What does it take to develop a strong company culture? In this episode, Dr. Harbir Sian shares insights from a previous guest, Dr. Justin Manning, who outlined his three pillars to developing a successful culture at work: vision, empathy, accountability. Harbir elaborates on each of these points while adding in some of his own stories and personal experiences of implementing these pillars in his own workplace.
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Eye2Eye: The 3 Pillars of a Strong Company Culture
This episode is going to be an episode of the Eye2Eye series. If you have been reading the show for a while, then you are probably familiar with Eye2Eye. Eye2Eye is a solo episode with this guy right here, sharing some thoughts and experiences that I have about certain things in the industry or within the profession, and often piggybacking off of some of the things that my amazing guests have shared with me over the years.
In this episode, I am piggybacking off of the last episode, which was with Kevin Wilhelm from POD Marketing/Marketing4ECPs. He talked about how to build a culture that will help you attract and retain top talent. As I was talking to him, I was thinking about an interview that I did with Dr. Justin Manning who talked to me about his three pillars of building a strong culture.
Dr. Justin Manning is a chief Member Experience Officer at PECAA. In this interview that I did with him while I was at Vision Expo, he shared his three pillars for building a strong culture. These are the things that he goes into different practices. He talks to the owners, managers, and staff, and he dives into what they can do to improve the culture that they have.
He's got a lot of firsthand experience. I resonated with a lot of the things that Justin was talking about, and it reminded me of a lot of things that are going on in my own offices and things that we are doing well and perhaps not doing well that we need to improve on. What are Dr. Justin Manning's three pillars for building a strong culture? 1) Vision. 2) Empathy, and 3) Accountability. We are going to dive into each one of those and explore what they each mean and how we can apply those in the real world in our modes of practice.
Number one is vision. A quick quote from Justin in this interview, he said, “Help your team connect the day-to-day role of their job with the bigger impact on the patients, the community, and society at large.” In essence, help them see the bigger picture. A lot of times, we go to work. We are stuck in the mundane activities that we have to do and forget the impact that they can have on our patients and community.
It's important to remind them. Justin said, “There's no such thing as over-emphasizing or oversharing your vision. That should be the first thing you do every day, the last thing you do every day, and make sure you relate everything that they are doing to your entire staff. All the managers, all the staff, everybody in the office, each job that they are doing, and how it relates to society at large, or at least your patients and how it's helping their patients’ lives. Help your patients see better and improve their quality of life.”
Take every little task that you do. Perhaps it's someone working in the lab, edging some lenses and reminding them when you get a chance, “Great job edging those lenses for this patient. You did a good job on this particularly tough prescription. It's going to help our patients see better and have a better quality of life. This is relating to our mission and our vision for the practice and the business at large,” and being sure to reiterate that on a daily basis.
This reminded me of a story that you may have heard a parable about the three brick layers. If you haven't heard it, I'm going to share it with you here now anyways. Essentially, there's somebody walking down the street and they see three people laying bricks building a building. The person walking down the street asked the first bricklayer, “What are you doing?” The bricklayer said, “I'm laying brick.” He moved on to the second person and asked him, “What are you doing?” He says, “I'm building a wall.” He moved on to the third person and asked the third person, “What are you doing?” He says, “I am building a place of worship.”
They are all doing the exact same job, but they all had three different perspectives on what they were doing. The third person had the biggest vision. He was building a church or place of worship. He knew the impact that was going to have on his community, his family, and even himself in the future. It’s having that larger vision for yourself, reminding yourself each day, what each time you go to work, how you are impacting more than the one person in front of you, perhaps your society or the larger impact you are having on that one person in front of you than simply providing a prescription or checking their eye health. As Justin said, remind your staff of that every single day.
Number one was the vision. Number two is empathy. I know this word gets thrown around quite a lot, but it cannot be overstated how important empathy is in our day-to-day personal lives and our work lives. The quote from Dr. Justin Manning that I want to share with you regarding empathy is the same way your patients want to know that you care about their well-being.
Your employees and staff team want to know that you care about them and their success more than anything. They want to feel understood at a human level. We all have bad days. We will spill our coffee or we all get stuck in traffic. Something happens, and our mood gets a little thrown off. We all get it. That, to me, is empathy, remembering that I have bad days. When somebody on my team has a bad day, I should be cutting them the same slack. I would cut myself when I say, “You spilled your coffee or you are in a bad mood. Let's move on from this. How do we make this better?” It’s understanding that everybody's coming in to work on their own and living their own lives with their baggage.
Recognizing those dynamics and being open to having those conversations with the team to see where they are coming from is vital to building that culture, to have that open culture where people feel comfortable and welcome at work. The way I like to say it is we talk to our patients, customers, and clients, and we try to give them the best possible experience because we know that they could go home and give us a Google review. We want everyone to give us a five-star Google Review. Imagine that your staff could give you a Google review every day. Imagine every interaction you had with every human being. Somebody could write there on the spot, give you a Google review, and a number would pop up above their head to give you an idea of how that interaction went.
How would you go into each one of those interactions differently? How would you behave differently? If you do that, not so much consciously, but in general, you have that understanding daily that you are going to try to give each person the best interaction and the most empathy that you can. How would you treat them differently, and how would that experience differ for your staff and your team that are engaging with you, and then how would they engage with themselves? If they know that the leadership in their company is providing this level of empathy, how much empathy would they then provide themselves?
From a doctor-patient standpoint, it's been well-documented how important empathy is and can be. Empathy helps to improve patient outcomes. It improves patients’ adherence to treatments and therapies. It reduces the potential for litigation and lawsuits. It can speed up patient recovery. There was a study that Justin shared with us during this show where patients who were dealing with common ailments like the cold or the flu didn't need medication or treatment.
Empathy helps improve patients’ adherence to treatments and therapies. It reduces the potential for litigation and lawsuits while speeding up patient recovery.
Patients whose doctors rated high in empathy recovered from those day-to-day illnesses faster than patients whose doctors rated lower in empathy. That is the magic of empathy, and that's the same type of magical effect you can have on your team and developing culture when you show a lot of empathy at work.
Out of the three pillars, we have covered two already. Number one is to have a clear vision that you reiterate day in and day out with your staff. Number two was to show empathy. Show empathy to your staff to help them feel seen and to help them feel welcome and to help them feel like they are human beings who can make mistakes and won't be judged too harshly on those mistakes. It helps them to build a more comfortable environment at work.
The third pillar to help build a strong culture is accountability. Part of accountability is providing feedback, providing praise, providing constructive criticism, and holding your staff and your team and yourself accountable to the goals and the tasks that you have assigned. Justin shared an interesting finding from the Harvard Business Review regarding accountability. He said, “The Harvard Business Review said that you should have four pieces of positive feedback for each piece of developmental or constructive feedback or criticism.” That's a lot if you think about it. The 4:1 ratio sounds like a lot, but that's not happening all at once.
You are not saying, “Here's 1, 2, 3, and 4 nice things. Now I got to give you a piece of constructive feedback.” It's knowing that you are always providing that constant feedback, and hopefully, it's mostly good feedback. We often neglect to provide that positive feedback. We assume everyone's doing their job good enough.
It's important to remind people that they are doing their job well because they don't want to forget that their task is important and critical to the success of the business. What's even more important Justin shared is those four pieces of praise should be linked back to number one, which was the vision. When somebody does a good job, you don't just say, “Good job.” You say, “Great job doing X, Y, and Z.” Be specific. That positive thing that you have done relates to our vision and the greater goal that we have to help our community. Relating that and bringing that together helps the staff and the team to understand their place in the bigger picture.
Company Culture: Remind your team if they are doing their job well. You don’t want them to forget that their tasks are important and critical to the success of the business.
It reminds me of, I make this joke, sharing this feedback. I do this as part of a lecture that I give. The lecture is called CEO Insight. I take people like Justin and other people who have come on the show, and I plagiarize them. I share their insights. I ask them first, and then I share their insights in this lecture. I like to share this one story. It reminds me of the movie Anchorman if you have seen that. I'm a big movie buff myself. There's a scene in Anchorman where Ron Burgundy said something nasty that he wasn't supposed to say. He read off the teleprompter, but he had no idea he did it.
To him, everything went well. The broadcast went amazing, and after the broadcast was done, he was just, “Great job, everybody. You over there, you are all on the floor. Great job.” He is walking off saying a good job to everybody and then taking off. Honestly, I have been caught doing that myself, walking out the door. Luckily not having sworn at anybody, but walking out the door and saying, “Good job, everyone. See you later,” and realizing that now I need to start to give and I have started to give more specific and constructive feedback to my staff on the good things that they have done that day.
If I forget to do it during the day before I leave, I will say, “Cindy, good job doing this. I witnessed you giving the patient this information or dealing with this difficult situation. I wanted to tell you that it was a great job, and it's helping us serve our patients better.” I’m making sure I'm giving each piece of positive feedback to as many of the team as I can each day.
When it comes to giving constructive criticism or developmental feedback, there are very important things to follow. The number one thing when giving constructive feedback is this. Let's say there's been a situation where the team member perhaps didn't deal with a situation the way they should have. The number one thing is to separate the person from the incident or the task that was done incorrectly.
Company Culture: When giving constructive criticism, separate the person from the incident or the task that was done incorrectly.
Instead of going to the person and saying, “You did this wrong,” it separates them and says, “Joe, this thing happened and it was done incorrectly.” Then ask Joe with empathy and understanding that he's coming from a different place than you are, “What is it that would have led to this happening? What was it that was going on that resulted in this happening?” Make sure those two are separate. The person and the task or the event that happened are separated so the person doesn't feel like they are being attacked. It was the thing that went wrong that's being investigated and you are working on it together.
Once you have determined what went wrong, talk about why it was wrong, how it should be done better, and how it could be corrected next time or avoided the next time. That was the key piece of feedback that Justin had given when giving constructive criticism or developmental feedback. It is to separate the person from the action.
Finally, when it comes to accountability, the only way to hold somebody accountable is to have specific goals and specific tasks and even further have some measurable metrics to say to determine whether a task was done up to standard or up to your requirements. You can give that positive feedback when you hit certain targets or goals.
You can give the praises when they are due and give the developmental feedback when you can have, and you have something to physically or visibly show the team member, “Here's where we fell short. Let's talk about why that happened and how we can do it better.” It is important to be transparent, to be very clear with the objectives, and clear as to why certain objectives were met and why they were not met so staff doesn’t feel like they are being kept in the dark and that you are perhaps judging them or evaluating them on criteria that they are not clear with.
Be transparent with your team. Be clear why certain objectives are met or not. Do not keep them in the dark or evaluate them on criteria they do not understand.
Be very clear about that. When I have spoken with other people, even Kevin Wilhelm in the last episode when we talked about building a culture, it's very important to be very clear about what's expected, how we are all going to get there together, and how the team is working towards all of that. Also, talking about when metrics were met and when they were not met.
Those were the three pillars of building a strong culture. Thanks to our friend, Dr. Justin Manning. 1) Having a clear vision. 2) Showing empathy, and 3) Having accountability at all levels from the top to the bottom, being accountable, and being open to discussing that level of accountability with everybody. Those are all very important, vital, and critical to developing a strong culture in your business.
From my perspective, I will always like to share that for me, I'm always a work in progress. Some days we hit all three of these bang on, and it's magical, and most days we are working on one or the other, or even 2 out of the 3 potentially. The number one thing that I like to come in and lead with is empathy, and I try my hardest to do that every single day, and then also be clear on accountability. I would say the one thing that I'm probably weakest at is sharing our vision for the goal of the practice and where we want to go and how we want to help our community. That's something that we are working on.
To add my two cents, this is something that Justin did talk about as well. Sitting down with the team or staff regularly is vital. I haven't done that enough over the years. We have started to do that a lot more, and instantly, I have seen how impactful that can be. A lot of the people I speak to have a great culture and great structure in their business. They are regular, and regular usually means weekly meetings. We are at a twice-a-month cadence now, but we are trying to get more regular. The more frequently you meet, the more quickly little issues will come up and can get sorted and dealt with, and they don't linger and start to eat away at the culture.
Company Culture: The more frequently you meet with your team, the more quickly little issues will come up and can get sorted. You can stop them from lingering and eating way at the culture.
Having a good culture also means recruiting good people, bringing in good people, training them well, developing that, and nurturing those good and talented people. That's something that I'm not going to talk about so much in this one. I want you to go back to read the episode with Kevin because he talks all about that. POD Marketing, the company that he's the Founder of, won a national award for a company that was admired for the strong culture that they have in their corporate culture. If you look at what they do and the way they showcase it, they advertise it. In the same way that I would use social media to advertise to patients how great my clinic is, they use social media to advertise to potential employees how amazing the culture is at their office.
I encourage you to go check them out. Go read that episode. If you want to rewind even further, you can go back and find the episode with Justin, which was part of a collaborative episode I did with 3 or 4 different guests when I was at Vision Expo. You will find that insightful as well. As always, thank you so much for reading. I hope you found this valuable. If you did, please take a screenshot, send a link to a friend, and let people know that we are sharing this information here on the show. Thanks, as always, for reading, Canada's number one optometry show. I will see you in the next episode.
Important Links
Kevin Wilhelm – Previous Episode
Dr. Justin Manning – Previous Episode