Does your workplace resemble a battlefield where no one collaborates, communication constantly breaks down, and productivity takes a hit?
Are your people more invested in politicking, one-upmanship, and other internal conflicts than driving the business forward?
If this sounds familiar, it's a sign that your business is grappling with dysfunctional team dynamics where power struggles, lack of trust, and poor communication make success a challenge.
But what leads to this dysfunction in the first place?
How does it impact the growth and the financial well-being of your business?
And how can you overcome this dysfunction to cultivate a healthier and more productive work environment?
In today's episode, Zach Montroy and I address workplace dysfunction and its impact on your business. We'll share practical strategies to restore collaboration, boost productivity, and improve your team's well-being, helping you maintain steady growth.
Zach is the Founder and CEO of The Intention Collective and a leadership team coach with over 20 years of experience in executive roles.
Zach’s passion for helping leaders expand their impact and build trust has led him to focus on helping entrepreneurs scale and grow their businesses.
As a sought-after speaker and podcast guest, Zach is known for his ability to distill complex concepts into actionable insights that help businesses achieve their goals.
With a deep understanding of the importance of both strategy and culture in achieving sustainable growth, Zach helps companies create high-functioning, high-
impact organizations through his innovative approach to leadership.
We discuss:
02:40 Prioritizing healthy team dynamics leads to business growth because healthy teams produce good outcomes while neglecting team wellbeing leads to burnout and frequent turnovers.
7:29 Cultural issues often stem from the lack of trust and courage, and the resulting dysfunction can lead to back-channeling, politicking, fear, shame, blame, gossip, favoritism, and nostalgia for the "good old days.
10:36 Leaders need trust, courage, and healthy boundaries to confront difficult facts within their team and to build a healthy work culture.
15:43 Leaders should apologize when wrong, create a healthy feedback mirror, prioritize clear communications, and explain their decision-making processes to build trust with their team.
20:25 Evaluate work success along the way, not just at the end, using "mile markers" and feedback.
24:25 Receiving feedback is a skill that can be learned, requiring curiosity and a willingness to become vulnerable.
32:08 Cultivate a healthier team dynamic by reassessing core values, aligning them with your desired culture, and examining and refining your existing habits.
Resources:
Zach Montroy, People, Team & Organizational Strategist, Founder & CEO, The Intention Collective:
https://www.intentioncollective.co/
LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/zacharymontroy/
Email:
Zach@IntentionCollective.co
Books Mentioned:
- John Gottman: What Makes Love Last?: How to Build Trust and Avoid Betrayal
- Brené Brown: Braving the Wilderness: The Quest for True Belonging and the Courage to Stand Alone
- Jim Collins: Beyond Entrepreneurship 2.0: Turning Your Business into an Enduring Great Company
- Kim Scott: Radical Candor: Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity
Kathy Svetina, Fractional CFO:
https://www.newcastlefinance.us/
Blog post | Overcoming Workplace Dysfunction
https://www.newcastlefinance.us/post/overcoming-workplace-dysfunction
Kathy (host):
Well, hello there, and welcome back to another episode of Help My Business is Growing, a podcast where we explore how to grow and build a business that is healthy and sustainable. I'm your host, Kathy Svetina, a fractional CFO and founder of Newcastle Finance. We believe that everything that you do in your business will eventually end up in your finances, and to get to healthy finances is to have a healthy business. But how do you get there? Well, this is where this podcast comes into help.
Kathy (host):
Have you ever felt trapped in a workplace where collaboration is a never-ending battle? Communication constantly keeps breaking down, and as a result, productivity suffers. Or perhaps have you experienced the frustration of leading a team that is more focused on internal conflicts than achieving shared goals. If so, these are major red flags that your business suffers from dysfunctional team dynamics, where power struggles, lack of trust, and poor communication make it hard to achieve success together.
Kathy (host):
And if you find yourself running a business that unfortunately has these issues, this is an episode that you most definitely want to take time to listen to. We're going to be talking about why is there dysfunction in a workplace to begin with. How does that impact growth and your business finances? Because trust me as a fractional CFO, I see this all the time, and it does. This type of dysfunction in the workplace will most definitely impact your finances. And how do you remove this dysfunction and develop a healthier culture? So these are all the topics that we're going to be discussing in this episode.
Kathy (host):
And as a quick reminder, all the episodes on this podcast, including this one, come with timestamps for topics that we discussed, and each one has its own blog posts as well. You can find all the links and the detailed topics in the show notes. My guest today is Zach Montroy. He is the founder and CEO of the Intention Collective and a leadership team coach with over 20 years of experience in executive roles. Zach's passion for helping leaders expand their impact and build trust has led him to focus his efforts on helping entrepreneurs scale and grow their businesses. As a sought-after speaker and podcast guest, Zack is known for his ability to distill complex concepts into actionable insights that help businesses achieve their goals. I'm excited to have him and share his knowledge and insights. Join us!
Kathy (host):
that welcome to the show.
Zach (guest):
Thank you so much, I'm so glad to be here.
Kathy (host):
So glad you're here because we're going to be talking about something really important, and that's dysfunctional relationships in business. My observation through the two decades of being around businesses, you know, first in large corporations and now in small businesses, has been that there's this direct link between healthy team dynamics and financial success. For one, when you have a toxic culture, you're going to have turnover, which costs money in recruiting and productivity. And two, there's also this focus on internal politics and personal agendas versus what's good for the business in general and the customer, of course. Then you start to lose that focus because of these unhealthy team dynamics, decisions are being made that are not in the best interest of the business in the long term. And obviously, that impacts the financial performance in the future. You being the expert on this, what is your take on this?
Zach (guest):
I think you're spot on. Look at anything that's living, right? If it's not healthy, there's no way that it's going to produce good fruit, good outcomes. And I think even as we kind of look at the trajectory of work over the last couple of decades, and oftentimes I hear people sometimes say, like, "Well, back in the day when I was working, we didn't talk about these things." And I push them and I say, "Well, what did that do for you? Were you better because of that or worse off?" And when they really think about it, they're like, "Yeah, we got burnt out. People didn't stay, they didn't enjoy their work, there was no meaning, there was no fulfillment."
Zach (guest):
And we have so much data now, we have so much research that's telling us that if we are not focused on the things that we know build healthy teams, there's no way we're going to stay at sustained results. Right? You can't get to healthy results unless you're building trust and there's vulnerability on the team, and we're building courage with one another. We have healthy accountability. There's clarity, people understand what their roles are. Because if you're not working on those things, they're going to actively be working against you. And even though we know that the cost of replacing an employee is much higher than working on these things, than building a healthy team, so often in our minds, we deprioritize it and wonder why our business isn't growing.
Kathy (host):
Yeah. And before we go into how do you actually do that and how do you fix this type of situation if unfortunately, you as a business owner do get yourself into either through stuff that has just been neglected or you have had some weird stuff happening in the team dynamics that you own. But I want to first define how does this dysfunctional relationship look like in the business sense because we all know, we have a feeling that subsides, how dysfunctional relationships look like in the friendship and the family environment. But how does that look like in the business? And there are some glaring things like probably someone's yelling and screaming, but there are also more subtle nuances of this. Can we talk a little bit more about that?
Zach (guest):
Yeah, I think when we look at dysfunction, especially on teams, when we look at dysfunction, especially in organizations, it oftentimes is like termites, we were talking earlier about living in Chicago. And when we lived up there when our family lived up there, we never I mean, I never talked about termites never heard about termites, we moved down to the south, we live in Nashville, Tennessee, now we go to look at houses and the realtors, like we got to look for termites, we got to get inspected for termites. And I'm like, wait, what in the world are we talking about here? And if you see termites, like, obviously, we're not buying the house. But you got to look for evidence of it too. And I think dysfunctional teams, dysfunctional cultures. It's the exact same way, right? Like there. There are ripple effects that happen throughout the organization. There's back channeling, we're not talking to somebody, we're talking about somebody, we're politicking, we're going around, there's pervasive culture of not being able to be courageous because we're fearful something is going to happen to us. shame and blame tend to run the organization at that point. You know, we're seeing gossiping, we're seeing that the politicking, the favoritism, happening in organizations my favorite, we see nostalgia, like the way that we always did it, the way that it's always been done, the good old days, those are all dysfunctions that happen in organizations when we have a toxic culture.
Kathy (host):
I always say that the worst words in business are "We have always done it this way." And we don't want to change because it's too uncomfortable. And the good old days, we did it this way, we want to continue doing it. And as much as we all like the nostalgia and the good old days, the only thing that is constant in life is change. In small business, especially, because the way you're operating right now is going to be different from how you're going to be operating in three to five years from now, even a couple of months from now. Because there are so many things that are changing, especially if your business is growing.
Kathy (host):
So, if you're starting to see, let's say, these types of signs in the business, some people are starting to be more cliquish, there's a little bit more resistance to change, like, "But we did this this way before all these changes happened." Or you're starting to see people gossiping more behind your back, especially as a leader, and people are banding together, your employees are banding together. What are some of the things that you can do to prevent this from going further and being even worse than it is?
Zach (guest):
I don't think that there's anything easy that you can do to fix it. I think it comes down to trust and courage. And as leaders, we have to be courageous about saying the hard things, about saying the daring things, about confronting the hard facts. And if we're seeing backchanneling in the culture, if we're seeing the invisible army of me, and all of these people think XYZ, but these people don't have the courage to voice it for themselves, there's a huge lack of trust. So, we really have to go back to the fundamentals of how do we build trust.
Zach (guest):
John Gottman, who's written a ton about trust as a psychologist over the years, says every moment, and as leaders, every interaction we have with our teammates is an opportunity either to build trust or decay trust. There's no in-between. So, every opportunity we have with our team, every opportunity we have with a colleague is an opportunity to either betray trust with them or build trust. And so, we have to go back and look at what are the fundamentals of trust. Healthy boundaries, and I take this from Brene Brown, her braving Trust acronym: reliability (we do what we say we're going to do), accountability (we make amends, we own our mistakes), the Vault (we keep information that's confidential), integrity (we lean into integrity), non-judgment (we're non-judgmental), generosity (we're generous with our interpretation).
Zach (guest):
So, it has to start there. If we're seeing these behaviors, it always is because there's something underneath the surface. And my bet would be that it's probably a lack of trust, a lack of courage on the team.
Kathy (host):
So, is there anything specific that, as a leader, you can do? Let's say that you have one-on-one meetings or team meetings. How do you start building that trust specifically? Because we read a lot of these books, and I read them too, obviously, because I'm a team leader too, for my team. It's nice to read that, obviously. But then you walk away and you're like, "This was great information. But how do you actually apply this into the business sense? In terms of having a meeting with a person, a one-on-one meeting, how do I convey that there's trust happening? That we're building it? I think active listening probably is a part of it. I'm guessing. But what are some of the other things that you can do as you're having meetings with people? Or as you go on a day-to-day, running the business, to build that trust with your team and make sure that they feel like they're safe in your business?"
Zach (guest):
Yeah, great question. Because if we can't take these learnings and put them into action, then really, they're meaningless. A couple of things that you really prompted me to think about. I would say, if we're seeing this behavior, if we're seeing some of this toxic behavior, as leaders, it's time to own it. So, if I'm in that situation, the first thing I'm going to do is say, "I'm sorry. I'm seeing some things going on right now that I think are because I've done a bad job at building trust on our team. And I want to own that. I want to apologize for that. And I'm committed to building a more trusting environment, a more transparent environment. And I would love your feedback. And I want to create an environment that's safe for you." Start asking some hard questions and saying, "Thank you for that feedback." Not being defensive about it, but creating a space where people can feel that their voice is going to be heard.
Zach (guest):
And that may mean, and I'm stealing this from Sheila Heen, who wrote "Thanks for the Feedback." She says, ask your team, "What are you doing well as a leader? What are the things that you need to continue doing, maybe even grow at? And what are the things you need to change or stop or fix? Like, what am I doing a poor job at as a leader?" And the first time you ask your team that question, they usually say like, "Oh, nothing. You're doing a great job. It's somebody else's fault." But everyone has an answer. We all have a list. We all have an answer. So, asking that question, getting regular feedback. And the whole notion behind her book was there are all these books about giving better feedback. But if we're not creating a healthy feedback mirror, you can give me hard but good feedback, and I can receive that, well, I can be not defensive, and I can take action. I can do something with it. We create an environment where feedback is the norm.
Zach (guest):
You know, I think the other big thing that I see as a trust builder is clarity. I have never worked with an organization that says, "We're too clear. We communicate too much. There's way too much internal communication going on here." Never have I heard that in 20-plus years of working. We have to make sure people understand what is it that we expect of them. What is their role? What is a win? What is the number that they're responsible for? What do they have authority over to make decisions or not make decisions? What information do they need to do their job better? And are we actively listening? Are we giving them those resources? Are we having those conversations?
Zach (guest):
Another big one, and I'll pause after this and we can talk through these. As leaders, oftentimes, we're the ones who have to make tough calls, tough decisions. And in the midst of working with a team, we're probably asking our teammates, "What do you think? What should we do here? What are your ideas?" And no one is going to win all the time. In fact, no one should win all the time. If we're bringing our ideas in, there's healthy debate happening on the ideas. There probably shouldn't be a lot of interpersonal conflicts. We should be resolving that quickly. But there should be a lot of conflict when it comes to ideas. We're debating those well with one another. And what does the leader do most of the time? It's so uncomfortable. They listen, they try to make peace, they sweep some things under the rug. And they'll say, "Okay, well, thanks for all that. I'll make that decision. And I'll circle back and we'll talk about it again." And we leave, and we never talk about it again.
Zach (guest):
I think exceptional leaders talk about what's the decision we're making? Why did I make that decision? And I value every one of you in the room and value your opinion, and I heard you. But here's why we're making this decision and how we're going to move forward on it. We don't need our ideas to win all the time. But we do need to be heard. And we need to understand the process of decision-making, that builds trust.
Kathy (host):
I think the point here that it's interesting to, as I've seen, that a lot of people don't, especially in the corporate world. What I've seen, and you can apply that to the small business world too, is there's this idea that every single idea needs to be great and it needs to be a winner. And unfortunately, you know, not everything is going to be a winner. And having that expectation that not everything is going to be a success, there's going to be some failures, especially, you know, in the growing business. You are experimenting. Some things are gonna fail, and some things are gonna go exponentially great. So I think having that, I call it almost like psychological safety, that, "Hey, we're all in this together. We're doing the best we can, and some things are gonna go sideways, and the other things are going to be absolutely amazing." But the people don't feel that burden of, "I'm going to make a mistake. And now I'm going to be reprimanded for it in whatever way it could be, that someone's not going to be happy with me, maybe I'm going to lose my job." So how do you give that psychological safety to an employee? That's, it's okay to share ideas, and some are not going to be so good. But we can decide that together. And even if something fails, it's okay to fail. We can fix it together.
Zach (guest):
Yeah, great question. I think it is modeled from the top. I'll give you a recent example on our team. We were launching a pretty big initiative in marketing, and it colossally failed. It was my idea; I ran point on it, but it involved other people on my team.
Zach (guest):
And we, you know, got done with this project. And I said, "That was a massive failure. Let's talk about why we failed, what went wrong." But, like, this was a really terrible idea that I had. And how do we learn from this? And the first thing my teammates said was like, "No, no, it wasn't a failure. Like, it was okay." Like, no, it was a colossal failure. And that's exciting! Like, now we know what not to do. So how do we learn from this and change it next time? And it took them a while; they're like, "I mean, because you know, you're the leader." But yeah, it was a failure. And that's great. That's awesome! Let's celebrate the fact that we failed. And now we know where not to put resources next time; like, that's a huge learning.
Zach (guest):
But it has to start there. I'm not my ideas, you're not your ideas. It takes a lot of crappy ideas to get to a brilliant one. And when we can openly talk about like, "Here's an idea I have, oh, here's how I can make it better," one of my teammates, we call her the queen of "Yes," she's really great at using that phrase. And she's also brilliant at comedy, in improv, but it's this act of building on other ideas where we can make them better. But I'm gonna hold my ideas with open hands. And it's not about me winning, it's not about you winning, it's about the best idea winning, and us being committed to seeing if that works as we leave the room.
Zach (guest):
But I love what Jim Collins says in "Beyond Entrepreneurship 2.0." He uses this metaphor of, you know, fire bullets, not cannonballs. And really, what he's saying there is we only have so much resourcing, we only have so much ammunition. And I think oftentimes we see this so prevalently in tech right now, this idea has to work. We're putting all of our energy, all of our resources, financial, and people, behind this thing. And when it doesn't work, we got to find someone to blame. Well, let's experiment, and let's try some things that maybe aren't betting the entire organization on this thing to see if it works. If it doesn't work, what worked about it, what failed about it, so we can constantly iterate and we can make it better and we can celebrate what went wrong.
Zach (guest):
Kim Scott in "Radical Candor" talks about she had was working on a team that was supposed to be innovative. If we can't get to innovation, if we're not willing to fail, and she has had the "oops" word of the week. Whoever owned the mistake talked about their biggest learning, like got this stuffed animal put on their desk every week. But it was something they celebrated because they wanted to build that into the culture. We want to celebrate learnings from failure; that builds psychological safety.
Kathy (host):
That's really interesting. And do you think it's because there's this mentality of "all or nothing"? It's either everything goes to plan, or we just completely abandon the idea. And you think that's contributing to this idea of, "Oh, my God, we're basically betting everything in the house and the farm on this particular thing that we have." And that puts so much pressure to perform.
Zach (guest):
Yeah, and I would say there has to be some aspect of fear that's ruling that decision. There has to be an aspect of even greed that can sometimes contribute to that, too, right? Like, when you go to Vegas and bet everything, you're not thinking rationally. We need to do something that's wise here. There obviously are bets that we're making in business. But I think, how do we make the bet but also, what's the system we need to put in place to really evaluate what's working, what's not working, so we're not just making the decision on this thing that we're betting on? And then we're waiting to evaluate success or failure until the end. How do we make sure we're instilling those mile markers along the way to say, on the front end, here's what we're trying to do, here's what done looks like. But at the 30-day, or 90-day, or whatever day, here's some things that we know need to be true, or we need to pivot, and we need to start thinking about other decisions or talk about what's working, what's not working, so that we can iterate and make adjustments because we're gonna get a whole bunch of new data. But I'm not sure why we wait until the end to determine success or failure when we have all of these points along the way where we can make that decision. Obviously, we need to give things time to see if they work. But we also, I think, have to make sure we're intentional about getting that feedback, often in planning for that along the way.
Kathy (host):
And it's almost like thinking of it as a journey. If you're, let's say that you're going cross country, right? You're driving from Chicago to California, you're gonna have stops along the way to see maybe there's a better way for me to get there. Or maybe I need to, you know, go around, whatever it's happening, there's a construction happening, whatever. So it's having the SOPs and figuring out, do I really still even want to go to her, I first thought that I would want to go, maybe I don't want to go to California anymore. Because something's happening over there. I want to go to Seattle or whatever. So I think the way how I think about that, you first start putting up the hypotheses, you get the data from whatever you doing, like even for us, like in for me in finance, things constantly change. You hope that you're going to end up where you planned. But you know, life happens, and you got to adjust.
Zach (guest):
Absolutely, I mean, to go off of your metaphor, I think oftentimes we're like, "We're gonna go from Chicago to California and let's just get in the car and go and see what we find along the way." We don't talk about, "Okay, well, by the end of day one, let's be in St. Louis," or, you know, "Let's be in Denver, Colorado." I'm terrible at geography, so let's hope this metaphor keeps working. But I think, you know, instead of doing that, we just get in a car, we drive, and we end up in Philadelphia, and we're like, "We'll get there eventually. We'll worry about it later." And we're supposed to be in LA, and we're in New York, and we're like, "Yeah, how did this happen?" You know, like, "Oh, you didn't do your job." Instead of going, "I think we're going the wrong direction. Maybe we need to pull out a map or GPS and track this to see what those points of success along the way are going to be." We just get in blind, we go, we work, work, work, work, work, and then we wonder why things aren't successful.
Kathy (host):
Let's go back to the idea of feedback because I think this is an interesting topic. How do you receive feedback? Well, I think that is a little bit of an art form too. You have to be able to be vulnerable and also just listen without taking it personally. And that's something that I have struggled with myself when receiving feedback from managers in the corporate world, and even now. How do you not take it personally and disassociate yourself from the idea that this feedback is a reflection of who you are as a person? Just because things might not have gone well in terms of how you lead people or how you did something doesn't mean it defines your worth. So, how do you prepare yourself to receive feedback well?
Zach (guest):
That's a great question. And I think most of us, it's a skill. It's just like leadership, right? It's a skill that is built over time. And I think maybe we believe the lie, like, I'm just not really good at getting feedback, or, you know, really, like, I get defensive, whatever. It's a skill set that I think all of us can learn, and probably none of us ever arrive at. We can always get better at it.
Zach (guest):
I would say a couple of things that I've learned along the way, because it's hard for me, I mean, I teach people to do this. And it's still difficult to receive feedback. But I think, number one, we have to be really curious. And I think that one of the first things that I always remind myself of is this person is really courageous in coming to me and trusting me that I'm going to receive this feedback in. So, I think the more curious that we can get, the future belongs to the curious. And we're asking good questions. We're really trying to drive understanding. What did I do here? What was my part? Help me understand.
Zach (guest):
One of the things we're doing when we get curious, and we have some good questions to ask when people are giving us feedback, is we're taking the limbic system in our brain offline, which is the fight-flight-freeze. Our brain thinks we're not safe. And so, we're not going to respond with thoughtfulness when we're in full-on parasympathetic limb, you know, fight or flight. So, we're asking questions to get that thinking center of our brain back online, so that we can process and understand.
Zach (guest):
I always take notes when people are giving me feedback, mainly because it helps my brain because I can see it, and I'm listening to it. It's your brain is also going, "Here's an emotion. Is this a safe emotion? Is this not a safe emotion? What do I do with this?" So, just to have that and be able to go back and I might not really be in a curious mode, I might be bitter, you know, whatever. But I can go back and say, "I heard you say this. Tell me more. Help me understand this. What happened in that?" And I think that can really help me have a non-defensive posture, right? If I can reflect a non-defensive posture, a posture of learning and understanding, I'm creating a safe environment for someone to give feedback to me. And that's vulnerability, right?
Zach (guest):
Vulnerability is that emotion of uncertainty. There's no certainty in receiving feedback. Vulnerability is emotional exposure. There's certainly we're putting ourselves out there when we don't know the answer. I might not have the solution to this, but I'm going to be open to hearing and understanding you. And know that, that whole idea of not taking it personally, is really hard because we're wired for connection. And our brain registers social pain in the same center as it registers physical pain. And sometimes feedback hurts, right? And our brain is feeling pain in that moment.
Zach (guest):
And I think being able to recognize the emotion that's being driven in us in that, in feeling inadequate, not feeling good enough, like, I'm going to write that stuff down because I'm going to need to come back to that, and try to figure out where's that emotion coming from? Maybe what is that emotion? What's the behavior that that emotion is driving in me?
Zach (guest):
But I think it starts with the wrong answer to your question. It starts with being curious. And it starts with having some mechanisms around yourself to really make sure you're not being defensive. You're being open, you're asking good questions. And you are leaning into vulnerability. It's our most accurate measure of courage.
Kathy (host):
And how often should you ask for feedback from your team?
Zach (guest):
I asked him in every one-on-one, which might be too much. But the reason I do that is because I don't even want to have to ask, but I know as a leader, I do need to ask because it's creating that environment. And what it has meant in the past is having teams come in after I did a really crappy job leading a meeting and said, "You did a really crappy job leading that meeting. And I know you're always asking for feedback. So here's some feedback." And I can say, "I'm sorry. What do I need to do to fix it?" Because, you know, my first response is like, "I think I did a great job leading that meeting. I was very efficient and got through it." Yeah, you also railroaded over these five people during the meeting. So, what do I need to do to fix this? Or, yeah, I did, and I think what I needed to communicate was a hard truth. And maybe I didn't even do that in the meeting because I was afraid or whatever. But like, we can always, there's always something to do with feedback from trusted people.
Kathy (host):
And this is interesting. How do you weave that into your one-on-ones? Because we had an entire episode on this podcast dedicated to just how do you run one-on-ones. And how do you run team meetings? And a lot of that was based on the focus was on the person that you are having a one-on-one with. There was not a lot of space on getting feedback from them. Like, how would you weave that into your one-on-one? Would you do that at the end of the meeting? Would you do that at the beginning of the meeting, like when it's appropriate? Like, how do you do it?
Zach (guest):
Exactly. It's probably different if I looked at every one-on-one. Definitely, I love the idea of a template. I'm, you know, a little bit more Type-A personality. Like, I definitely jump around quite a bit. I try not to for my more systematic friends. But I usually, that usually comes in the section of one-on-ones for me of, "How can I be helping you? What can I be doing for you?" Because in part of that is like, I want to consistently be working on being a better leader to you. So, what's one thing that you see me doing well? And that's not an ego. That cannot be an ego question. Like, "What am I great at?" No, "What am I doing well that I need to continue to do and continue to lean into?" And that's where people will say, like, "I really thanks you for advocating for me in that meeting," or "Thanks for showing gratitude to my team. That really meant a lot to them," like small things that I know that they're telling me or building trust, or, you know, whatever. And then it's been two weeks since we met, "What's one thing that you wish I would have done differently or done better?" And really receiving that feedback? And it's not a long section of the meeting. Sometimes it is, you know, but exactly, yeah, they're like, "We have 25 things that you did over the last week."
Kathy (host):
So, Zack, if someone's listening to this as a business owner and they say, "Okay, I think I might have a little bit of a dysfunctional dynamic going on in my team." And, you know, we gave a lot of good tips, and how do you actually do this? But even, what is the one thing that they can do in the next week or two to get them closer to having a healthier dynamic in the team?
Zach (guest):
Yeah, I always say start with your values. So one of the things that we work through with teams, and this is just an easy equation for anyone to work through, is your values, plus your habits equal your culture. So start with your values, what are your core values as an organization? And are they still relevant? Are they still true for you? So who is it that you are and want to be like, there's a little bit of aspiration in those. And then fast forward to your culture. What is it that you hope to read about working with or for you on Glassdoor? Or if one of your great employees that you want to clone is trying to recruit a friend? What do you hope they say about working at your company working with your team? And what sits in the middle there are your habits, your values? Plus your habits? And habits are just what do you put money time energy behind? What are the things that we do and hold sacred as part of who we are? Those two things equal your culture. But for most of us, we have not done the work of figuring out what those habits are. And I think that that's a great place to start.
Kathy (host):
That's great to have these habits to marry and with the habits as well, because I see a lot of people talk about the culture and the values, but not really about the habits, which is what brings it in from an everyday perspective.
Zach (guest):
Absolutely. There's no way you cannot get to, you know, from values to help the culture, if you're not working on how you operationalize those and how you invest in those values.
Kathy (host):
You know what this reminds me of those posters from the offices in the 90s and 2000s.
Zach (guest):
Yeah, we're like, had integrity with an eagle. You're like, what does that mean? I fly fast and catch small critters with my claws at work. Like what does that mean? Yes, I'm with you.
Kathy (host):
So habits, habits, you need to have it? Yes. Zack, where do people find you?
Zach (guest):
Well, I'd love for you to check out our website, intentioncollective.co. And we've got a lot of great resources there that are free. And we also offer a free 45-minute coaching call to business owners to talk about your business, do a maybe a little checkup on how things are going and ways that you can continue to improve the organizational health and aligning your strategy and vision, and making sure that you have confident execution on your team behind that. So check us out at intentioncollective.co.
Kathy (host):
And all of the Keys are going to be listed in the show notes too. So if you're interested, you can go and see the length. Thanks so much for being on the show, Zack, super appreciate it.
Zach (guest):
Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.
Kathy (host):
Thanks so much for joining us on today's episode, and I hope that you picked up some helpful tips on how to end this function within your business. Should you, unfortunately, find yourself in that situation? I know it's very, very hard, and you also picked up some ideas on how to foster a healthier and more productive work culture so that you can all achieve growth and shared goals together. Also, if you love this episode, you can find all the timestamps, show notes, blog posts, and links on the website, newcastlefinance.us/podcast. And before I go, as always, I do have a favor to ask. If you're listening to this on Apple Podcasts, please go to the show and tap the number of stars that you think the show deserves because this helps us with that much-needed Apple algorithm love so that other people can find the show and benefit from it as well. Thanks so much. Until next time.