Good Comes First - Teaching leaders to make respect as important as results

Driving Results Through Culture

Today’s video features Good Comes First book co-authors Mark Babbitt and yours truly discussing what it takes to build and sustain an uncompromising work culture. Here’s an excerpt.

Chris: Once leaders get to a stage where they realize “This is not sustainable. We’re not going to be able to attract the kind of talent we need. We’re not going to be able to manage using, you know, everybody around the conference room table so I can yell at you!” A toxic work culture doesn’t translate to global remote digital nomads, which, which in a lot of cases is what employees are able to do.

We want leaders who understand that it could be better – who understand it could be different – to be able to look at our process. In essence, the process is three pieces. It’s define the culture you want. then align practices, people, behaviors, decisions to that defined uncompromising culture and third, refine it over time.

The idea of, as you say, if leaders promote good comes first, they must make respect as important as results. We have to teach leader how to implement this change.

Mark: The teaching part is what excites me most about working with you on this book. We both take a mentor approach to everything we do in our businesses and in our personal lives.

And it was fun to actually create a model where we could teach people – not talk at them – but work with them to model the behaviors themselves, coach those behaviors, to monitor, measure the behaviors, and mentor people through the change.

Occasionally when you have people that aren’t living up to the new expectations. What can you do?

Too many business books talk at you, not with you. They tell you exactly what to do at what moment, but in a, not in an actionable way. In this book we actually create the steps where if you first model and then you coach, and then you measure, well, now you have something quantifiable to go back to an individual and say, look, your performance is actually really good, but you’re not showing the level of respect that we demand now within our new culture and we’re going to work on that. We’re very happy with this, but we’re going to work with you on this.

And Good Comes First walks a leader through that. So it’s, it’s not a personality thing. It’s not a toxic thing. It’s not even a negative thing. It’s like, “No, you have to be both a high performer and you have to have high values.

And we’re going to measure both. We’re going to monitor both and we’re going to help get you into the, into the higher sector of both of those areas – results and respect. And then you’re a model corporate citizen.”

Good Comes First will be released on September 28, 2021. Learn more and pre-order your copy at GoodComesFirst.com.

This is episode four of our Good Comes First video series, published on http://DrivingResultsThroughCulture.com on August 3, 2021.

You’ll find Good Comes First and Culture Leadership Charge episodes and more on my YouTube, iTunes, and Amazon Podcast channels.

Have you responded to this month’s culture leadership poll? Add your ratings to two questions – it takes less than a minute. Once you vote, click “results” to see the responses from around the globe.

Video production was brilliantly handled by Phelos Productions – Chris Archuleta and David Towers.