Month: June 2024

Company culture is the unsung hero of a successful business. Your team is the backbone of every impactful strategy, campaign and sale—they’re the ones that propel your brand forward.

And yet, prioritizing positive company culture that fosters connection, builds employee relationships and strengthens your team often gets pushed to the backburner. 

If you’re seeking to improve your company culture this year and beyond, here are five little-known things that kill company culture (and how you can easily fix them). 

Tedious Micromanaging 

If you’ve ever been micromanaged, you know the unnecessary stress, pressure and frustration that comes along with it. When you micromanage your team, it can make them feel as though you don’t trust them to do their jobs.

This lack of trust and faith in their skills can crush your company culture. It also limits their opportunities for growth, as they won’t be able to learn from mistakes and move forward with confidence. 

Not to mention, when you’re busy micromanaging your employees, you’re unable to focus on core business initiatives and do your job effectively.

How to fix micromanaging: Empower your employees by letting them do their jobs. Letting go of control, embracing delegation and trusting that you’ve hired the right people is liberating. When your team is competent, organized and committed, you open doors that elevate your leadership and ability to drive strategy.  

Lack of Clarity 

Are you having important conversations with your team members? Does your company prioritize effective internal communication? Do your employees have clear roles and tasks? Is there a shared vision and goals throughout your organization? 

These questions all play a vital role in creating clarity throughout the workplace and within your organization. When meaningful conversations happen and your team feels clear on their roles, action items and goals, a beautiful thing happens—teams complete projects on time, employees feel empowered and your operation runs like a well-oiled machine. 

How to fix a lack of clarity: Prioritize communication, define your individual and collective goals to ensure you’re all on the same path, get clear on your employees’ roles and responsibilities and stop avoiding important conversations. 

As one of the Giant Voices leadership members exclaimed on a recent weekly team huddle, “Stop typing, pick up the damn phone and have a real conversation!” Talk to one another, rather than relying on email or instant messaging conversations, where things can often get lost in translation. 

Big Egos

Big egos are often at the root of a toxic workplace and a business lacking company culture. Leaders with big egos are typically afraid to be wrong, defend their mistakes rather than learn from them, refuse to listen to others and regularly seek recognition or validation.

They have an over-inflated sense of self-importance and ultimately destroy company culture. The teams they lead don’t strive for innovation, because they know it will get stifled. Instead, they simply do what they’re told and don’t stray far from the status quo.

How to fix a big ego: Embrace humility, vulnerability, open-mindedness, constructive criticism and the ability to make mistakes. This helps foster sustainable success, informed decision-making, a creative environment and a culture of collaboration. 

Additionally, utilize Radical Candor®—say what you mean and challenge your team while also caring about the person to whom you’re speaking. This doesn’t mean you have to be brutally honest; it means you are kind, clear, specific and sincere. Tell someone they use “um” too much, or use filler words unnecessarily, it helps them become a stronger and more confident person. 

Value Misalignment

The misalignment of personal and company values can result in a lack of engagement, investment, productivity and growth. Without a shared sense of purpose or commitment to your organization’s vision and goals, your team members may feel disconnected and unmotivated. 

How to fix value misalignment: Define (and uphold) your company’s core values, hire candidates not only for their skills but also their cultural fit, provide ongoing training and development, lead by example and recognize and reward team members who exemplify your company’s values in their work. 

Additionally, when you choose to define your values and adhere to them as a company, you may find some current team members don’t get on board. They may even self-select out—and that’s okay. You want employees who are engaged and align with your company’s values and vision.

Failing to Seek (or Use) Employee Feedback

Actively listening to your employees and making them feel heard and valued is an important part of building company culture.

If you don’t seek employee feedback or continuously ignore it, this can result in lower morale, lack of trust, decreased engagement and productivity, stifled creativity, employee burnout and increased turnover. 

How to fix ignoring employee feedback: Ask your team what they think and how they feel, and do it regularly. You should know if they’re comfortable with their workload and if they have any feedback regarding organizational operations.

You could send an anonymous survey or have casual conversations—do what works best for your company culture. Ensuring your team members feel listened to and respected will help cultivate a positive work environment where creativity, trust, morale and motivation can thrive. 

Company Culture is Powerful

Cultivating a positive company culture is not just a nice-to-have—it’s a necessity for driving success and growth. By addressing and rectifying these five common culture killers, you can create a work environment where employees feel valued, engaged and motivated.

Remember, your team is the backbone of your business. Invest in them, listen to them and watch your company thrive. 

If you need help optimizing your company culture, chat with the Giant Voices team. We’ve helped numerous clients implement strong, impactful culture strategies that result in meaningful ROI. 

Business owners spend considerable time building strategies for growth, but an often overlooked aspect of a business’s trajectory is the continual investment in employee development.

Helping your team build skills, gain experiences and grow into more advanced roles is like sharpening your kitchen knives to achieve a finer, more precise cut. Creating and rolling out an employee development plan can help attract new talent, retain your existing team and position your business for continued success.

It’s an all-around win in our book.

If you’re considering creating and implementing an employee development plan, we have a few tips to get you started. 

Clearly define your business goals

Yes, before you dive into your team, we recommend taking a step back to look at your business as a whole. First: levelset.

How is your business performing in terms of revenue generation, growth or other key metrics? What barriers are impeding your growth? What gaps exist in your offers, team or overall capabilities?

Once you’ve gotten a solid handle on your current state, look to the future.

Where do you want your business to be, and how will you get there? Do you have the team you need to achieve your ambitions? Are there clear gaps that team members could fill with additional resources or skills? Does your team want to grow into more senior positions within your business?

With this knowledge close at hand, you can begin to create an employee development plan that elevates your team and your business simultaneously.

Embrace a culture of learning

As a strategic marketing firm, Giant Voices operates in a field that is continually evolving. It’s interesting and exciting to reflect on how our business has changed.

The client work we generate today hardly resembles the work we were completing 10 years ago. Our team is developing complex and highly integrated campaigns, generating revenue and sales for our clients. We wouldn’t be able to offer, let alone deliver, this type of strategic sales enablement work had our team not been hungry to learn all along the way.

Back in 2019, when our business was reaching a critical tipping point in our maturity and ability to serve clients at a higher level, Giant Voices leadership created a short course for our team that explored Learning to Learn and the Navigation of Moods: The Meta-Skill for the Acquisition of Skills by Gloria Flores.

Our team had reading assignments followed by a classroom-like setting for discussion. Perhaps the most valuable lesson from this course is the incredible impact our individual moods can have on our ability to learn new skills.

Unproductive moods can plague everyone at times, but the ability to recognize and shift that mood into one of curiosity, excitement or wonder is a gift not just in the workplace, but in every aspect of life. 

Once we, as a team, viewed ourselves as constant ‘learners’, we found more excitement around deeper exploration of complex marketing challenges and strategies for our clients.

We embraced a culture of learning, providing us freedom to try new things, experiment, fast-fail and to keep looking for better solutions for our clients. We eliminated the need to be subject matter experts immediately and replaced it with the freedom to learn, grow, explore and excel for ourselves, our business and our clients. 

The Learning to Learn mindset has been so successful at Giant Voices that we dust off our copies every few years to explore it again with both new and existing Giants. There’s always room to learn, and in the right environment, that’s a recipe for continued growth.

Empower Your Team to Take the Lead

After you’ve completed the internal, operational legwork to define your business goals for the near future and create an environment that supports learning and growth, the next natural step is empowering your team to take the lead on individual development plans.

Yes, growing a stronger team will support business growth, but it’s up to your team to think about their future and what they truly want out of their career. 

Ambitious, future-focused employees want to grow themselves and your company. Provide power and possibility, and there’s no telling how far they’ll go.

Encourage your team to reflect on the following questions and let them know you’re available to help provide direction, determine new goals and brainstorm action plans.

• What do you want to achieve in your role this year?
• What is your ideal next career step?
• What skills would help you in your role today? 
• What skills would help you progress to the next level?
• What experiences will help you grow?
• How will additional training and development help you support this business?
• How can we support your growth?
• Do you have any technology needs?

Working together with your employees to create individualized development plans creates shared accountability and responsibility for growth and progression. Driven employees will seize the opportunity. Complacent or unmotivated employees may self-select out—and that’s an okay element of healthy turnover.

Once the plans are formalized and in place, let your employees run, explore, learn and grow for the betterment of themselves, their careers and your business.

We recommend a mid-year check-in to ensure employees are on track to achieve their ambitions, as well as a more in-depth annual review to reflect on successes and challenges and reinvigorate the employee development plan for the year to come. 

Ongoing employee development leads to a stronger team, a healthier company culture and a higher quality of work. By nurturing the talents and potential of your team members, you’re not just investing in a brighter future for your company—you’re investing in the power of your people.