Culture Focused Practice

 Hey. Hey, Dr. Tara, Vossenkemper here, and you're listening to the Culture Focused Practice podcast. I love that you're here with me. Thank you for joining me.

Let's get into this. This is all about culture, so our episode today is culture is a system, not a vibe, and basically. It's time to just kill the myth that culture is a vibe. I mean, yeah. Okay. It kind of is a vibe, but it's not just something you feel from your vision board, you know, that you created 10 years ago and you're still trying to bring to life. No judgment. I love a good vision board.

It's a system. If we think about culture, we should be thinking about it as a system. It is a product of repeated behaviors, of values that we spend time setting and reinforcing. It's a product of what we allow, and it's also a product of what you correct, what you amend, what you seek to change, and the behavior of those around you.

So in this episode, we're going to unpack what culture really is inside of a group practice and how to build it with intention instead of vague-ry and vibes.

If this podcast has resonated with you so far, then make sure you subscribe if you haven't already. The more we do that, the more that this content can hit like-minded people who need the same message that you are getting. So do that. Please, before we go on.

Agenda, just real quick to make sure we put some parameters on the episode, we're gonna talk about how culture doesn't equal vibes.

We are going to focus on where we get it wrong. We're gonna talk about culture as a system, and we're also gonna talk a little bit about fixing cultural drift. So let's get into it, shall we?

Number one, culture does not equal vibes. I love vibes for the record. But culture isn't just energy or morale or how your team feels about you. That stuff is all important, but that's not all of it. And so I think sometimes when I go to talk about culture, people end up feeling like it's really abstract and really esoteric.

Yeah, I think that the product of a really healthy culture, or of a really shitty one, is that you feel it as soon as you start interacting with the system. It's not something that can be avoided, but just because you feel it when you interact with the system doesn't mean that there's not intentionality or lack thereof behind creating it.

I think of it almost like a thermostat. You know, if you set your thermostat to 70 degrees, the system in the background is kicking on and off to adjust the way that the space feels. So when you walk in, there's a temperature that's relatively set. It might be high or low depending on the weather outside of the building, but broadly speaking, the temperature's kind of set. You walk in and you, it's noticeable. You feel it.

That kind of feels like culture to me, where you walk into a space and you get the sense for what the culture is, but that's not how it's built or created. And so, to interact with it is a specific type of experience with culture. To intentionally build, it means we have to change our mindset and think about it in a strategic, systemized way.

Because culture isn't just vibes. The temperature is the product of what we set the thermostat at and how we ensure that it's functioning. That's on us.

If I wanna be a little less abstract right now, I would say culture is a system. It's dynamic first and foremost. So that means it's not a static set in stone thing.

It's a dynamic, ever evolving, organic, malleable system. It reflects what's rewarded, what's tolerated, what's corrected, what's ignored, and daily interactions. So all those little micro moments you have with people around you, all of those things matter. All of those things feed into a healthy culture or an unhealthy culture.

Culture's about how we do things. It's, it's whether or not how we do things aligns with what we say we value. So if I were to ask you about a decision you made lately, and if I said, okay, run it through a values based lens, I. Did you make decisions with values in mind would be my first question. My second would be, did the decision you make align with the values?

So theoretically you didn't run it through a values based, you know, list of questions, but does it align with your values? Can you say, yeah, we do or don't do this thing based on this value, generally speaking.

That's how we not only create culture, which is what we're kind of talking about, but also maintain it. That we basically do what we say and we say what we do.

Let's segue, let's talk about how we get culture building wrong. So this is agenda item number two. I think that this is a little bit hard to talk about because I think about culture a lot. Um, I read about it. I think about it. It's kind of a constant framework in my mind, you know, so it's hard for me to extricate myself from how it lives inside of me.

A lot of what we've built out has been through a cultural lens, and so I'm gonna talk about how culture building is wrong, how we get it wrong, excuse me, and so just gimme a little bit of grace as we have this conversation, because some of this might be obvious, and some of this might feel really over your head potentially or really, really hard, and for me, it all feels like, uh, the shit that's too important to let go of. So yeah.

All right, so let's do this. And where we get culture building wrong. One is thinking that it's just all about the perks. You know, it's all about the benefits. It's about happy hours, it's about bonuses or beanbag chairs and the shared office space, or having a one day retreat each year, or sending out a little birthday gift, email or something.

Those things can be important. I'm not saying that those things are not important because we absolutely do some of those things. But that's not solely what's needed to build a healthy culture. Those can be outcomes of a healthy culture. They can be things that we focus on and we seek to do as a result of conversations around how we meet certain values-based needs, for example.

But doing that and saying, well, this is how we're gonna have a healthy culture, is we're going to, we're gonna have, make sure everyone has snacks at work, or we're gonna make sure that everybody has beanbag chairs in the shared office space.

That is like a bandaid on top. That's not something in and of itself that's gonna create a healthy culture. It can be a product of a healthy culture. It will not be the thing that gets you a healthy culture. I hope that that makes sense.

Another way that we get culture building wrong is that we avoid hard conversations.

By this fucking point, you should know exactly how I feel about hard conversations. They are needed. They're wanted, they're necessary. I love them. They're super hard. Still need to happen. Still really impactful, really healthy when done well, I should caveat that. They are healthy when they're done well.

So, when we avoid hard conversations to keep morale high, well, one, I would say we're absolving ourselves of the responsibility of leadership.

Two, I would say we are potentially ignoring and avoiding cultural. Issues, behaviors that are going to erode culture that somebody else might be doing. So maybe Joe is doing something kinda shitty, like he's saying, not very nice things to his colleagues, and it's kind of in passing and it's a little bit petty or a little bit passive aggressive.

By not having that hard conversation, we are again, absolving ourselves of responsibility as leadership. We're also avoiding or ignoring joe's behavior, but then further, we're sending a message that this behavior is okay, and that's to the entire team. The entire team knows this is happening, and yet somehow nobody's seeking to stop it.

You can also think of avoiding hard conversations through the lens of metrics, for example. So if we say that one of our values is exceptional clinical service, as an example, or just exceptional service overall, but somebody is really underperforming and we're not addressing it with them, we are not living out what we say we do.

We're not living out the values that we purport to have and believe in and stand by. We are acting in the exact opposite way. And additionally, we're not helping anybody. If Joe knows he's underperforming, I'm picking on Joe. I don't know who the hell Joe is, but if Joe knows he's underperforming, he's not providing exceptional quality services, he's not getting documentation done on time, whatever exceptional quality or you know, high quality looks like for you, he knows that this is happening.

He's probably not dumb. He's avoiding a conversation. You're avoiding a conversation. The entire team knows there's this, you know, anchor and that's not getting done what needs to be done. What message is that sending?

So avoiding a hard conversation because you're afraid it's gonna drop. Morale is the exact counterproductive thing you should do to keep your culture low. If you want a healthy culture, you need to have those hard conversations and, and having those hard conversations and being real with people, that is what keeps morale high.

I say being real with people, and I should also probably always caveat that with in a healthy way. So bringing somebody into your office and giving them a dressing down and chastising them and making them feel shitty is not also a healthy culture.

Having a kind and honest and direct conversation about underperformance, for example. That is healthy culture. That's what it's about. A third thing that we get wrong about culture building is that we rely on things that we've written a long time ago, but that we never revisit and that we don't ever talk out loud about.

So for example, if I say, hey, do you have a vision or a mission statement? And you say, oh yeah, we definitely have one of those. And I say, cool. What is it? Without looking, tell me what it is. If you can't tell me, there's no fucking way your team knows. 0% chance.

No way they're gonna know. They're not gonna know. You don't even know. How are they gonna know? But the other piece is that even if you do know. Your team probably still doesn't know and that's not any shade at them. I remember there was something, maybe it was a Harvard Business Review. I don't freaking know.

But one of the articles I read was something about vision statements or missions and how executives thought that most of their employees knew what the vision was or what the mission was. And the reality is that the vast majority of employees had no idea.

I mean, it was like a difference of 60% between what executives thought and what employees were reporting. And so when I say, your team probably doesn't know this is what I'm talking about. Unless we are shouting it from the rooftops and have it, you know, tattooed on our foreheads or maybe on the walls of our building, or we're talking about it consistently and repeatedly, your team probably doesn't know.

And further still, if you are a person who created this and then sort of let it sit. They definitely don't know. That's another thing that we get wrong about culture building. We think it exists, and so therefore it's in place, but that's not really the case.

The last thing we get wrong about culture building is very, very similar to the vision and mission issue, is that we think that our team understands and lives out our values because we have them written down. They don't know.

Even my team, I love my team. Sometimes they need prompting. We'll get it where I'll ask the team, okay, you hit me up. What are the values? Okay, you tell me. How do these get lived out? They'll get there and there might be one that is the sort of the forgotten value that people don't think is much about, but they get to it. They remember, they give examples. That's what we're after.

We wanna make sure our team understands that these values should be lived out. We should be celebrating them. We should be hiring based on them. We should be terminating based on values, misalignment, and also we should be talking about them consistently enough so that people all around us know this is who we are, this is what we're about.

So closing that out, just because you wrote them once does not mean that your team knows what they are. Just because you talked about them at a meeting once doesn't mean your team knows what they are. And to make that assumption is where culture building can go wrong.

I think like one of the maybe main pieces to where we get culture building wrong is that we think people know more than what they actually do know that is not shade at other people. That is reflective of what we hold in our brains and how much time and energy we spend thinking about it juxtaposed with. What it's like to be an employee for a group or for a business. You are not spending as much time thinking about the vision or the mission or the values. You are seeking to do your job well.

Hopefully that's what you're seeking to do. And so I don't think it's fair to assume that everybody's gonna know and integrate this in the same way that I do or that I expect leadership to. But I do know that we're still gonna celebrate, hire, fire, build culture into our systems. We're gonna do all of these things to ensure that culture is being lived out, including talking about it consistently.

But I will not assume that people know it to the same extent that I do.

Okay, let's keep going. Agenda item number three. This is how culture becomes a system. This for me is where shit comes to life. It is where it comes to life first and foremost in your hiring process. We've had a couple of candidates lately come through and they have said what drew them to us.

One was the position description itself, because I hate normal position descriptions, and I just totally reworked it and made it borderline ridiculous, but absolutely reflective of me and how I talk about shit. And so that was one thing that drew people in, which is reflective of our culture. The way I show up is also reflective of our culture.

Two or B, if I said A, then B, they looked at our values, they wanted to know more about us. We talk about our values in our position description, so they clicked the link to read more about them and see how these things live out. That's before they even apply. They have access to this information.

In the hiring process. Also, we are vetting values in this entire hiring process from the phone screen all the way through to our clinical skills portion of the interview. We're assessing values. In indirect and direct ways. So your culture becomes a system via your hiring process.

That's one way. Another way is onboarding. So if we're taking hiring and we're gonna, you know, follow it through to its logical conclusion, we're gonna close out an onboarding process.

Our onboarding process is 90 days. In that process, there are culture-based things. All throughout, embedded in the entire thing from the videos that we do, some of our onboarding videos all the way through to the types of meetings we have with people all the way through to the way that we're asking for feedback and soliciting it from them all the way through the 90 day review where we are assessing this person, this recent hire from a values-based perspective.

Your onboarding process is that second leg. So if hiring is the very first thing before people even get in the door, we are lambasting them with culture, with core values, for example. Same thing with our onboarding process. Not only are we baking in values-based things, but we're also in a position where we get to really reinforce messages that we're seeking to cultivate.

We get to really reinforce messages with the people that are new, including how we show up together, what we expect, how we talk through hard things, et cetera.

A third way culture becomes a system is through your feedback systems. So what behavior gets corrected, of course, but also what behavior gets praised.

So any sort of praise from my perspective needs to be done globally. It needs to be done for the entire team to see it and to hear it, and to bear witness to it. Any sort of correction needs to be done face-to-face. This is not my idea. I'm plagiarizing, so to speak, from the Culture Code by Daniel Coyle.

In some section of this book, I cannot give you the exact example, he writes about this. He writes about making sure that negative feedback or anything that can be perceived as negative is done in private one-to-one with a person and also face-to-face. And that praise should be done publicly. It should be done for everybody to see.

I love that. I love that. So your feedback systems are a third way that we can start to treat culture as a system. What's really beautiful about something like that is it's an easy ask. If I said to you, think about this last week. What's one thing that somebody did that you were like, fuck yeah, that's awesome.

Right now, press pause on this, if you're listening or at your computer watching, or what the hell send an email to your entire team sending praise about what that person did. That's it. So easy. That's one thing, and get in the habit of doing this consistently.

I'll give you one more example. At our leadership team meetings, which are held weekly, I think you all know by this point that we use EOS, the Entrepreneurial Operating System developed by Gino Wickman.

We do the weekly L 10 meetings, and at our weekly L 10 meeting, we've started adding in shout outs in the meeting, and then what we do is we take those and we follow up with the entire team after the fact, and we say, Hey, here's a shout out to this person.

Additionally, we've added shout outs in to our monthly team meetings, and so everybody should know. And so everybody has the opportunity at the end of this meeting to give some praise. What is something that somebody did that was great lately? Like, highlight, come on, shout it out. So these are feedback systems. That's ultimately what we're doing.

A fourth way that culture becomes a system is through accountability systems. So, uh, this to me is like sort of a similar to feedback ish, but accountability is gonna be where somebody is underperforming, let's say. You need to sit down with them, for example, and say, this is not happening. We need to figure out what's going wrong or what's going on that's getting in the way of this thing coming to fruition in the way that we want it to.

That's accountability. When you are really holding people's feet to the fire, when you're actually ensuring that they're getting done what they are supposed to be getting done. A little bit different than feedback.

Sure. Related, you know, but slightly different.

The final way, at least in this episode, that culture becomes a system is through leadership modeling. What we do as leadership speaks volumes. It is so much stronger and more potent and more powerful than anything that we can say.

If I say to my team, your autonomy is really important to me, you can't do whatever you want. You know, absolutely not. 'cause we have a whole system that we're trying to uphold, but I want you to feel some autonomy in the work that you do.

And then I follow that up by saying, but during this one process, you have to do exactly all of these steps in this exact order, in this micro movement sort of way. And none of those steps actually matter that they happen in that order. It's just the way that I prefer that they happen.

That is not me modeling my love and want for autonomy, that's me micromanaging. And so we have to be living out the values, I would say, even in a louder way than we expect people around us to.

So it might almost feel like you're a caricature, that you're sort of playing this really effusive part. But the reality is that if you're screaming at an 80, they're probably gonna hear it at a 40. If you're talking quietly at a 20, they might not hear it at all.

And so again, this isn't hating on the people that work for us, it's that their roles and expectations are so much different than leadership. And I don't think there's anything wrong with that. I think it's just trying to hold space for our experience of being a part of this group is very, very different.

When it comes to living out our values and modeling the behaviors and the actions, the way that I wanna see people show up. I'm gonna hold myself to that same level of expectation.

Let's transition then. This is our last agenda item for this episode. We're gonna talk about fixing cultural drift. I also love this. This thing, this happens. These things do happen like in a Phantom, the opera, Carlotta Carletta, what was her name? It doesn't matter.

Let's transition. Our final agenda item is fixing cultural drift. There are a few key things I wanna highlight here more than a few, there's like six, so gear up.

Number one. Audit your values. If you're not looking at your values on at least a quarterly basis, who even are you? I'm just kidding. But seriously, I'm not about auditing your values. You need to be looking on a quarterly basis because I don't know, are they still reflective of you?

Are your values reflected in the behavior that you seek to model in your expectations for others? Are they accurate? Do they hold true for the group that you have and the group you're trying to build?

You have to ask yourself these questions, and I do not think your answers should be a very quick, yep, they're great, move on. I think you should grapple with them. You should try to poke holes. Well, if we were to come up with one more value that's missing, what would it be? What's the weakest value that we have listed here? What makes it weakest? What might make it stronger?

Try to poke holes. You don't need to do the, the poking process necessarily every single quarter, but I do think annually you should do that. And again, this is reflecting my own EOS tendencies because we do this at our two day annual. That's an annual meeting, a two day annual meeting.

We look at the values and we look closely at the values, and we might grapple, we might debate, we might discuss, we might argue, we might do whatever we need to do to make sure that they still hold true, that they still hold weight for us, that they still feel very accurate for who we are and what we're trying to build.

So, make sure you revisit and audit your values. That's one thing.

Another way you can start fixing your cultural drift. This is such an obvious answer, and I don't know if people are scared of it or they just don't even think about it. Ask your team, holy shit. Ask your team. What do they think?

Send them a values assessment. Make it mandatory to complete. Ask your team. You can ask them about values you, you can ask them about vision. You can ask them about mission. You could ask them anything. I don't give a fuck what you ask them. Just ask them.

Get a baseline data from your team about their perspective, with regard to the values. Your perspective, your leadership team's perspective, super valuable. That's half of the puzzle. You need the entire other half to be included before you can make any changes.

My perception of something meetings, for example, I do not like talking at people. So doing a podcast, I feel like I'm kind of talking to myself and it's so, it's different. But doing a meeting where I'm like sitting and talking to this group of people online, and we have, you know, a couple locations. People are in different places, so we do everything virtual for our full team meetings. I hate it. I, I do not like how I feel when I run meetings. I do not like talking at people in that way.

It needs to happen. Sure. I still don't like it. My perspective of meetings is just constantly skewed, and so when I seek feedback on how things are going, I'm also gonna ask about meetings. I'm also gonna ask if they're relevant, if they're helpful, if they're resonant, if they are informative, if they leave anything to be desired, and if so, what? If they are thorough?

I'm gonna get feedback on what a meeting is like for a person who's attending it. I'm not just gonna rely on my own input. I might make some amendments. To a meeting structure based on my own input, for example. But I'm not gonna scrap the whole thing just 'cause I question if it's valuable. No, I'm gonna ask my team.

Another way you can start fixing cultural drift. I love this also is mapping your current systems to your values. So for example, if you have a system in place related to an intake process, let's say.

Take all of those just broad steps. Don't get into the very micro little steps that people do. Take broad steps of the intake process, write them down, and in a second column, just start assessing. Okay, i. Why are we doing this one thing? Is there any overlap with a value? And if so, which value?

So another thing you can do to start fixing cultural drift is checking for misalignment between words and rewards. So if you are saying that, let's say interdependence is really important to you and you are not celebrating people who are really tuned into interdependence or who are acting in ways that it's obvious where they are thinking about this interdependence.

One if you're not shouting that out and not celebrating it, that's problematic in my mind. And then the second piece is, that's also something where you might start to consider little bonuses. Like how are we rewarding people who are acting out values?

It doesn't mean you need to reward every person who acts out values all the time. It could be where you do something like there's a quarterly draw for a $50 gift card somewhere and you get entry into that raffle or into that draw by living out values.

If instead, let's take that same concept actually. If instead we're rewarding things that we don't ever talk highly about or we don't say this is a value, or this is a part of our vision, or this is the way we show up with each other and we're just willy-nilly deciding to reward something that isn't even in alignment with our values, we're sending a major red flag message.

You know, we're, we're eroding trust inadvertently, kind of directly a little bit, but we're starting to erode trust. We're starting to have people question the values and then of course the culture starts to crumble around us. So just check. Is there anywhere in our leadership processes or anywhere in our ops team or our work processes period, where we can see a misalignment between what we say we want and then what we actually reward.

Ooh, we're almost there. Stay with me. So the fifth way to start fixing cultural drift is through feedback loops. You can set it and forget it in terms of you have a weekly email with a survey link that goes out and you, it's just schedule send, repeat, you have it. You know you can do things like that. That's what I mean by set it and forget it. I mean, the call for feedback.

Or if you want more involvement and control, it might be something where you, on a monthly basis, you're pulling two people from the team and you're having a specific style of conversation with them. Basically, you wanna assess with your team, you know, what feels off, what feels unclear, what do you know about our culture, what do you like about it versus what would you like to see? What would you like to see reflected in how we show up with each other, et cetera.

In essence, we just want a way to be able to get feedback from the people around us, because like I said. All of these people around us are at least half the puzzle, if not more than. Your view is different and your obviously involvement is crucial, but they are equally important in a very different way.

Okay, the last way to start to fix cultural drift is treating cultural cleanup like an operational task, like an operational project. This is not extra when I have time work. This is foundational level required for the sustainability of your business work.

It cannot be ignored. It cannot be forgotten. It cannot be set aside and discarded and left until later. It's crucial. It's integral. It's foundational. It needs to happen now, and it needs to be treated like a system and not like some, you know, half-ass thing. We can vibe. We can vibe later. No the fuck you can't. You need to do it right now. Think of it like a system. Think of it like projects, operations, tasks, et cetera.

I'll close this all out by saying I am the visionary at my business. And then one of my main responsibilities is culture. Like, that's literally one of my main responsibilities. So from my perspective, it is so important that it requires its own broad thematic responsibility associated with the visionary role of the business.

It's not something I, I personally, but I think should ever be forgotten or let go of. It needs to be front and center in everything you do. And one of the easiest ways of doing it if, if all of this felt like overwhelm for you, you know you're listening and you're like, oh, geez Louise, how am I gonna do any of this?

The most simple thing I can ask you to do is to run all of your decisions, conversations, processes, through a cultural lens. That's it. Even if it's just your core values. When you go to make a decision with leadership, for example, you and your leadership team are sitting, talking about a decision, bring up the question, okay, let's look at this process or this decision through a cultural lens.

What core values are we living out? What are we missing? Are we doing anything that would go against our core values? If so, how? And then go from there. Simplest thing you can do, you have other lenses. You probably have an HR lens, you probably have a legal lens. You probably have a clinical lens. I'm saying cool. Also, you need a cultural lens.

Culture is not created on accident. It is created intentionally. A lot of leadership will treat it as a byproduct and it should be instead front and center.

If you really want to focus on systematizing your culture and building alignment that sticks and that you can expand within your group, consider joining the membership. This is something that we focus on heavily in there.

You can join at www.taravossenkemper.com/the-membership. That's where you sign up, that's where you join. That's also where you see what it's all about on that website page.

So. And that my friends is all I got. I actually have a lot more, but that's all I'm willing to talk about right now because this probably is already long enough. So lucky for you, we're wrapping up.

Thank you for being here with me. I said it earlier, but I'll say it again. Subscribe to, keep following. Make sure that more people like you who need to hear this, get to hear this. And I so appreciate your time. I really love that you are here with me and I'll see you next time. Okay. Peace out. Bye.