Culture Hacks | Colin Ellis | Episode 177

Scott McCarthy [00:00:01]:
Today, on episode 177 of the Peak Performance Leadership Podcast, we speak to culture expert Colin Ellis. And he’s back with Culture Hacks. And he’s going to tell you how you can quickly and simply improve your culture today. That’s right, folks. It’s all about culture today. Are you ready for this? All right, let’s do it. Foreign welcome all to the Peak Performance Leadership Podcast, a weekly podcast series dedicated to helping you hit peak performance across the three domains of leadership. Those being leading yourself, leading your team and leading your organization.

Scott McCarthy [00:00:46]:
This podcast couples my 20 years of military experience as a senior Canadian army officer with world class guests to bring you the most complete podcast of leadership going. And for more, feel free to check out our website@movingforwardleadership.com and with that, let’s get to the show. Yes, it is your chief leadership officer, Scott McCarthy. And welcome to the show. And today you’re going to love it just like every other episode because today we’ve got returning top shelf guest, one of the most downloaded guests of all time on the podcast here, Colin Ellis. And we’re going to be talking about culture and more importantly, easy, quick and effective ways which you can improve your culture today. That’s right, how you can improve your culture today within your organization. You see, Colin is a culture expert.

Scott McCarthy [00:02:07]:
He’s second time that he’s been on the show. In fact, he’s one of my top rated and most downloaded guests of all time. And during this episode we go into his latest book, Culture Hacks and we talk about things, how you know a leader, you can quote, unquote, hack your culture. Newsflash, we’re not actually hacking your culture, but rather bite sized things which you can change to improve your culture. So we talk about how meetings train your culture, a way to find trust in your team and in your culture, why failing will actually tighten your organization and not divide it, how hobbies can bring your team together and so much more calm is an award winning international speaker, best sitting author and just an awesome guy to listen to. He’s from the good old Australia down under. So you know, he’s got that little twang to him which for us North American folks, we enjoy and it, you know, it just makes him easy to listen to. But you’re seriously folks, all joking aside, you’re gonna love this episode.

Scott McCarthy [00:03:23]:
Colin and I, we have a great, you know, great rapport. We have this, you know, bond and basically friendship that made this episode just even more special. To be honest. I love having him on the Show. I love interacting with him because we see things in such eye to eye, yet he puts it in a perspective, which, even for me, I haven’t even thought about at this time. So, you know, you’re going to get a lot out of this episode. Anyway, that’s it for me. So why don’t you sit back, relax, and enjoy my conversation about how you can hack your culture with Colin Ellis.

Colin Ellis [00:04:16]:
Hey, Scott. How are you?

Scott McCarthy [00:04:17]:
Welcome to the show, buddy. Welcome back, welcome back. Round two. So I was just about to tell you this before I hit Go live slash record, but I wanted to save it for when we are now live. And that is you, for the longest time, was the number one downloaded show on my podcast. Forever.

Colin Ellis [00:04:40]:
Is that right?

Scott McCarthy [00:04:41]:
Yeah. With. With.

Colin Ellis [00:04:42]:
So. So. So who’s gone ahead of me? Because I’m going to hunt that guy.

Scott McCarthy [00:04:47]:
You might. You might cry. Do you. You really want to know?

Colin Ellis [00:04:50]:
No. No, not really. I’m gonna. I’m just gonna eat that compliment while it’s being put on a plate in front of me and go, cool. How do I beat that? Yeah.

Scott McCarthy [00:04:57]:
All right, so I think you’re gonna beat it now, right? Because you’re back better than ever with culture.

Colin Ellis [00:05:03]:
Better than ever with everything that we learned from the last year, Scott.

Scott McCarthy [00:05:08]:
Awesome. I can’t wait to dive in. So here’s my first question for you, Colm. When you say culture, hacks, and the word hacks comes to me, you know, culture. You know, hack. The word hack to me is something that’s normally cheap, easy, something you jimmy rig, you know, all these. You know, you see those hacks, right? Like, oh, dad hacks, you know, which are usually like. You know, how to entertain your kid.

Scott McCarthy [00:05:34]:
You sit them on the Roomba and you send the Roomba off the vacuum, and then you sit back and watch the game with a beer. But I’m like, culture, like culture change has got to be deliberate. It’s. It’s. It’s like hard. It takes forever, it takes a lot of effort, etc. Etc. How do you hack culture? So your demand is going to tell me.

Colin Ellis [00:05:52]:
Yeah, that’s what I was going for. Cheap shortcuts. That’s. That’s my middle name, Colin. Cheap shortcut. Alice. No, I mean, yeah. Yes, I get that.

Colin Ellis [00:06:04]:
I think I’m using it more in a software context in the sense that what are those little things that you can do to almost be the system? And, you know, it’s one of those things, Scott, when I kind of look back at my own career as a manager and How I. And something. I get asked a lot, you know, when I’m doing speeches or facilitating sessions, they’re like, oh, what’s, what are three things that we can immediately do? And I’m like, oh, change the length of your meetings or don’t send email. Like, real simple stuff. And they’re like, dude, that’s awesome. I’m like, is it awesome or is it just something that I just decided I was going to do? So I think that that’s the thing with culture. Culture is a series of micro experiences, Scott. And I think often we tell ourselves a story that’s that it’s too hard.

Colin Ellis [00:06:46]:
And where organizations don’t have the money to throw behind a dedicated, you know, what I. What I would call an evolution program, then what are those little things that managers can do to actually kind of incrementally improve stuff? So that’s what I mean by hacks.

Scott McCarthy [00:07:01]:
That’s. Yeah, yeah, no, don’t worry. I knew you weren’t going for the cheap. The cheap, but I just had to throw that out there first because I knew you’d be a good sport for it. So here’s a good question for you then. Would you say this is definitely geared towards those middle managers who are kind of like sandwiched, right? They have that overarching company, corporate whatever, but yet they’re kind of like in their own little entity, their own maybe satellite office or whatever, and they’re trying to align with corporate culture, but at the same time, every little individual area has their own culture. So trying to like hack their way in there and make their own little. I wouldn’t say empire, definitely not empire, but like their own identity within the greater identity.

Colin Ellis [00:07:48]:
Yeah, I’d say that spot on, Scott. You know, in Culture Fix, I talked a lot about this concept of subcultures, and I don’t think we really, we really understand the importance of subcultures. So that’s every manager creating their own sense of vibrant culture to contribute to the organization’s culture. Culture. Often what happens, particularly within kind of small, within medium large corporates is they say, this is your culture, this is what you do. And of course, the inner child in us comes out, goes, we’re not going to do that. In fact, we’re going to do anything but that. And so these.

Colin Ellis [00:08:20]:
It’s aimed at managers who want to demonstrate that they’ve got the courage to do things differently while still making sure that it lines up with what the organization is trying to do. So, so essentially it’s 26 kind of simple decisions or simple. And they are so, you know, I never put anything in my book, Scott, that I wouldn’t do myself either as a, as a former manager or with my clients now, you know, and I would say at least half of them have been done by clients even in the last kind of 18 months.

Scott McCarthy [00:08:51]:
All right, so let’s, let’s, let’s hit up the audience with some of these. You know, we got 26 of them in your book now, obviously we don’t need to go in through all 26.

Colin Ellis [00:09:00]:
Yeah, it’s got a nine hour podcast.

Scott McCarthy [00:09:04]:
I don’t. Joe Rogan this show. You know, no three hour shows here because, you know, the listeners. Listeners got you. They only got so much time.

Colin Ellis [00:09:12]:
That’s right.

Scott McCarthy [00:09:13]:
Right. And so I want, you know, quality over quantity, as I say, and basically everything in life. Unfortunately, my wife wouldn’t. Would been listening to me when that came to kids. And now I have two. But no, they’re both great kids.

Colin Ellis [00:09:26]:
We have to say that, don’t we?

Scott McCarthy [00:09:29]:
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. No, they really are great.

Colin Ellis [00:09:32]:
Just in case they’re listening. They’re never listening.

Scott McCarthy [00:09:35]:
No. They should be in bed right now. All right, so let’s think of the 26. Where do you think the biggest bang for the buck is coming from out of that 26? If you pick one right now that comes off the top of your head, where a leader can go, okay, I can tweak this. I can hack this right now, like Colin’s saying, and I’m going to get some serious results tomorrow. 1. Let’s dive into that one.

Colin Ellis [00:09:57]:
All right, so the main one, which I think is number one in the book, is meetings, Scott, because we are horrible as a management. Come on, we’re horrible when it comes to meetings. We love to drain our productive time with things called back to back. The last thing we did back to back was shoot each other as a human race. You know, who decided that that was a good idea? Having meetings put up against each other. Each other. But we’re lazy. So people are lazy.

Colin Ellis [00:10:25]:
They do 30 minutes and 60 minutes because that’s the outlook default. And they just can’t be bothered to change the meeting time. And so you know that the first hack is around just, you know, kind of thinking about how much time you actually need. Like 20. I always say 20 minutes and 40 minutes. You know, if you’ve got 30 minutes and 60 minutes, change them all straight away to 20 minutes and 40 minutes and be really, really disciplined about how you use that time. Time. Now, I went one step further as a manager.

Colin Ellis [00:10:50]:
And I, and I still do it now. You know, I had an instance last week where someone booked a time to talk to me about doing a program and I sent a meeting invite request for 47 minutes. And she wrote me backside, Colin. Ha. What’s this 47 minutes? I’m like, just feels like a 47 minute meeting, you know, And I start, I didn’t start on the hour because I’m respectful of the fact she might have a meeting on the hour. And I didn’t finish on the hour because she, you might need to get to another one. And so, you know, I was just again, a little bit different in thinking about the actual time I needed for a meeting. If it needs to be five minutes, make it five minutes, Scott.

Colin Ellis [00:11:26]:
So that’s the simplest one. And you’ll be amazed how much productive time you get back in your day to do your job if you’re a little bit more disciplined around meetings.

Scott McCarthy [00:11:35]:
I love it. And I hate meetings. I hate meetings that are one hour. And I’ll tell you why. Because human beings are notorious for one thing. We’re notorious for filling space. And that doesn’t mean, and that doesn’t mean, you know, that, that’s not limited meanings. That’s all kinds of space.

Scott McCarthy [00:11:52]:
You buy a new house, you go in, you see that empty corner over there, you got no furniture. What do you do? You go to the furniture store, you end up ordering a sofa that you never sit on. Well, because it’s an empty space. But the thing is that happens in meetings too. It’s like, oh, we’re done in 43 minutes. Meeting was for an hour. Someone finds something to talk about and you’re just like, you know, you’re looking at your watch, you’re just like, oh, come on, I got 50 million other things to do. I have absolutely nothing left to either give or, you know, likely to receive in this meeting.

Scott McCarthy [00:12:26]:
Why are you sucking me drive right now? I got an interesting question for you though, because, you know, we’re recording this mid, you know, early mid May 2021. We were just talking before we hit record, slash, go live, talk about the pandemic. Because it’s the number one thing everyone wants to talk about these days. Do you find with, as, you know, in your role as a, you know, coach, consultant, that with the dispersed workplace now that these back to back meetings are occurring even more frequently because, you know, it’s easy, you just like click a button on your computer.

Colin Ellis [00:12:58]:
Yeah, yeah, Microsoft. Microsoft, click a button. Sorry, mate. Yeah, Microsoft found that as well, they are more, more frequent because it’s easy just to click it. And what we’ve, what we found, Scott, is that we replicate some of the poor behaviors, particularly around things like meetings and emails. Email uses shot up during the pandemic. We just replicated that in the, we didn’t stop the, the great workplace culture said hang on a minute, we need to go virtual. What’s a bunch of stupid stuff that we do in person right now that we’re not going to wrap replicate.

Colin Ellis [00:13:28]:
And they made, you know, kind of this concerted effort. Not we’re not going to email everyone, we’re going to use chat tools, we’re not going to use video conference all the time. We’re going to pick up the phone and talk to people for those one on ones. And yet that’s not most organizations. Most organizations simply replicated those behaviors and it’s easy to do. Not only that, that little green light showing you online became the thing where people I gotta, gotta show that I’m online. So we got this cultural presenteeism. So it’s great that we’re concerned about everyone’s welfare, but the downside to that is presenteeism.

Colin Ellis [00:14:00]:
And I got asked at a conference last week because we can do them in Australia. Just rubbing it in, I got asked is like, oh, do you think people are doing less work? I said, I think the opposite is true. I think people are doing more work because they’re feeling the pressure to be always on, which is not necessarily a good thing.

Scott McCarthy [00:14:20]:
Yeah. So right now I work predominantly three days at home and two days in the office. And that’s just really like I’m coming out of coming, you know, back into the office right now. And I tell you like, if I notice that someone tried to get a hold to me, you know, went get a coffee or use the washroom or you know, heaven forbid I changed the laundry or something, right? That I’m home and I come back and I know someone tried to get hold to me. There was a message that they’ve been waiting for five minutes or missed a call or something. Oh crap, you know, think I’m doing nothing, right? Because that’s immediately. Oh, you know, they’re home, they’re slacking off and they’re, you know, watching TV or doing this or doing that. But the reality is no, heck no.

Scott McCarthy [00:14:58]:
I’m like sitting like right, that’s right. With my work computer, you know, work computer. But unfortunately that, that moment you just need hold to me. But like how many times have you come to my desk at work and I wasn’t there. And I think that’s the mentality that we need to adapt here and adopt here is that, you know, just because you can’t get ahold to someone at that instant doesn’t mean they’re not doing anything. Thing. Yeah, that’s something else.

Colin Ellis [00:15:22]:
Absolutely right. Yeah. But that speaks to a lack of trust often within our workplaces. Scott. You know, I had a guy said to me, he’s like, yeah, but all people really working at home or are they just kind of taking the, you know, whatever? And I was just like, now they are working from home. I was like, if you don’t trust them, that speaks a lot to you and your management style. You have to be able to set expectations in a way that people understand what they need to do and then you need to focus on. On the output, not necessarily where they’re doing it.

Colin Ellis [00:15:50]:
Now, don’t get me wrong, some work is best done and will always be best done face to face. So as soon as offices are able to be open or wherever you are in the world, if you can go to an office, then cool. The managers need to say, we’re going to meet in the office, you know, in line with all the guidelines. But then it’s. It’s about the group saying, okay, well, this work is better done face to face in this particular space. But I can do this bit at home. You know, I think we’ve always wanted, we call it hybrid work environment. Right? We’ve always wanted the hybrid work environment.

Colin Ellis [00:16:18]:
You know, I remember working from home in 2001 and it was a preference for me. I work from home Monday to Friday, and I had to go to London Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. It was ideal, Scott, but we were only able to do it effectively and still be productive because we had a good manager who set expectations well. And as a team, we knew what we had to do when we needed to do it in order to be successful.

Scott McCarthy [00:16:40]:
Now, I haven’t gone fully through your book yet. Is trust in there in those 26? It’s gotta be in there.

Colin Ellis [00:16:48]:
Yeah. So I mentioned, I mentioned trust a lot because I think, you know, one of those simple things that we don’t do is actually take the time to bring the team together to talk about what we expect of each other. It’s something I covered extensively. Culture fix is that definition of culture, Scott? And the organizations and the teams that thrived during the pandemic were the ones that said, hey, the world of work has changed, albeit temporarily. Let’s come Together and decide, you know, and redefine what we expect of each other such that we can hold each other to account if things don’t go wrong and we can celebrate that collective success of when things go right. So trust is kind of. It runs throughout the book because what I’m trying to create is a sense of togetherness, this sense of belonging. And without that sense of belonging, it doesn’t matter how many hacks you apply, your culture’s never good.

Colin Ellis [00:17:36]:
It’s always going to be stable, stagnant. You’re never going to get off that, that start line. Really?

Scott McCarthy [00:17:41]:
Oh, that’s mic drop moment right there. Wow, that’s right. If you don’t have that sense of belonging, you know, you’re not, you’re not building that team. And reality is culture, to me anyway, revolves around an organization, but what does the team revolve around? That’s, you know, a team and a team revolves around people and individuals. So you got to have that sense of belonging right through the whole thing in order to achieve what you’re looking to achieve, which is, you know, a great high performing, you know, high performing, peak performance culture to drive that organization and hit that output as high as you possibly can, you know, hit that or that team, hit that team at peak performance, because that’s what you’re looking for.

Colin Ellis [00:18:20]:
So you know as well as I do, Scott, is you can’t just throw a bunch of people together in a room and go, high performance. High. You are high performing. Yes, we’re high. That’s not how high performance works. High performance starts with redefining the expectations of each other and then making sure that you achieve everything you set out to.

Scott McCarthy [00:18:40]:
And to me, from a leadership standpoint, that sound that I smell, you know, checking your ego at the door, right. In order to achieve that, you know, starting that ball anyway, because how do you do that? Well, you gotta be open, you gotta be vulnerable, you gotta be humble, you gotta be all these different things, which. Oh, by the way, ego is the like, you know, opposite too. So.

Colin Ellis [00:19:00]:
Yeah, and there’s still a lot of managers who will never make it to leaders because they’re carrying around a bunch of emotional baggage. You know, an ego is part of that bag. If they’re dragging it around like the heaviest suitcase is, here’s me and my ego coming, and I’m going to tell you what to do is it’s like, ah. I mean, and I think that’s one of the good things during the pandemic is there was a little bit more vulnerability There was. There was definitely more empathy, you know, and there was one survey with employees that said that they, you know, kind of 50% of the respondents said they expected more empathy and vulnerability from leaders. Geez, that’s never been expected of leaders. And so it’s a real kind of sign that the world of work has definitely changed for the better.

Scott McCarthy [00:19:41]:
So, no, you know, I asked a question about, you know, the number one hack that you got going. We went from email or meetings to email to trust, and, you know, everything we just hit on. There’s a couple, you know, I’m looking at the list here of your books. By the way, thanks for another copy of your book. Fantastic. I was actually even looking at Culture Fix today, by the way.

Colin Ellis [00:20:05]:
Oh, awesome.

Scott McCarthy [00:20:07]:
Yeah. And there’s a few ones that are, like, sticking out at me that are really interesting. I want to dive in there. Oh, we talked about honesty as well. Number nine is fail visibly. And you know, I’m a fan of failure. Anyone who’s listened to the show for a while knows that I’m a big fan of failure. Unfortunately, I come from an organization background where failing isn’t really something you look for in a military leader, but I think in your context, it’s quite different.

Scott McCarthy [00:20:36]:
So let’s go down this route. What do you mean by fail visibly and what does that do for our culture and bonding it together?

Colin Ellis [00:20:42]:
Well, failure represents an opportunity for learning, Scotland. When we frame it in that way, what we then do is move away from a culture of blame and admonishment and one towards one of kind of evolution. The fact is that as humans, as teams, things are going to go wrong. And what we need to do is to create an environment that is safe, where everyone feels trust. If there’s that trust thing again, where we recognize that, hey, you know what, from time to time, things aren’t going to go your way and you’re going to do something that maybe we weren’t expecting. But rather than put you in a corner on a stool and getting you to face the wall, what we’re going to do is we’re going to kind of capture everything that went wrong, and we’re going to use that as an opportunity for everyone to learn from. And so, you know, I took very much in that particular chapter about a failure wall is, you know, what’s that place where I can go to, where I can find out the things that we’ve done in the past that have helped shape this team, that have helped us, us to grow together and learn together, but also that I Don’t want to remake in terms of those mistakes. And so I think, you know that concept.

Colin Ellis [00:21:49]:
And it can be virtual. It doesn’t have to be physical. It could be the best ones I’ve seen a physical. That little three by five cards that people write on and stick on a wall with some Blu Tack. And then you’ve got this awesome learning wall with all these things that people just get a coffee and just read all these things and they’re just. It’s just a fabulous little meeting place. But it can be virtual too, too. And you know, it really provides that.

Colin Ellis [00:22:10]:
That sense of, hey, we’re not perfect. We recognize that. But what we don’t want to do is remake these mistakes. So what can we do to share the things that we’ve learned to help others in the future?

Scott McCarthy [00:22:23]:
No, I absolutely love that. And I actually applied that myself on, you know, a regular basis as a leader. Right. Or one incident in particular where as the operations officer of our schools, in charge of coordinating all the resources required for training. And we ran a lot of training, let me tell you, we did something like 300 different. No, was it three. 300 different sessions? I. E.

Scott McCarthy [00:22:48]:
Courses per year. Three. Over 3,000 students through us per year. And my little self, six people. We were responsible for scheduling and organizing all the required equipment and all this stuff, you know, making, you know, making. Making square pegs fit round holes on a daily basis. Right? And one of my guys, they made. He made a mistake.

Scott McCarthy [00:23:08]:
Made a pretty big mistake at the time, and we fixed it luckily. And then I said, all right, brought everybody into what we call the bullpen area where four of my people worked in this cubicle office area. So shut the door, said, all right, after action review, let’s go through this. You know, what happened, why it happened, what the mistake was. And I said, listen, this is not, you know, this is not me calling you out publicly. Everyone here needs to learn this mistake and know how to avoid it in the future because they may slip into your seat at any moment if you’re out for the day or week or whatever. And to be able to do your job, because guess what? It don’t stop. Things don’t stop.

Scott McCarthy [00:23:49]:
Right? You know, the work still keeps going regardless, and we need to keep up on top of it. We did that on a regular basis.

Colin Ellis [00:23:55]:
And I think as well, for any team to achieve results, it has to take risk, Scott. And so what you want to do is to create an environment where people are comfortable taking. Taking risk. And if, if there’s a blame Culture. For every mistake that’s made, they’re never going to be comfortable. They’re always going to. They’re always going to wait for permission to do things. And as a result, the culture will stagnate and you’ll end up missing targets left, right and center.

Scott McCarthy [00:24:18]:
Well, then, you know, the secondary effects I look at as well, then initiative goes down and innovation goes down. Motivation goes down, retention goes down. Oh, turnover goes up through the roof. Right. Because of people like, hey, I don’t like this place, I don’t belong here. I’m popping smoke, I’m pulling pen, I’m getting out of here. Oh, heading over to the competition because they got opening and I like what I see and what I hear. Right.

Colin Ellis [00:24:42]:
Yeah, exactly right. Exactly right.

Scott McCarthy [00:24:43]:
So love it. Failing visibly. And this is something, I think a lot of senior leaders out there, like, I’m talking like senior, senior board level C suite leaders. I think this is something that they need to actually do more. I think they need to own that bit more and be a bit more transparent there because not seeing, you know, from my standpoint, I don’t see a whole ton of it. And I think we could, you know, people could definitely do better with that, but that could be a conversation for another day.

Colin Ellis [00:25:13]:
Yeah. And I think it’s as simple as a senior leader sharing a very human moment, you know, and that’s that vulnerability you talked to earlier, Scott, is what’s one thing that you’ve learned in your career that you can pass on on to someone else? Employees love that stuff.

Scott McCarthy [00:25:26]:
Yeah. Hell yeah. One that’s really sticking out is interesting to me is number 11, hold a hobby expo. So a little interesting side story. So we were actually one. We had one, you know, Tuesday here. This is record on a Tuesday. Tuesday for me at work is meeting day.

Scott McCarthy [00:25:45]:
Go back to what we talked about earlier. Right. Like today was two and a half hours of my day gone of meetings. Don’t get me wrong, some of it is very worthwhile, but I think we could tighten up some things as well. But in one of those meetings, I talked about this because we were talking about culture in that meeting and I said, hey, if you’re interested, and I fired the link out. And you know, there’s people watching right now and I don’t know, hi, guys from work. If anyone’s watching from work, hey, Scott’s work, First Canadian division headquarters right there. So.

Scott McCarthy [00:26:20]:
But the interesting thing is I haven’t, you know, I said like, not many people know this about me at work because I don’t talk about my podcasting side that often. And I talked about having you on because we were talking about culture and stuff. So what’s the premise behind holding a hobby Expo in regards to an organizational culture? Because I find that very intriguing.

Colin Ellis [00:26:41]:
So this is to strengthen the connection between individuals. It’s something that the late Tony Hsieh used to talk about a lot. Tony Shea, used to be the CEO. CEO of Zappos, died recently. And he talked about the fact that they believed in social integration, not social separation. You know, and I got the. I had the pleasure of speaking to him back in 2019 and he said, what we do is look for ways to bring the outside in, which I love that. And something that we used to.

Colin Ellis [00:27:08]:
I used to do with my teams is if anyone ever had an interest, something that they did outside of work, and we kind of got wind of it, we would ask them to talk about it. So what we would do is we would kind of either do a bit of a roundtable or else we would get people to bring stuff in to shoot. Just like you did with, with your podcast is, you know, so, you know, what are those interests that you have? So some guy was really interested in fishing, so we went on a fishing trip. Like, I’m not a fisher. It’s just not something that I. It’s not something you tend to do in the middle of Liverpool when you’re growing up. And so we all went fishing and it was really awesome. And he got to tell us about stuff and all of that.

Colin Ellis [00:27:45]:
And so it’s a way to kind of share your interests with other people that strengthens the connections between them and that sense of belonging. Because we all have a life outside work, Scott, and we’re all interested in something. And so, you know, it’s a way of encouraging interest in other people’s, in people’s lives outside work. And it can be a whole lot of fun. It really, really can.

Scott McCarthy [00:28:09]:
That’s awesome. I often talk about building, you know, building high performing teams starts with nothing to do with work. And to me, this just amplifies that. Right? And once you build a high performing team, guess what? Your. Your culture is going to exude that. You know, as new people come in, they’re like, hey, what the heck’s going on? Oh yeah, we get this, you know, hobby expo. Hobby expo. What the heck is that? Well, this is what we do here.

Scott McCarthy [00:28:35]:
Oh, cool, right? And it just exudes that, you know, togetherness, that bonding and all that, those types of things, which, guess what is needed for those High performing teams. Because when people feel connected, that’s when they go to bat for each other. That’s when they go, I got your back. You know, regardless, I will, you know, I’ll work those extra hours, I’ll take on that task load because you got something going on that you know is taking distracting away from you. Your ability to operate at 100%. Because I know when it’s my turn and when I’m in the same situation, you got my back and you’re going to take care of me and that’s, that’s what you need. But it starts from knowing each other on that more intimate level, you know, and things outside of work. So that Hobby Expo is a fantastic idea.

Colin Ellis [00:29:20]:
Well, you know, I do, I do kind of a team workshop, a culture building workshop. Scott and I do two day in person or kind of over four days virtually whenever I ask people what’s their favorite part of it because I always include the Hobby Expo in it and I talk about bring some information on something that you do that you don’t think anybody else does. And like the, the immediate response is I don’t do anything. But somebody always does something. It doesn’t matter whether they go hiking at the weekend or whatever it is that they, it’s always people’s favorite part. Not that the rest of it’s rubbish, but they get to really learn about the people that they work with. They see a side of them that they’ve never seen before. And everything that you just said stems from that, that kind of knowledge and having empathy for someone else.

Scott McCarthy [00:30:04]:
So we’re kind of dovetail and to what which I, which shocks me is here and that could be pop up in the Hobby Expo and let’s start a podcast. This is amazing. You have start a podcast as part of a culture. I have so many thoughts in my head right now. But I want, you know, the person who wrote the book literally tell me, you know how starting a podcast can help a company’s culture.

Colin Ellis [00:30:32]:
For the simple reason, Scott, the best ideas for evolving a culture, the best ideas for enhancing business value live within an organization. Right now, what many organizations don’t do is create an environment to bring them out. Either running a hackathon, which is another one of the hacks, which is a search simple innovation session, or else by sitting down and interviewing people and getting them to share their knowledge. And the thing was, Scott, and you know, you’ve been doing this for a while is podcasting used to be way more difficult than it is now. Like you used to have all of the bells and all of the whistles and it cost a thousand dollars just to get started. And now it’s pretty straightforward not to demean the work that you’re doing. Obviously you make it look it easy, but you know what I mean in terms of setup costs, there’s really not a lot to it. And I think, you know, and I’ve appeared on a number of corporate podcasts.

Colin Ellis [00:31:28]:
Every time I work with someone, they’re like, oh, would you mind being interviewed for our podcast? I’m like, of course. Some of those stories from the front line. It’s a great way to find out what other people do in other divisions, particularly those organizations. I’ve worked with one organization, I encourage them to do it because they had a lot of silos. I’m like, there’s no better way to break down the silos than interviewing someone for 20 minutes on the job that they do, the challenges they face and the opportunities that they have. So again, it really builds that sense of togetherness. But crucially, understanding for what people, other people have to do on a day.

Scott McCarthy [00:32:00]:
To day basis, absolutely amazing. You know, I see just you’ve, you’ve hit a home run already. But starting a podcast, you know how senior leaders, especially in like big, really big organizations, right. I work for the Canadian armed forces as my day job. We’re around the globe, 100,000 people. You don’t want to talk with stovepipes and different subcultures. We have it all, right. And what amazing tool for the senior leadership to be able to promote their ideas, to be able to past their vision in a really intimate way which is not necessarily being leveraged that much right now, I believe at that corporate level because people more see podcasting, how we’re doing podcasting right now, I.

Scott McCarthy [00:32:52]:
E. A couple of people that are not, you know, we have a relationship because you’ve been on the show before, but that’s about it, you know, so it’s like an interview and I’m, you know, obviously there’s business behind my show and all this stuff, but not for that internal communication. And I’m going to double dovetail quickly to say the great time for me to announce that actually not too long ago I’ve released a how to podcast course, a podcast for your business course, which takes you from not having anything smack of how to do anything, to completely planning your show, to setting up your equipment like Colin said, not spend those thousands of dollars because guess what, a hundred dollar microphone is all you need this day and age. And you’re good to go. And how to actually produce your show yourself professionally and not spend a crap ton of money. Because I’d be honest, like I do all my production and the people out there, I’ve looked at the rates because I was thinking about offloading it. They’re just fleecing us, to be honest. Now I understand they got to eat, but they’re fleecing you.

Scott McCarthy [00:33:54]:
So record your show, set it up, plan it, execute it, and automate and everything else in between. So if you’re interested in that, just links to me in the show notes. But podcasting for your business 299 us and check it out at Scott McCarthy Co PFYB for podcasting for your business. So that just slid right in there. Nice. And this is something that I’d say, and this is something super new that I’ve just actually released 10 days ago. That’s awesome. But honestly.

Scott McCarthy [00:34:30]:
No, but I did that because I believe in the power of the medium. I wouldn’t have been doing this for five and a half years now because if I didn’t believe in the power of medium, both from, you know, from a business standpoint, but even from a leadership standpoint to be able to connect with your people. Especially if you’re big, large corporations that are dispersed. You know the problem with those corporate emails these days? No one reads them because they’re just so flat and dry and you feel like they’ve been vetted by 50 lawyers before they come out. You don’t get any of that, that texture from the leader of what they’re saying. You know, obviously it depends on the leader. Some of them just do their own thing. But I think with a podcast where people can listen to the voice of the leader and their passion behind a particular topic, you can really connect with your people hell lot better than those mass emails.

Colin Ellis [00:35:21]:
It’s so true. And I think as well, Scott, is there’s this inference that if they send an email out, that’s all people. People need. But that’s only one method of communication. I spoke to a CEO at the start of the pandemic and he was like, I’m not comfortable on video. What should I do? I’m like, get comfortable on video because people want to see you do more video. Yeah, do more video. Or do a podcast, do some audio because people want to hear your stories, you know?

Scott McCarthy [00:35:46]:
Yeah, no, it’s awesome. That’s. That’s fantastic. And I think this is, this is somewhere where it’s being underutilized right now and you can really make A difference and you know, make, I wouldn’t say make a splash or make a scene, but you can definitely make some chatter amongst your people and like you said, it’s just another medium because guess what, you know, not okay, not everyone’s going to listen to it, but maybe people will watch role read the email that, you know, I don’t enjoy reading. All right, so at least then it’s another, you know, net in the water of passing, you know, catching people to pass your message to them. So I think, I think it’s fantastic idea. I think it’s a great way to, to, to, you know, to grab that culture and anyway, I’ve said it all. All right, let’s, let’s dive into, you know, one more and this is something interesting that I see all the time.

Scott McCarthy [00:36:36]:
So I know the benefits to it, but I don’t know if it happens and I don’t believe this whole happens in corporate a lot. And that is inter departmental sports day. So like in the military. So you know, the, the context is this. Like in the military, obviously we’re highly competitive a type personalities, right. And we enjoy sports. That competition. Like I’m serious, I’ve seen people from the same unit that is, you know, small organization.

Scott McCarthy [00:37:02]:
Like I remember being in Kandahar, Afghanistan, we had two ball hockey teams from my unit and we would play each other and the rivalry was going all day to the point where like, you know, you almost get scared someone’s going to get hurt, you know, not in combat but on the ball hockey court. But it’s just your take from more of a corporate side of, you know, why is this so, so great for culture and bringing people together and all those things.

Colin Ellis [00:37:30]:
Well again Scott, there, I mean these are born from my own experiences. I know that I got to know other people from other departments through simple little events. You know, one of the things that I used to do is we used to have, have innovation time on a Friday between 3 and 5 o’ clock. And at 5 o’ clock we would take a rounders bat and, or a baseball bat and you’d have to hit the ball. Every time you hit the ball you had to come up with an idea. You’d run the bases, right? And so word got out about these kind of little events and other people wanted to join. And of course then it became a competition. Then you had teams versus teams and essentially we do our innovation and then we’d have interdepartmental sports.

Colin Ellis [00:38:06]:
But it doesn’t have to be outdoor sports. It doesn’t have to be physical. It can be kind of a cheap chess competition. It can be a fantasy football ladder. I think anything where you’re inviting a little bit of healthy competition. I think often we forget in our cultures our job is there to really perform to our highest level. And I think if you can kind of stimulate that motivation in other ways other than just around the work, all it can do is enhance that. And so, you know, as a former football player.

Colin Ellis [00:38:37]:
Soccer player. Football. It’s football. Football player. You know, I always used to partake in, you know, kind of my company’s team sports, and then we would always encourage other sports with the element on fun. You don’t want to turn it into, you know, a kind of episode of the Office where we’re so aggressively, you know, kind of competitive that it ruins everything. But it’s just a fun way to spend some time with other people in a way that, you know, creates a different level of energy. But you do exactly as you say.

Colin Ellis [00:39:06]:
You get to see a different kind of motivation, which. Which is. It’s always going to be beneficial towards results, achievement.

Scott McCarthy [00:39:15]:
No, it’s awesome, for sure. We always find sports just, you know, makes teams bond tighter together. It’s just that competitive, that competition aspect. And like you said, it doesn’t actually have to be, you know, hockey for us, rugby for you down on there. It can be, you know, in a fantasy league. It could, you know, it could be esports. This day and age, who knows? That’s right. Or a friendly competition.

Scott McCarthy [00:39:36]:
Right now we have a friendly fitness competition going on where we’re all. We have teams and stuff like this. And it’s, you know, because you can’t do a whole lot together. It’s individual, but you still have that team aspect where, you know, you look at, you’re like, I gotta. I gotta get up. I gotta get my workout in because it counts as points, and if I don’t do it, I’m going to let my team down. Exact same type of atmosphere, but in more of an individualized area.

Colin Ellis [00:40:00]:
But that’s right.

Scott McCarthy [00:40:01]:
Helps people together.

Colin Ellis [00:40:03]:
Steps. Challenges have been really, really popular as team sports. And they’ve been little ladders certainly down here. When we were locked down last year, Scott, you know, trying to be the team that does the most steps because we were allowed out for one hour a day and kind of, you know, how much energy people put into it. It was fabulous.

Scott McCarthy [00:40:20]:
That’s awesome. Colin. Colin, man, it’s always been fantastic having you on the show. We need to do this more often before we Wrap up there. You got actually a last question. So a lot of people are like, could be listening to this, like, oh, you know, how is this culture you’re talking about? You know, having a podcast and talking about sports and you know, we talked a bit about trust and you know, reducing meetings and all this stuff. How would, what would you say to, I would say maybe the cynical listener out there say, how is this actually relates to culture? Isn’t culture, you know, values and overarching organization, fitness, feel and vibe and all this stuff? What would you say to that person?

Colin Ellis [00:41:00]:
Well, I would say that culture is the sum of everyone’s attitudes, beliefs, behaviors, traditions, skills and stories. And if you’re not taking meaningful action to enhance those stories and to create those different experiences, then your culture will never evolve from kind of that stagnant, pleasant space to vibrant. And vibrant is where the magic happens. And just by a few well placed little hacks, you can transform everything.

Scott McCarthy [00:41:27]:
Beautiful. Love it. All right, last couple questions for you. Let’s see if you remember. I’m going to compare notes because I’m still asking you this. According to you, Colin Ellis, what makes.

Colin Ellis [00:41:38]:
A great leader A great leader is someone who’s humble, empathetic, vulnerable and puts himself in service to others, Scott.

Scott McCarthy [00:41:47]:
And for the listener, if you want to compare notes, feel free to go to movingforwardleadership.com 109 because that’s the last time Colin was on the show. I asked all the guests here that question. And a final question of the show is how can people find you? How can they follow you? Feel free. Shameless plugs are allowed. It’s all about you right now.

Colin Ellis [00:42:08]:
You can find my books on Amazon. Colin D. Ellis is my author name. You can find me on LinkedIn at the same. Otherwise you can can head to my website colindellis.com oh, I should also plug. I’ve got a community, Scott. I’ve got a virtual community for anybody who’s interested in building and creating great workplace culture. And that’s culturemakers.community.

Scott McCarthy [00:42:30]:
Awesome. And for you, all the links are in the show notes. It’s easy as always. Go to movingforwardleadership.com 17-7177 Call my man. Thank you again. Thanks for coming.

Colin Ellis [00:42:42]:
Always a pleasure.

Scott McCarthy [00:42:45]:
Cheers.

Colin Ellis [00:42:45]:
Thank you.

Scott McCarthy [00:42:50]:
And that’s a wrap for this episode. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for listening. Thank you for supporting the Peak Performance leadership podcast. But you know what you could do to truly support the podcast. And no, that’s not leaving a rating and review, it’s simply helping a friend, and that is helping a friend by sharing this episode with them. If you think this would resonate with them and help them elevate their performance level, whether that’s within themselves, their teams, or their organization. So do that. Help me help a friend win.

Scott McCarthy [00:43:23]:
Win all around. And hey, you look like a great friend at the same time. So just hit that little share button on your app and then feel free to fire this episode to anyone that you feel would benefit from it. Finally, there’s always more. There’s always more lessons around being the highest performing leader that you can possibly be, whether that’s for yourself, your team, or your organization. So why don’t you subscribe? Subscribe to the show via movingforwardleadership.com forward sl subscribe until next time. Lead don’t boss and thanks for coming out. Take care.

Scott McCarthy [00:44:06]:
Now.