EM 165 Building Culture with Billy Boughey (Part 2)
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In this week’s Executive Minds, David Farmer continues his conversation Billy Boughey about building blocks for culture from his book Culture Reconstructed: A “Start-Where-You-Are” Guide to Building a Culture of Impact. Billy is an author, host, leadership consultant and founder of Elevate Experiences. Billy has been featured in Tedx, Business Insider, Forbes, & Inc. and many more.
Links + Resources
Culture Reconstructed: A "Start-Where-You-Are" Guide to Building a Culture of Impact
Three Culture Takeaways:
Diversity and Inclusion
Diversity and inclusion is an under-discussed topic of culture building. While it covers creating a culture that includes diversity with regards to race, gender, socioeconomic background, etc. It’s much more as well. Diversity is also needed with regard to ideas. The inclusion of ideas means that all ideas are important. Healthy culture includes and considers all voices. It takes a proactive approach to diversify those voices within the organization and team. Moreover, this can be a catalyst for employee buy-in and organizational growth overall.
Health and Wellness
Health and wellness is an important building block of culture within an organization. It’s good to be asking the question of what is your responsibility as culture creators to make sure that health and wellness are part of the conversation. Being mindful in this space can look like providing gym memberships or yoga classes. It can be an annual 5k walk or substituting the pizza and doughnuts with healthier gluten-free or dairy-free options. Addressing mental health and emotional wellbeing, especially when you have a work culture where anxiety levels can be high, is vital and you should be actively thinking of ways to allow the team to take a deep breath. If you engage with this on some level, then it communicates to your team that you care and you’ll watch people’s hearts come to life.
Physical Culture
Something to consider is the actual environment and physical culture of your organization. Creating a positive and welcoming environment and culture should be done with intentionality. What do you want people to feel when they walk into a building? This isn’t so much about money or accouterments. It’s found in the subtlety of facial expressions of team members and how they look at visitors. It’s in the texture of the carpet and smell of the place. It’s about answering the question of who’s the hero in this engagement. Organizations, whether they know this or not, are communicating their focus even in their physical space or online presence. Is the focus on the product or the customer? This is a crucial question to gauge the health of your culture.