The Importance of Culture

I’d like you to ask yourself a question: Are you intentional? Or do you like to just ad lib, and fly by the seat of your pants?

Culture is an intentional decision. Whether you decide to put structure and clarity behind your culture, or just let things happen, both of those are decisions you’ve made. One has a goal, and the other doesn’t.

Some friends and I were having a discussion recently about Chick-fil-A, and how they’ve created an intentional culture with clarity and purpose. They’re only open six days a week, and their sales revenue in six days in one store is almost double what a McDonald’s does in seven days, open twenty-four hours a day. Their culture drives their success because they’ve created a culture where employees have the ability to move a large volume of customers through the line effectively and efficiently.

That’s their culture: excellent and fast service.

Whataburger has a culture too, and if you’ve ever eaten there you know what it is. If you see even two people in the drive through line, you know it’s best to just move along to another restaurant unless you’re willing to wait a half an hour for your food.

Whataburger’s culture, their WHY, is to produce unique, freshly made burgers for every customer, but because they don’t have an efficient process to meet that “WHY” of freshness, it automatically reduces the number of customers they can serve in a day. They took their why and let the culture develop itself rather than guiding and directing it.

You’re still getting fresh food at Chick-fil-A, of course, but their business has studied and understands how long people are willing to wait as long as the food is fresh and good. Whataburger is so focused on fresh food that they haven’t considered learning to predict demand and build a good process for serving fresh food quickly.

The question is, what kind of organization do you want to be? Chick-fil-A or Whataburger?

Organizations need an intentional culture because when you have that, people will either love it or hate it. There are a lot of people who are passionate about Whataburger. The same can be said about Chick-fil-A.

Are they going after the same customers, and do they attract the same employees? A lack of intentional culture creates chaos, you get what you get. Intentional culture that reflects your why will give you what you expect and much more.

It’s important to note that culture can’t be changed without clarity, honesty, and trust. If everyone knows the organization’s WHY and believes in it, the culture almost develops itself. That’s not “accidental culture” because it was formed around a clear and concise WHY. As a leader, understanding my own why will have a heavy influence on the culture of the company.

The culture at Smart Chemical, and the one now at Refined Completions, are very different. Because I’m the authentic me now, I have clarity in my purpose and my life, I know my why. I’m living an authentic and vulnerable life, not hiding behind a mask. We have a long-term goal, but the biggest change is that I have a patient sense of urgency.

For example, we’re in the process of implementing EOS. We’ve gone through the first day-long meeting that helped us start building accountability and understanding the areas in the business where we needed real clarity and visibility. We started practicing a level-ten meeting. That was in September, and today we’ve gone through three meetings, and the clarity that has shown up in the business has been unbelievable.

I really wanted the next full-day meeting to be in October, but we couldn’t get everyone’s schedule together. I was so focused on what I wanted, I reverted to a Command and Control leadership style (it happens!) and said, “Okay, we’re having the meeting on this day and I don’t care what schedule conflicts there are. Deal with it.”

I wasn’t patiently urgent; I wasn’t honoring our culture. I was focused on the transaction of the next meeting instead of realizing we were making great progress in being a visible and vulnerable team. When I realized what I was doing, I slowed down, and we found a time in November that fit with all of our schedules.

During the acquisition process last year, I felt a great sense of peace in recognizing that I wasn’t in a hurry to acquire the completions division. I had a great sense of urgency, but I was not in a hurry. A lot of companies (even me, with our 10 Rules when I was CEO of Smart Chemical) believe that rules build the culture, but in reality it’s about building a way to practice those rules (or vision, or mission).