Going from Good to Great Company Culture with Arron Price, COO of Financial Independence Group

ARRON PRICE [: 00:00:00

We really need to be more intentional with our culture, and we need to formalize our culture a little bit more because that's how you go from good to great. We believe that every new person that comes on doesn't just become part of it. They drive the culture forward because we want to make sure everyone on the bus is heading in the same direction.

KATE VOLMAN [: 00:00:17

This is lead with culture. I am Kate Volman, and on this episode, we're talking all about what it takes to go from a good to great culture churn. I chatted with Arron Price, chief operating officer at Financial Independence Group or Floyd Consulting. There are 170 team members serve thousands of financial professionals across the United States with one mission empowering financial professionals. Please enjoy my conversation with Arron.

[: 00:00:44

Arron, thank you so much for taking some time to chat with me today.

ARRON PRICE

I'm so excited. I've been looking forward to this all week.

KATE VOLMAN [: 00:00:53

Oh, good. Me too. Yeah, we had such a fun conversation last week, and you are clearly so passionate about culture and people development, and all the things that you're doing over at Fig are really what leaders need to hear about, and so I'm excited to dig into this conversation. Arron, why are you so excited about people development and culture?

ARRON PRICE [: 00:01:16

Yeah, I think it comes from a couple of things. Early on in my career, I was an individual contributor. I was actually in the tech space, so I was building software out, and it was actually when we started bringing on new people that I found the most excitement.

I used to get excited about software engineering, but you bring on people when you watch them learn and you watch them learn things and see them grow, that they never thought they could get to where they were at. And so I started seeing that. I was like, wow, what if we could do that from a team side? What if we could do that from a company side? And then as more opportunities started to grow, that's when that passion kind of led me to where I am today and how excited I am about culture.

The second thing I think that helped me, too, is I had a really good mentor. So I had someone that was telling me, don't step on this landmine. Hey, you maybe want to look at it from this perspective. And that helped me start to even build me as a brand and be like, okay, what is it that really drives me?

KATE VOLMAN [: 00:02:05

So, obviously, it's fun talking to you about culture.

You've been at the company for a while. You've had a lot of different roles. You grew into this, the role that you have now, which really is focusing on culture and team development. What do you feel like are some of the biggest challenges that companies are facing today when it comes to building a great culture that people are excited about joining a company?

ARRON PRICE [: 00:02:30

I think over the last couple of years, we've seen a tremendous amount of change throughout just hiring and companies that are going through a lot of these exponential changes.

When you look at it at the surface, everyone now realizes that they want to connect with a company that connects with their values, right? They want to be able to connect with the mission of where a company is going. Whereas before, maybe three, four or five years ago and throughout the livelihood of corporations, you never really knew what the mission was. And I think that's what has been kind of the light bulb moment that has kind of surfaced with that. And the biggest challenge, I think, on both sides is stability, right?

So you look at our current environment, you want to align to a mission, but then you want stability in your work, too. And then also just the perception. I think when you look at companies implementing good and great cultures and dynamic cultures, the perception of those coming from their own experiences into a company like that, that's a challenge, right? It's a mindset shift. It's wait, hang on. My company cares about me. My company wants me to grow personally. They don't just want me for my cog in the wheel of the machine that this is. That is probably one of the hardest things when you bring new people on is to actually train their mind to say, hey, no, we care about you. Because if you grow, the team grows and the company grows.

KATE VOLMAN [: 00:03:48

I mean, that's the philosophy, right? That is the philosophy that we all need to have. And it's interesting that you mentioned that some people don't really understand that because there still are a lot of toxic cultures out there and a lot of people are coming from those kind of cultures. So it's crazy to think that some people are like, wait a second, this is a company that cares about me as an individual. Yeah, right.

ARRON PRICE [: 00:04:14

Well, you know what's interesting, too, is that the toxic cultures that we talk about, we talk about managers versus leaders and things like that, I think the number one reason why they're still out there is because it is the easier way. Right. It is difficult to build a dynamic culture. Yeah. Everyone's excited, but there are a lot of moving pieces. There are a lot of complexities to it. You're talking about human beings and everything like that on a toxic side. When you really boil it down on toxic, it's like, I'm going to tell you what to do. Just do it. Right. Don't question it. That's easy to do, right? Just do it. But that only gets you so far. But to build a culture where everyone is included in the mission, where everyone's grown, everyone's taken to the next level, it's difficult to build that from all levels of the company.

KATE VOLMAN [: 00:04:54

Yeah, and it might be easier, but in the short term, but not in the long term. And that's really what you are all doing, because you're set for growth. Like, you are growing, you're scaling, you're adding on new team members. And if you don't have the foundation of culture right from the beginning, then of course things are going to fall apart. Right. So one of the things that I think is interesting about FIG is as you've kind of taken on this role, you already had a good culture, right? Like, the culture was good, but you're really tasked with not only continuing to make sure that it's good, but also level up and make it great. How do you go from good to great? That's really what you're tasked with.

ARRON PRICE [: 00:05:42

Yeah. So like you said, since our foundations over 40 years ago, we always had an incredible culture. It was built from Bill and Erica, our founders. They had a great culture. They built a great culture. They built bringing smart people around everyone and doing it the right way. So we had that as a foundation for us, though, as we started to grow and as we started to scale, we said, you know what we need to do? We really need to be more intentional with our culture, and we need to formalize our culture a little bit more because that's how you go from good to great. I think to be a great culture, you have to really kind of peel all the different pieces back and say, okay, where can we improve and how can we get better? So that is really what we did.

And one of the things that we started with was let's simplify and redefine our mission. Let's simplify and redefine our vision and as well as our core values and have everyone be able to speak to that, because if you can align everyone to those three areas, then we can all move forward as a company. And we would argue, yeah, we had a good culture, but we didn't have a great culture because everyone said what the mission of FIG was differently. They may have been kind of similar, but you could even just see that across the board. And that's what we needed to narrow in on. We needed to simplify that so everyone had that guiding light that they could run to. As mission is king. Right? So what is that mission and how can we run towards it and then being intentional? Because there's one thing on rolling something like that out, but I think in many companies where they fail to make it to the great level, it's because they kind of roll something out and then it kind of falls by the way side. You got to have accountability, and you got to be able to continue to say, okay, we rolled this out, but how can we get better? Okay, what did we learn? What are the things that we need to do now? Like, okay, with six months in now, what and that is how we continue to grow. And I think over the last year and a half has really been a good to great culture journey. We've learned a ton over that time span.

KATE VOLMAN [: 00:07:29

So talk about that, talk about some of the things that you've learned in what you've implemented. It's always fun when you hear you're listening to a conversation and someone's just like, and this is what we did, and now all of a sudden we have a great culture, but let's get into the kind of nitty gritty of what that takes. And what were some of the challenges that you faced and how did you get over those challenges?

ARRON PRICE [: 00:07:48

Yeah, so the first one was being more transparent with our initiatives from a corporate level. So it was defining those and actually making sure that everyone in the company knew what those were, even like quarterly initiatives, we had that on a silo level and we'd never really pushed that out. So we started defining that and putting it in front of the company across all departments. All departments had quarterly initiatives. Now, as we went along, obviously we grew them. We realized, okay, there was clearly a little bit more focus that we needed with our quarterly initiatives. We had a ton. But one of the biggest learning opportunities for us over the last year, outside of putting these structures in place, was that people didn't necessarily know what culture was. And we kept talking about it like everyone knew. So what we realized was, hang on a minute, we need to take it to step back and really educate people on what does culture really mean? And I think we joked about this a few weeks back. Like, we've read as many of these books and everything like that, and we kind of take it in our own minds as like, everyone knows what we have already kind of ingested. But that's just so unfair on everyone else to push this word culture. And everyone say, okay, be a culture advocate. We'll see a layer and everyone's like, I don't even know what that means. Right? That was some of the other big challenges and how do we get education out there?

How do we help our employees really grow in that? And so over the year, we decided, okay, let's bring in some speakers, let's bring in those that can target specific aspects of culture. And then we really saw that. And then we started to see people come up with their own ideas and say, hey, what about this? What about that? I don't understand this bit, but I understand that. And that's the coolest part about where we sit today.

KATE VOLMAN [: 00:09:23

I love that. So what do you think? How did your people define culture? Like, what was their way of looking at culture originally?

ARRON PRICE

It was all across the board. It actually makes me think of one meeting that we had on the operations team where we talked about leaders versus managers. And our director of operations did an incredible job on basically handing out different pieces of paper that had definitions on them, on definition of a lead and definition of manager. And it didn't have the word on it. So the operations team had to guess which one was which. And it was so telling because everyone had different interpretations. It was interesting because that then led to, okay, well, we even need to talk about what is a manager and what is a leader. And so it's those things that come to the forefront that we're like, okay, at this moment, we got to address this. What we actually found from that specific example is we see our director of operations as a true leader through and through. She actually has a doctorate in strategic leadership. But there were some frustrations early on in the team on the way in which she handles situations. And what people realized in that meeting was because of the definition of a leader was different to a manager. Sometimes they just wanted this individual to just say, you do this right? Because they were so used to the manager role where a leader was trying to say, well, talk me through how you would handle the situation.

There was a realization that the frustration was coming from the definition and misrepresentation of that, rather than the fact of the frustration with the director of opps.

KATE VOLMAN [: 00:10:39

This is such a great example of communication. We have to communicate. We have to let our people know, why are we asking these questions? Otherwise, people can feel very defensive or what's going on, especially when you're implementing new strategies or when you're working on culture and being so intentional about it. It can be a little disruptive, it can be a little uncomfortable for people.

ARRON PRICE

Yeah, it really can. And we saw a lot of that. And I think one of the big things when you look at going from good to great culture, especially if you completely reconstruct your culture, especially those that have been there for a while, sometimes you do that because there are people within your culture that you know aren't going to be. The culture advocates may not be there for the long term, having the right people in the right seats. We saw that. And I think one of the biggest things when you look at something like that is being able to say openly, hey, this is where we're going. This is the bus, right? Everyone has the right to have a seat on it, but you've got to want to be on it. And it's okay if you don't, because it ended goes back to us at the beginning on you got to align your values to your company's values.

And if that doesn't align, then it's never going to work. And so what we did is we said, we screamed from the mountaintops, this is our values. This is where we're going. And we knew that there were some individuals that would never align to that. And naturally they left and they left it on good terms.

And I think that's cool to see because we were obviously early on in that journey, you're like, okay, we know we have some culture, not necessary issues, but we just have those that don't align to our culture. And so we're like, okay, how will this pan out? But what we realized was us being more vocal, us being more communicative in, that led to the fact that people came to us and said, you know what? I don't think this is going to work out because this is not how I align how I work. And we're like, that's completely fine.

KATE VOLMAN [: 00:12:36

That's so great. It's almost like you have to give people that opportunity. You don't know what you're walking away from if you don't know exactly what you're in and what is expected of you.

ARRON PRICE

Yes. Because everyone creates their own subcultures when you have many of those different things going on. So they've kind of created their own subculture where this is how I've wanted to live. But then we kind of took that apart and said, well, it's a corporate culture. We want an FIG of one. And now it's like, well, that's not quite what it's for me. And then now they know. Right?

KATE VOLMAN [: 00:13:03

Yeah. Well, and as a leader and a big part of your role is not only so you're improving the culture with the people that you have now, but obviously the people that you bring in, the more established you are with how you communicate the culture, they know what they're getting themselves into. Right. You're creating that before they even walk through your doors. They know the kind of culture that you have. So is it a good fit or not? And this is why it's so important to have that culture part of the interview process so that you know you're bringing people on that should be there. Also, as a leader, it's your responsibility to do the hard things like hiring and firing. And when you become intentional about your culture and people do get uncomfortable, yes, some of those people leave and they end on good terms, but sometimes people don't leave and they try to just stay and make it work.

And that's the leader's role to kind of discern. Is it time to let somebody go? How do you coach them up? How do you decide at Fig, is this person just not a good fit for the organization? Or is this really a coaching opportunity to help them align with the culture and better move forward with the vision mission for themselves and the company?

ARRON PRICE [: 00:14:13

Yeah. So naturally, our lead is what we see as coaches. So we educate them on how to be coaches, how to have those tough conversations, how to really figure out what is it that you as an individual wants to strive for, where you want to go? What do you like? What?

You don't like all the things, right? And sometimes when you get in those conversations, you see there is this deviation away from the mission. But going back to what I was saying about being able to define the mission vision values, our quarterly reviews are fully based on how are you hitting the mission, how are you impacting the vision, how are you with your core values? So that gives us, basically the expectations and infrastructure for every individual.

So when we go through these and we see that they're not necessarily hitting those areas, it's a way in which we can coach to. But if they're not receptive to it because they don't align with that or they don't believe in it, that's when we start to see, okay, this is where it's kind of going down a path. And that's when it starts to get more in those hard conversations where we can pretty much say, hey, this is where FIG and the team is going. You're here right now. Is this okay? Are you okay with that? Because we want to make sure everyone on the bus is heading in the same direction.

So it is tough. It's tough to have those conversations, but it's even tougher to not have those conversations because that person may not necessarily be a cancer, but they can disrupt the direction that you're going. They could be maybe more of an anchor or there's kind of a body there. And that's disruptive because even when we look at the hiring side of things, I say 80% of it is culture driven.

Like, our questioning is like, how are you going to fit into the team? But what we say in every interview is that we have a great culture here at FIG. We want you to be a great part of that culture. But we believe that every new person that comes on doesn't just become part of it, they drive the culture forward. So we want you to have a seat at the table.

We want your opinions. We want you to be able to drive forward. So it's the same thing when we're having a conversation with an existing individual, how are you driving our culture forward? And if you're not driving it forward, maybe you're not a good fit.

KATE VOLMAN [: 00:16:14

This is a big question because a lot of organizations, especially when it comes to anything team development, culture related, how are you measuring success? How does FIG know when they go from a good to a great? How are you measuring what that looks like?

ARRON PRICE

We're still in the transitional stage of that. I think that's one of the most difficult things to measure. And if you read any culture books, that literally you can say it has the highest ROI without being actually able to truly measure it.

But what we have seen is some of the signals that we already had in place. So, like, in our operations team. We have surveys from our financial professionals, and so we have seen a shift in the types of comments and the positivity of those comments shift over the last year and a bit. And what's interesting is we would have assumed they would have shifted down a little bit as we had a lot of new people over the last year. You would assume it would have gone down and come back up.

But what we saw more within these comments was a word that we were trying to strive for with the change in culture, which was care. So we hypothesize that, and I think we all know this here, but experience isn't everything. It's how much you care about your customer and it's the culture side, right? So we start seeing way more on, hey, this may have not gone right, but I'm going to get five stars, because they cared, they jumped in, they did this, and then we just started to see it just continue to exponentially grow on that side.

Another thing is engagement over the last year, it's tough to measure with COVID and obviously everything happening over the last couple of years, but this year alone, we have seen a lot more company wide engagement than we've ever seen before. We have events that we put on throughout the year, and we always have done, but the fact that we're seeing people interact with other departments, going to happy hours, creating their own happy hours, that wasn't happening before, that was the cool part of seeing some of those things.

I think going into: 2023

KATE VOLMAN

This is a good point, because it takes time, right? You don't change your culture overnight. It doesn't happen in a month, it doesn't happen in three months. And I love that you have decided to what you called formalize your culture plan, which is so awesome and really kind of giving it the space that it needs to grow and develop. Because I think that's a big thing with leaders is what do we want? We're so used to the ROI and looking at if we want to make sure that we're going to get results in six months, in a year, we want the results right now. Right? We need that instant gratification. But culture, it's a living, breathing, growing every single day. So talk to the leader. That's thinking, where do you start? Right? What do I even do? It feels really heavy. It feels like a lot to kind of take on. If you're transforming your culture, like, where do you start? Where do you begin? What does that look like for you?

ARRON PRICE [: 00:19:23

Yeah, you need a starting point for sure you need that initial kick off, whatever that is. Redefining your mission if it's your core values and the kick off. Okay, what is our culture? But you're right, it is not overnight.And anyone that thinks they can change their culture within a week is kidding themselves. Right? Absolutely.

The key to it, though, there's two things that I can think of. Consistency. People will resist at first because it's different. Right. And it's not like they're intentionally resisting. They're like, this is different to how I've always approached things. But the key is, are the leaders being consistent or are they backtracking and falling back into what it was before?

So, what we found I take our director of ops again. She was consistent in her message of where the culture was, even when there were days when people were piling on. I don't get it. I don't know the direction. It was consistency. And this is the second part, plus the little things. It's not the big grandiose things. Yeah, you'll have your rollout, but it's consistently just giving the small things the small pieces. That's what culture is, right? The small thank you.

The small appreciation. You build that up, that starts to compound the consistency, starts to make everyone realize that, okay, this is the direction. They didn't just have this fluffy thing that they just rolled out with the flashing lights and everything like that. And I actually saw it over the last couple of months. Someone came into my office who didn't resist the culture, but had been here so long that they were unsure of where the direction was.

And they were very vocal about it in a very respectful way. They actually said, like, Arron, I don't know if this is the right direction. I'm not sure how I fit into this. And they came into my office a couple of months ago and goes, I get it. I completely get it, and I completely buy into it. And it took me a while, but I get it. And the way it took her a while is because we had to have that consistency. They didn't quite understand is the education piece. Going back to that thing about, like, not everyone knew what culture meant, but because we kept going with it, the worst thing you can do is roll something out and then just start to regress back because there's a little bit of resistance or you don't feel like you have the time because there is an investment too in it. You have to be intentional.

KATE VOLMAN [: 00:21:30

Yeah, for sure. I think every one of us can relate to being in an organization when they get super excited about an initiative and then all of a sudden you're like, Wait, what happened? Wasn't that supposed to be the big thing that changed our company? And now we never even talk about it anymore, right?

ARRON PRICE

Yeah, exactly. And we made it very intentional when we said this. We started talking about this. A year and a half ago, we said if we were to do this, we need to do it. Like, we need to continue this on for years to come. This isn't going to be one of those roll out, get everyone excited, and then it dies off.

KATE VOLMAN [: 00:22:00

And what I love is so obviously, in Matthew Kelly's book, The Floyd Consulting, he shares the six principles of a dynamic culture. Principle number one is make culture priority. Principle number two is mission is king. And I feel like over at Fig, you guys really took those first two and rolled with it. Obviously, you're very intentional. You are the person responsible, right? Everyone's responsible for culture, but there's got to be one person that really leads that to make sure that it doesn't just fall by the wayside. And I love that you've been talking about mission, and you said simplicity a few times, which I just want to highlight because this is so key, because, again, as leaders, shiny object syndrome, we get really excited about the newest best. But keeping things simple in this world of complexity is so important.

So when you decided, hey, we really got to focus first on mission, how did you bring everyone together? You have a team of 175 people. Yeah. So you have a nice size organization, lots of different people. Not everyone had the same idea of what the mission was. So how do you bring people together and figure out, okay, we're going to simplify our mission? What does that look like? What does that mean?

ARRON PRICE [: 00:23:00

Yeah. So we started polling different people. Like, we had already started doing that anyway. And that's how we got to the fact that, wait, not everyone can interpret our mission. We had a defined mission, but no one could just straight up say it. So we started record those, and then we had a little subgroup subcommittee that met, I would say must have been like six or seven times, really ironing out, okay, what is our mission like? What are we trying to do and how do we simplify it? And we had so many different I'm sure every organization that goes through this will have this. There's so many different ways in which it was written. There was a long one, there was a short one, there was one that made no sense. All of those. Right. But it's hard.

It's actually funny because, you know, as an organization, what your mission is. It's just how do you verbalize it? That was the hardest thing. And how do you verbalize it so everyone understands it too?

So we actually, in the end, landed on one, which I think is absolutely perfect. It's three words, and it's empowering financial professionals, because everything we do within these walls is to empower financial professionals no matter what department you're in. So it was a cool exercise, and on the surface, it looks like that's pretty simple. They must have just. Come up with that, like, over lunch, but it took a long time. It probably took, like, three or four months. It took a lot of whiteboarding out, like, who do we want to be? Like, all of that stuff. And then that's really how that came to be.

KATE VOLMAN [: 00:24:31

It reminds me of that quote. I would have written a shorter note. I just didn't have the time. Right. Because it takes time to really define that. I mean, you have to really think through because, again, you kind of know the essence of your mission, but to actually verbalize it in a very clear, succinct way, oh, yeah, it's challenging, and you have to be intentional about doing that. Now everyone on your team can remember it.

ARRON PRICE

All right? They do. Yeah. And we say it all the time. We say it naturally now, and that's what our goal was. Right. I will say this, though. It's difficult to do, but it was a fun activity. I think any company that goes through doing something like that, especially a more established company that has had all of the four years to build up and to be able to do something like that, was a cool, fun exercise.

KATE VOLMAN [: 00:25:18

Getting the team involved, getting everyone involved in that process. That's what people want. I always say people want to do good work and they want to be part of an organization where they feel like they're contributing. And when leaders bring them involved in those conversations and they understand why it's being done and they get to kind of get their feedback, there's nothing better. People feel supported and appreciated and, like, your thoughts and ideas actually matter to us. That's huge.

ARRON PRICE [: 00:25:48

Well, that's big on what we're talking about in terms of simplicity and consistency when we roll something like this out. Yeah, you could do that. The upfront part of bringing admission. But then what about after? What about when we have new initiatives?

What if when we bring up a new idea? And that's the small things, right? Bringing someone in that's on the front lines, doing this role to bring their ideas. It's those things that are very simple that I think a lot of organizations just miss. They're like, okay, well, we'll just bring in the department heads and they'll make the decision, and we'll just trickle it down. But bring in the people that are doing the job day in, day out, because we firmly believe that those are the ones that are going to be able to innovate more than the ones that are the leaders over.

KATE VOLMAN [: 00:26:25

What has surprised you the most, Arron, as you are tasked with all this culture stuff? What has surprised you with your team as you're building out your formal culture plan?

ARRON PRICE

Yeah, I think the first was and this was just what we talked about before, the shock of realizing that not everyone knew what culture meant. Everyone wanted a good culture. No one knew what that meant to them, though. And I think that came very much to the forefront almost immediately. When we talk about surprises, though, there's just been so many of them, just so many countless opportunities to grow and learn. I think it's how everyone interprets initiatives, the way in which we rolled it out. Really what I'm getting at here is how not black and white rolling out a culture initiative is and how much we had to realize that we're talking about human beings and human beings are complex.

And so when we had leaders that had different situations, a lot of our older, more tenured leaders were like, well, give me the process. Give me the exact black and white process on how I handle the situation. We were like, while there is a high level process, it depends on the individual you're communicating with. We had to figure out communication styles, which is another thing, because at the end of the day, you wanted to be able to communicate what your intent was that individual, but they received it differently. So there was a lot more of that than we ever thought we had to. And that was, I wouldn't say a surprise, but just something for everyone to keep in mind, is that when you change a culture, you are having to make sure that everyone understands what that culture is. But on 170 human beings, that interpret the world differently based on their entire experiences up until the point where you've launched culture out. And that's hard because even in teams, and we have some leaders that have teams of 30 people, right, they're sitting down with 30 individuals learning everything about them and how they communicate it, as well as what their goals are.

And it's great once you get through it. But the initial state is a lot, right? There's a lot of things that our leaders had to take on there and a lot of areas where they were like, I'm not quite sure the best way to do it because they were looking for what is the path and the workflow and that necessarily wasn't defined.

KATE VOLMAN [: 00:28:39

It's almost like we have to just get more comfortable being uncomfortable, being uncomfortable in the uncertainty.

ARRON PRICE

That's exactly it. Yeah. I think we live in a world, in organizations with good or maybe even bad cultures where it was like, just follow this process and that's it done. We've checked the box, we've done it. But it's not a check the box thing anymore. It is how does this individual respond and how do we need to handle it with this individual?

And it even happened this week. We've had a couple of conversations that we've had to have. It's nothing by the book, it really isn't. But we had to figure out the best way in which we approach that conversation. And they ended up being really good. But you couldn't have got that from the FIG culture manual, right? That just doesn't exist.

KATE VOLMAN

yeah, people. People are going to people, man.

ARRON PRICE

Yeah, that's it. Right. But when you accept that, it's not as. I feel like the initial shock for a lot of leaders is frustration. They get frustrated at the people. But when you actually accept people are people, you kind of take that load off you. You can't be frustrated at someone because of the way they are. The way they are because that's how they were raised. Right.

That's their perceptions, their feelings. You cannot negate. That's just how it is. So once you can start to get over that hump, then you can start to figure out, well, how do I now communicate with that person?

KATE VOLMAN [: 00:29:59

Well, you talked a little bit about your leaders being natural coaches, right. How are you as part of building a dynamic culture, you're coaching your coaches. Do you have anything in place that helps to develop your people, develop your leaders and coaches so that you are creating that coaching culture?

ARRON PRICE

Yeah, that is like the funnest part of my role is coaching the coaches. I feel like we do have some things we did, like leadership training and things throughout the year. Those things definitely help, but I think it goes back to what we were just talking about. But when you get into the situations that come up, the leadership training kind of helps because it gives you a little bit of a framework, but it doesn't really when you actually get into it. So the coolest conversations I have day in, day out is, hey, I got this situation, I need help with it. And the fun part about our culture is everyone comes to the table with their solutions, right. So it's like, I think I need to do it this way, but if I come across this way and it's in the end, what I've found is I'm having less input. Right.

I'm hearing our coaches say, I'm going to try it this way and this way, and I'm like, I love that. That's a great idea. Continue to go down, let me know how that goes. And that's actually really fun to see that, because you can tell in that moment there's growth because they're thriving and being uncomfortable in situations. I think also another thing about and I'm going back to the uncomfortable side, but just maybe think of it, because I think we've had in this year, when we talk about going from a good to great culture, everyone thinks sunshine, rainbows or all that kind of stuff, right? But I think this year we've had more conflict resolution conversations at this company than we ever had before. And I think people were scared to say that, like, it's a bad thing, but it's a good thing because I think in so many organizations, we brush things under the rug. But this year we've had more of our leaders be in these conversations, oh, earlier on than way down the road, when it's very frustrating. And we've had people come together and say, hey, I know you're frustrated. How are we going to handle this situation? Let's get everything out on the table, how we want to move forward. And we have solved 99% of those problems by having those conversations up front instead of saying, yeah, it's going to be a hard conversation we're just brushed up.

KATE VOLMAN [: 00:31:59

That is so huge. That right there is huge. I mean, this is what healthy conflict is. We have to be comfortable having that healthy conflict. And when we think about managerial courage, which Matthew talked about in his book, there are so many leaders that we don't want to have those uncomfortable conversations. And when we have more of that coaching culture and I love that you talked about, you are empowering your team to make those choices and make those decisions and have those conversations. And the more you have those conversations, the less uncomfortable it is to just have that open dialogue. But that takes time.

ARRON PRICE

It does. Yeah, it really does. I tell people the time because I've had a few of them throughout the year and I've said it may be uncomfortable for everyone else. I feel comfortable in these conversations because I'd rather have this conversation now than in three months time. Yeah. Because then it's a whole other ball game. There's a lot more emotions, a lot more assumptions built in.

And because we are building a culture where we're problem solvers, we're all coaches around the table, that's an easier conversation to have across the board. Right. Because everyone has that same mindset. They're approaching problem solving in the same way now it's like we're just here to grow. The only reason why we're having this difficult conversation is because we have an opportunity to grow from here.

KATE VOLMAN

People actually do want to have the conversation much earlier because it relieves all that stress of weeks of going home and talking to your spouse about, oh, my gosh, what is Arron thinking and what's going on? And am I going to get fired? And I'm like, we we are so wired to think the negative.

ARRON PRICE

Yeah. Yeah, I completely agree. You know, one thing on that is another part that I think we talk about surprising this year is when we talk about building a culture, we want to build that trust so people can be truly honest with us. I think that was a lot of a very difficult thing for some people that had been in other cultures before and we see it even with some new hires who do definitely buy into the culture, but they're definitely resistant at first because how honest can I be with my company? Right. That comes up a lot. How honest can I be with my manager? My manager has the power to fire that's kind of like what goes on in their minds, but trying to figure out tell me how it is and I'm never going to scold you. I'm always going to come at it from a sense of curiosity and coaching and growth and being able to have the consistency. To continue to say that has been key for us because we've seen some people that were a little bit resistant at first and then really kind of got on board and are very open with everything. And I think that's a good thing. That's a good healthy relationship because it really ties that team member into the company and realizes this company is here to help me grow, not try and hold me back and put me in a box at the company, if that makes sense.

KATE VOLMAN [: 00:34:34

Yeah, absolutely. All right, Arron, what is one tip that you have for leaders that they can take action on right now?

ARRON PRICE

Yeah. Without being the grandiose? In order to redefine the mission vision. Some leaders don't have the power to do that. You got to get by in to have that stuff. But if there's one thing for a leader that has a group of people that they support is really getting to know their individuals, really understanding and appreciate the role.

I think if you're in an organization where you don't necessarily have that great culture and maybe you're leading roles that are predominantly those that have always been pushed to the side a little bit, there is always an opportunity to show appreciation on truly the impact. So figure out a way to change the culture within your own team to grow and show that this team makes an impact. You make an impact and get to understand that individual and then appreciate them. And that's the little things, right? And it's not go out and buy several thousand dollars of gift cards. Not that, but a simple walking around the office and saying thank you is just one thing. And people remember that. Sometimes us as leaders don't remember those things, but other people remember how that made them feel. So that is the small things that you can do to improve a culture. Because what we've seen, and I've seen this where I have some buddies who are leaders at other firms that don't have great cultures, but their team has a great culture because of the things that they've done and start there and you can then build momentum up and across the organization.

KATE VOLMAN

I love it. It reminds me of my favorite quote, one of my favorite quotes by Maya Angelou. People will forget what you said. They will forget what you did, but they will never forget how you made them feel.

ARRON PRICE

Exactly. Yeah, that's it. Maybe just the leader put that above their desk and just live that every day.

KATE VOLMAN

I love it. Arron, you're awesome. Thank you so much. I am so excited to continue to watch you develop and grow and do incredible things over at FIG.

ARRON PRICE

Well, thank you so much for everything. Thank you for the opportunity. As we said, we're a coaching culture here. I'm looking forward to having the same conversation in a year's time, because all of the new surprises that we'll learn there and all the new nuances that we find within our culture, so maybe we'll do this on a yearly basis or something as a touch.

KATE VOLMAN

Totally. I love that idea. Done and done.

KATE VOLMAN [: 00:37:00

Thank you so much for listening to this episode. We hope you got something out of it. I know Arron shared so many incredible strategies and ideas on what he has been doing to go from that good to great culture. It is really important for us to make sure that every time you listen to an episode of Lead with Culture, you've learned at least one thing, one takeaway, something that the guest said that made you think, AHA, I can do that. Arron talked about simplicity, because culture can feel like this big thing that we have to tackle, but we have to do it every day.

Like Arron said, we have to be consistent. We start to put that plan together, and we just kind of chip at it every single day. And then we start to see all these results, all this success. It was simple, right? Just start talking to your people, start recognizing your people.

Those little small things make such a huge impact in an organization, which is why I love in Matthew's book, the Floyd Consulting, he talks about culture advocates. Everyone plays a role in building a dynamic culture. Everyone has that opportunity to do one thing every day, to make that shift, to help you create that culture. And so what does that look like for you? What is one thing that you're going to do to move your culture forward, to go from that good to great?

And if you're wondering, hey, I don't even know where my culture sits today, what do my people think about the culture of the organization that I'm in? Maybe you lead it, maybe you run it, maybe you're on the executive team, and maybe you're just a team member. It doesn't really matter because, again, everyone plays that role in a dynamic culture. And so if you want to assess where you are in your culture right now, we've created a free resource to take advantage of. You can actually get our Floyd culture assessment, and it will give you a culture score, not only an overall score of your culture, but it also break down what your score is on all of the six principles that Matthew shares in the book.

So it'll give you a little bit of insight of where should I start? Out of all the things that I could do to impact the culture, where should I start? Today? Will help you simplify that plan. So if you want to take that free assessment, you can go to Floyd Consulting culture.

Thank you again for listening. And until next time, lead with Culture.