Culture - Tonesetters

Run creatively with me for a moment.

When you are cooking dinner at home, what sets the tone for the meal? Typically, it's driven by the main ingredient. Steak takes you one way. Chicken another. Eggplant takes you places that I'm neither with familiar or comfortable enough to go there.

All of the other ingredients either intensify, soften, but overall are (hopefully) chosen to complement the main entree.

For those of you that handle that operation with ease and grace, it comes quite naturally. For the rest of you... well, there's cookbooks and the internet.

Back to Business

Culture is largely an extension of the individual with the most authority and/or influence within a room. Don't let it puff up your ego, but you are the entree. You establish the boundaries and overarching cultural direction for your company. If you are inwardly driven by connection and creativity, that will reflect itself outwardly in significant ways. If you are intensely private and introverted, that shows up in different ways.

You can put whatever values and mission statements you want on the wall in hopes to manifest the culture you think others may desire. But the tone is set by your actions - via conversations, accountability, setting expectations. Your non-verbal communication reinforces it even when you are not speaking.

We help clarify this message for your teams. We also work to unravel conflict that has arisen by people who are not aligned with your culture and vision. These situations happen in unglamorous ways. As with most of our approaches, it does not require significant financial commitments, but rather conversations that ultimately set the stage for reconciliation, alignment, and the establishment of boundaries for your team to work within moving forward. As with tackling most of your business challenges and growth, the way forward is usually choosing the harder path over and over, living uncomfortably. We help lead your team through that.

Feel free to reach out - until then, keep bringing good value to the world,

Eric