Hire for culture fit first
Skills can be trained. Cultural alignment is harder to retrain after the fact. Culture reinforces expectations about how we act, lead, and interact at all levels of the organization.
Treat people as individuals, not stereotypes
Don't manage "a Gen Z employee" or "a Boomer employee." Manage the person—their specific motivators, work style, and communication preferences. To do this, you need to spend time getting to know the individual.
Case example
Supervisors were clashing with younger workers over task-completion vs. purpose-driven work styles, and over technology use. The fix: one-on-one coaching, not group sessions. He coached supervisors to see conflict as potentially healthy, not something to suppress and identify what actually drives each team member individually. The takeaway: build the relationship before trying to bridge the generational gap
Virtual and hybrid team management
• Require everyone to keep their camera on during video meetings.
• Make whoever's talking feel like the most important person in the room, especially if they are on a screen, not physically in the room.
• Include 3-minutes at the end of meetings to reflect on whether the cultural and engagement goals were actually met. Start by asking each participant rate the meeting. And don’t fall into the trap of saying “we don’t have time to do that.” This 3-minute investment in continuous improvement is too impactful to skip.
Culture isn't one-size-fits-all
CEO-owned, family businesses, non-profits, public, and VC-backed companies need different cultural models depending on mission and incentive structure. Define and measure culture via employee surveys and ongoing leadership conversation (not a values poster). As leaders, defining culture and continuously improving culture is too important to ignore.
CEO relationships set the tone
Culture is not team-building events. It is the sum of how the CEO (and leadership team) relates to every employee. A healthy leadership team disagrees and challenges each other. CEOs must avoid surrounding themselves with "yes people."
Action Items for CEOs and their Leadership Teams
1. Identify the top “high performers” in your organization. Document the specific traits/behaviors that make them top performers.
2. Bring this to your next leadership team meeting and distill all of these documented traits/behaviors down to the 3 to 6 key traits/behaviors.
3. Bake these into all that you do (hiring, training, promoting, compensating, firing, etc.)
4. Compare those traits against your org's published values.
5. Revise published values if they don't match observed behavior. Too often there is a mismatch between the stated values in a published mission and the values that come from this organic, honest exercise that reflects the real values of the leaders and top performers.
6. Build leadership habits around individual coaching, one-on-one engagement, and flexible-but-accountable management.
Experience a CEO Exchange
See the Calendar of upcoming and past CEO Exchange dates & topics.