What's up, everybody?
Dan Martell here.
Serial entrepreneur, investor, and shotgun Nerf shooter.
Bam!
Anyways, creator at SaaS Academy.
In this video, I'm going to walk you
through how to identify if you have a toxic culture
in your business.
And be sure to stay at the end where I share--
I should put that down--
a framework called the Weekly Sync that
allow you to get clear with your team to make sure that they're
working on the right things and everybody
is on the same page from a communication
point of view, which will hopefully solve
your toxic culture problem.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
So I've had the privilege of seeing world-class companies--
Pixar, Google, Airbnb-- the culture
these companies have created, Netflix in San Francisco when
I lived there, to the opposite of when I was building
my company, Sphere.
These government agencies and big Fortune 500 companies that
were just--
people would live in like cubicle farms, OK?
Two different worlds.
But what I've learned over the years
is there's characteristics of the team.
And the company that will tell you
if you have a toxic culture.
And that's what I want to share with you guys today is
the seven areas that I've seen that'll let
you know if something's going wrong with your team.
Number 1, speed of their feet.
I believe that if you have a team that when it hits 5:00 PM,
they are bouncing, they are out, they
are done because of the clock, you've got some issues.
I still remember.
We were building my company, Clarity.fm.
And we had just hired this new person,
and it was his first day.
And at 5:00 PM--
I'm not even joking.
I'm in the conference room.
I'm on a call with somebody on the West Coast.
And all of a sudden, I see the guy at the corner of my eye
walk past and leave the office.
And I just said, hey.
I was on the phone.
I said just one sec-- pause, muted them,
opened the door of the conference room and screamed.
I was like, did that guy just leave?!
And they're all like, yeah, he just left.
And I'm like, wow.
OK.
Closed the door and get back to my meeting.
The next day we had a conversation.
Because look, I do not--
I've never built a company where it was a time-punching income,
do your work kind of scenario.
That is just not the kind of people I want to work with.
And it's not the kind of place that I create.
I want to let people have the freedom.
If they want to take a three-hour lunch,
they can do that.
If they want to start and work early in the morning
and get done by noon, they can do that.
But to me, it's not about just punching in and punching out.
And I've seen this at many other companies.
Parking lots just clear up.
Boom!
4:30.
Bam!
Gone.
Everybody is out.
Essentially, the speed of their feet
is what shows you if they are committed to the business.
Number 2, asking for perks and raises.
Now, I'm not opposed to compensating.
I actually compensate my team on the upper end of what I should.
Because I want high-performing people,
and I want them to be comped accordingly.
But what I've learned-- and I've coached hundreds
of entrepreneurs, scaled their executive leadership teams
and their teams in general--
is that when they have a half dozen,
a dozen people out of 30, 40 folks on their team all
of a sudden come up to them and ask them for a raise,
ask them for more perks, there's usually
something going on systemically in their business that's
causing that.
Because at the end of the day, somebody
is working at your company.
And if they feel like they're kind of stuck there
and they're not getting their needs
met, and they're not feeling like they're being appreciated,
and they don't feel like they're progressing in their career
path, then they're just going to ask themselves like, what am I
getting out of this?
And the first, easiest place for them to look is, hey,
I want you to pay me to go on more training.
I want you to offer day care.
I want you to offer these.
I want a raise.
And to me, if you see multiple people do
that in a short period of time, you
got to start asking yourself, where
are we lacking in the reward system of really encouraging
people to feel committed to their career path
within our organization?
Number 3, lack of empathy.
Now, this is a really interesting word.
Empathy to me is that just people care.
And when I've seen the contrast of bad cultures--
these government agencies-- like everybody
was out for themselves.
They didn't care.
But they wanted something.
They didn't care if anybody else got it.
Whereas on the flip side when you see these high-performing
teams at these high-tech companies,
they're really operating as a primal unit,
as one group of people moving towards a mission.
And one of those things is empathy.
And you see it in meetings.
You see it in language.
You see it in emails.
I've seen this where there's an email
to ask for a request for access to something.
And the person-- reply is, fill out this form.
It's like, where's the empathy in that?
If you really want to see your team be successful,
then you want to offer to be helpful.
So if you notice that the messages, the communications,
the conference calls are getting a little transactional
and there's lacking a sense of support
from other teams and departments,
then you might have an issue you need to resolve quickly.
Number 4 is dissatisfaction and anxiety.
One of the worst things that you could create
is a culture where people feel anxious to come to work.
And I've seen this.
I've had team members.
I find this after the fact.
I've had team members cause other members of my team
the need to go get medication, to get prescription
to deal with the level of anxiety
that they felt in their work.
And I have a rule that if somebody
has an issue with somebody else, they go direct first.
And if they can't resolve the issue, then they come to me.
And to me, if I have a team member causing
that level of frustration, dissatisfaction, anxiety
amongst the team, they got to go.
I just don't--
I don't put up with that.
If somebody has to go to the point
where they're taking medication to deal with that,
I think that that needs to be resolved.
And it tells you right off the bat you have a toxic culture.
If you don't have a tool that does
an internal eNPS, an employee Net Promoter Score
to uncover these scenarios, or these teams, or departments,
it could be different areas of your business
that are underperforming from a satisfaction point of view.
Then you've got to resolve that.
You got to get that technology.
You got to get that survey.
You've got to ask that question to make sure
that you understand who's feeling dissatisfied
or who's feeling anxious in their job.
Number 5, high turnover.
This one's a no-brainer.
If you continuously have people joining and leaving
every four to six months, then you
have a problem with your business.
And this is the worst part.
When you keep a C player, a D player,
it's not their underperforming that actually
impacts your business the most.
It's the fact that an A player won't
work with that kind of person and they leave.
So essentially, what you end up with
is a person that isn't performing in the first place,
so they're having an impact to the business.
And they cause so much frustration
that your A player decides to go find another team to join.
And to me, high turnover is a no-brainer,
obvious area that's telling you you've got a toxic culture.
Number 6, a failure to meet deadlines or goals.
If your team continuously frustrates
you, that doesn't deliver on their goals, do not perform,
or not hitting their numbers, then you've
got to look at the culture and the communication
structure that's set up to allow the team to operate, OK?
Culture to me is a byproduct of rules, of structure,
of a communication rhythm, of what your reward structure is
in place to allow people like they're performing
or they're not.
So there's a level of accountability, clarity,
and support to allow them to get results in your business.
And if they continuously miss deadlines,
there's something missing from a culture point of view
that needs to be resolved.
Number 7, lack of core values.
My rule is that you hire and you fire against your core values.
And these are not things that you just put up on a wall
and look at and recite.
These are things that you're measuring every new hire
against.
There's core value interview questions.
When you're doing employee reviews,
there's employee review questions
to make sure that they're meeting and exceeding
those values as a team.
Because at the end of the day when you start getting to 20,
50, 100 people on your team, there's
no way you're going to be involved in every decision.
And what your core values become is
a rule set for everybody else to make decisions against.
And you know that if they follow these values,
that they're going to make the right decision.
It's almost like they're the guiding principles
or true north to making decisions and moving
forward in your business without you being involved.
Now, if you don't have those, then that's
where the culture for me starts to break down.
Because without some mission, without some kind
of values to guide people, folks will start looking internally.
They'll start looking for things that are wrong.
They'll start gossiping.
They'll start having politics show up in the teams.
And that's when things start to take a downward turn.
So seven things that are telling you
that you might have a toxic culture.
Number 1, speed of their feet.
Are they leaving at 4:30 PM?
Number 2, asking for raises or perks.
Number 3, lack of empathy amongst your communication,
your team.
Number 4, dissatisfaction and anxiety amongst its members.
Number 5, high turnover in your team.
Number 6, failure to meet deadlines or goals.
And number 7, lack of core values.
So as I mentioned at the beginning of the video,
I want to share an incredible resource with you
called the Weekly Sync.
It's the same format that I use every week
with my team in different departments in the organization
to make sure that we're on the same page,
that everybody understands what the rest of the team
is working on, and that we measure the right scorecard
to ensure we're making progress.
Now, the trick is to use the same Weekly Sync.
You can download your copy below.
Just click the link and get that to use
the same structure for each departmental team meeting.
So you might have an executive leadership team--
every Monday--
meeting where you use the Weekly Sync.
And then you might have a sales, a marketing, a biz dev,
et cetera, meaning using the exact same structure, just
to make sure you get everybody on the same page.
So you can click the link below to download your copy.
And if you like this video, be sure to smash that Like button
and subscribe to my channel.
And if there's somebody you think
that this video could serve, feel
free to share it with them directly.
As per usual, I want to challenge you to live a bigger
life and a bigger business.
And I'll see you next Monday.
Hold that.
Great.
Got it.
All right.
Yeah, yeah.
[LAUGHTER]