head like, “Newton, gravity. I never realized this before.” Whereas a lot of them happen, even if they do come in that sense, our input bylaw, the conversations and discussions that we have with each other. The last question I want to ask you is as far as our culture of communication or community. Whether we are talking about within our organizations, work, entrepreneurial pursuits or personal networks, what do you think is the number one thing people can do to become better communicators amongst the people around them and make others feel less like they are alone?
Identify who you are, be more of a human being and less of a human doing. Understand who you are. Who you are does not have any right to control anybody else. People say we should be less judgmental. We have to be judgmental every minute of every day. I have to know where the countertop is or the walls are. I’m going to walk into one. It sounds silly, but understanding where and why you are coming from will help you become more being. You will be much more able to be who you are. Take things in. I was reading something about a coach. This coach has got the most incredible ability, regardless of background, to become one with and a part of an insightful and intuitive to his client.
Everyone had some part in creating the space where we are, even if it is with little decisions like, “Should I call my friend or scroll on the phone?” The devices that you were referring to earlier.
Not doing something can be a pretty bad decision sometimes. Not doing something can be the best decision you can make sometimes.
As long as we are conscious of it.
There is an old expression that, “It’s better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt.”
Hopefully, we all can improve our acknowledging, appreciating and listening. Todd, I would like to thank you so much for joining us on the show and sharing your insight on communication, community, as well as building a better organization. Hopefully, everyone out there reading, you are thinking about your community or communication pattern, how to be as opposed to do around others, as well as what you want to do, your vision for your ideas. I’m sure so many of you out there have wonderful ideas that the world would benefit from if you were to bring them into fruition and bring in all these new organizations.
Identify who you are. Be more of a human being and less of a human doing. Share on XHopefully, with a better culture than the one we had so many years back that used to laugh Todd out of the boardroom for saying, “We need to treat our employees with respect.” Thank you for reading. I would like to encourage you to continue reading about the show. We will have more fantastic conversations with people who have some fantastic insights into what we all need to do to create the life we all want.
It was my pleasure, Stephen. If there are other things that we can discuss, let’s continue along those lines. I welcome the opportunity to come back and have a whole other barrage of questions.
Thank you very much. I always love it when people appreciate these interviews.
My pleasure.
Important Links:
- Management Insight
- Todd Wheeler
- Zappos
- Colorado Concierge
- Concierge Resource
- Todd@ManagementInsight.co
About Todd Wheeler
For over 2 decades Todd has made companies more human. He and his company Management Insight (www.managementinsight.co) create Cultures of Connection based on acknowledgment and appreciation, he simply makes companies run better, have more fun, and be more profitable. By serving and holding all stakeholders to their highest levels of accountability he creates critical alignment between all aspects of organizational performance including Culture, Strategy, Structure, and Leadership Style. Whether it’s your organization’s Stage of Development, goal setting or Mission/Vision/Values protocols, his non-threatening, collaborative, and supportive style helps any organization achieve results beyond their greatest expectations.