In this whole human episode, Laura Buckley, Owner of Laura Buckley Coaching and Consulting, Inc., shares how she has taken the lessons she’s learned as an Army Officer, A Registered Dietician, and a Leadership Consultant to help her clients build strong cultures they are proud to call their own! If you’re frustrated that your culture isn’t as strong as it once was, or if you’re curious to know how vital your physical health and well-being are to maintaining a strong culture, you won’t want to miss this episode.
You will discover:
– When you can no longer build it yourself (AND why it can’t be built without you)
– Why you can’t build a strong culture with words (and what you CAN use instead)
– How to assess the strength of your culture
Episode Transcript
Scott Ritzheimer
Hello, hello and welcome. Welcome once again to the secrets of the high demand coach podcast. And here with us today is yet another high demand coach in the one and only, Laura Buckley, who is a former Army officer and registered dietitian. I’ve never seen those two in the same sentence as before, and she’s turned leadership consultant. She spends her days today helping leaders create more engaged and empowered teams and shift their cultures so people can thrive. Laura has extensive experience in leadership development, culture change and organizational assessments. She works with private companies, federal agencies and nonprofit organizations. Laura highlights a shift in workplace dynamics from command and control to leadership through personal impact, to attract top talent and achieve excellent results. She dedicates herself to helping clients develop systems and strategies for success in the modern work environment. She’s here with us today, Laura, I’m so excited to have you on the show. It’s just like the trifecta in an army officer, a skilled dietitian and a leadership consultant. How did those three worlds come together?
Laura Buckley
Yeah, it’s a great question. I always say my journey was very unique. I was very grateful to be able to be a dietitian in the army. So the army does have its own dietitians in the army, Medical Specialist Corps. And so that is where I started my career. I started my career as an Army officer practicing dietetics, and my favorite thing inside of that was learning about leadership, learning about the importance of camaraderie and trust and connection inside of our work, and also opportunities to train and develop other people. And so when I felt like I wanted to follow that path, I did leave the army, got a master’s in adult education, and then really transitioned into the leadership development space, but taking very much what I learned as an Army officer from the leadership development and the culture that I was able to work in, and take that with me to transition, and I will say the work I do and when I think about cultures where people can thrive, that’s very much grounded in what I saw and learned as a dietitian, through how people’s experience in their world shapes so much of their capacity for well being. So how we create spaces where people have that capacity.
Scott Ritzheimer
Wow. I love that. I love that we’re going to unpack a couple of those things as the episode progresses. Here, what I want to start with is that there’s a lot of content out there about culture, right? I’d argue, more than ever, in your opinion, in your experience, either despite all of that talk, or maybe even because of it, where do we still get culture wrong?
Laura Buckley
Yeah, I think the biggest thing that you know, the thing that comes to mind, first and foremost, is thinking that we can create a culture with words instead of behavior. Doesn’t matter really what we say about how we work, or what we say about our leadership, people feel our impact, and so when we think about shaping culture, it’s not enough to think through our values and to give them a definition, to put things into policies and procedures, because if we don’t live by those things, If we’re not making decisions because of our values and based in our values. If we’re not following agreed upon practices, we won’t create. We’ll probably create the opposite of what we meant to create with our culture. And so it’s so important to take that honest look at our behavior, the energy that we’re creating and how that’s impacting the people around us?
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, so I’m wondering if you could, because culture, despite all of this talk, is oftentimes really nebulous in its definition. And a lot of folks who use the word culture and couldn’t come close to a definition other than culture. So I’m wondering, like, particularly with a strong culture, how do you define that, and maybe even, how does someone who’s sitting there, how do they kind of take inventory or even assess the strength of their culture?
Laura Buckley
Yeah, I think the biggest thing I look at is, how are your people showing up? How is your team showing up. What kind of dynamics Do you see between the people that are working with and for you, a lot of companies focus on customer success and customer outcomes, but the customer experience is directly related to the internal experience that your team is having. So we can look at what are people experiencing inside of your culture. Are they excited? Do they feel empowered? Do they take ownership for their work and feel supported inside of that? How are people building relationships? What is your. Or turnover, like, what is your retention rate? Like? These are things that are actually really good indicators of strong culture. You know, I think about culture as, what is the experience of working here truly like when people wake up in the morning and think about going to work, how are they feeling about the environment they’re walking into when people are at happy hour talking about work. What are the people on your team saying? Because those are the things that really give us the strongest indicator of how your culture is performing.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah. So we’ve kind of laid out there’s there’s strong cultures, and just by virtue of contrast, there are then weak cultures. My question for you is, is there such a thing as a bad culture? Or maybe even more specifically, is there such a thing as good values and bad values? Could could we actually define it incorrectly or the wrong way?
Laura Buckley
I’m curious what you think of when you think about good or bad values, I think there are things that are the values we are promoting in living by, the ones that people feel really proud to show up for. Noma. Are they the values that motivate us in our human at a human level, at a soul level, versus some of the things that might be more driving towards some of the more standard indicators of success, like money and customers and those kinds of things. So I’m not sure that I would think of them necessarily as good or bad, but I would think of them as Are they things that truly motivate and inspire and drive people to show up and do a good job every day.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, I love that. I love that now within, within that there’s a couple that are pet peeves for me, like integrity or something and and so why is it that we feel such an intense pressure to pick certain values,
Laura Buckley
The like, the ones that are like, so like, honesty, integrity, some of the ones that are really common. You know, I think from like, if I’m looking at it from a definition perspective, it does make sense. You want people who are going to show up and every day do what they say they’re going to do and be honest about mistakes, or just really take that ownership and accountability. I think that the challenge with the words that we often use in our values is that we define them more as how they sound versus how they truly guide our behavior well, and then that makes them just kind of jargony.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, yeah, right. So, so I’ll often ask folks a question like this, if we’re working on the values or something along those lines, is, when’s the last time you you bonused your highest integrity sales rep, right? And I think it goes to that same things. Like, how does this change our behavior, right? How do we how do we communicate this? Yes, but really, where are we celebrating it? What are we celebrating? What are we actually living out? And again, there’s a lot of why’s in this, but like, why do you feel like it’s so common to have that space between what we say and what we do?
Laura Buckley
So I think this that, I mean, it’s gonna sound simple, it’s not that simple, but it’s, it’s focus, it’s intention, it’s, you know, I think people know that it’s important to have company values, or we it’s become a common practice to set, you know, to have company values, but if you don’t take there is a really important intentional step then of defining, what does this look like in practice? What happens when we actually live this value? What happens when we don’t? How do we hold ourselves accountable for it. How do we celebrate it? So it takes a much deeper practice with the work to make it something that we actually show up for every day. So I work with one company that they have their core values, and every quarter, we do an exercise around, how did this value show up? Who lived it really strongly? What did that look like? And we share it to the team, so that it’s not just something that we did. It’s an exercise I did with them to develop their values seven years ago now, wow. And, you know, we I facilitate a quarterly all staff for them. And very frequently, we’re bringing it back up, and we’re saying, you know, tell me about a colleague who lived this value, and what did that look like? And we celebrate it, and that’s how we start making it come to life.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, I love that. So we’ve got a lot of founders who listen to the show and and I would argue. And I think they would, too, that they’ve built at least a relatively strong culture. They’ve had some success in it. You know, a lot of entrepreneurial startups, they’re so close to the founder, right, that it kind of, it’s almost by immersion, right? That you kind of, you get it, or you don’t. They hire people that they like and enjoy the natural alignment from that. But you and I know that that can’t last forever, that can’t scale indefinitely, is a better way of putting it. So when do you see that start to break down inside of an organization? What are some of the early warning signs?
Laura Buckley
Yeah, so I think we know there’s, there’s actually quite a bit of research on when we start to kind of hit this tipping point right where it’s beyond the original founder, CEO’s reach to manage the whole culture, and that’s somewhere between that 2025 person team. Once we get to that point, we just can’t be quite as high touch with the whole organization and have our own energetic impact be what’s leaving the whole energy of the organization, and so that’s about when we see it. I think when you start seeing employees really living differently from what your organization has originally created, when you start seeing this, you know the organization start to splinter, right? Like, that’s one thing I’ll see is like a pocket of people and start kind of going in a different direction, or having maybe a pretty negative experience, and now they’re chatting about it, but that energy is starting to spread. You know, that’s a really important thing to look at. When you start seeing new hires not last very long, when people aren’t lasting beyond that 90 day to six month mark, then we gotta say, like, what’s happening here? The culture maybe is pretty strong with the original group that grew to 20, but now newcomers aren’t feeling it, experiencing getting embedded in it, and they’re leaving. So those are probably the two key indicators I look at is when we start seeing that little bit of churn, especially with new hires, and when you start to see groups turning off.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah. Speaking of founder, CEO, as I was researching the episode, I was surprised at how how deep the linkage was between their own personal well being and the strength of the culture. And I’m wondering, if you could unpack that a little bit, why is the CEO’s personal health and well being such an integral part of maintaining a strong culture?
Laura Buckley
Ooh, so strong. And I love that. I love that question, you know, I think about, you know, as in the army, like there’s a big old command and control culture, right? Like you knew, as I say, there’s a lot of structure around that, but I think very much of leadership, and what we’re seeing moving forward is this piece around personal impact. So I say as a leader, instead of looking at us ourselves from a top down, we need to look at ourselves as if we’re like a drop in the in the water, right? And what is the ripple effect right that comes out from us, our energy, what we have capacity for how well we’re able to regulate our nervous system to make really intentional choices about how we show up, how we communicate with our teams, how we solve problems. It is all directly impacted by our level of wellbeing. Well, if I’m undernourished, if I am overstretched, if I am running on fumes, if I’m not sleeping, yeah, all of those things are going to have an impact on how much energy and capacity I have to show up in a way that creates a positive impact on the team.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, it’s so true. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been sitting in a coaching session and had a client on again, most founder, CEO types, and they’ll be talking just, it’s so hard this. It’s so hard that it’s like, hey, when’s the last time you had a good night’s sleep? Like, did you eat a full breakfast? Like, when’s the last time, and just nuts and bolts stuff like that. You know, when you’re hangry, you know, you’re not going to make a bunch of great decisions. And so I was really surprised by that, because I had done a lot of work on the kind of mechanics of organizations, and it wasn’t until the last four or five years that I’ve done a lot more one on one coaching, and I’ve just been struck at how big a role that plays. I actually started doing one on one coaching. You’ll appreciate this, because I saw that there were things that were undermining what we’re doing is as teams, and it’s this. It’s simple stuff like this, it’s behaviors and how they show up, but so much of that is rooted in some simple things like this. Have you found that that’s true for other leaders inside an organization as well? And if so, if you’re CEO and you see someone who seems to be struggling, how can you help them?
Laura Buckley
Yeah, I definitely see it at any level. You know? I feel like right now, maybe, maybe it’s always been this way, but especially right now, there’s. So much focus on how full everybody’s play is, right? And so I always tell people, you lead from where you sit, so even if you’re not managing a team, you’re still having impact in an organization, and your energy is still creating impact on the people around you. And I think that it’s really important to pay attention to our teams and where they’re at with their stress, their capacity, looking at them from a whole human perspective. You know, this is where it starts to feel a little bit vulnerable. And I think vulnerability is a really important piece to grow and develop as leaders, because it is important to be able to say to somebody you know, how are you feeling? How are you doing? I work with one senior leadership team that they’ve actually started a practice of at their beginning of their meetings, everybody doing a stress check in so that they have greater awareness of how everybody’s doing and who might need some support, how we can maybe shift the work to more, you know, level it out, or at least just be able to be there for each other, in in that in that way. So I think it’s important, I think it’s important to be able to recognize that what’s going on in our personal lives, it affects who we are as people, and so being able to have some tolerance for that, and some understanding of that is really important too.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, I love that the idea of a stress checking, because there’s a couple of things there. One, it takes a significant amount of of confidence even to say, I have a lot. I have too much. I need help and and also, one of the things I found with teams, and why I love working in teams so much is like, I may be completely maxed but I can help you right, like there’s just an extra gear that we find in being able to help someone out, make a meaningful difference in their life. And instead, we often isolate around that, right? Just, I can’t tell anyone. I’ll let them all down and and we actually rob them of the opportunity to help us and the joy that that brings. So what a great little exercise. What a fantastic I mean, it’s not little in the sense that it does take some some work. It takes effort, especially to do it over time, but just a simple, simple way of breaking that barrier. It’s fantastic. Yeah, it’s very cool. All right, so there’s a question, Laura that I like to ask all my guests, and I’m very intrigued to see what you have to say. The question is this, what would you say is the biggest secret that you wish wasn’t a secret at all. What’s that one thing you wish everybody watching or listening today knew?
Laura Buckley
I wish everybody really embraced the power of the human connection inside of work, inside of our experience, is that human capacity to connect with each other, to support each other, to get to know each other, I think it’s something that we’ve moved away from a bit in a lot of our environments and work. And I think it’s amazing what happens when people share of themselves in a more personal way, not now in an appropriate, unboundaried way, but where we spend the time, take the time, make the time to get to know each other and build that connection. It’s so impactful for trust, for teamwork, for efficiency, all of the things we’re striving toward, we could actually get more of that if we focus more on the human connection that makes it all possible.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, that’s so good, Laura, there’s some folks listening, and just every word’s resonated with them right where they are right now. They’d love some help. They’d love to find more out about you do? Where can they find you?
Laura Buckley
Yeah, I would love for you to come visit me at laurabuckleycoaching.com There’s lots of ways in there to connect. You can reach out, set up a call and have a chat, sign up for my email list. There’s a couple opportunities to connect right right there.
Scott Ritzheimer
Fantastic. We’ll get that in the show notes. It is Laura Buckley B, U, C, K, L, E, Y, coaching.com check it out. Great site, super simple and just some fantastic resources there as well. So highly recommend it. Laura, thanks for being on the show. It really was a privilege and honor having you here. And for those of you watching and listening today, you know your time and attention mean the world to us. I hope you got as much out of this conversation as I know I did, and I cannot wait to see you next time. Take care.
Contact Laura Buckley
Laura Buckley is a former Army Officer and Registered Dietitian turned leadership consultant. She spends her days helping leaders create more engaged and empowered teams and shift their cultures so people can thrive. Laura has extensive experience in leadership development, culture change, and organizational assessments. She works with private companies, federal agencies, and non-profit organizations. Laura highlights a shift in workplace dynamics from “command and control” to leadership through personal impact to attract top talent and achieve excellent results. She dedicates herself to helping clients develop systems and strategies for success in the modern work environment.
Want to learn more about Laura Buckley’s work at Laura Buckley Coaching and Consulting, Inc.? Check out her website at https://www.laurabuckleycoaching.com
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