Les McKeown: Hi everybody, and welcome to another episode of Scale! with Predictable Success. And today I'm absolutely delighted to have my good friend and colleague, Jenni Catron.

Jenni's the founder and CEO of The 4Sight Group, and for the purposes of our discussion today, most importantly, she's the author of this wonderful book, 'Culture Matters: A Framework for Helping Your Team Grow, Thrive and Be Unstoppable’.

Who doesn't want to have a team that's unstoppable? Jenni, welcome to Scale!

Jenni Catron: Les, thanks so much for having me. I always enjoy our conversations.

Les McKeown: Well, you know, that's a that's a good point. Full disclosure. We know each other quite well. We've known each other for quite some time. We're colleagues. At the time we're recording this totally, coincidentally and without planning, we're just back, each of us from Chicago, where we shared a stage at the Global Leadership Network Base Camp Conference, which was a great conference.

And a tendency I have when somebody comes on who, I know well, is to assume that all of our viewers and listeners know you that well, too. And many of them do, but some of them won't.

Jenni Catron: For sure.

Les McKeown: So I'm going to ask you to do 2 things, because I happen to know, having spoken with you about the book on a number of times, to tell us a little bit about your own journey to getting to the point of running your own company. And how that got you to needing to write this book, because I know you needed to write it.

Both: Laughter.

Les McKeown: I know a labor of love when I see it, right?

Jenni Catron: Right, yeah.

Les McKeown: You've got to get out of your system right? This is one of those. So tell us the story of how you got here, and then we'll talk a little bit about what's in Culture Matters and why it's important.

Jenni Catron: For sure, for sure. Well, the journey is always an unexpected one. I started out in the music business in Nashville. I thought I'd be a CEO of a record company. That was the dream job since I was about 13 years old.

And I had the privilege of doing that for almost a decade, and then I went into nonprofit work. I worked at a large church in Nashville, Tennessee, and was there for almost another 9 years, and then shortly thereafter I launched the 4Sight Group.

And the theme, the thread that was running through everything that I was doing was that I was so deeply passionate about figuring out how to lead well, because, frankly, Les, I was a horrific leader in the early days of my leadership journey.

Les McKeown: Surely that's not true.

Both: Laughter.

Jenni Catron: It was. I was super driven, ambitious, wanting to make things happen, and sometimes I saw people as like, you know, kind of the cogs in the machine to make it work rather than really part of the the responsibility that I had. And so there's lots of learning, lots of really good mentors who spoke into my life.

Jenni Catron: And so I was working really purposefully on my leadership growth. But I also kind of stumbled into the power of a great team. And just the joy and the fulfillment of doing work with others when you really embraced that belief that you can go farther working with people than just what you can do independently when you kind of really internalize that. And so I launched the 4Sight Group. Now it's almost 8 years ago.

And really with a heart to help leaders be healthy and thriving, and teams to be healthy and thriving. And so that's kind of been the journey in the book became the reflection of that work of almost over 20 years of in the trenches, trying to figure out what makes some teams great. What makes some teams not so great. You know, in those early years of the music business, I started out in a fantastic team. Like I was kind of spoiled.

Les McKeown: Right.

Jenni Catron: I was a part of a company that was on a rocket ride of growth. We were every bit in Fun and having a blast. And hitting all of the metrics and the sales targets, and so forth.

And I was just learning and thriving as a young leader. I was part of a team where I felt connected. I felt a sense of belonging. I was being stretched, I was growing. I had pretty clear but ambitious goals that I needed to achieve.

And I was absolutely having a blast. And then we went through a corporate merger, and overnight the experience went from amazing to awful.

And I just remember feeling this tension of what just happened to me? Like, what in the world just happened?

My job hadn't changed. My responsibilities hadn't changed. But my leader and my team had changed.

And so that's like that first memorable experience to me of the significance of culture. That culture really matters.

And I just became more and more curious. And so I went on to lead in different environments and in every environment I just kept trying to figure out how do you build a great team? How do you intentionally, purposefully build a team? Not just with some perks and fun stuff, but like the things that really rally a team and pull a team together. And so Cultural Matters became a reflection of that journey and my own curiosity of how do you do this well?

Les McKeown: And you know that pivotal moment of moving from that vibrant organization
into the merged, less vibrant version. Something that many of us have been through, if not all of us have been through in some form.

Jenni Catron: Sure.

Les McKeown: But that's sort of indicative of the fact that culture is a little bit like the thing that I work in a lot, which is complexity. You don't notice it until it's an issue.

Jenni Catron: That's right.

Les McKeown: In the case of complexity, that it's there and threatening. In the case of culture, it's that, it's not there anymore. Right? It's the absence of it.

Jenni Catron: That's right.

Les McKeown: And you tell a particular story involving a Mexican restaurant. It was like a wake up moment for you. That what you had had before, had gone. I'd love if you just share a version of that with our listeners.

Jenni Catron: Yeah! It was a funny little wake up moment for me. So what was happening is I had joined the church in Nashville as Executive Director, and we were a small team of about 5 of us, and so I'd come off of my experience in the corporate world, in the music business, you know, great first few years. The last year was that merger that was really just not not fulfilling.

And so I started the role at the church, saying, I now sit in a seat where I disproportionately shaped the culture. I am now one of the senior leaders. I'm going to be shaping the experience that the team has.

So I went in with that understanding. But I still didn't know how. I knew that I wanted to create something that looked like my first experience, but I didn't know how.

So what we did in those early days. And this is typical small team behavior, is we would do our staff meeting every Tuesday. And then we would go to the local Mexican restaurant for lunch. And again bonding over chips and queso like I know no better, like great team event.

Les McKeown: Absolutely.

Jenni Catron: And so we did that. And it was just part of our culture. It's just what we did. And you know, you talk a lot about like that flock ball thing where everybody's around the ball and doing everything together.

That's the stage we were in. We were just doing everything together. And it worked. We knew our culture, the who we are and how we work together. That's how I define culture. We knew that because we're all together, we all got it. And so we did that. And that continued.

And then a handful of years later, it was another Tuesday. We decided to stay on site for lunch that day, and I don't remember the why's I just remember something was happening that we needed to stay on site.

So about 12.15, I get a phone call. It's the local Mexican restaurant who are very kindly saying, "Hey, Jenni, we're just checking to see if you're coming today?"

And Les, it was that memorable moment of like, "Oh, my gosh!" Because here's what had happened. I was quickly envisioning this. They were prepared for us because what they had done going on probably 5 years, is every every week we'd walk in; they'd have our tables ready.

Les McKeown: Right.

Jenni Catron: But we were no longer 5. There were 30 of us on staff. So the amazing people at this restaurant would string together tables that took up at least half of the restaurant, and they would be ready for us every Tuesday. Every Tuesday. They were ready for us.

And what I recognized in that moment is that I was unwilling to accept that we had grown. We had changed. We couldn't expect culture to be caught. We couldn't expect to keep doing the same things at the scale and the size that we were.

Les McKeown: Right.

Jenni Catron: And so it was just a somewhat silly example. But such a wake up moment for me that my unwillingness to accept that I had to lead differently in how we were leading at a much larger scale, because it wasn't just impacting us. Our dear friends at the Mexican restaurant were bearing the brunt of my unwillingness to recognize I needed to lead differently because we were a different team at that stage.

Les McKeown: Right. When something like that happens, it prompts you to think something that feels competing with culture, which is, how can I codify what we had? How can I bottle it? How can I make it replicable.

Jenni Catron: That's right.

Les McKeown: And one of the reasons I so love your book. And again, full disclosure, we're going to push everybody to go buy this. And when they do buy it, they'll see I've recommended it in the book, because I think it's just a phenomenal book.

The thing that I love most about it is, most books in culture, they sound good. They read well. They've got all the right words, but there's nothing to do with it afterwards. You can't actually take principles and apply them.

But you haven't done that. You've actually put a structure together to building good culture.

Jenni Catron: That's right.

Les McKeown: I want to talk in a second or two specifically about that structure and what you recommend people do. But before we get there, I'm just always interested with any author. Did you know you're going to have a structure-based book when you started?

Jenni Catron: I would say I knew it when I started the book, because I'd been workshopping it for so long.

Les McKeown: Ah, ok! That was clever. I wish I thought of that.

Jenni Catron: Laughs.

Jenni Catron: Here's the truth of it. This is what you taught me through Predictable Success, was as teams grow and you're attempting to scale, you're going to bump into that Whitewater and not only bump into it, you're gonna like you're going to be in it.

And you need to build the systems that help support the growth that you want to continue to see happen in your organization. And so that's the mentality I took into the culture work. Was to say, well gosh, we all know and intuitively how to create cultures when our teams are small. When we can be in proximity to everybody. And we can shape and influence how we you know who we are and how we work together.

Well, that's relatively easy. So we we know it when it's great in those smaller environments, but we don't know what to do with it when I get to 30 team members, and we can no longer sit at the Mexican restaurant together.

So I had to distill, what is it that I'm trying to hold on to? And how do I do that at scale?

So I took some of that thinking, and some of the learning that I'd had, you know, as I was scaling other parts of the organization that I was in. And so what do I do? How do I do that with culture?

So that's what I began to workshop. And so the first, almost like almost 7 years of my business at 4sight in the culture work that I was doing, I was really digging deep going, what are the things that are producing great culture?

What are the things that produce culture at scale? And the fascination that I found Les, and I think sometimes culture gets a really bad rap because people think ping pong tables and..

Les McKeown: Right, beanbags...

Jenni Catron: Beanbags and pizza lunch, you know, or whatever it is. But in actuality the things as I was talking to teams and talking to organizations. The things that were producing the best cultures at scale were very intentional. Points of clarity, that the leader was providing.

Clarity of mission. Clarity of vision and direction. Clarity of organizational structure. So many of the things that are part of the Predictable Success model, were things that were showing up in building the consistency and the predictability that helps team members know how to contribute.

Les McKeown: Right.

Jenni Catron: So I found this really fascinating relationship between clarity and trust because everybody wants trust. You know, that's the buzzword in teams. Everybody wants trust. Well, what I found is that there were things that we, as a leader, had to provide in order to create a measure of trust.

And so again, it goes back to things that you and I both know and love so much. It's that clarity of are we providing the basic needs that team members have of mission and direction and goals. And an understanding of this is how we succeed together.

Are we giving them an understanding of where they fit in the organization? The roles, the responsibilities. And then, as we create those things well, then, they're more confidently contributing because they have clarity of understanding of how we show up.

And as I diagnosed my experiences back at the Record Company and those 2 different scenarios, I was like, that's what was missing.

And then we build the connection, the belonging, the things that we want, the relational outcomes we want in organizations.

But so many times I see us fixate on the relational pieces when, in fact, there's those organizational clarity components that are so critical to setting a foundation for trust that helps team members engage.

So anyway, I just found all these kind of unique things that I was like. Culture is not what most of us think it is.

We want the outcomes of the camaraderie and the connection and the sense of belonging and the trust. But the inputs, and that's the system we need to create or what are we inputting regularly to produce the outcome we want?

Les McKeown: Yeah, it's not gooey. Culture is not gooey. It may look gooey. It may feel gooey when it's in flow, but it isn't so.

And I'm about to ask you to do what when I get asked to do it, I think if I could, if I could do this well in 17 min, or whatever subsection of a podcast is, I wouldn't have had to have written that whole darn book.

Jenni Catron: Laughs

Les McKeown: So I realize you're only going to give us an umbrella view of it. But tell us about that structure. What is the the approach that you recommend People take?

If what they want to do is either recover, if they've lost their culture, or codify, keep, build, sustain the culture that they have. What are the stages that you recommend they work.

Jenni Catron: Yeah. So I ended up defining 5 phases that I call the Lead Culture Framework. 5 phases and I show them kind of in a circular pattern, because it's kind of a cycle that you repeat as you as you keep living into the culture you aspire to.

So the first one is just to simply assess. Where are we? What's our reality? Because there's no perfect culture. We're a bunch of imperfect humans trying to work together to achieve a goal.

So what's our current reality? And I caution leaders because it is really hard to get an honest assessment of the experience your team is having. Especially the larger your team is, the harder it is for you to understand what the experience is like throughout the organization.

And there's a myriad of ways that you can do that. But be deliberate about assessing your current reality. Where are we?

The second phase of the framework is to define. What do we aspire to? So we need that picture. My favorite question to ask is, what do we look like at our best? Right? Like, what? What do we hope for? What do we aspire to?

And sometimes you can define that maybe in a recent project, or something that your team has worked on together, and you were like, gosh, I want more of that. I wish we looked like that most of the time.

Or maybe you're reflecting on, you know, a point in history. And you're like, okay, what about that was so really reflected who we are and how we want to work together.

So define it. And again, there's a lot of ways we need to define it. The thing that I would tell, especially founder owners and founder leaders is that you intuitively, and it's probably true of most leaders, but I find this particularly true of founders who grow things that scale is, they intuitively know what they hope for in their culture, like, what how they want their team to show up. But they haven't put language to it

They they know it when they spot it. And so what happens is it presents as micromanagement, because something happens organizationally, and it pricks a really core value to that leader. But that leaders never actually articulated why they care about the thing they care about.

I'll give you an example. Have a leader that I worked with, who had a high value on the environment of the organization, like the aesthetics. And they were doing a new building project, and he came in and changed the color of all the baseboards. Well, of course, that meant Change Orders for the work crew, and his operations person was frustrated because he's like I had no idea you cared about the color of the baseboards.

And this is a pretty good sized organization. So it's like the kind of thing you wouldn't think the founder cared about.

But he had such a high value on the aesthetic environment that he wanted more input. But he'd never articulated that. He just assumed everybody got it. Everybody knew that that mattered to him.

Les McKeown: Right.

Jenni Catron: So then he would come around and he'd be changing things and rearranging things, and it was driving the team crazy until he got clearer about defining, hey, this is something that's really important; this is what it looks like.

So every leader has that thing that is so common to you, so obvious to you, that you assume everybody's got it. But the key part, and I'm kind of emphasizing this phase because that clarity of definition of that clarity of hey, here's who we are, here's how we work together. Here's what's important to us. Here's the values that align us.

The more you can provide language. Now, the bigger you are, the more the culture is not just you as the leader, the culture is the collection of the group. And so you've got to make sure you're considering the whole group in that equation, but particularly for founder led organizations, they're disproportionately influencing how that culture is formed and shaped.

So the clearer you can define it, the more success you're going to have in the third part of the process which is to build the plan.

So, my aha in this Les is, you know I'm a strategic girl. You know this because I love a good strategic plan, and I love the Predictable Success model as soon as I got my hands on it. I was like, this is the plan I need to help me lead my team through Whitewater.

So I love a good plan. And then what I discovered is that nobody has a plan for culture. In fact, research tells us that 90% of us say it matters, like culture. Matters, like engagement is important.

But only 25% of people have a plan. So we leave it to chance. We just think, okay, I think you know, they'll just get it. They'll just understand what's important here like, but just like every other key initiative in our business, our culture needs a plan.

And that was probably the most surprising thing to me, and probably is the biggest aha for the leaders that I work with. That it's like, of course, you need a plan to actually equip your arguably greatest resource, the talent, the people that are helping you achieve the mission.

They need a plan, we need a plan for how do we close the gap from where we are to what we've defined we want to be.

And so there's a ton of rigor in that. That's where the system part of the framework really comes into play, is looking at all the different places in the rhythms in our organization. The employee journey, so to speak, inside of the organization.

How are we making sure that we're reinforcing that vision of what we aspire to as a team?

And then the fourth phase is equipping? How do we make sure every leader at every level isn't sabotaging this thing? Because that's where we find it happens often, is we can do all the work of assessing, defining, building a plan.

But if our leaders, especially like our mid level leaders, aren't equipped to understand it and help support it and reinforce it and coach it. Then we're kind of dead in the water.

So that's where the leadership part of the work comes into play, is like we need every leader at every level, equipped to help facilitate it.

And then finally, commit is the fifth phase. And that's the hey, this isn't a one time episodic thing that you do and forget. It's a system that is part of your rhythms as an organization. It's a system you're committing to.

So again, I kind of visualize it as a circle. So then you go back and you assess again. And I recommend about once a year, just to check in. How are we doing? Clarifying how are we lined up to what we've defined? Do we need to add anything or change anything in our plan? How do we make sure our leaders? Do we have any gaps? And making sure our leaders are helping reinforce the best of who we are. And we do it again, and we do it again.

So 5 phases that really became the framework to building a healthy culture.

Les McKeown: And we're going to, with your permission, just have an outline of that graphic on the show notes.

Jenni Catron: For sure.

Les McKeown: I want to take you back for a moment or two, and just hone in a little bit on the assessment, and to find the first two stages there.

There's got to be a large degree to which that's got to be based in some sort of reality, right?

Jenni Catron: Right, right.

Les McKeown: But we've all dealt with a mismatch between a presumed assessment of who we are and two things. Either. Yeah, that's that's incredibly aspirational. You know we've seen the big words up on the wall, you know, and then you wander around and you think well, it would be nice to see all of that. So we've got the really aspirational stuff that is maybe forward looking.

Jenni Catron: Right.

Les McKeown: And I want to hear you talk a little bit about that in a second or two. And then there's the retrospective definition which is looking back at the myths and legends of the business that were all achieved back in, when at the Mexican restaurant, there were only 6 of you going there. And you can't assess and define a company that's moved way beyond that in those early terms. And yet I see founders trying to, you know, put history back in a bottle and use that.

Jenni Catron: Right.

Les McKeown: Let's take each of those separately. First of all, to what extent, when you're working, you know personally with people, do you find you've got to push back a little and say, that's a that's a that's a great phrase or word or intention to build into your culture. But do you really think you're there yet?

Jenni Catron: Right.

Les McKeown: Where does aspiration come in? Is it a value thing?

Jenni Catron: Yeah, it's a great, great, great question. And so one of the things when I'm working with a team, Les is, I will have them build a culture team from team members throughout the organization. So our instinct is to use our senior leadership team, you know, and have our most senior team members around the table to do all of this work to assess and define.

Jenni Catron: I actually discourage that, because, again, the perception that the senior leaders have is not as accurate as team members throughout the organization will have.

So one of the first steps we do in even pre assessment is define, okay, who's that culture team?

And I want team members from throughout the organization. I want them at different levels in the organization. I want admins and coordinators. And I want one or 2 senior people. I want people who've been there 10 years, and I want people who have been there 10 minutes like, I want this really broad swath of team members.

Now, it's still going to be a team about 10 to 12, you know, so that we can have good, healthy conversation.

But what I find in that is, it helps us get that actual understanding of our reality. And even a measured awareness of the aspiration, right?

There's always a level of aspiration when we define culture. But if we're just defining something that is so aspirational, everybody's going to roll their eyes. We're going to be dead in the water.

Les McKeown: Right.

Jenni Catron: Like to your point, and all of us have done this that we've we've done some exercise. We've written some organizational values. We've put them on the wall. And everybody's rolling their eyes when they walk by them, because they know that's not at all how we operate.

And now I'll give you a little like caveat nugget to this. There's an organization that I've worked with for a handful of years now, and I was doing another round of assessment with them. And I had some team members express "Yeah, gosh, there's a couple of values that still feel so aspirational, I want to give up on them".

Well, that's like, really, really important data. Because then we have to go. Okay, why, what is what is pulling us back to that historic behavior? And, you know, is there something we can address. Or have we written something that's too aspirational? It's not true to who we are or who we might be.

So to answer your question, getting that team of leaders from all different parts of the organization to be a part of the conversation is a helpful like, push and pull on what we're defining we want to aspire to.

That's probably the most helpful thing I've seen. Another thing that I'll do in that context is, we'll work on that aspiration of defining the how we work together and we'll get some language. We'll get some stories. We'll get some behaviors and things out, and then I will say, Okay, 1 to 5, how aspirational is that? And I have every team member privately score.

Usually we're doing this around values work. And I'll have every team member privately score them of like from 1 to 5, 1 being, that's true. That's who we are. To 5, being very aspirational like, we're not at all there.

And and then we'll all put our scores up. And that's again really helpful to see everybody's response to which ones feel so aspirational. And then we go back. Then we workshop it some more to go. Okay, what do we need to adjust? Is it time for this? Is this unrealistic? Is this something that is just not true to who we are.

So again. a good blend of voices that are bringing different perspectives becomes really powerful and helping dial that in.

Les McKeown: Two things from what you've just said. That ranking between the one to 5 thing. I think there's there's a comparator here to must have skills when you're hiring people. They don't have them, you don't hire them. And good to have great when they have it. It gives them a competitive edge in the interviewing process.

But if they only have the good to haves, they don't have the must to haves, you know. No point in taking them on. I think there are must have cultural imperatives. Frankly if people frequently abrogate them, they shouldn't be kept on in the organization.

Jenni Catron: That's right.

Les McKeown: When was the last time we fired somebody because they were broaching our cultural norms? Well, that and from what I hear you saying that can and shouldn't apply to every aspect of culture. But there is a core that should be that important right?

Jenni Catron: That's right. That's right. Yeah. And so what we'll also find in the build phase of the work is, we're looking at. Okay, once we've defined that culture we aspire to, and we put really good language around it. We bring as much clarity as we possibly can to it.

Then we're saying, how does that show up in our interviewing and making sure that as we're selecting talent, we're looking for people who really align with what we've defined.

Then we're making sure it's showing up in performance reviews and regular like feedback conversations of again, this is where equipping our leaders is so critical that they're they're helping create conversations and provide coaching around those values to make sure every team member is actually living into them, or they're being coached, too.

Because then, if they're not, then we are having a discussion about whether they're a good fit for the organization.

So yeah, what you're defining is like that's part of that system that reinforces the health of the culture of saying, Hey, how do these things show up so that we're frequently having conversations, we're frequently leading towards it.

Les McKeown: Right. I think it is always quite funny when working with a leadership team. And you see that they're really up for enforcing cultural fit for certain hires. And then there's a group, like the call center, you know...

Jenni Catron: Right, right.

Les McKeown: Why would you bother? You know? Well, that's just a slippery slope.

Jenni Catron: Completely. Yeah, completely. And that's part of what you know to consider as you're working through this, because every seat in the organization is so critical that they're operating around that those values we've defined in that culture that we aspire to.

There was one team that I worked with, and they had one of their grounds crew on the culture team. Now most organizations that would not even be on their radar.

Les McKeown: But why? I agree with you. When you think about it logically, they've got an incredible amount to contribute.

Jenni Catron: Completely, and they see everything. That was the thing that we found by having that individual in the room is that he saw everything. I think he was more than grounds. I think he was facilities as well.

So he interacted with every team in the organization. And so their experience with him, and his experience with them was so critical.

Again what we're trying to do is we're trying to get really clear on who we are and how we work together so that we can achieve our mission. We're trying to remove the roadblocks. We're trying to remove those points of just misunderstanding or lack of alignment with how we show up and how we work together, and so to be dismissive of different parts of the team would be to suggest that those roles are not needed to make the mission happen.

When, in fact, they wouldn't exist. We wouldn't be paying for them if they weren't critical to helping us ultimately accomplish everything we're doing.

So those are some of my favorites. So I probably have a little bias. But I love bringing in the unexpected team member who sits maybe a little bit on the fringes, or is more in the background because they have so much insight into the best of the culture and the worst of the culture frankly.

Les McKeown: And also, once you've got it to a certain point, involving your supply chain, I think, is important as well. Are we showing up like this, for you?

Jenni Catron: Right.

Les McKeown: As suppliers, as customers, as clients.

Jenni Catron: Yeah.

Les McKeown: I think you've you've answered the question for both the misalignment issues, which is, make sure that this isn't just a small group of folks who are bringing their preferences here.

Jenni Catron: That's right.

Les McKeown: Make sure you've got a broad consensus of what culture really should be for us.

As we move towards closing, I want to just break out the book Culture Matters by the way, available everywhere, just on its own, and talk about the work you do with culture.

What's a typical client? If we had typical clients our work would be boring, and we'd both do something else.

But what's the sort of profile what the cool kids call the Avatars these days? Who do you find yourself working with on culture?

Jenni Catron: Yeah, I tend to find leaders who have kind of been where I was in that Mexican restaurant example. They've been building and growing a team. And all of a sudden you wake up and you realize, oh, I have to think about this differently.

We've grown to another stage of growth. And so I love working with those leaders that are, in Predictable Success language, they're likely in Whitewater, and they're trying to figure out, okay, how do we do this? How do we grow this? How do we get through this really uncomfortable stage?

Because that's where we tend to see and feel the fractures of culture, of like, we start asking, saying things like that's not how we do things here. And you're starting to feel that lack of control, because things that used to be intuitive and everybody understood, and everybody got.

And it just felt like it came with ease all of a sudden, isn't, because now we have, you know, 30, 50,100 people across multiple locations, or different divisions and departments and we've lost that sense of control.

And you still want that camaraderie, that connection that you know, sense of team that is so valuable. So I love working with those individuals.

Another key place that we work is when there's a leadership transition. So maybe most senior leader exits the organization. And now we have to kind of redefine. We have a new leader coming in. There's new vision. There's new direction, and that always impacts culture.

So that's another key place that we engage, because, along with redefining mission and vision and goals and direction for the organization, you're also having to reaffirm who are we? And how do we work together to achieve this?

And so bringing clarity to that at a most senior leader transition is also a really key spot for us.

So those 2 are probably where we feel like we can serve the best and engage the most.

Les McKeown: And do you have a market, or a group, or a type of organization that you most enjoy working with.

Jenni Catron: So because I have a background with working with a lot of faith based organizations. Those are fun for me, just from a values alignment of leaders who are people of faith, but they might show up in nonprofits. They might show up in businesses.

I'm not forward facing. It's easy for you to share the book with anybody on your team, but because I'm a person of faith, there's a nice values alignment in working with people who kind of share that same background.

Les McKeown: Yes, it's interesting that cause-based and faith-based organizations, it feels much more of an imperative for them because of the fact that there's an underlying cause or a faith.

But the reality is, all of us mercenaries on the for-profit side needed even more because we don't have that thrum, thrum, thrum, thrum of a so-called mission, right?

Jenni Catron: Yep, yep, that's exactly right. And that aligning function of, again, I use values as an anchor. It's not the only thing that defines culture. But it's a big piece that defines culture.

And so you know, especially in the For-profit space, where you can say, Hey, here are the things we really care about. These are the things we really want to make sure are elevated for us to succeed as a team.

That gives you that anchoring piece that, like you said, a lot of faith-based or cause-based organizations will naturally have some of those things. It becomes a stronger anchor, I think, in the for-profit space.

Les McKeown: So tell all our viewers and listeners if they want to find out more about how to reach out to you more about the book, more about you. Where do they go?

Jenni Catron: Best place to go is culturemattersbook.com. So simply culturemattersbook.com that takes you technically to my website. So you can see all kinds of information there; a bunch of bonus resources and extra things. There's a podcast that I host. Lots of extra downloads and resources and fun tools to explore there.

Les McKeown: Super duper. So culturemattersbook.com. It's in the show notes. Go there, get all the additional information.

Jenni, thank you so much for coming on the podcast it's been a delight. This has been a wonderful fortnight, to use my good British expression, because we got to spend some IRL time, as the kids say.

Jenni Catron: That's great!

Les McKeown: I look forward to having you back on at another time.

Jenni Catron: Les. Thank you so much. Thanks for being just such a champion and encourager. You know you did give so much encouragement and support to the book, and I'm really grateful for having me on the show today. Thank you.

Les McKeown: Absolutely my pleasure.