Building Your Business Grounded in Culture — Part Deux
Hey now, you’re an All Star. Get your game on, go play
Hey now, you’re a Rock Star. Get the show on get paid
And all the glitters is gold
Only shooting stars break the mold
— — — Smash Mouth
At Maverix Private Equity, we are continuing our journey with the aim of building an organization from culture up. We started our formal journey approximately 9 months ago and I wanted to provide an update on our progress, what we have learned, and the challenges ahead of us. I refer you to Building Your Business Grounded in Culture to remind you where we started and what our objectives are.
The leadership team of any organization should provide the ultimate vision of the type of culture that the organization hopes to achieve. But it should not be dropped on the organization like Thor’s Mjolnir. It is a shared responsibility with the entire team. It is a shared social contract with one another. Building culture in an organization should not be delegated to one person in the organization. We hired Mike Lipkin to be our team’s coach to help guide us through this journey. He moderates our all-hands team discussions on culture on a quarterly basis. Mike also works closely with our leadership team on a weekly basis to help us work through issues and help us navigate to meet our objectives. Using an external coach is essential in my view to help reduce unconscious bias.
The navigation of our journey has been made more complicated as the world enters a period we have not seen for over a dozen years and perhaps a lot longer than that. But where there is volatility and fear, there is opportunity. We have written extensively about how as an entrepreneur you will likely need to change the way you conduct your business. See Top 10 Things to do as an Entrepreneur in Navigating the Storm.
We have previously written how we aim to position ourselves in the market as a Thought Leader with our current and prospective investment partners. I refer you to The New Normal: Building Your Business Like You Did in the Old Normal. But to achieve our desired state of meeting the apex of service excellence, we need a culture that supports our aim of “being perceived as the best in the game.”
Our journey is leading us into 4 distinct stages of our culture setting process:
1. Forming — this is the stage of team formation based on a common set of values and ideals;
2. Storming — this is the stage when people are figuring who’s on first and which lane are they swimming in;
3. Norming — at this stage, the team members are establishing the team norms or winning behaviours; and
4. Performing — this is the penultimate stage when the team outperforms the competition and is the best in the game.
At Maverix, we believe we are in the Norming stage of our cultural evolution. But you will always be Forming at some level as you add new team members, and I would be lying if I state we were completely past our Storming stage. In our Norming stage, we are working on developing the Maverix Winning Behaviours. In this third stage, our team is agreeing on what specific behaviours would be required by everyone to get to the Performing stage. Many organizations never get to the Performing stage. The Norming stage will take quite some length of time as this is where a lot of the details are. The team is already realizing we have a variety of opinions and contrarian views on what our norms should be.
We broke down our intended Winning Behaviours into 3 components:
1. Intensity (I) — the energy input
2. Quality (Q) — workmanship and standard of results
3. Efficiency (E) — efficacy of transforming energy into output
And we came up with a formula for success of:
Q/I = E
The team has defined Intensity, Quality, and Efficiency to be represented with the following behaviours:
Intensity:
1. Race the Clock (have a sense of urgency)
2. Handle Volume with Care (prioritize and triage with care)
3. Stop at 60 (it’s a marathon and not a sprint)
Quality:
4. Strive for Perfection (credibility and reputation)
5. Play as a Team (we before I)
6. Prove and Improve (do it right and raise the bar)
Efficiency:
7. Ask then Accelerate (seek guidance and then go)
8. Kill it Quickly (focus on what needs to be done)
9. Play your Position (a jack of all trades is a master of none)
The next step for our team is to take each of these 9 intended behaviours and break them down even further into specific illustrative daily norms. This is the real challenge. We will need to ensure that not only are we each trying to abide by these behaviours but we will commit to “call out” one another if we think another team member is in breach of any of these behaviours. It is only then when we will determine whether we as a team understand and agree to what winning behaviours will ultimately lead Maverix to being a Performing team.
We still have a long journey ahead of us, but we now know the pathway to get to our ultimate Performing stage.
John Ruffolo,
Founder & Managing Partner,
Maverix Private Equity
