Culture Eats Strategy

Walter Rogers invites Alex Shootman to discuss how “Culture Eats Strategy” with Kevin Price on The Price of Business

Kevin Price: Welcome back to the “Price of Business.” I am your host Kevin Price. Talking to you about you and your business. Going to be talking to my good friend Walter Rogers. He is lined up. He is queued up. He is ready to go. We’re getting him ready to go actually. My producer is. Walter, welcome to the program.

Kevin Price: Good to see you figuratively speaking. You can say things like that in radio and no one actually knows you’re not in the studio. Anyway, glad to have you here nonetheless. You have a great guest that’s been on before I believe. Alex right?

Walter Rogers: Yeah, Alex Shootman is back. You know, last week we talked about the difference between managing and leading right?

Walter Rogers: We listed some very specific differences. The one key difference that we outlined, and you actually brought this up Kevin as a big difference, is that leaders have followers and managers have subordinates or employees. We talked a lot about that, the implications of that, and gave a few strategies around how to, you know, shift your pattern from a manager to a leader, not that you don’t need both skill sets, but you certainly need to apply leadership. All that’s great, but how does it come to life? How do you actually bring this to life? Alex has been though 4 turnarounds essentially, where he had to turn sales organizations around. This topic around culture will eat strategy for breakfast is near and dear to his heart and his company and his strategy inside of Eloqua actually is a best practice for how you go about shifting from management to leadership. I wanted Alex to come on and really talk about the challenges that he has seen, why it’s important to do this, the “what” and the “how.” Real life, first hand experience.

Alex Shootman: Thanks Kevin. Thanks for having me back. I appreciate it.

Kevin Price: Why don’t you just jump in with that great introduction by our friend Walter.

Alex Shootman: Yeah, I’m not sure I can fill in all those platitudes. Thanks Walter. Kevin, at Eloqua we help customer with the front end of their business generating revenue from marketing and sales efforts. So I get a change to interact with a lot of clients. Every company, if you’re a for profit company, you want more revenue. When you’ve got sales people, you hire sales managers. The first thing that happens when you’re a sales executive is you come into a business. The boss says, “Alright. What’s your strategy for more revenue?” Kevin, I’ve just learned the hard way that culture just eats strategy for breakfast. If you don’t have a culture that supports what you’re trying to do, you’ll end up failing. One of the first things that become important to me is to just define what is culture. There’s all sorts of great definitions in the dictionary, but what it comes down to for me is that culture is just the visible part of the shared values of the people in our organization. If the folks that are working with you don’t have shared values that are going to drive success, then you’re really going to struggle. Over time what I’ve observed is that there’s kind of three values that are really important for a revenue generating organization to be successful and to attract high caliber folks. First is just a focus on merit vs. entitlement. Kevin, you’ve got a lot of experience, and you’ve been in a lot of places and you know when you walk into a place where entitlement is the king and people just kind of walk around saying because I have this badge somebody owes me something. It’s a be served versus a server mentality basically.

Kevin Price: Yeah. If people are looking for a real stark contrast for benchmarks. Maybe look at Forbes when they talk about top businesses out there…I could personally vouch for some…maybe the community banks here in the Houston market versus the retail banks those to me are great examples. If you’re looking for real stark contrast in terms of how they should not be in the entitlement mentality, start with the department of motor vehicles. Then start looking at others. That’ll provide you a good benchmark of how not to be, culture-wise.

Alex Shootman: You know, to me there are three cultural elements. Number one merit based. Number two, straight talk versus passive aggressive. Nothing kills field performance more than the kind of behavior where, Kevin if you and I worked together you might look at me to my face and say, “Wow, Alex. You’re doing a wonderful job. “ Then you walk into the next office to one of your buddies and say, “I just think Alex is such a complete waste of oxygen. I don’t even know why he’s here.” Just that cultural aspect of I’m going to come to you, to your face and we’re going to discuss the issues and work it out. So, the second thing being straight talk and the third piece being accountable versus paternalism. Paternalism in an organization kind of looks like when everything works well, I think that I’m great. When things don’t work well, I just wait around for daddy to fix it for me instead of just strapping it on and just saying, “You know what? I’ve got a responsibility here as well.” Number one: Culture eats strategy for breakfast. We’ve got to have the right shared values. The values I’ve observed have mattered are merit based, straight talk, and accountability. Then there’s the whole piece Kevin really of making that come to life in an organization.

Kevin Price: Yeah, absolutely. That again is where you go back to your very opening statement. What was that culture eats?

Kevin Price: Culture eats strategy. Yeah, you’re not going to get strategy implemented if the people fundamentally aren’t in the same agreement with you on the bigger issues, not just the strategy. In fact they can be in full agreement on a strategy, but if the culture is messed up, it still isn’t going to work.

Alex Shootman: You’ve got to drive on the culture. You don’t do that by just making speeches. There’s really not a lot of things you can get done in life by just making a great speech. What you have to do is you have to set expectations and you have to inspect and you have to hold people accountable. What Walter and I have spent some time talking about internally…We just have a little performance grid. It’s a really simple 2x2 grid that’s got getting it done and doing it right on two axis’s and on the getting it done axis we just look at the person’s skills, the basic skills, the actions that they take and the results that they drive. On doing it right, the horizontal axis, we look at number one, are they focused on teamwork? Number two, do they have integrity and accountability? Number three, do they have optimism and enthusiasm? We score people and we rate them and we put them on the 2x2 grid and we talk about it. We say, “You know what buddy? If you’re not getting it done, you’re not doing it right, you’re probably not going to be here for very long. Frankly, if you’re getting it done, but you’re not doing it right, I’ll probably fire you faster than the other guy because you’re getting in the way of what I’m trying to get done.” If you’re doing it right, we’re going to coach the heck out of you and if you do both of these things well. If you have the skills, the actions, the results, if you’re focused on teamwork, if you’ve got integrity and if you’re filled with optimism and enthusiasm, you’re going to be a rock star here. You’re going to be well rewarded and we’re going to make a hero out of you. In summary Kevin, culture eats strategy for breakfast. There’s values that matter, but you can’t get it done with just a speech. You get it done by measuring people and talking to them and then making it real public, who’s making it and who’s not.

Kevin Price: I was going to just ask you, Walter, if that’s you about to speak Walter. Tell me about how you see this in the real world.

Walter Rogers: Well, I think Alex has just nailed it. It’s all about taking that courageous step, because it’s not just about getting it done. It’s about getting it done and doing it right. The fastest way for people to realize that this is a real message, that the company is seriously behind it is to get rid of the people who are getting it done but not doing it right. At the end of the day, getting it done isn’t good enough. You have to get it done, but you also have to do it right. So, that boils down to courage because sometimes getting rid of people who are getting it done may impact the short term performance of a sales unit, but the long term impact of eliminating those resistors is much greater than the short term impact that you’re going to face. That comes right back to leadership versus management because in order to get rid of somebody that is getting it done but not getting it right is really all about courage which is about leadership is not about management.

Kevin Price: Very good. Very good discussion. Hey, Alex how do people learn more about your firm?

Alex Shootman: Our firm is called Eloqua and we provide really powerful lead generation, nurturing and conversion tools to drive sales and marketing and you can find it at www.Eloqua.com.

Kevin Price: Yeah, now more than ever, people are really interested and very serious about taking their business to the next level, particularly in an economy that seems to be limping along on so many fronts. Now, is the time to be aggressive and very growth oriented. Not to be shy, if you will. I really appreciate the good things that you’re doing to help our audience Walter.

Walter Rogers: Well, we sure do appreciate the time you’re given us Kevin, on the air. It’s our way of contributing back to the community because we do think every single company out there can and should look at how to improve.

Kevin Price: Walter Rogers. Baker Communications. Every Wednesday right here on The Price of Business. Thank you, sir. Alright, when we come back to The Price of Business we’re going to be talking about so much more here, including some great information about some things that you can find only at PriceofBusiness.com and over at our sister website at HoustonBusinessDaily.com. One of the things we say is that this is the show that never ends. It continues 24/7 at our sister websites where we give you video, audio, and its articles like the one I just mentioned by Walter Rogers and so much more. So stay tuned for more right here at CNN650.

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