Category: Company Culture

Company Culture, Leadership

Why having a clearly defined role & accepting it are two very different things

I’m a mid level cycling geek. I love nothing better than being out on a bike, especially a mountain bike and when I’m riding I find it’s often a mindful experience. I don’t get the same kind of flow experiences whilst running or doing other kinds of sport, although skiing gets me pretty close too.

Over the years I’ve read all kinds of books on the sport, whether it’s about Lance Armstrong and the conspiracies around him or more recently about Team Sky and their stellar performance in world cycling over the last few years. Sir Dave Brailsford is well known in the public psyche as one of the architects of this success. As I was thinking about my blog this week, one of his quotes about clarity of role came to mind:

  • Do the guys understand the teams’ strategy and the plan going in to a race?
  • Do they understand their own role in the plan?

The final piece of the obvious jigsaw is Role Acceptance.

Ask Sir Bradley Wiggins about role acceptance as his team mate Chris Froome rode away from him at the summit of La Toussuire in the 2012 Tour de France. Sir Brad’s autobiography makes a cracking read on the subject.

The concept of a strategy, tactics to deliver and people with the responsibility to deliver them is not new. Role acceptance is linked to company culture, but in the context of the average vet clinic it requires us to ask us some challenging questions. I’ve written before on culture and recruiting for culture and this is an extension of that thought process.

Our specific veterinary problem is that the pressure brought on by urgency in managing the clinical cases exacerbates our cultural and people challenges. Urgency usually trumps importance when it comes to task management. Urgent can take over by accident, but one way to help manage it is to ensure the important stuff is well thought out before urgency takes over. That means taking time to work on culture, strategy, tactical delivery of tasks and ensuring all team members know their role in the plan. Team members should be held accountable for that role too.

So here is the call to action. Answer the questions yourself first. If you can, that’s brilliant. If not, you’ve got some thinking and planning to do.

  • Does your clinic have a clearly expressed strategy?
  • Does your clinic have a plan for delivering on that strategy?
  • Do you know your role in the delivery of the plan?

And critically: Do you accept your role in the delivery of the plan?

I’ve come across many situations in clinic and business over the years where the strategy is clear, the plan is sound and people have the tasks clearly delegated to them. Yet the plan has not been succeeding because role acceptance has been an issue.

If you or your team haven’t accepted your roles, for whatever reason, then trouble lies ahead. It can be a real challenge to manage a person who hasn’t accepted their role in the plan. Usually it stems from having a divergent vision or belief about why they do what they do. Most people can explain what they do really well. Few can explain why as succinctly.

If your team doesn’t share the same vision and the same “why” of why you do what you do, then it’s unlikely they’re going to pull in the same direction and become a high performing team.

There’s a famous phrase, “Get the right people on the bus first and worry about them being in the right seats later”. Have you got the right people on your bus? Are you on the right bus? Don’t get caught up managing the seats on the bus if someone’s on the wrong bus. You’ll never make them happy and it might be time for a grown up conversation with them. It’s scary to approach this kind of conversation but usually both parties benefit, even if there’s a parting of the ways. Get the wrong people off the bus.

Engaging your team in building a shared vision, strategy and tactical delivery can reap dividends. Ensuring everyone knows their role and has accepted it is the final piece to get right.

The VBC can run a facilitated workshop for your clinic and coach you through it personally. We can help you work out job descriptions, roles, and responsibilities and help you roll them out. We’re not legal experts but we can also help you work through some of those difficult conversations you might need to have.

Drop us a line to set up a confidential chat, we’d love to hear from you!

Company Culture, Human Resources

How culture turns you into THE employer of choice

Recruiting for Culture: becoming the employer of choice is the second blog of two. Company Culture was the first blog, which is here if you haven’t read it.

The premise for this blog is a friend asking, “What do you do if you can’t recruit for culture and you’re desperate to fill a vacancy”?

I’m going to break this into two halves,

  1. Why you should never recruit when you’re desperate.
  2. Using culture to become an employer of choice.

Opportunity cost

That’s the answer to number 1. An opportunity cost when faced with two mutually exclusive decisions is defined as the value given up when making one decision instead of another. The cost of making a bad employment decision is traded off with the cost of having a vacancy.

I’m going to be honest, I’ve recruited when desperate and I’ve paid. I’m going to lay out the cost of my vacancy and the cost of the poor recruiting decision so you can understand how I paid.

Cost of vacancy

  • Sales revenue lost directly
  • Failing customer relationships
  • Personal impact of trying to manage my own job and do the “essential” bits of the vacant role too.
  • Impact on the performance of my own role and pressure from my manager.

Cost of poor employment decision

  • Revenue lost directly due to poor performance of the employee
  • Failing customer relationship, including the loss of credibility for putting this employee in front of them.
  • Cost, time, effort and stress of performance managing the employee
  • Cost of exit strategy for the employee

The two are almost the same on paper, but believe me; the personal cost of performance management in time, stress and wellbeing, far exceeds the cost of a vacancy.

So how do you get it right? How do you become the employer of choice? Well, that’s part 2.

Culture, culture and a rock solid, proven recruitment plan.

If you have a great company culture, your team, clients and friends will have been extolling its virtues already. It happens organically and word of mouth is still the most powerful business tool in the box. It’s just we do it digitally these days. Internal culture with your team is now exactly equal to external culture with your consumers, or at least it should be, because of the transparency and immediacy brought about by social media. Double that impact because we exist in a small profession where everyone knows everyone and you’re only 2 steps away from some who know how good or bad your business is.

Get your culture right and you won’t just have clients, you’ll have advocates. Get it wrong and everyone will know. So consider this:

  • What do your EMS students say about you? Well, back at vet school that could be at least 150 people who know you and you’ve never even met.
  • What do your trainee nurses says about you when they’re at college? Ok, there are another 50 people who know you.
  • What do your clients say about you and how you look after their pets or animals? That’s thousands of people!

You’re looking for Love at First Sight. You’re crafting Loyalty. That’s what your culture should do for you and that culture will travel further than you think. If you have a great culture, you become an employer of choice and people will know about it. The right people will want to be part of your culture and therefore your business.

So how does your culture help you become the employer of choice?

People with shared values gravitate towards you

Having a common platform of beliefs and values to work together with is rocket fuel for your business.

Your jobs become aspirational

People really want to work for or with your business! The news will travel fast and people will be looking for the opportunity to contact you. Many will spontaneously contact you in advance. Nurture these contacts; they will bear fruit in the future.

Your culture will spill out into everything you do

Culture and your mission become the flavours of your business, but you’ll have to work really hard to select for a good cultural fit. Passion and enthusiasm for your mission is a prerequisite for any prospective employee, but ensuring your next employee has the right cultural fit becomes just as important. Skills can be trained, but changing beliefs, attitudes and values is very difficult. That puts increased emphasis on a solid recruiting process.

Have a think about your business. Are you an employer of choice? Can you describe your culture and, if so, would your team agree with you? We can help you organize your thoughts and design a roadmap to cultural success, so drop us a line.

For another blog

Recruiting is a massive topic so we will revisit it in another blog. There are many steps to creating a solid, proven recruiting plan, but it essentially boils down to three elements

  1. Precisely plan your recruiting, from person specification and job description, right through to the end of your on-boarding process and probationary period.
  2. Have a multistage, objective interview process.
  3. Prepare and implement a stellar on-boarding process. Hiring only finishes when the new employee is at full performance.

The people you employ have to be as passionate about their mission as you are and they have to be the right cultural fit.

Company Culture

Are you a culture vulture?

A veterinary friend of mine was asking the other day, whilst you should recruit for culture, what happens when you’re desperate to recruit? Don’t you just get a person in the gap; what if you’re up against it?

She was very exercised about it, as she tends to be about most things, but it got me thinking. There are two blogs’ worth here for sure but firstly, here’s my perspective:

  1. 1. Yes you should recruit for culture, but most vet clinics haven’t got a clue about their culture.
  2. 2. No, you absolutely should not “just fill the gap”. The opportunity cost is just too high if you get it wrong.

So this blog topic: Company Culture and how to grow it.

Next week: Recruiting for culture and being the employer of choice.

Your company culture is what your team says and does when they think no one is looking. The trouble is, in this age of connectivity, someone is always looking. Your boss is probably looking the least but your consumer is most certainly looking and they’re tweeting it, posting it and blogging it. It can be highly costly to your business if you’ve got a cultural problem.

I believe the absence of company culture in vet clinics is one of the core problems with the vet profession right now. We’re a bunch of highly qualified individuals, working for a large number of small to medium enterprises. If we’re lucky, then the schools have stepped up and are teaching teamwork, leadership and those horribly misnamed “soft skills”. These soft skills weren’t taught to my generation or until recently and are the hardest and most impactful skills in the book. Clinical competency is a given whilst the other stuff isn’t. Developing culture is one of these skills but it cannot be contrived and has to be earned. To help you, here are a few things to reflect on, but if you’re really struggling, please get in touch and I’ll help frame it for you:

Culture starts at the top

It starts with the founding team. Your team looks to you for guidance, energy and validation. The health of your business is directly linked to the health of your leadership culture.

Culture is actions, not words

Actions speak volumes and consistent behaviours are essential.

Culture takes time

Built on clarity of purpose, passion and consistency and nurtured in an environment where your team can flourish, culture will develop. You must support it with careful, thoughtful decision making and this is often the challenge with partnerships or small groups of vet directors.

Values need to be lived daily

You should unfailingly live and breath the core values of your culture. They are the lifeblood coursing through the veins of your business. It’s what you actually do, rather than what is written down, that your team will take as the example. Think carefully; act deliberately.

Be a culture Vulture

New employees bring their own values to the business; meaning company culture changes over time. One of the key decisions to make when hiring is assessing how good a cultural fit a prospective employee will be. No chalk and cheese, it’ll never work out.

Consumers can spot fake culture a mile off

It’s the dissonance between what you say and what you do that will catch you out. You can’t impose culture or spin it. At best an imposed culture is a thin veneer of false promises.

A great company culture is the glue that bonds a team or a business together. It should be authentic, honest and lived. Without it, we’re just a bunch of people in the same building, doing roughly the same thing. That’s hardly a recipe for outstanding success.

If you need help herding cats, knitting your team or getting your head around your leadership group and establishing your company culture, drop us a line and I’ll call you back.