Building a Family Culture in Your Organization, with Ed Molitor

Welcome to the Athletics of Business, a podcast about how the traits and behaviors of elite athletes and remarkable business leaders frequently intersect. The real stories and hard lessons to help you level up your leadership and performance. Now, your host, Ed Molitor.

Welcome back to another episode of the Athletics of Business podcast. I am your host and CEO of the Molitor Group, Ed Molitor. I am really fired up to jump into today's subject. It's just going to be you and me. This is a solo cast, but we're going to talk about building a culture, a family culture, inside of your organization, your team. And there's a lot of terms we use to describe certain cultures, successful cultures. It can be a resilient culture, a powerful culture, a positive culture, a safe culture. But I want to talk about that component of not being like a family, but being a family. Now, I know there's some pushback out there about, well, you can't be an organization. You can't be a business and be a family, because a family is all about unconditional love.

And you kind of just tolerate each other and you forgive each other and, you know, how can you fire someone that you love unconditionally? Okay, why don't we just get a little bit more academic or be a little bit more of a victim of paralysis by analysis? Because here's what I mean by building a family culture. You know, having a family component to your culture, because it is. It is so powerful. I mean, this. You get to know each other at a very deep level. You develop a deep sense of trust. You treat each other with empathy, with care. You. You. You learn to grow to love each other. Doesn't mean you always get along. It certainly doesn't mean you always disagree. But you trust each other, right? You have each other's back. You'll go to battle together. All right?

What happens when you start to build this sense of family, this family inside of your organizational culture, your team culture? Your members become more emotionally attached to the greater good. They really buy into the fact that they're part of something much bigger than themselves. And that's the team and the organization that they're a part of. They're going to refuse to let each other, as well as the team, the organization, fail. And when you. When you get to know each other, you know how the other one operates. You know how to communicate. You develop a shared language, a common language, and I can go on about all the powerful things, and we'll talk a little bit more about it as we go on the podcast, but just really gets me when people say, oh no, no, you can't do that.

Everything's about, you know, I read an article recently and I don't really want to dive into the whole article and what it said, but I do want to share just a bit of it with you. And it talks about, I can't remember, I have the notes here and I can't remember what magazine I read this in that I pull it up offline. But it basically kept referring to Patty McCord, the former head of HR at Netflix, which obviously a very successful person. And we can agree to disagree on certain things. We agree on other things. But she talks about embracing the transient project based nature of all professional relationships. Right? All professional relationships. Pretty broad stroke there, if you ask me. I get creating a culture of freedom and responsibility. I like to call it controlled freedom.

I spoke of that and I preached that when I was coaching college basketball. And I do in the business world as well. And it just means that workers are powerful enough to embrace radical honesty, work wonders in the workplace. She insists that all managers should learn to say goodbye by, to their employees. Like this is some big secret that all professional relationships working together doesn't last forever. She talks about that we play make believe, okay. The article talks about playing make believe in the corporate world, that we pretend that we want to grow with an organization forever. I might be missing something here, but I don't think that's the case. She, she goes on to talk about like marriages. We all pretend that they're going to last forever. Well, to death do us part. I know it's not the case.

I know it's not the situation. But here's my thing. Even if I'm on like a project based team, right, I want those people on that team to know that I'm all in on that project with them. And I want to get that to know them and serve them as much as I possibly can in our time together as an employee of an organization. Okay, you may decide to leave for another opportunity. But that's what being a professional is all about. Contributing and being present where you are if another opportunity comes up, hey, maybe this culture that you're in right now makes it impossible to leave. That's great. But I don't think just because people leave. I mean, think about families. People leave the nest all the time, don't they? Kids don't live at home forever.

Well, now I've got some friends that beg to differ. But you Know what I mean? Okay. Go back to, you know, the greatest college basketball programs, high school programs that I was a part of as a player, as a. Were families. We didn't stay there forever. But you know what? After our time had come and it was time for us to move on, or when I was a coach, a player's time to move on, or even if someone transferred, I still rooted for them. We still rooted for each other. I still want to know how their family was doing. It didn't change the fact that I knew they had a brother who was battling cancer that they were very close to, and it affected them deeply. No, come on, man. That's what family is, right? You're there for each other.

You grow through adversity together. You learn how to sustain success and enjoy success and celebrate each other and each other's wins, and you learn to serve each other. And by doing that, you're serving yourself in essence. Okay? That's what family's all about. So you can give me this garbage that everything's so transactional and transient in the business world. Well, you keep going down on that journey because I ain't joining you. Because I truly believe that the most successful organizations in teams are the ones that are family. Not like family, but they are a family. So that's great. Okay, so maybe you're. You're agreeing with me. Well, what are. What are some things, Ed, that I can do to get to that, to get to the family? You know, you may be going through some organizational change, may have some struggles on your team.

There may be some people sucking the life out of your team or people not buying into the culture, but what can you do to create that family atmosphere, to create that culture with the family component where you have that vibe and you have that sense of closeness and that bond and you're. You're connected. That singleness of purpose, there's so much power behind it because you are a family. Well, I'm going to share three ways that you can do that, and this comes from all my years of being a coach, ok. Around the game of basketball, around athletics, as well as in the business world. And these are things that they work. I'm going to share a couple stories with you, a couple examples, and I think they're really cool. I think they're really powerful.

And here's a really great thing about it, is that anyone can do them. Now, just because anyone can do them doesn't mean everybody is doing them or everyone is doing them. And that's the wonderful thing about success. Success is a choice, right? You can choose to be successful. Now, we're all going to struggle. And it doesn't mean that your rate of success, or let me rephrase that, it doesn't mean that your timetable of becoming wildly successful is going to be the same as someone else's. It is what it is. But we all have a choice to do the things that need to be done for us to be successful. And as an organization, if you want to become a family, I'm going to share three things with you right now that you can do. The first thing is this is facilitate collective awareness.

Now, what does collective awareness means? Okay, let's take a. Let's take a team, for example, a business team, a leadership team. Okay? How well do you know everybody on that leadership team? All right? How well do you know everything that's going on in their world or what's important to them? On the surface, you might know. You might. Bobby. Bobby's eight. He's playing little league baseball. And. And Jimmy thinks that's the greatest thing in the world. He's going to be the next, you know, name your favorite baseball player. All right, I was about to name one of mine, and some of the folks listening to this podcast would be like, God, how old is he? So I just let it go with that. But anyways, facilitate collective awareness.

So, you know, get to know each other and get to know what's going on in one another's lives and in the present. Okay, in the present. So how do you do that? Well, let's take Monday morning meetings. We all, we all dread those. I remember when I first got out of coaching, went to the mortgage business, and we had these dreaded 7:30am Monday morning meetings in the mortgage business. You know, and you gotta remember I was 28, living across the street from Oak street beach on Lakeshore Drive in the mortgage industry with my guys. So Sunday, especially in the summer, Sunday kind of turned into a fun day. But anyhow, I digress. But let's take your Monday morning meetings. Okay? How do you start the meeting? Eric Schmidt? You know, it's no secret. I love to read.

One of the books I really enjoyed this past year was Trillion Dollar Coach, the Leadership Playbook of Silicon Valley's Bill Campbell. Get it? I'm telling you'll love it. But Eric Schmidt was one of the authors, along with Jonathan Rosenberg and Alan Eagle. Now, Eric worked at Google, was a leader at Google with Bill Campbell. And Eric would start his Monday morning meetings with a weekend update or a Weekend roundup. And what he would do is he would go around the room and he would have people talk about what they did over the weekend and share that. Okay? And this served a couple of purposes. And if you really think about this, it sounds really innocent. It sounds really like, oh, okay, that's great. Kind of Pollyanna, whatever. Now think about it, okay?

Because inside of that book, they, he, they talk about how he and Bill. There's two objectives in this. First, for team members to get to know each other as people with families and interesting lives outside of work. And the second was to get, and I love this, to get everyone involved in the meeting from the outset, but in a fun way, okay? So as Googlers and human beings as they refer to it, and not just as experts and owners of their particular roles. So in other words, get to know the real person. And I really, really like that. Then another way to facilitate collective awareness, which I think is pretty powerful. Marissa Mayer, former CEO when she was a CEO, Yahoo. What she would do instead of weekend updates, she would start out with thank yous. Okay?

So you'd express gratitude to somebody else on your team for something that happened the previous week. Her team jokingly called it a family prayer because they were saying how thankful they were for everybody. But it's really pretty cool and powerful when you think about it because as we've discussed before in the podcast, physiological, you cannot show gratitude and be negative at the same time. You can't show gratitude and be stressed at the same time. In this. Physiological. Physiologically. Excuse me, that's like a five syllable word. That's hard for me at least. But anyways, it's impossible. It's physiologically impossible. Okay? But there are two rules in her thank yous, you couldn't thank yourself. Hello. Obvious. Okay. And then you can't repeat what someone else said.

What's really cool about this when you think about it, is you're basically going to recap the entire week before with all the positives. Now the second thing that you can do which is really powerful is commit to a cause outside of work, one that serves a higher purpose. And again, I'm going to refer a book that I've read recently. I met this wonderful gentleman at my son EJ school where EJ goes to kindergarten. Gentleman's name is Ray Benedetto and he authored a book with Ken Thompson, Tom Walter and Molly Meyer. And the title of the book, and I really recommend you go grab this as well, the title of the book is it's my company. How entangled companies move beyond employee engagement for remarkable results. And one of the companies that they studied and that they discussed the results in.

I mean, in depth, and they spent a lot of time with this company, Integrated Project management. And it's interesting, when you read about integrated project management, they're talking about building an ethical culture, an ethical company, an ethical organization, but it really dives into how to become a family at some points inside of the chapter. And they talk about how all business relationships start out transactionally, don't they? Because if there's a contract, and in the contract, what do you get? You. You get the job description, the hierarchy, hierarchical relationships with your boss, there's the performance expectations, incentive to do more than a contract states really isn't there, because the trust isn't there yet. So how do you build that trust? When you build that trust and you build. You build sincere relationships, and when you start doing that, you start moving towards a family. But.

But there's a story inside it that I want to share with you because it is. It is extremely powerful. And there is a woman by the name of Karen, excuse me, Karen, hiding. And Karen was an assistant to the CEO for many years. And several years ago, she was diagnosed with cancer and spent five months away from the office, getting better, recuperating the entire time she was out of work. And this is. And I don't want to use the word, this is great. Like, this is really cool because obviously she was in a big battle, but the entire time she was out of work, co workers called, they emailed, they visit her, they brought food, showed their support and love to encourage and motivate her to fight and then get back in the saddle. And Karen, being the person she is, had an idea.

Okay. She saw an opportunity because she realized how generous and caring her co workers really are. She thought it'd be a great way to kind of bring those efforts together and step out into the community with the larger corporate commitment to social responsibility. That's huge. Having a social responsibility with your organization, and it goes a long way towards building a family. So she came up with the concept of Integrated Project Mercy. Now, what Integrated Project Mercy does is that supports IPM's mission and beliefs by focusing efforts on the needs of. How awesome is this? On the needs of children, education, veterans, and the homeless. And not just within the communities where IPM employees work and live, but on a global level as well. That's a great story. On episode 15, we had Don Yeager. And Don is an amazing man.

And he shares a story in that episode. And he shared in one of the keynotes, one of the three keynotes. He did it at my Unleashing Greatness event at Texas A and M this past April about how they will shut down once a month, they'll shut down for a day, and they will go do work at the choosing of one of their employees. But the story he shares was great. It was one of the men that works, one of the gentlemen that works in his office had a grandmother that was in a nursing home, okay? And she had passed away. And what he wanted to do is he wanted to go back and do a day of service at the nursing home, which was great, as you can imagine, right? People at the nursing homes loved seeing new faces, younger faces come in.

But what was really cool is that Don and his team got to learn about their coworker's grandma, and they got to hear stories, and they got to know their coworker at a much higher, much deeper level and to really know a lot about something that was very important to them. And then another example from another podcast guest, Cody Foster of Advisors Excel. He was on episode number five. I mean, go listen to both these podcasts. Don Jaeger, episode 15, Cody Foster, number five. Both phenomenal listens. Okay? But Advisors Excel recently did something that I think is so cool. The kids and a couple of grandkids of Advisors Excel employees participated in their program called Fun Food Fridays Program. And what that does is that fills gap. Okay, what does that mean? I filled a food gap for the weekend. There's people inside the community.

When they go home from school, they're. They're not going to have a lot of food in their home. Okay? As a matter of fact, where they. The article that I read, only 20 of the 274 kids got any sort of food assistance on the weekend. All right? So with the help of Advisors Excel and the kids of the kids, and a couple grandkids of Advisor Excel employees, they fill bags, right? And they fill that gap between Friday afternoon and Monday morning for those struggling. And it's. It's really cool because it gets your kids involved with your life, right? With your business. And your organization becomes much bigger than just what you do for a living. It's who you are, what you stand for and who you serve and your kids. And you get to experience that together while making a huge difference.

Again, building towards family. Okay? You're not acting like your family. You're not behaving like your family. You're not operating like a Family. You are becoming a family. And then the third way to work towards that is to track each other. All right, now, what do I mean by track each other? Okay, well, recently I shared an article on LinkedIn which I have no idea to this day how the algorithm rhythm worked, but it was viewed over 109,000 times. It received close to 13. 150 likes, 140 plus shares, and just a whole bunch of comments. And it was a very simple article about Sheldon Yellen, the CEO of the property restoration company Belforo Holdings. And it's pretty amazing what he does, but it's so simple, but yet so powerful. He handwrites all 9200 employees. Okay.

And on the surface, it seemed like he just sends a thank you, excuse me, a birthday card or a birthday note to every employee on their birthday. But if you really read into the article, he does more than that. Like when hears about something special happening out in the field, what Belfor holdings does, you know, it reads property restoration, but they do a lot. I believe the majority of their business is in disaster relief, right? Going to an area that got just absolutely pummeled by a hurricane and, you know, they restore the property. But anyways, when hears some great stories, he hand writes notes. Now think about that. So it's a minimum of 9200 birthday cards a year. But in the article, it goes on to talk about, you know, what that means to the people.

And the comments on my LinkedIn post, my LinkedIn share of the article, were phenomenal. Okay? Not just, not just the ones saying, yeah, that's great that, you know, we do this, we do that, we do this, but the ones like, I wish my boss would do that for us, or maybe I should be doing that for my people. But think about the power of a handwritten note, okay? To your team, to your co workers who are a part of the same leadership team that you're on. But track each other also in when you're sitting in a meeting and someone on your team says something that's coming up, you know, they have a big deadline or there's a big project they're working on, or they're waiting to hear back on something, make a mental note of that, okay?

If there's milestones or whatever, make a note of the date set, calendar reminders for their birthdays, for anniversaries, for whatever it is. Just track each other's world, track each other's success or certain, you know, certain significant events that you can Check back up on them. You know, let's just say you have a co worker, for lack of a better example, you have a co worker whose son is going to be going away to college in two weeks and they're really nervous about it. How about two and a half, three weeks? You put it on your calendar to reach out and see, you know, how is Sheila doing with Jennifer going away to college? Alright, so those are some things that you can do to track each other.

So the three things, facilitate collective awareness, commit to a cause outside of work, serve a higher purpose, and three, track each other. Now, again, this goes back to building a family within your organization, becoming a family. All right, so what happens when you do that? Well, when you start doing things like that, you get to know each other much better, you get to understand each other, you become closer individually, become closer collectively. Number two, by doing these things intentionally, you are increasing the level of care and empathy that you operate with. The third thing, you grow individually and you grow collectively. And if everyone inside of your organization is doing this thing, guess what happens? Everybody's gratitude goes up because everybody's going to be on the receiving end.

And all of this contributes to what it is that we're all after is building that culture, whether it be resilient, however you want to word it, resilient, safe, positive, powerful, caring, family. Building that culture that's worth fighting for. Okay, so that's what we've got today for the podcast. I hope you enjoyed it. Again, the three things that you can do to build a family culture. Number one, facilitate collective awareness. Number two, commit to a cause outside of work where you're serving a higher purpose. And and three, track each other. If you enjoyed this podcast, which I obviously hope you did, please rate and review the podcast on itunes. The better the rate, more reviews we get, the more people that we can reach. Again, thank you to everybody who has taken the time to send me emails.

Let me know what they'd like to hear more of, what they like to hear less of, what guests they love, what conversations they love. I believe that I've gotten back to everybody that has emailed me. If I haven't, forgive me. If you can send me another email, I'll be sure to get back to you. And remember, keep doing great things.

Thank you for listening to the athletics of business. Be sure to give us a rating and review so we know how we're doing. For more information about the show, visit theathleticsofbusiness.com now get out there. Think, act and execute at the highest level to unleash your greatness.