789 Rita Ernst:

Rita Ernst

My hope for the future as we have new generations after the pandemic really filling out our leadership roles at a much more concentrated level than ever before, that the values that they do have around teamwork and appreciating and hearing other people will lead us into the space that we’ve been talking about for decades, but not actually enacting, which is co-creating in the workplace. Letting go of this idea that the people at the top have the divine vision that they pass down like the 10 Commandments, and instead recognizing that we are what we create together. And so, it is about how we use the agency and the power of each person as an architect of the culture on a daily basis.

Quiet quitting. The great resignation. We’ve all read the headlines, and it’s become increasingly obvious that to build a great business requires a great team culture, everyone happy in their work and aligned on mission, vision, and values. So how to build that positive culture? Rita Ernst is an expert on workplace culture, and getting it right means listening and co-creating with your team.

MELINDA

Hi, I’m Melinda Wittstock and welcome to Wings of Inspired Business, where we share the inspiring entrepreneurial journeys, epiphanies, and practical advice from successful female founders … so you have everything you need at your fingertips to build the business and life of your dreams. I’m a 5-time serial entrepreneur and the CEO and founder of Podopolo, the interactive app revolutionizing podcast discovery and discussion and making podcasting profitable for creators. I’d like to invite you to take a minute, download Podopolo from either app store, listen to the rest of this episode there, and join the conversation with your questions, perspectives, experiences, and advice … Because together we’re stronger, and we all soar higher when we fly together.

Today we meet an inspiring entrepreneur and organizational consultant who helps startups and corporations alike create positive team cultures.

Rita Ernst is the founder of Ignite Your Extraordinary and the author of Show Up Positive, and she’ll be here in a moment. First, Look at just about any company’s website and there will be a mission statement and more often than not something uplifting about team culture and shared values. Yet how many companies are actually living their values day to day? It’s definitely easier said than done.

So, what does it take to build a great team culture, why does it matter, and what does operationalizing your values have to do with creating and sustaining a positive and inclusive workplace that attracts and retains top talent and bottom-line success?

Rita Ernst, founder of the executive coaching and organizational effectiveness consultancy Ignite Your Extraordinary, says your team culture is likely the biggest determinant of your productivity and profitability. A firm believer in personal growth with a Masters in Organizational Psychology, Rita left the corporate world to help leaders change it from within. Author of Show Up Positive, Rita shares why the best team cultures are co-created with team members and practical steps to create a positive and productive workplace.

Let’s put on our wings with the inspiring Rita Ernst  and be sure to download the podcast app Podopolo so we can keep the conversation going after the episode.

Melinda Wittstock:

Rita, welcome to Wings.

Rita Ernst:

Thank you for inviting, Melinda. I am so excited about this conversation.

Melinda Wittstock:

Me too. Well, I love talking about great workplace cultures, because at Podopolo, we have built one and continue to build one. I wanted to start, though, by getting into the link between happiness and productivity. Talk to me about how those two things are linked.

Rita Ernst:

That is a perfect question to be asking because the link can be either a destructive cycle or a highly productive cycle, because they feed off of one another so well. So, we as human beings, we have particular psychological needs that have to be met in the workplace in order for us to be able to contribute our fullest selves. And most people don’t name those things. They just talk about, “Am I happy or not at work?” When I’m happy at work, then I’m willing to do more. I’m willing to give more. I’m all in. When I’m unhappy at work, when I’m dissatisfied or discontent at work, I start retracting myself. I’m not as committed. I’m not as willing to do extra. The whole quiet quitting idea. But people don’t say, “Well, it’s because I…” well, they might, when you get into it, but they don’t lead with, “It’s because I’m not really valued, because I don’t get to contribute what I can do best, because I’m getting overlooked.” You have to dig for that. What they lead with is, “Either I’m happy or I’m unhappy.”

So, as easy as it is to discount this idea of happiness, don’t fall into that trap, because that is how your work force, how the people that are a part of your team, talk about it. They’re going to start from a place of, “Am I happy or not?”

Melinda Wittstock:

It’s just human nature. People want to be seen, they want to be heard, they want to make a difference. This seems like such a no-brainer, and yet we’ve all lived through and experienced toxic cultures in a kind of command-control or fear-based sort of environment, and it just seems so obvious that if your team members are happy, they’re going to be doing more, giving more, et cetera. So, what is the disconnect there? What is the issue? Because this seems so obvious to me. I don’t know why it’s not obvious to everybody.

Rita Ernst:

I think it’s because we forget that we have to give as much attentiveness and maintenance time to that as we do the other things of our business, like our financials. You don’t just set your financials on autopilot and say, “Oh, that’s taken care of. I don’t need to pay attention to that.” But not if you’re a smart, successful business person. You are looking at your P&L, you’re looking at your operations, you’re thinking about, “What kind of profit am I making? What kind of margin am I making? Where’s my revenue headed? What do I need to do to have this performance that I want?”

For some reason, so many of us, as business owners, we think about culture more specifically. I’ve even seen some of the best new businesses, they’ll write a culture manifesto when they’re founding the business. They’ll talk about who we are and how we treat one another, what it’s like to work here. But then we forget that people are people, and it doesn’t matter what you wrote, it matters what people do, and you’ve got to do work to cultivate. The best example I love to use is think of it like a garden. You can plant all those little seedlings, but if you don’t go in and weed and do that kind of maintenance, your harvest will be less because those weeds will take nutrition that your plants that you want to produce need out of the soil. They rob from that.

Melinda Wittstock:

Yeah, I love the garden metaphor because it is a constant. We like to say that it’s as much who we’re being as what we’re doing.

Rita Ernst:

Yes.

Melinda Wittstock:

I see so many companies, yeah, publish their values on a website, but then put no thought into how to actually operationalize them. If we say that innovation is one of our highest values, well, what does that actually mean in practice? What does that mean in terms of how we make decisions? All aspects of it. Or if we say that kindness is a core value. Well, what does that actually mean? And in our case, it’s like, well, it means that we need to be compassionate to ourselves. We need to be out of judgment with ourselves. We need to be open and empathetic to others, but what does that actually mean?

And really being conscious about implementing this. It’s easier said than done, but walk through the processes, from a company that’s kind of a little bit more on the conscious side to begin with. So, they set out and they say, “Yes, I want to create this really happy culture where everyone’s valued,” and whatnot. Talk to me about the steps of maintaining that garden over time, especially as a company is growing or scaling quickly.

Rita Ernst:

Well, I want to totally lean into what you were talking about, Melinda, because I think it is essential. And that is this idea of what we mean. You can’t focus on the words. You’ve got to focus on the doing. And so, the meaning has to come from the people who are active. So, what you have to do is you have to be in this ongoing, curious, observant state of, if, let’s take your example, kindness is our value. How are we living that? How are we experiencing that and when are we not experiencing that, and what is that about? And you want everyone at every level to be helping to develop and refine our idea of what that means. And it also means that every time you get a new team member, they’re going to bring their own stuff into the mix. So, it’s never going to be finished.

Melinda Wittstock:

Yeah, we always think there’s some destination, but it’s really the journey.

Rita Ernst:

It is the journey, absolutely. And so, somebody asked me in a recent interview, “What’s the future?” And my hope for the future as we have new generations after the pandemic really filling out our leadership roles at a much more concentrated level than ever before, that the values that they do have around teamwork and appreciating and hearing other people will lead us into the space that we’ve been talking about for decades, but not actually enacting, which is co-creating in the workplace. Letting go of this idea that the people at the top have the divine vision that they pass down like the 10 Commandments, and instead recognizing that we are what we create together. And so, it is about how we use the agency and the power of each person as an architect of the culture on a daily basis.

Melinda Wittstock:

I love that. That sounds really good. Talk to me about the practicalities of that, the execution of that.

Rita Ernst:

So, the execution of that in is in simply having conversation in your team about the values and about people’s experiences, allowing people to talk about, “Hey, we’re really good. We’re our best.” I have this conversation with clients all the time. They might have a list of 10 values, which, I’ll give them… We do the multi-rater voting system. So, we’ll put them up on the wall, and if there’s 10 of them, I’ll give each person five stickers. You can put your stickers and you can use them any way that you want on the wall. And I’ll say, “Tell me which values, using your five blue stickers, which are the values that we nail on a regular basis?” And I’ll send them to the wall. And some people will put three stickers on one. Some people will put one sticker on five different ones. It’s theirs to spin, their five stickers, however they want.

They will change colors. And I will ask the question. So, now we’ll get a yellow sticker, and I’ll give them five again, and I’ll say, “Tell me which values we need to be doing better at. Which are the five that trip us up the most, that we don’t do as well as we do others?” And we put those on the board. And then I’ll give them green stickers and I will ask them the last magic question, which is, “Moving forward, which of these values do you think is most essential in the next six to nine months?”

And everybody has a voice, everybody has a vote, but we see things that coalesce, we find commonality, and we can start a conversation from these are the most essential, and you know what? We’ve already nailed four of the five most essential, or three out of the four most essential. So, how do we maintain that while we boost our performance on this one? And now let’s get into some real talk about why do we do those so well, and what gets in the way with this, and what commitments are we willing to make to improve this one? What real-time behaviors would make a difference to that for each person?

Melinda Wittstock:

That’s wonderful. I love this concept of co-creating with everybody because that’s the way you get kind of ownership or investment in it.

Rita Ernst:

Yes.

Melinda Wittstock:

And so, rather than it being imposed.

Rita Ernst:

There’s a saying that I love that I share with all of my clients, and it is, people will tolerate your conclusions, but they act on their own. Meaning, when you try to tell people what to do, you can get compliance, but that is not the same thing as ownership and commitment. Ownership and commitment comes from within a person. It can’t be dictated. You can get compliance. You can micromanage, tighten, manage, threat, fear, control, manage people into compliance, but that doesn’t mean you have their commitment.

Melinda Wittstock:

This is so important. Watching a lot of people, Elon Musk, say, at Twitter, okay?

Rita Ernst:

Yes.

Melinda Wittstock:

Now, it is kind of like a lesson of what not to do. He may be getting what he perceives are results, but is he really? It seems like a really old school, very maybe masculine, dominant kind of approach.. Say, if someone had come into Twitter and really listened and really involved people, what would have been the difference?

The subtext of the question is really about, I think we’re in a process of real change. I personally believe the companies are going to succeed. Are those that master this more inclusive, more collaborative type of positive culture rather than that old school, almost militaristic one?

Rita Ernst:

I 100% agree. And I think that the leaders that really get this particular concept are the ones that are going to win. And that is, sometimes slower is faster.

Melinda Wittstock:

Right.

Rita Ernst:

Because when you have commitment, once you start executing, you don’t have people second guessing, dragging their feet. How many times do we go into a meeting, we have a conversation, we make a decision, and then we walk out of the room and two weeks later, we’re back in the room challenging that decision and reexamining it? So, we think we were so decisive. We think that we had speed on our side, but we didn’t because we made a decision, but then we didn’t execute it fully because people weren’t really in agreement. They were just unwilling to speak up and talk about their disagreement in that moment. So, then the disagreement comes down the road and everything has to come to a stop, and then we have to reexamine things.

So, the leaders that understand that allowing the space, even though it might take a little more time on the front end to get to a good solid decision that we all have confidence about, that we can then execute at lightning speed because we’re all on board and ready to go and excited and motivated, the ones that really shift… because you’re right, the old school dynamic is fast is about jamming stuff down people’s throats. And I just don’t think that’s going to work in our current workforce anymore. I think we have raised our children in our school systems to learn in a different way, and they expect those same values to be showing up in their workplace.

Melinda Wittstock:

It occurs to me that you see all this reaction to the school system, and all our kids haven’t been trained to be good workers, right? And so, you see there’s a lot of reaction against that rather than it’s actually a positive thing.

Rita Ernst:

Yes.

Melinda Wittstock:

So, give me an example of some of the companies, maybe a before and after of some of the companies that you’ve worked with. Maybe, let’s start first with a change management one. There’s a company that’s been going the old way, and, “Oh, man, this isn’t really working for us. We’ve got to step it up. We’ve got to figure this piece out.” Talk to me about the steps that you go through, how that happens, and what the before and after is.

Rita Ernst:

So, we’ll take an example that I talk about in my book, Show Up Positive. I use a lot of stories from client work with some anonymity built into them. But the pandemic has been the biggest human psychology experiment, real-time, on the planet. And as a psychologist, I am just there taking it all in.

And so, I was invited into an organization that was small, maybe 50 employees, not a sizable organization. An example of the culture that people told me about when I came in, Melinda, is one woman told a story about how she advocated for three years to get hired. Somebody was in the position she wanted, and she just kept coming back around every few months, once she knew who the hiring manager was, and saying, “If that person ever leaves, I want that job. If that person ever leaves, I want that job.” Until one day, that person left, and she was like, “Okay, I’m applying for the job. I want to work there.”

So, people described their team as a caring, committed organization. Another teammate said to me, “You could put any of our names out there on the marquee. That’s how much ownership we feel for the work we do and the commitment that we have to one another.” But the pandemic was this huge change that we all got tossed into. It’s sort of the equivalent to the earthquake in Turkey. Just one day life was not the same anymore. And even though they were showing up in their workplace, they had all of this fear and anxiety and concern that took them to a place of individual protection versus connection and teamwork.

And what happened was, of course, the performance started to fall and the team cohesion started to dissipate. And the next thing that happens is attrition. People start leaving. Some of your key people are leaving the workplace. So, not always going somewhere else, just saying, “I don’t know, it’s not the same place anymore. I just don’t want to be here anymore.”

And so, my job was to come in and help them figure out how to reinvigorate their team and get their culture back on track. And it’s become the core of my work. I call it culture repair that I’ve been doing since the pandemic, which is helping all kinds of businesses. They are not the only business. Almost every business suffered this depletion of their culture, this derailment of their culture and needs to repair it.

And so, what I do is I do a lot of listening. I engage with people at every level of the organization. I set up coaching relationships with the leadership team and engage with them on a regular basis to really help them shift their head space and their mindset and their language. We did intervention. So, the first thing we did is we did an all team member meeting where we came together and we reconnected around our values and we told some of our favorite stories about who we are and why we love this place. And then we told some of our favorite stories about the people we work with and what they mean to us. And so, we just focused on belonging and connection.

Melinda Wittstock:

Ah. That’s beautiful.

Rita Ernst:

And it’s extraordinary that the shift, just in one conversation like that, one facilitated design conversation, the shift that occurs. And then from there, we started then in smaller groups having conversations about our team values and how we want to be treated and how we’re willing to treat one another, what commitments we’re willing to make about the experiences that we’re going to share when we are working together.

So, people were complaining, “Nobody helps anybody anymore. Everybody’s just on their phone doing their own thing.” So, when we get in a room, when we start talking about our teaming and what’s getting in the way, and people start talking about that, and then the next question is, “Okay, so what can we do about that?” And we as you. Nobody can fix that, but each person has to do that for themselves.

And then we made statements about commitments, and we looked at the whole team, looking one another in the eye and saying, “Yeah, I could live up to that. I’m willing to step up to that.” And then we took that same idea and we started working across departments, where we have connectivity into other groups and saying, “We are still a team, so now let’s have a conversation about how we collaborate together across departments and in our workflow in a way that says, ‘I see you and I value you and I appreciate you.'”

And so, much of this work really comes down to, more than anything else, that whole issue of belonging and appreciation. And that’s really where the work of repair centers.

Melinda Wittstock:

it’s so interesting when we have hybrid work environments or companies saying it’s mandatory, you have to come back to the office. People don’t want to come back to the office. Or you have companies like ours that actually started in the pandemic, so we’re entirely remote. Right?

Rita Ernst:

Yes.

Melinda Wittstock:

On Zoom and Slack and other tools and whatnot, and there are challenges related to all of them, but the work that needs to be done is kind of the same. Let’s talk about it in the context of a complete remote company where people don’t have that kind of day-to-day in-person collaboration, and definitely, it’s harder in a lot of ways. How do you really get that culture in place at a company like that, say at Podopolo, where we put a lot of effort into it, you sort of miss being able to just work alongside your colleagues.

Rita Ernst:

I think that what you do is you have more conversation about what people want and what they need. It’s easy to give a simple list of do these five things, set up these rules, or have these kinds of meetings, or make sure that… whatever it might be. But at the end of the day, it’s who are the people and what do they need?

So, an example I’ll give, this is many years ago, and this was, of course, face to face, but when I worked in on a corporate team, and we were, of course, scattered all over, and I was at headquarters, and so we would have this annual meeting where everybody would come to the town where corporate headquarters is, and it would be a week-long event where we would get training, we would do all kinds of different conversations and learning opportunities and all these things.

And since we had so many folks in from out of town, then every evening there were scheduled evening events. So, we’re starting our day at 8:00 in the morning and we’re ending our day after dinner and drinks and everything at 9:00, 10:00 at night. And I had an infant at home that I was breastfeeding. And I was just like, this is not working for me. I really resented that infringement on my personal time. And so, I was dashing out of there as soon as I could. And of course, I got negative feedback from my manager about not hanging around and not socializing enough and whatever, but I had to do what made sense for me.

I think in remote, where we’re creating something new, there’s not a ton of templates, the freedom that that gives us is that we get to create it however we want it to be.

Melinda Wittstock:

Right.

Rita Ernst:

And so, if you just start asking questions, if you just make sure that a part of your regular check-in is what’s working, what’s not working, what could be better, what do you need that you’re not… Don’t assume, don’t force people to have social time just because somebody said on a Harbor Business Review article that you must have social time every week. Ask your team, “What social time would be valuable, and when would be a good time?” What’s a good way to do it? Can we do that social within our normal work? Is it something we want to do outside of our work? What does it look like, and what frequency, and what outcomes?”

Once you understand what your measure of success is, what each person, “This’ll feel right to me when,” fill in the blank, and we start comparing notes around that, then we have all the guidance that we need to help us get creative about, “Okay, so what are the things we’re going to do that would create that kind of success for us?”

Melinda Wittstock:

Right. Right, exactly. Well, I love the inclusion. It keeps coming back to that. What do your team members actually want? What would be valuable to them? There’s nothing worse than showing up on some sort of forced Zoom meeting where you’re supposed to be having fun.

Rita Ernst:

Yes.

Melinda Wittstock:

And the last thing you feel like doing is turning your camera on in a Zoom, do you know what I mean. It’s kind of…

Rita Ernst:

Yeah, you have to bring an object that represents who you are. And for some people, that’s just like, “Oh my God, you’re torturing me.”

Melinda Wittstock:

Right.

Rita Ernst:

My mind doesn’t work that way. Don’t do that to me.

Melinda Wittstock:

Right. And everybody’s different in terms of what they want. So, this inclusion and actually asking people and listening is something that you could do at any stage or phase of company, whether it’s a change management or whether you’re just a new startup, in whatever situation you’re in. What about the kind of company that has all these things in place and is actually doing it, but then suddenly finds themselves in rapid growth, rapid scaling, and it’s really easy to lose sight of the stuff? As you’re ventured-back, you’ve got to hit your numbers, you’ve got all these things incoming from everywhere. It’s going really fast, and it’s easy for it to fall off the rails at that stage.

Rita Ernst:

Fast growth is change, and change is at the core of everything that we’re talking about, Melinda. These are all moments of change, but that fast growth, and I give some example stories of companies that I’ve worked with, it is its own disruptive change. Because when you’re in that fast growth mode, it’s like a sprint. But once you win that business and you’re hitting your targets, the next thing that you’ve got to ask yourself is, “How am I going to sustain this?” That question is not a sprint question.

Melinda Wittstock:

Right.

Rita Ernst:

That’s a marathon question. So, if you are still training and operating on a daily basis as if you’re running that sprint, you are going to wear everybody and everything out.

Melinda Wittstock:

Right.

Rita Ernst:

You’ve got to switch gears, you’ve got to switch strategies, and you’ve got to start asking yourself questions about, “Now that we are this, how do we maintain this? What is the new training we need?” And for most companies, it’s about defining roles more clearly. It’s maybe about organization and structure. A lot of the smaller startups that I’ve worked with, I’ll help them build out their very first leadership team, because most founders build everything at the beginning with themselves in the center of all activity and decision making. And very rapidly, you become a bottleneck. It drives your entire team insane.

Melinda Wittstock:

It’s so easy to do psychologically, because you were there from day one, you’re involved in everything, and then you have to kind of let go of stuff, you have to get good at asking for help, you have to get good at receiving. I think a lot of women in particular have a hard time with that, thinking they have to do it all. And on this podcast, we talk about this a lot. Women really burn out in that stage, and yes, become the bottleneck.

And so, at these different phases… and a startup is really constant change, I love that you said about that because a lot of people are just rank uncomfortable with change. Change is uncertainty. That’s hard for people. Some people are wired for it and learn to accept it and live with it and be fine with it. I’m one of those people, but not everybody is.

What are some of these steps in terms of understanding sprint versus marathon, the cadence of that, and how the founder is gradually letting go of these different things and removing themselves from being the bottleneck?

Rita Ernst:

Well, the most important piece of wisdom, and jump in here and share because I know you have a lot of experience in this realm, Melinda, is that you are likely not going to be able to have the objectivity and insights that you need on your own. You are going to need a thought partner, a coach, a resource that is really going to help you step outside, because the demands of just maintaining the running of your business are so immersive. There is no space to really attend to the things that you need to attend to.

And this is where somebody who has expertise like I have is extremely valuable because I have the ability to come in as an outside observer and, one, ask really basic questions that you have forgotten to ask yourself.

Melinda Wittstock:

Right.

Rita Ernst:

Because you’re too far down the road. Two, one of the things that all of my clients say to me is, “I could never find time to work on my business. But now, because I have this time on the schedule with you, then every week I know I’m good, I can work on my business.” But the accelerator-

Melinda Wittstock:

The difference between working in your business and on your business is very different. And a lot of people, when they create companies, basically end up creating a job for themselves, and instead of being a 9:00 to 5:00, it’s around the clock, and lose the boundaries, first of all, around that, or can’t differentiate between how they should be leveraging their time.

So, I agree with you, we all need different perspectives. We all have kind of unknown unknowns or just things that we can’t see that we need other people. We need coaches, we need advisors, we need mentors. We need a lot of different support that we’re not going to be getting as founders from our team members.

Rita Ernst:

Right. And hear me, if you have an advisory board, again, it’s not about how to make your P&L look better. It’s important that you have an advisory board that’s helping you with some of those things, but we’re talking about the structure and operating of your company. So, you need to make sure you have somebody that’s talking, helping you think through those things. And a good consultant is going to come in… One of the things I do is I talk to the people closest to the work. I find out from them, what’s gotten harder since you’ve grown? What’s eating your lunch? What’s dissatisfying you the most? So I can take my time… You and your team are time starved. You have achieved this huge, enormous growth goal, and it is eating your lunch, and you are time stared.

So, when you hire a good consultant, they should be a resource that is doing some of this foundational data gathering that’s going to help you then make the kinds of decisions that you need to make. And that includes how to build a team and use your dollars that you have allocated for your payroll, for example, in a way that really is going to strategically support your business the best, not just for this moment, but for the next evolution of the business.

Melinda Wittstock:

Do you see a difference between women and men leaders in being able to make this transition to a more inclusive, happy workplace culture?

Rita Ernst:

I think I sort of attract a certain kind of client, in some ways. I see more differences in generation, to be honest.

Melinda Wittstock:

Right. Maybe it is a generational thing. That’s very interesting because you were mentioning earlier in the interview the schooling system, for instance. So, what Gen Zs and millennials really are looking for is a very, very different approach. And the sort of old school came up when every conversation about business was based on the book The Art of War. We’re going to crush it, we’re going to… you know what I mean?

Rita Ernst:

Yes.

Melinda Wittstock:

It was very, very male dominated in that archetypal way.

Rita Ernst:

Exactly. And the models, the older you are… I’m a Gen Xer, but I’m an older Gen Xer, and all of my models of leadership and management are old school.

Melinda Wittstock:

Right.

Rita Ernst:

So, I’ve read all the cool books about different ways of leading that are not those, but what I’ve experienced, and most of the time we replicate, and especially when we are under stress… It’s like as a parent, you say, “I’m never going to be like my mom.” But then when you get really stressed out, all of a sudden you’re doing something and you’re like, “Oh, God, that was what my mom did when I was a kid.” It’s the same thing. In the moments of stress, you replicate what is most familiar to you versus that theoretical idea that you had.

Melinda Wittstock:

Yeah. Very, very true. And these are always opportunities for growth, though. An entrepreneur, in my mind, a good one anyway, is really like an alchemist. And in those moments, where you’re presented with a challenge or you’ve had a failure, however small or big and whatnot, or you’re triggered by something, to see those as opportunities for growth, because it really is a constant learning process.

Rita Ernst:

Yes.

Melinda Wittstock:

Right. And once you’re kind of in more of that mindset, you actually get to the point where you’re grateful for… Sometimes when things go wrong, it’s like, “Oh, okay, so that’s feedback,” or, “Oh, wait, I’m triggered by this. What do I need to clear out from all the subconscious cobwebs that’s holding me back?” for instance.

Rita Ernst:

Well, I think the most successful entrepreneurs, if you look at the psychology of the most successful entrepreneurs, they do not allow their failures or their setbacks to define their possibilities.

Melinda Wittstock:

Right. They’re not making decisions from your current circumstance in that sense.

Rita Ernst:

Yes.

Melinda Wittstock:

Or maybe it’s just quick recovery time too. “Okay, this didn’t work. It doesn’t mean that I’m wrong or that I’m a bad person or I’m not talented or…” like that. Yeah?

Rita Ernst:

Yes. Yep.

Melinda Wittstock:

So, in the context of cultures, we’ve talked about bottom-up culture and really in encouraging the team to take ownership and be part of that decision making. But to what extent does the founder and just who the founders being on a day-to-day basis really set the tone?

Rita Ernst:

It’s extremely important at the beginning of a business because the founder is selecting the people to come join them in their organization. And whether it’s intentional or not, most smart business people are looking for and inviting people in who value match. So, that’s one of the reasons that the culture thing gets harder the faster you grow, is because early on, when things are slower, you have time and attention to really find the right people, and sometimes you find the right person and you create a job for them, because you’re like, “This person and I, we’re on the same wavelength. I want them to be a part of my journey.”

But, when you start to get that time stress, and you need more resources, when you don’t have those criteria really codified well into a system, then you will start to convince yourself that some of those values are not as important and you’ll compromise on things. And this is when it can become challenging, because one of the key places where I see compromise derail a culture is when you compromise for a leadership role. So, somebody that’s going to sit side by side with you at the table and they don’t really share the core values, but you feel like they are an expert and have an expertise that you need, and so you value their technical knowledge over their being. And that is often the place where I see the first major cultural disruption happening.

Melinda Wittstock:

Right. Well, this starts out with hiring the right people that are aligned. Because I have just noticed in all my businesses, if you have one person, it just takes one person who’s not aligned, it drags everyone else down. Or say you have a whole bunch of A players who are playing on top of their game, mastery, and there’s this one person who’s dialing it in, it demotivates everybody else. So, it’s just like, it takes one.

Rita Ernst:

Yes. And what I say in Show Up Positive, if one person can knock a culture off course, one person can set it back on the right track just by how they choose to show up. I think there is the possibility that is real for that to go both ways, but you are 100% right about that, Melinda. I see that too. And so, the longer a company has been around, and the more change-out in players that you have, the more distance you can get from that, unless you really do have that manifesto practice, which some companies that I have seen that are led by younger leaders are really leaning into that strongly.

But if you don’t have an onboarding practice and a selection practice and other things that really link to the culture and wanting to ensure that we are all in this place of shared purpose and meaning around the experience of what it’s going to be to be a part of this team, and that we create that together on a daily basis, if you don’t pay attention to that, what you’re telling those people is it doesn’t matter. And so, they’ll just show up and be whoever they’re going to be.

Melinda Wittstock:

Yeah. This is one of the reasons why we’re in the process of hiring a chief of staff to work with me very closely, but on actually operationalizing our values around our decision making, around that onboarding, around just the actual implementation of the vision and the values, that that’s kind of critical to get that person in place and be just a little bit ahead of the chaos of rapid scale, which we’re about to go do. And that’s-

Rita Ernst:

Let me just throw in real quick because you just triggered something for me while we’re talking about this. And we said this earlier, what doesn’t work is telling people. So, if your onboarding process is to give people a piece of paper with a list of values or a list of team norms and say, “This is how we do things around here,” there’s no ownership. You’re asking for compliance, you’re not creating ownership.

Melinda Wittstock:

So, say in the onboarding process, you have your published values and you have the existing systems that you’ve put into place so far with the team. So, how do you get that sense of ownership through some sort of interactive process in your onboarding to get ownership from people right from the beginning as you bring new people on?

Rita Ernst:

You make space for the conversation. You talk about these values. You talk about their relative importance to other people. You talk about their experience. When have you experienced this value? How do you think you can contribute to this on a daily basis? If the team were living this value every day, what would that look like to you? And then, if that’s what it looks like, how willing are you to do those same things? What commitment are you willing to make to that end? You can only get there by giving people space to really engage and talk about it.

And there is magic. You could say, “Well, people will just do that as homework or individual work or whatever.” But our minds, when we just think about things, our minds process at this crazy speed rate that just has stuff rolling through our head continuously without any really good examination. So, what we need to do is we need to slow that process down. And this is why talking or writing helps because that forces us to slow our minds down and be more thoughtful and more in tune with our own thinking and ideas.

And so, it’s very important, if you’re building your onboarding processes and stuff, if you’re just going to give people a little takeaway workbook, do it yourself, you’re missing this really important, valuable piece, which is this need to have an exchange in thought-provoking conversation around ideas.

Melinda Wittstock:

So, tell me a little bit about your ideal customers, Rita, and how many you take on, who you’re looking for, if anyone’s listening to this show and could become a client of yours. Who’s your ideal?

Rita Ernst:

So, my ideal client is an independent business owner. It’s not that I won’t work with publicly-traded companies, but my heart and my passion is with that independent business owner. I love working with founders and leaders who are very close to all of those decisions, who we are, what we’re about, how we do it, who we serve, those kinds of things. And independent business owners just have a different connectivity, which I’m sure from your experience, you feel that, Melinda, in your own businesses that you’ve run versus being a leader at a public company.

Melinda Wittstock:

Right. The interesting thing, I get asked all the time in the context of Podopolo, “So, are you going to IPO?” And I can’t think of anything worse than being the CEO of a publicly-traded company, honestly.

Rita Ernst:

You end up having to put your financial performance in a different position sometimes in your priority list.

Melinda Wittstock:

Well, completely. Completely. Because you’re suddenly now forced into this short-term paradigm, where the only thing that matters is shareholder short-term value. And so, this is where you start to see a lot of businesses that may be set out to be triple bottom line or actually care about their employees’ long-term health, say, or care about these other things, and suddenly you’re being judged by a paradigm that I think is not sustainable, actually.

Rita Ernst:

Yeah. I follow Jessica Kriegel on LinkedIn. She is the chief scientist at Culture Partners. She’s been sharing data and research around this trend that we’re on right now of layoffs. And it’s not just the technology sector, it’s all over. But there’s a ton of data that shows in prior recessions, the companies that chose to keep staff versus lay staff off came out of the recession much stronger and in a much better place, and outperformed those companies that made those short-term decisions to cut payroll to keep Wall Street happy.

But, you feel very torn. It just takes a different decision for sure. And having spent a lot of time in corporate and seen those trade-offs, I love the independent business owner’s ability to really decide that they can allow their profits to be in a different place or take a different margin in the short term to position themselves for something bigger in the long term. And that we can have a vibrant conversation about that that isn’t clouded by this drumbeat of the marketplace.

Melinda Wittstock:

Well, I think I had a very early lesson in that, way, way back very, very early in my career when I was a financial and then media correspondent of the Times of London, and I got the chance to be a fly on the wall watching Richard Branson, and his decision making around taking his company back private again for exactly that reason. It stayed with me.

Rita Ernst:

Well, and think about what his company is and how they’re known and how they’re respected. And I don’t know that that would be possible if he hadn’t.

Melinda Wittstock:

It wouldn’t. I seriously believe that it would not.

Rita Ernst:

I’m with you. I’m with you. So, I don’t want to bash corporate too much, but you asked my favorite, those are my favorite clients. And the industry doesn’t matter because my core belief, Melinda, is people like you, you’re smart business leaders. You know your business. I’m not McKinsey & Company. I’m not coming in to tell you, “Here are the five things that you need to do that all of your competitors do in order to keep up.” I believe that if you own a business, if you’re an executive in a business, you got there for a reason. You and your team know the right answers. We just need to convene the right conversations to allow them to emerge. And so, industry doesn’t matter. It’s a willingness to do that, to invest the time, create the space, to listen to your team.

So, I interview my potential clients as much as they interview me. If you’re not interested in letting me talk to people at all levels of the organization and design engagement practices and workshops and other things where we are working at all levels of the organization, if you can’t understand and make that part of your priority, then I’m not going to be the right solution for you.

Melinda Wittstock:

Right.

Rita Ernst:

And so, it really comes down to this mutual purpose that we develop. And I work in a contracted phase. I work in 90-day sprints. So, if we’re going to set up a contract to do something, it’s not going to be six months, 12 months, 18 months. We’re going to say in the next 90 days, what’s the most important movement that you want to accomplish? Now, it has to be reasonable. We have to be able to do it. We’ve got to get it contained correctly. And then we’re going to focus on that. And then, if you want to reengage me for another 90 days, immediately following that, or three months later, let’s do it. I get a lot of repeat business that way. But we can make change more effectively when we can define it clearly and get that momentum.

Melinda Wittstock:

100%.

Rita Ernst:

Momentum is your friend. Because we go from uncertainty to certainty in a timeframe that people can handle, that 90-day window. And so, I work kind of in that project mode, and I limit my clients, because it’s me. I don’t have a whole staff or team. It’s me, my wisdom, my experience that my clients are buying. And so, I work with no more than six to eight depending on the size of the work that we’re doing. But if we’re talking about 90-day sprints, I’m not going to have more than, really, five clients that I’m in that process with at any point in time, because I know that I want to make each client a priority. And I don’t want somebody to say, “Hey, can we get together? I have this urgent thing, I need your help,” and I say, “Well, in three weeks I have an opening on my calendar.”

Don’t you hate when you need the doctor and you call and you say, “I’m having this medical issue, I need to see the doctor,” and they say, “Well, we can see you in July”? And they’re like, “Well, by July, hopefully it’s resolved. If it’s not, I’m going to be in the hospital. This is crazy.” I never want my clients to have that experience. So, I do keep it really tight. And because we are doing the 90-day sprint, it also allows me to rotate through clients. So, if I can’t start with you immediately, usually it’s a super long wait for us to get going.

Melinda Wittstock:

Fantastic.

Rita Ernst:

You can find out about me at igniteextraordinary.com. You’ll probably put that in the show notes. That’s my website, and everything about me is there.

Melinda Wittstock:

Fantastic. Well, thank you so much for putting on your wings and flying with us today.

Rita Ernst:

This has been a delightful conversation. I love the way we think together, Melinda. Thank you for the invitation.