Cultivating Culture as the Soul of Your Organization

0:02 What's working on purpose anyway? Each week, we ponder the answer to this question. People ache for meaning and purpose at work, to contribute their talents passionately and know their lives really matter. They crave being part of an organization that inspires them and helps them grow into realizing their highest potential. Business can be such a force for good in the world, elevating humanity. In our program, we provide guidance and inspiration to help usher in this world we all want, working on purpose. Now, here's your host, Dr. Elise Cortez. Welcome back to the Working on Purpose program, which has been brought to you with passion and pride since February of 2015. Thanks for tuning in again this week. Great to have you. I'm your host, Dr.

0:43 Elise Cortez. Most leaders are sitting on untapped human energy and capability, and I help them unlock it. I'm an organizational psychologist, logotherapist, workforce advisor, and the founder of the Gusto Now movement. But my favorite title is just simply, I traffic in energy. Not the kind that you throw around for another engagement initiative, but that deeper force, what I call Gusto, the life force of performance that drives commitment, perseverance, and genuine ownership of a shared mission and the clients we serve. You can learn more about us and how we can work together at gusto-now.com or my personal site, elisecortez.com. Coming in today with us is Scott McInnes. He's the founder of Inspiring Change, a Dublin-based culture and internal communications consultancy where he helps senior leadership teams close the gap between culture they have and the one they actually need to deliver their strategy. He hosts the Building Better Cultures podcast and is the author of the Mind the Gap Report, original research with CPOs across Ireland on the five culture gaps holding organizations back. We'll be talking about the five disconnect challenges every leader is facing today and those five culture gaps, holding organizations back, and what leaders can do to address these issues. He joins us today from Dublin, Ireland. Scott, a hearty welcome to Working on Purpose.

1:55 Elise, how's it going? Are you well? I'm well. I'm with you now. How bad could it be? Super. Absolutely. And it's 24 degrees outside and sunny. It's not even raining in Ireland, which is like, as people might expect, a weird thing. Amazing. I have been to your beautiful country. It is gorgeous. And of course, you're talking about Celsius versus Fahrenheit, just so our listeners know. And viewers understand that difference in case they're like, 24 degrees. That's cold. Just double it and add 28. Okay, very good. Very good. Well, let's first, since our listeners and viewers don't know a little bit about you like I do, let's just get a little bit about your background and how it is you came to be doing this kind of work. I mean, you could be designing like amazing landscapes or something like that, but instead you're doing this work. How did you get into it and why do you stay with it?

2:37 I'd say, thank God I'm not designing amazing landscapes because I am rubbish with my hands. I've worked in communications for 25 or 30 years. And you're talking with your hands, I see as well, just like I do. Yeah, I do that a lot. Actually, I was doing a talk this morning and I was given a clicker and a mic and I was like, oh my God, what am I going to do with my hands? I'm going to have to keep them on my sides. I digress. I'm 25 years in comms and my last probably What my kids slightly unfairly call my last proper job was in AIB, one of our two pillar banks here in Ireland, from 2012 to 2017. I left there in 2017 to set up Inspiring Change. And over the period, we've moved from being an internal comms and engagement organization to being an organization and a consultancy purely focused on helping organizations build better cultures. And as you said at the top, at least helping organizations to be really, really intentional about culture and moving from the culture they have to the culture that they need. We believe squarely that culture is simply a vehicle for strategy. It's not fluffy. It's not driven by HR. It's a corporate imperative. And it's really, really important that companies get it right.

3:45 100% aligned with that, my friend. 100% aligned. We're talking the same talk and the same walk. So in our show here, Scott, we really. Like to be able to help educate and inspire and equip listeners and viewers who are coming in from around the world. So I want to definitely address those six disconnect challenges that you talked about in one of your articles, as well as the culture issues. And then of course, we'll bring these, these disconnects to life. So people, listeners and viewers really understand them, but also give them some ideas, some ways that they might start to address them. So the first one that you mentioned in terms of disconnects that every leader is facing is, It's just too busy to connect. So if you could address that one, what's that really like? Peel that back for us.

4:27 Yeah, sure. So when we did the research, we spoke to a chunk of chief people officers, and we asked them, what is it that's getting in the way of you having strong human connections in your organization? And the one that came up more than any other as a big challenge was busyness. People are really, really busy. And I don't know about you, Elise, or people listening, but we haven't seen... the level of busyness go back from where it seemed to shoot to during COVID back to some kind of normality. Anybody you speak to, they're up to a million miles an hour all the time. And that's a really big challenge. And, you know, I think that pace of work is leaving people with less time to do all the other stuff. And then layer into that, again, I don't know about you, but WhatsApp groups, crike, you know, I'm on a million, my phone's pinging all the time with a million WhatsApp groups I want to just mute and turn off. Because they're just getting in the way.

5:22 And of course, it's relationships then that are the first things that get squeezed because we don't leave time to do those things. And that's really, really important. And I think we've seen through the research, that's a big gap and a growing gap. So let's just talk about a few things that you mentioned in your article about how to address that. I certainly appreciate one is audit your meeting culture. Do I really need to be in this meeting? And do I really need to be, does it need to be, you know, meetings on the hour, every hour kind of thing? So I think that's a really important one. And then the other thing that you mentioned that I really want to situate here too is challenging the culture of business from the top. Of course, we follow the leader and we watch the leader closely. So if you could speak to a couple of these ways that leaders can address this particular too busy to connect, disconnect.

6:09 So let's kick off with meeting culture because one of our clients, we did a lot of work with our senior team and what came out of that seemed interesting. you know, madly simple, which was we need to do some work around our meeting culture. We need to make sure, because I said to them, look, if you receive a meeting request with no agenda in the meeting request, then just don't go. And everybody was aghast. And I said, because pretty quickly, people are going to change their habits if it's really important that you're in that meeting. If you don't show up when there's no agenda, then, you know, they're going to start putting agendas into email invites or into meeting invites rather than So that came up again this morning in a keynote I was doing for a conference in the Central Bank of Ireland where we talked about meeting culture. And somebody said, sometimes we need to have meetings. And I said, yeah, you do. But actually, probably not as many as you think you do. And they need to be better managed. And they need to have proper defined outcomes and timings and people taking minutes and real clarity at the end of each meeting, what's been agreed, by whom, by when, and be really clear on that. And if you don't need to have a meeting, don't have a meeting because we're getting just churned up in hours and hours of meetings. To pick the second one that you spoke about there briefly, you know, challenging the culture of busyness from the top. And maybe it's an Irish thing, I don't know, but when you say to somebody, how are you? Jesus. Up the walls busy.

7:28 Will be the answer that you'll get most often. And it's almost like a badge of honour that we're busy all the time. But actually, are you doing things that are valuable? Are you doing things that are making a difference? Are you doing things that are moving you closer to where it is you need to be? And that's really, really important. Another one that I'll probably pull out here because it popped up in a couple of different places was giving new joiners time to build relationships. I don't think organizations do onboarding very well at all. I think they bring you in, they show you where the lockers are, they tell you about the expenses policy. But in terms of giving you actual proper time, investing in proper time to help those people know each other and bond before they go off to their various silos is really important.

8:13 And I don't think it happens well enough. 100% agree. There's nothing that you wrote in those articles that I don't completely agree with and that I haven't also discovered as well. So bringing this to life for our listeners and viewers is important. is really the opportunity here. And some of it becomes so insidious, right? That you just, it becomes a water that you, that you're swimming and you don't even recognize you're swimming it and doing these things. So the second major disconnect that you identified there was how leadership's influence on connection is so, so strong and, and, and, and also not really well leveraged. Absolutely. And when you think about it, you know, a, a, a CEO running an organization of a few thousand people, she or he can't know all of those people, can't connect with all of those people. It's not possible. But of course, the people leader down the chain of command, the frontline supervisor, they can. But we still have this thing.

9:05 And I worry, I'm not saying anything that anybody, nobody listening to this podcast, at least, is having a light bulb going off above their heads going, oh my God, that's amazing insight. All of this is really basic stuff that we're just not doing well enough. And when you think about what we need to do, we need to stop taking people from teams and from organizations and simply putting them into people leader positions because they're technically good at what they can do. They're a good accountant. They're good at IT. They're good at legal. They're good at sales. They're good at whatever. And then we make them a team leader. And that's not a great idea because we don't give them the skills, the confidence, the tools to be amazing people leaders. And we need them. to be able to create those connections with people. Go back to Gallup, the 70-30 link, 70% of engagement and connection is in your relationship with your people leader, not the organization. So we keep shooting ourselves in the feet when we're putting people into these roles. and we're not giving them those tools.

10:03 And then we're not holding them to account for that connection. Part of your job is driving connection with people on your teams. The end. If it's not happening, I want to have a conversation about why it's not happening, where the gaps are and how I can help. And if it's still not happening, then perhaps we need to be having a different conversation. I want to put a little bit more, shall we say, muster on that last point that you were talking about, which is really, you know, this speaks to giving managers the confidence for difficult conversations and equipping them to be able to do that. And I see, certainly in our work too, that that's definitely not happening in many, many organizations. And so now you've got these poor managers that are the least engaged group out there, right? Partly because they're being squeezed by senior leadership and the frontline, the employees that they're accountable for. And then they're not equipped to be able to handle these difficult conversations. Horrible place to be.

10:54 And so, you know, I completely agree with you. We need more leadership development training. We need more manager training as well. Mm-hmm. And the points you make there, Elise, is exactly what was spelled out in Gallup's 2025 report where manager engagement went down again. Yes, I know. That's a really scary place to be for organizations because they really are the glue that holds an organization together. And they are the ones that can translate and contextualize those on high levels. organizational messages coming down through the organization and say to their teams, well, this is what that means for us. Or actually, lads, don't worry. This doesn't mean anything to us. That's somewhere else in the business. But don't get flustered. There's no jobs being lost in our team or our division. And that's their job to be able to deliver that message down to their people.

11:43 And this next one that I want to bring up here, Scott, is one of my all-time favorites. And that is the need to be more human and intentional about hybrid work and arrangements. Let's talk about that one. Yeah, I think it's interesting because the conversation that often we're having about hybrid is, well, is Elise working in the office today or is Elise working at home or somewhere else? And then the conversation stops and we don't take the conversation any further to get into any details about, well, what kind of work is Elise doing today? Who does she need to do it with? Is it better that she does it here in person? And without that colour, It means that we're not being sufficiently intentional about what we're doing when people come in. We haven't defined what office time is for. Perhaps in many organizations, they don't have spaces in order to let people get together and do that kind of team time that's really important to do face-to-face. For me, there are three people, I'm using people in inverted commas, in that relationship. One is the organization setting out the ground rules or the frameworks or the guidelines that for what hybrid working should look like.

12:51 The second is the managers, because they can see the work that's going on, the work that needs to get done and how it's happening. The third one is one which isn't particularly, people aren't particularly excitable when I say this, is the employee. There's responsibility on employees to not be booking in back-to-back-to-back Teams meetings on a core day in the office when everybody else is there so that they're sitting in a booth. It's a waste of their time, it's a waste of the organization's time, and it's a waste of the time of all of their teammates who've come in. We should be spending that time actually collaborating and working together. Well, I have a lot of juice around this one, Scott, because one thing that I'm keenly aware of, and this is through the function of also serving as a social scientist of sorts, and that is we can't underestimate or undervalue just how much the pandemic really changed us and the way that we're working. and what people expect from work today. And so I keep hearing more and more people say, people just don't work when they're at home, and they just don't work. Well, then if that's happening, then you have a management problem, right? So one of your points is make expectations clear and give managers confidence to be able to enforce that accountability, and what do you need by when kind of thing. So we're managing outcomes, not presenteeism.

14:10 And I spoke to a people leader not very long ago, and she said, well, you know, I've been out in the shops some days, and at 4 o'clock on a Tuesday afternoon, you know, there might be people going and doing their shopping. And I said, well, A, what were you doing in the shops at 4 o'clock on a Tuesday afternoon spotting people? And B, they could have been up since 6 in the morning. They could have been at their desk at 6.30. They might now go back to their desk and stay until 10 o'clock. So is the question not, are they getting the work done on time, to budget, to quality, in a way that actually is adding value to the organization? Because if you can tick all of those, my response is, I couldn't care less where they work.

14:50 Right, exactly. They're probably doing a great job. The need to hit the nuclear button and drag people back in, I think is incredibly damaging. Oh, I 100% align with that. And I had somebody else on the podcast earlier talking about and sharing that 73% of the workforce are caregivers in some fashion, whether they're caring for children, aged parents, loved ones that have mental or physical extra needs for them. And if you create the workplace so that you're boxed in so much that you can't handle these outside needs in your life, you're only getting a portion of that human back to the energy introduction that I said before. And you're working so hard against momentum as an organization and as a leader to produce those results and grinding people down in the process.

15:38 We talk about inclusion, and we want to have single parents back in the workplace, and we want to have people with young children, and we want to have people with aging parents, and we want to have people who are caregivers for people with disabilities. But then we say, we'll be back in the office five days a week. And I kind of go, that doesn't really make a lot of sense to me. That feels like a bit of a battle. And yeah, I don't think it's particularly helpful. Well, it actually, you know, it's been shown in the research that it just creates resentment. And then, you know, it reduces the commitment of the employee to the organization as well, because it's clear that this is more of a one-way street here for the employer to get what they want versus for things to work for everyone kind of thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. And imagine if you create that resentment and that person doesn't or can't leave the organization.

16:23 Yeah. You've then got a fundamentally disengaged person on your team. What would you rather have? Right, right. So this is really worth working at and getting right and getting the shared commitment, as you say in your article, getting the shared commitment about how we're going to work together and create this sense of teamship and honor the commitments that we have and the accountability that we have, et cetera. And that really, in my view, going back to my College teaching days is really like a charter of sorts. How are we going to work together as a team? Absolutely. Really, really super practical. How are we going to turn up on the days that we say we're going to be in the office? How are we going to turn up for each other? And I think part of that team charter should also have your values rolled in there.

17:11 So the values and behaviours of the organisation. How do we live those? What do we do when they're not being lived? How do we hold each other to account for our behaviour? So, yeah, absolutely. I think once you've got that down, I don't think you need to go as far as printing it out and getting people to sign it with a Sharpie or any of that kind of nonsense. But I think just a conversation is, Because actually, that's the bit that's missing, a conversation. How can we work together most effectively given how we work today? And we were 100 years doing it before COVID. Right. 9 to 5, Monday to Friday. We are now three years into this hybrid journey. And people are getting all panicky that, you know, it's not working. It's not working. Get everyone back in again. And I just, yeah, I just relax, lads, and just let's just let it settle. But let's be intentional about making it settle properly.

17:56 Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Let's let our listeners and viewers think about that for a second and how that occurs for them and their current situation and for their team while we take our first break. I'm your host, Dr. Elise Cortez. We're on the air with Scott McInnes. He's the founder of Inspiring Change, a Dublin-based culture and internal communications consultancy where he helps senior leadership teams close the gap between the culture they have and the one they actually need to deliver their strategy. We've been talking about some of the issues that all leaders face when it comes to disconnection. After the break, we'll finish that list and then go on to culture. We'll be right back.

18:43 Dr. Elise Cortez is a management consultant specializing in meaning and purpose, an inspirational speaker and author. She helps companies visioneer for greater purpose among stakeholders and develop purpose-inspired leadership and meaning-infused cultures that elevate fulfillment, performance, and commitment within the workforce. To learn more or to invite Elise to speak to your organization, please visit her at EliseCortez.com. Let's talk about how to get your employees working on purpose. This is Working on Purpose with Dr. Elise Cortez. To reach our program today or to open a conversation with Elise, send an email to Elise, A-L-I-S-E, at EliseCortez.com. Now, back to Working on Purpose.

19:35 Thanks for staying with us and welcome back to Working on Purpose. I am your host, Dr. Elise Cortez. As I, too, am dedicated to helping create a world where organizations thrive because their people thrive. They're led by inspirational leaders that help them find and contribute their greatness. And we do business that betters the world. I keep researching it. writing my own books. So one of my latest came out, it's called The Great Revitalization, How Activating Meaning and Purpose Can Radically Enliven Your Business. And I wrote it to help really leaders understand today's very discerning workforce. What do they want from you to give their best and stick around? And then I give you 22 best practices to equip you to provide that for them in your leadership and your culture. You can find my books on Amazon or my personal site, EliseCortez.com. If you are just now joining us, my guest is Scott McInnes. He's the host of the Building Better Cultures podcast and the author of the Mind the Gap report, original research with CPOs across Ireland on the five culture gaps holding organizations back.

20:28 So as we continue this list of disconnections that all leaders are dealing with here, Scott, the next one that we have to queue up here is just this crazy one that the more digital we are the less connected we feel it shouldn't be that way but it. Is it does seem slightly counterintuitive doesn't it does And I think where this came from was really interesting that we have got so much coming at us these days. We've got, you know, in organizations, you might have Slack, you might have SharePoint, you could have Teams. You've got some other, you know, divisional intranet pages. Then you've got your WhatsApps. Then you've got a whole lot. So there's a whole load of channels, a whole lot of stuff that's happening, digital screens in the canteen. And we've got so much coming at us that actually what can happen is we don't look at any of it. because we've given up trying to sort the wheat from the chaff because it's too hard. We see a message and three days later we go, oh my God, there was a message about something that I really need to look into.

21:28 I haven't got a clue where it was or where it came from. And I think that in itself is a huge challenge. I think the second piece is that we think that just because we're doing this This is a great conversation, but I can bet your bottom dollar, Elise, we'd have a better conversation if we were sitting over a desk from each other. And that's just human beings. We just pick up on each other, on the chemicals, on the physiology, on the psychology, and we're missing that. So although we're sitting here looking at each other in little squares of our head and shoulders, we're missing a whole lot of body language. We're missing a whole lot of other signals. And that's happening. Multiply that by billions because that's happening everywhere. all around the world, in every organization, in every online Teams or Zoom that's happening. And we think we're connected, but we're not. If we're doing hybrid, the people in the room are getting the lion's share of the focus, not the people online. They're generally kind of looked at nearly as second-class citizens. And we're not very good at creating those tech-free moments. Like everyone, phones away, laptops away. I do it by a standard now in workshops. right, lads, you won't need phones or laptops for the next 90 minutes.

22:43 We'll have a break in between. Unless something's going on properly on fire, please put them away. There was a stat that came out recently that 75% of your focus, even if your phone is off and still on the table, 75% of your focus goes to that phone, which is insane. It is insane. And one of the other things that you offer in the article is how important it is to invest in the skill of listening. And I can tell you I'm guilty of this, Scott. I considered myself a pretty good listener in part because of how long I've been doing this podcast, but I'll tell you where I discovered that I'm not a very good listener besides relationships, right? But that was taking improv. So I take improv classes. And the thing about doing improv is if, you know, when your stage partner comes on and says a line, if you don't listen well enough, like I realized that I'm doing, I miss that cue. And if they're talking about tennis and I come in and I want to talk about football, I've just missed it. Because I wasn't listening to what they said. And that's where I discovered, just like the rest of the planet, I'm not very good at listening either.

23:44 And I don't think that human beings are great listeners because we're just waiting for the opportunity to respond. We're listening to respond. We're not listening to understand. And that's a massive challenge. And I think if we can get better listeners, at listening, being fully present, listening to that person without an agenda, really truly listening to their words. I think particularly from a leadership perspective, it makes us much better leaders, but it also then makes us much better role models. Because when we're able to repeat back to somebody something they've said almost verbatim, everybody else goes, crikey, I couldn't have done that. And then maybe they go off and do something about it. So I think it pays dividends well beyond just the leaders. It pays dividends to the people in the teams and around them as well.

24:33 So yeah, definitely a muscle worth building, let's just say. And I want to add to that as well, Scott, because I have a strong opinion about this. And of course, we address it as well in our training and our programs. But the beautiful thing is when someone really feels listened to, They literally melt in front of your very eyes. It's the most amazing thing to witness as somebody feels truly listened to. It's that rare. And then the second thing that you and I both really know about listening really well like this is immediately you start to be able to bring down the charge high emotions. When people are upset about things and they're mad or they're frustrated, when you listen to them, you immediately start to bring down the tenor of those emotions so that you can start to have an actual productive exchange of information and ideas.

25:24 Yeah, just actually doing what I was doing there, if people are watching this on video, just nodding and listening and just showing I'm paying attention to you, I'm hearing you. That's really important. Not just that I'm listening, but I'm hearing you. That's a really important thing to think. But yeah, just being there and just not jumping in, not cutting in, just waiting until the person's finished and even just leaving a bit of silence. can be incredibly powerful as well in case they've got anything else to say or just to let you have time to just focus on what they've just been saying because it could have been and then you know a massive monologue of stuff where your brain is just fizzing you need a bit of processing time and that's okay. Yeah for sure for sure well another disconnect issue that you brought up in your article which is really really powerful and so significant today is this idea of these all of our different generations and of course they have different connection needs and and according to johnny taylor who is the president and CEO of SHRM. There are six generations in the workplace today. When you count the new alpha coming in that are just entering the workforce at, say, age 14 and 16.

26:26 Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I was only talking about this this morning at the session that I was doing, because I said to everybody, we were probably, I looked around the room, it was a senior leadership team, there's 120 of them. And I kind of said, people, remember going for a couple of beers on a Thursday evening? And they all nodded. And I went, do you do that anymore? And they all shook their heads. And some of those norms that used to exist in organizations gave people, maybe of the same generation, the opportunity to connect with each other, but also the opportunity to connect with other people as well, other people from other generations that are coming in newer to the workforce. However, the one thing we've got to remember is people, so my kids are 21, 18, and 16.

27:06 It's when the 21-year-old gets into work. And in fact, we've had a couple of kids in with us, kids that were disrespectful, students on internships coming in. And they're 21, 22. They don't want to go out for beers on a Thursday night. They're happy to go to the gym, go to the cinema, see their friends. Literally, one of my daughters had a party here. She's 18 with her friends. They played board games. Who knew? And so their needs are very, very different. Their ability to connect with each other, you know, saying to somebody, just pick up the phone and ring Elise. Because at least like me, you're somebody that if something's going on, you'll just pick the phone up, I suspect. I just pick up the phone, but, you know, I'll send them a message. Says that, you know, the 25-year-old intern. No, no, go and speak to them. They feel completely uncomfortable doing that. And that's a really, really big challenge. There's also a second piece to this, which is people from newer generations coming into the workforce tend to explicitly ask for the things that they want. People who are longer tenured in organizations either won't do that because, quote, it's not the done thing, unquote, or because they kind of just expect they should get it anyway. And then when they don't get it, they get pissed off. So it's a really tough one. And the only way to get around that is to have a conversation about it.

28:21 Open up the room. If we were going out for a team day or a team afternoon or a team whatever, what would work best for you? What would you really like to get from that? And how do we do it so it fits the needs of everybody as much as it possibly could? Right, right. Yeah, beautiful. And one of the things that you say in the article, which I really align with and also do with this with our clients as well, is you offer the idea that one way to deal with this disconnect is to build cross-generational networks deliberately through such things as reverse mentoring programs. And I really, really like this, Scott, because we advocate for this as well. But where, for example, maybe you've got the younger generations teaching the more mature ones about technology and how to really leverage it and how to take off the heavy lift to some of their They're burdensome tasks, and the more mature ones are helping them learn about the history of the organization, the politics and the strategy and relationships and how important those are. And I like that two-way focus because it shows that there's value in each of those contributions, not a one-way street.

29:26 Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And, you know, we all know things that are helpful to other people. My kids would probably dispute that about me, but I'm sure it's true. I'm sure it's true in some spaces, but we, we definitely do. And I, you know, somebody who's in their fifties or sixties might struggle with spreadsheets and Excel and not be a particularly good Excel quiz, but what they are brilliant at is relationship building with people inside and outside the organization. So that sharing of skills can be incredibly powerful because the 25 year old you know, tech whiz who can do Excel off, you know, off the charts. It does a mean pivot table. They're just not very good at maybe interacting with others. And I know we're being very generalist here, and I don't mean to be, but of course, doing research, you have to draw some themes and assumptions. But, you know, I think, yeah, there's opportunity for, you know, for people to share what they know, and it'd be powerful and helpful, definitely.

30:26 Yeah. And in so doing, they each are emboldened and their confidence rises, right? And everyone needs some general boost in confidence. And they feel good that they're making a contribution and that it's being noticed and appreciated. You and I both know how important this is. Yeah, yeah, definitely. It's that shot in the arm. And we know that when we do something good, for somebody else, not only did they benefit, but physiologically in our brains, we benefit because we get that little dump of dopamine. And that's a great thing. It's a great thing. Yeah, it makes us feel better. How good is that? Right. No, I'm totally in for that. And the last issue that you talk about, let's just briefly hit on this one because I do want to be able, we'll take our break and then hit the culture stuff. But the last disconnect issue that you talk about in the article is how structures, silos, and geography are keeping people apart. And this is, of course, as you and I both know, a huge problem in a lot of organizations, and it causes so much extra work and, you know, double work that doesn't need to be done.

31:26 It's incredible. Well, I'm not anti-silos. I actually think they're a good thing because we need to have silos in order to have expertise in in organizations. But I think what I'm kind of against is what goes on and the inability of people either being able to or having the processes or the systems to punch out of those silos if and when they need to in order to create those processes and systems that just get work done really effectively. So, you know, I really want to see organizations create very intentional boundary points between silos, very intentional handoffs, very intentional relationships. A big challenge is that we don't, you know, we don't have huge empathy with other teams. And that's because we don't understand what it is they do, what their daily challenges are. You know, every time I ring finance, they never pick up the phone. Well, when do you ring them? Well, I ring them on a Thursday morning.

32:21 But we work in an organization that does weekly payroll. Thursday morning is literally the worst time to ever ring the finance department. No one's going to answer the phone. Oh, I didn't know that. So that lack of knowledge breeds a lack of empathy for what other people are doing in the organization. And that's challenging. I think we need to get to the point where we design. This comes back to my onboarding point earlier on. Design onboarding better. Design the opportunity to let people, you know, you hear all the time, oh, I met Elise when I was, you know, in my onboarding at the bank. And, God, I've known her for 20 years. She's been one of my best friends ever since from that one interaction. So make that one interaction count. Do onboarding better to give people the opportunity to meet and bond and understand each other before we send them off. into their various silos and departments.

33:15 Well said. So let's let our listeners and viewers think about that. We covered those six areas of disconnect, and we'll talk about the culture issues next here after the break. I'm your host, Dr. Elise Cortes. We're on the air with Scott McInnes. He's the founder of Inspiring Change, a Dublin-based culture and internal communications consultancy where he helps senior leadership teams close the gap between the culture they have and the one they actually need to deliver their strategy. We'll be right back. Thank you. Dr. Elise Cortez is a management consultant specializing in meaning and purpose, an inspirational speaker and author. She helps companies visioneer for greater purpose among stakeholders and develop purpose-inspired leadership and meaning-infused cultures that elevate fulfillment, performance, and commitment within the workforce.

34:11 To learn more or to invite Elise to speak to your organization, please visit her at EliseCortez.com. Let's talk about how to get your employees working on purpose. This is Working on Purpose with Dr. Elise Cortez. To reach our program today or to open a conversation with Elise, send an email to Elise, A-L-I-S-E, at EliseCortez.com. Now, back to Working on Purpose. Thanks for staying with us and welcome back to Working on Purpose. I'm your host, Dr. Elise Cortez. As you know by now, this program is dedicated to empowering and inspiring you along your journey to realize more of your potential. And the book that I mentioned in the last break, The Great Revitalization, it contains those 22 best practices to equip you to elevate your culture and your organization's way of being for today's discerning workforce. What I did for you is I created a very simple three-page assessment. You can pull off the website, gusto-now.com, to determine the extent to which you are meeting those discerning standards.

35:15 If you are just now joining us, my guest. Is Scott McInnes. He's the host of the Build Better Cultures podcast and the author of the Mind the Gap report, original research with CPOs across Ireland on the five culture gaps holding organizations back, which is where we're going next. So I think it's important that we can address or at least surface all five of this as we can in this last session here. Scott, so the first one, of course, that you talk about here is in terms of a challenge is leadership skill and will. And I really appreciate that you've made that as the number one here because what I've discovered, and you probably have as well, is that many leaders, especially the senior ones, don't think they need any ongoing education or development because they think, well, I've gotten this far, I must be doing something right.

36:02 So if you could speak to this first cultural challenge. I think that in my experience of working with lots of clients over the past nine years of running Inspiring Change, I've met lots of senior leaders, a lot of whom do a very, very good job. A lot of whom talk about doing a very, very good job. And that whole say-do gap is real. That thing where senior leaders and organizations, they're saying the right things. We want to have a strong and aligned culture where, you know, we're values-led. But actually, they don't really live it. And that's a massive challenge because the minute a leader, a senior leader particularly, and I talk about the fact that leaders cast long shadows themselves. And those shadows become longer and longer the higher up the organization you go. And everyone's watching. I don't care how flat you say your hierarchy is. When somebody's looking up, they're looking up. They're looking to see what you do as the boss, he or she at the top of the organization. So we need to make sure those people are visible, that they are actively involved in building the culture, that they're thinking about people centricity.

37:05 But of course, that also means understanding what culture is, the link between culture and performance and sustainability, because that's really what they care about and is what they should care about. How do we make our organization successful? Well, you do that through aligning your people, getting them all pulling in the same direction. And that's not something that happens for me consistently across all organizations. There's gaps. Right. For sure. We see it as well. And the other thing that I want to point out what you just said here is I think there's a real misunderstanding or a lack of True understanding is maybe a better way to say it, of just how strongly the connection between performance and culture actually is. I don't think leaders really fully understand just how that is the driving force. They talk about it, but I don't think they fully understand it.

37:51 Yeah, and look, there are a million research reports out there that highlight the connection very strongly. And, you know, I think leaders that still think that culture is an HR thing, you know, the minute culture is mentioned in a board meeting, okay, well, go and grab the HR director or go and grab the chief people officer because we now need to talk about culture. Well, that's not good enough. Culture is owned by everybody in an organization. It's shaped by senior leaders, but it's owned by everybody. So the CIO should be as well equipped to talk about culture as the chief people officer. In the end. 100%. 100%. Okay, so the second cultural challenge that you talk about in your article is accountability for values and really embedding these core values into everyday behaviors and holding people accountable for them is important. which is a disconnect for many organizations.

38:44 And what I would also offer is that when leaders or when values are not actually held to account, it's incredibly demoralizing for people. And you think about, so let's look at what values are. So values are the signposts toward the culture that you want to have in your organization. And for me personally, values are empty unless you have behaviors sitting underneath those values. Because what respect means to me, or working together, might mean something slightly different to you, a flavor, a flavor, and a theme. But we need to have them, and we need to hold people accountable from a leading perspective of holding people accountable for the values. But then when those values aren't lived, we need to hold people accountable for not living them. And the challenge is in organizations where you've got, and I always pick on a salesperson, and I'm sorry, salespeople, it's not you, it's me, that, you know, you've got a salesperson doing 200% of their sales target, and by God, we're very pleased with what they're doing. But literally, there's a trail of, you know, detritus and, you know, and bodies everywhere in their midst.

39:54 Question is, is that the organization that we want? And the answer I don't believe is yes. You know, I think the answer is squarely no. So we have to get rid of that person or have a conversation with them, say, this isn't the kind of organization we are. This is acceptable. And we get them to change because you're right. The minute you start to then not hold people accountable, those, those values are not worth the paper or the wall or the screensaver. They are written out. I have to add a little bit more to this one, Scott, because I've got a lot of opinions about this one too, and a lot of charge around this because it's so important. I, I, I watched the Jackie Robinson documentary and it was so, so powerful, such a powerful thing, right? That, you know, this is the first black man to get, get to be able to play baseball in the big leagues and a lot riding on him. And he was chosen according to the documentary because, you know, he, and also trained to be able to handle all the social backlash that was going to come with that. And there's a scene in the show or the documentary where Jackie Robinson is out on the field, and he starts to get heckles.

40:58 There's a young boy who's watching this, and a young white boy is watching this, and Jackie's getting now heckles from the audience that he shouldn't be there, and there's racial slurs being thrown out, et cetera. And so the young boy then sees that, And he starts to say the same slurs, the same thing. And then he watches one of Jackie's comrades on the team, a white player. And this white player comes up and he puts his arm around Jackie. And this is in front of everybody. They're on the field. And the white player says to Jackie, said, I need my family to see this because they don't know who I am. And this is important that I get to live my values. And I want them to see that I'm not what they think I might be or where I came from. Now the young kid sees this interaction, and now he's confused, but he gets a different message.

41:48 And this is why I really want to paint this picture, because this is exactly what happens when we either live or don't live our values in organizations. The message is so strong and so imprinting. Yeah, and that's a really brilliant way to bring to life the idea that I might know your values, but I can see your behaviors. Right. That's why. So we may have known that that guy was a team player. That's one of his core values. But we didn't know that until he exhibited that behavior of going and putting his arm around a teammate. It's the behavior that told us that. So how do we make sure that people are exhibiting those behaviors, being celebrated when they do, being held accountable when they don't?

42:30 Mm hmm. Mm hmm. So that will also send us to one of the other cultural challenges here, which we did allude to earlier, and that's what you call the manager factor, and bridging that say-do gap at the middle management level and helping the group to understand their role in shaping culture. And this is so delicious for each. Of us, right? So if you could speak a bit to this cultural challenge, the manager factor, a bit more deeply. Yeah, and what's interesting here is that this talks back to the conversation we had earlier on, The managers and organizations are the glue that hold the organization together. So they're the ones that we need to make sure have the confidence, the skills, the tools, the ability to be able to manage really well. It's not good enough that we simply say, well, you're a very good accountant now.

43:19 You're a senior accountant. You're very good at what you do. So now you're a people leader here as a team. Good luck. Not good enough. But we do it all the time and we see it all the time and we don't invest in our people leaders and we don't invest in our supervisors and we don't give them the skills and the tools and the confidence to be amazing. And then we wonder why they're not being amazing. Well, is it because we haven't bothered investing in them perhaps? So we know that there's potentially then a say-do gap at manager level because we're saying one thing about perhaps our values or our culture or how we want to get things done, but they're doing something else. And maybe they aren't being held accountable. Maybe they don't understand that.

44:01 the role, the really, really important, critical, I'd say, role that they play in really driving strong and aligned cultures across organizations. You know, it does come back to that point about having difficult conversations. That's often the one that comes up most. So, you know, when somebody is being anti-vouchers, just being difficult or just being obnoxious or rude, hit them aside and have a conversation and say, what's going on? That's not like you. That doesn't feel like you. Tell me what's going on. We start there for a place of empathy. And then if we don't get anywhere there, then we come from another direction. So, you know, I think they need to reinforce the culture that they should have in their teams. We hear subcultures thrown around often.

44:45 I don't particularly like the idea of a subculture because it doesn't sound particularly positive. But, you know, as long as cultures are aligned with the overarching culture of the organization, of course, you're going to see differences from a tool shop in a manufacturing organization to the HR department, to IT. And that's okay. So if we can have cultures that are flavors, microcultures, that's okay. I don't mind. And actually that's driven by the leader. Now, of course, one of the other cultural challenges that you mentioned is disconnection, which we already covered in the first two segments. So we won't, we won't treat that here. But the last one that you put forth in the article is that the skills for today and tomorrow, fostering that culture of continuous learning and career growth and development, having psychological safety for making mistakes and trying new things.

45:36 Yeah. And one thing, again, that I spoke about this morning when I was doing that keynote was that 70-20-10 model of learning. You know, we sit down at the end of the year and we say to our teams, well, you know, what development have you had this year? And they say, well, nothing. Well, that's not strictly true. You might not have been on any courses, but the stats would suggest that 10% of our learning comes from a course. 20% comes from working with other people and 70% comes from on-the-job learning. So we've got to perhaps reposition what we mean when we talk about development in the workplace. You know, I used to say something to my kids when they were at primary school, when they were small, six, seven, eight. They'd come home from school and I'd say to them, what do you know today that you don't know tomorrow? Sorry, what do you know today you didn't know yesterday? And they would tell me things because that's things they've learned.

46:24 They've developed over the course of a day. They are better human beings than they were 24 hours ago. So, you know, there's a piece there, but also to touch off one of the points you made there, Elise, that whole area of psychological safety being open to failure as a way of learning. If we're not failing, we're not learning. We just keep doing things the same way. So if we can get to a place where we have trust, really high trust in our teams and organizations, where we have really good psychological safety and relationships with our managers, coming back to the manager factor, and you start to see there's kind of these all weaved together. They're not standalone. That we can actually get to a place where we get to do better work quicker because we fail faster.

47:06 And everyone goes, oh, yeah, I at least tried something and failed. That's great. Well done for trying. What did we learn from that? As opposed to, you know, taking a lease out into the courtyard, out the front of the organization and, you know, flaying you, metaphorically, of course, in front of the rest of the company. So, you know, yeah, I think if we can create space for learning from mistakes and create space for development and reposition what really good development looks like, that's a really powerful thing. I 100% agree, of course. So here we are. We've come already to the end of the show. It goes by so fast. Scott, you know how it is. Yeah, that flew. Absolutely flew. Right? So you probably know that this show is hosted by people around the world who really do care about elevating their own leadership, who care about creating cultures where people can flourish and just become better humans along the way.

47:53 What would you like to leave them with? You and the people that you work with have a choice every single day to keep doing things the same way or to see what isn't working in yourself and in others. and change them. And there's a line that I use all the time. If nothing changes, nothing changes. So I would urge you, if it's something that you've heard here or something you've heard elsewhere or something that's just kind of a light bulb has come on in your head and you've thought, I must try this, do it. Beautiful. Great way to finish the show, Scott. I'm so happy to know you, to know that you're now in my orbit and we got to share this conversation and with my listeners around the world. Thank you for being on Working On Purpose.

48:35 Thank you, Elise. Thank you for having me. I've really, really enjoyed the nearly an hour of conversation. It's flown. I know, I know, I know. Now, listeners and viewers, you are going to want to learn more about Scott McInnes, the work that he does at Inspiring Change and his podcast and research reports. I suggest you head to the website inspiringchange.ie forward slash working on purpose. You can find all kinds of treasure out there and connect with him. See you next week for another inspiring episode that advances the conversation on creating destination workplaces led by inspirational leaders that help us do business that betters the world. See you then. Let's work on purpose. We hope you've enjoyed this week's program. Be sure to tune into Working on Purpose, featuring your host, Dr. Elise Cortez, each week on WFU. Together, we'll create a world where business operates conscientiously, leadership inspires in passion performance, and employees are fulfilled in work that provides the meaning and purpose they crave.

49:31 See you there. Let's work on purpose.