166. Small Town Business: When the Boss Is the Culture with Simone Pickering and Prina Shah

SPEAKER_00 0:03

This podcast is for people who know that the workplace can and should be better and are ready to do something about it. You will learn practical ways to change organizational cultures and human behavior without passwords, without box sticking, without performative leadership. I am the boss of Freena Shark Consulting, working with executives, leaders, and teams to create work cultures and environments that actually work for people. I am Freena Shark. I specialise in organizational culture change and human behaviour change. I am all about making work better with people who give a damn. So if you think I can help, contact me via LinkedIn. I am here to help you to find decent ways to change the workplace. Let's do this. Hello and welcome to this episode of the Ways to Change Your Workplace podcast with myself, your host, Pruna Sha, and I'm bringing back my friend Simone Pickering, all the way from Kalgooli in Western Australia. Simone. How hot is it there today, may I ask?

SPEAKER_01 0:58

It's well, it probably hasn't reached it now because it's only quarter past ten, but it's going to be 42 today.

SPEAKER_00 1:03

Ouch!

SPEAKER_01 1:04

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 1:05

Stay very cool, my friends. Now, as you can clearly gather, Simone works and lives in a regional area in a small town. Simone is a HR guru of all things, and you've probably heard many an episode with her before. Simone, today I want to talk to you about culture change when the business owner is the culture. Small town 101. Can we get into this juicy topic?

SPEAKER_01 1:30

So both of us work a lot in the space of culture and building and embedding strong cultures into organizations to improve business outcomes, really. I mean, culture is a business lever. But what happens when the business owner sets the culture? Culture is the business owner's personality.

SPEAKER_00 1:52

Oh gosh.

SPEAKER_01 1:53

Yep. So you if you think about a large organization and going in and you're looking at culture work and culture change, there's the ability within at the team level that can change based on movements of a leader.

SPEAKER_00 2:07

Correct.

SPEAKER_01 2:08

In that organization.

SPEAKER_00 2:10

Always and it evolves constantly. I've seen that. Yes.

SPEAKER_01 2:13

When the person business for 30 years, there's not a lot of relief for employees for that change to improve.

SPEAKER_00 2:24

So the organizational culture doesn't evolve in the other way that we've just described, then so it remains static, perhaps. This is the way we've always done it. I hate that sentence, but it might be that mentality, right?

SPEAKER_01 2:36

Yeah. So also too, it's based around the leadership style and the personality of the leader. Yeah. So if the leader doesn't see the human element to the workplace, then you're never ever going to have human-centered leadership and a culture that values the individual. You're never going to have a culture that people feel safe to speak up. You're never going to have a culture that develops people and builds them up in a positive way. The feedback that's coming out is generally when they've stuffed up. That's generally the only time that they get a culture. There tends to be very much of a if you don't like it, leave because I can just bind somebody else. And then that creates a lot of barriers to growth. They get to a certain point, about 10 to 15 employees, and then a bottleneck starts to form.

SPEAKER_00 3:27

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 3:27

And they can't get beyond that. So there's a lot of uncomfortable conversations that come with that for consultants such as myself. So I try to start with some just some just basic, introduce them to the idea of what culture is. And let's talk about the employees that have left the organization in the last six months. Okay, so where did they go? Did they go for an increase in pay? They weren't getting paid anymore. They went to an organization that substantially is very similar to yours. So they haven't left to improve themselves financially. They haven't left because it's a promotion. They've left because of this organization. Something wasn't working for them.

SPEAKER_00 4:12

I love the way that you you meander through this in such a beautiful manner so that it opens my eyes. If I'm that CEO, my eyes are closed. This is my business. But now you're talking my language, Simone. Why have your people left? Or no, you're not even asking why. When did they leave? Where did they go to? Did they go for a higher salary, lower salary? You're really analyzing that. Then I'm gonna realize like shit, they've just gone to a competitor, Simone. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 4:38

And so a hard moment may happen. I try to come at it as an evidence based conversation rather than what I think. So this is what we know. But what are some of the reasons that actually drive that? Uh-huh. By the time we get to that point, that business owner has started to have some self-realization.

SPEAKER_00 5:00

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 5:01

That maybe it's them. And then we have some walls go up. Defensiveness. We're human. Yeah. Because we all like to say this isn't personal, it's business, but when it's your business, it's person. Even harder. It's your baby, isn't it? Yeah. So it takes a very self-aware person with that feedback on board and see it positively as a way to change to make things better. Generally the response is it's not me. Yeah. Okay. So then usually the meeting ends and then I leave it for a little bit and try again.

SPEAKER_00 5:39

Yeah, because it just starts to settle. I need to think, I need to percolate these things that Simone's just told me or giving me aha moments for, right?

SPEAKER_01 5:48

Yeah. So sometimes it can take 12 months. Yeah. We get a business owner from understanding and accepting and having a change of mindset. Yeah. That something needs to change.

SPEAKER_00 6:00

But sometimes I may need to get burnt repeatedly after Simone's told me that one thing. Like, no, Simone, I don't want to hear it. I might be in denial. When that happens again and again, it might be that aha moment for me then, yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 6:11

Yeah. So there's a lot of work and a lot of education from a HR consultant's perspective that goes in to educating employees to educate business owners what other systems they need in place and other things that they need to be considering because their whole mindset is a contract and a couple of policies. Yeah. That's my HR dung. Yeah. And that's not it. And when I say compliance actually does nothing towards addressing employee retention, but I was told that this was all I would need. There's more to it. Yeah. So I try to use a lot of data backed research to be able to say, so research tells us that employees need this to for you to meet their basic needs so that they can at least be interested in attending work and a little bit motivated. So this is what we need to start with. Once we get that in place, then we're actually starting to look at creating that psychological connection to the workplace so that we can start to build some engagement. What a lot of regional businesses tend to do is associate perks or wow gestures with building engagement. Which is or addressing retention. So they will think that a high pay or a sign-on bonus is going to solve retention issues. All that's going to happen is that if a condition of the sign-on bonus is that you get it after six months, then at six months and two days the person resigns and goes somewhere else if the culture's no good.

SPEAKER_00 7:48

Right.

SPEAKER_01 7:48

A big favorite is fishing trips. We're building employee engagement by taking people out, by chartering a boat and taking them on a fishing trip. If you enjoy fishing and so do people on your team, by all means do it. Don't do it under the guise that it's actually achieving engagement because it's not. And just going out and walking around the workshop and talking to your employees doesn't build engagement. Not at all. For employees to move into that space. So it's about educating employers that this is what's actually required to address retention. But then we still come back to but I'm making money. So why do I need to bother with this alone? Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 8:40

What's your answer to that?

SPEAKER_01 8:42

Well, you're making money now because we're in a boom. Right? What happens when the gold price falls again? Yeah. Or the nickel price or the iron ore price falls again, and you have to start letting people go and you've got nothing to offer people.

SPEAKER_00 8:59

So that is your business case for managing organizational culture, isn't it? So when I've worked with some larger organization in a regional setting or small town setting, and the kind of work I've done with them is really asking, like you say, the CEO to understand their organizational culture, but asking from a really curious perspective. So what is your organizational culture? What do you think it is? They might come out with, oh, my people are really entitled, they're just one, want, want, want, want. Okay, that's one thing. But really trying to get to the root cause of what their understanding is. Is it a negative perspective? Is it a positive perspective from that CEO's perspective, right? Then I've done lots of culture change work with uh a few regional areas where I really try to understand from the people's mouths. So it's in it's in my book. So Seamus Lug, make work meaningful, how to create a culture that leaves a legacy. I've got my whole workshop in here actually. I've got the whole outline for the workshop in the book. And one of the things I ask me because it's a co-design workshop. So if this organization was an animal, what would it be? So I don't even talk about the C-word, I don't even mention organizational culture at that time with employees, and they'll say a snake, a sloth, or whatever, and then we'll really unpack what that means. Then I'll take that information back to the CEO and the executive and say, Hey, this is what your people have said, and this is what you said, and then we do a bit of a gap analysis, yeah, and then it's like, oh, okay, now we need to work on this, and then the understanding grows eventually, but it does take time because you need the people to speak and you need the people at the top to speak to understand does this marry or are we on two different plans at the moment?

SPEAKER_01 10:40

Yeah. And I think that the conversations that people have at a senior level and the way that those conversations build a belief about the experience of work is very different to the experience of work of people like in the trenches. So it's at the top level, you're only ever talking about revenue and performance and output output, and that's all very positive. You start to build this belief around the workplace that everything is great. But when you come down to the employee level and ask them what their experience of the workplace is, their experience is conversations about not having the right tool to do the job. Yeah, having to bring my own stationery to work because we've gone over budget on stationery. And so I have to bring my own pens and notebook to work. Having computers that constantly die or laggy internet. Oh gosh. If the people at the other level aren't actually asking the question, what does it feel like to work here? Yeah. How do they know? So if I'm at a conference and I'll go up and I'll introduce myself to a workplace business owner and I'll say, I work in a space of employee experience of workplace culture, the absolute knee-jet response is there's nothing wrong with our culture. And I'll say, How do you know? Yeah. And like the door drops a bit. If you're not asking the question, how do you know what the experience of your employees is? So what I'm really trying to do is educate that you can't just assume you need to ask that question. That was one of the key reasons why I wanted to start the real work, is that it's a way of sharing that information of all this other work that has to go in to building a great workplace. And the concept is it's the space in between where the real work appears that does the heavy lifting. And that's the day-to-day stuff. Like it's how you feel on an average Tuesday that tells you what your culture is, and that's the real work. That's the stuff that's in the space in between. How you should how your leaders show up on a day-to-day basis that builds organization, builds the experience of work.

SPEAKER_00 12:58

And I love the fact that you've actually gone to Glossy Magazine, it's just so beautiful. Okay, so for people who are listening, I'm gonna put a link. Do you have links to the Simone? ID. Yeah, cool. Send them to me. I want to put a link to Simone's magazine, magazines, which are called the Real Work magazines, and every volume has a different title. And Simone gives this to people within her small town clientele and whatnot, and it's within the workplace, but then you're infiltrating the workplace. I love the way you're doing this, right? Because the topics that Simone has in these workbooks, the great recalibration, why HR must lead the lead the charge into the future of work. Like you're really getting us to think differently. HR less lessons from Romeo and Michelle, one of my favorite films. So there's like it's like an added humor.

SPEAKER_01 13:49

There's a bit of humor in there. Yeah, and in issue one, uh it had a theme of music. And so there was the article in there about the more things change, the more the young and old stay the same. So it's really talking about on a generational level, understanding the things that shape us, yeah, how that impacts the way that we show up to work, how we lead, and how that can bring our default leadership approach into play.

SPEAKER_00 14:19

Bringing magazines with good information that we can learn from. When someone spends a hell of a load researching, I've seen like this isn't just an overnight job. You don't just pull this one out. Yeah, there's a lot of effort here, there's brilliant contributors as well to it. So thank you for the work that you do. So, CEOs, culture change when the business owner is the culture. Check out Simone's magazine, check out my book. I'm gonna recap as well this conversation because I've just loved so many things that Simone has said. So the first thing that Simone said is your culture is based on the leadership style and the personality of the CEO often, especially in a small town setting, because that's the way the world revolves there. And therefore, these CEOs need to understand culture. And the beautiful way that Simone does it is why have you people left? What are the facts? What are the reasons? Where did they go to? So real deep dive into really understanding not just that, but Simone asks many questions, I know. And then eventually, I hope, and it does often and eventually result in self-awareness. But initially it might cause defensiveness because your business is your baby, and we get it, we're business owners ourselves and we're precious about our businesses as well. So being there done that ourselves as well, yeah. But you have to take those blinkers off and really look at the real world. And then once you do start to look at real things and you've had those aha moments, you'll understand what the root causes of the issues are in relation to the organizational culture that you're building well or building poorly, and then you need to address them appropriately. Now, every single organizational culture is different, and therefore you can get the help of Simone, help of me, help of Brilliant Minds. You are not alone CEOs, but you often act like you are. So please break that bubble, is all I will say on that note. Simone, anything else to add before we conclude this episode? Just look for ways of developing yourself.

SPEAKER_01 16:15

If you're looking to start a business, whether you already own a business and it's only been a few years or it's been 20 years, everybody always has something to learn. But try and get coaching that's one-on-one that is going to be very specific to you rather than just a general course or joining an influencer style like inspiration group and learn about those like your team sort of organizations. You know what I'm talking about. I know. Get one-on-one support where they can actually look at what's going on in your team. If you need to be called out on bullshit, that someone that's capable of calling you out on your bullshit and have an open mind and some self-awareness that you're willing to accept that. Because change can't occur if you're closed off to the idea that you might be contributing to the problems that your people and your business is experiencing.

SPEAKER_00 17:12

Nothing changes if nothing changes. And I know Simone is speaking from experience here because I've seen her as a lifelong learner because I've bumped into her at many a conference. So I know you learn yourself as well. So you practice what you preach. And I love that about you, Simone. Thank you so much for this conversation. I have loved it. Great conversation. If you like this episode, check out the show notes and sign up for my newsletter. That will help your workplace to be less shitty. It's full of novel ideas, good food for thought. And if you like this episode, pass it on to at least two people who will benefit. That's your good deed done for the day. Also, remember to subscribe to the Ways to Change Your Workplace Podcast via your podcast provider. And I will see you in the next episode.