How To Build A Company Culture That Strengthens Your Marketing

Jeffro (00:01.262)
Welcome back to Digital Dominance. As an organization grows, it can drift away from the values it was founded upon. This is often because the founder is too busy to focus on proper training or creating a company culture as they try to keep up with their company’s growth. But what does that have to do with digital marketing? As it turns out, quite a lot. For example, if your team doesn’t understand the vision, then the messaging that they put in your ads and your website will not be consistent and won’t represent your company the way it should. Now, this is a unique episode because I’m supposed to have two guests.

Bart McCollum (00:13.935)
keep up with their comfortable growth. But what does that have to do with digital marketing? As it turns out, quite a lot. For example, if your team doesn’t have any family, then the messaging that they put on the website won’t be consistent, won’t represent the company that it should. Now this is a unique episode because I’m so excited to guess, Barley Collin and Dr. Gerald Hanna. Dr. Hanna is trying to do a writing interview, hopefully they’ll help on any. Together they have written a book called View Before Me, which will include the attack of this channel and stuff.

Jeffro (00:31.214)
Bart McCollum and Dr. Gerald Hannah. Dr. Hannah is trying to join right now, so hopefully he’ll pop on any minute. Together, they have written a book called You Before Me, which is designed to tackle this challenge of company culture. But rather than write this as a typical business book, they decided to write it as a novel. So buckle up because we’re going to dip our toes into behavioral psychology and company culture in order to get our teams in alignment and shore up the marketing messages that we put out in the world. So welcome to the show.

Bart McCollum (00:43.343)
It’s great to be here, Jeffra.

Jeffro (01:02.318)
Yeah, I’m glad to have you. And, you know, first of all, let’s make sure we know who this is for. You know, when you’re talking about company culture within a team, how big of a team are we talking about? Do these concepts apply to someone with two employees or does it need to be a bigger team?

Bart McCollum (01:16.911)
No, it applies really for any team where there is more than one layer. So if you’re managing a department of people inside of a company, or if you’re an entrepreneur, you have a marketing agency or any business, and you’re trying to get past a certain point and you have people that are working for you, whether as contractors or as full -time employees, then this is something that applies to you 100%.

Jeffro (01:39.662)
Right, so as long as you’re not by yourself and your team, you can apply some of this stuff.

Bart McCollum (01:45.199)
Yeah, even if you’re by yourself, there’s competencies that we’re going to talk about in here that apply to you within any relation, dealing with customers, getting a heart for what a vision is, and so on and so forth. But yeah, it’s primarily directed towards people that are trying to lead in an organization.

Jeffro (02:01.07)
Got it. That makes sense. Hello, Dr. Hanna. Thank you for joining us. Can you hear me okay?

gerald hannah (02:02.259)
here.

gerald hannah (02:05.811)
Well, I apologize. Good to see you both. And Bart, thank you for helping me here. So, Jeffro, I need one plus one equals two. That’s about as complicated as I get. So I apologize.

Bart McCollum (02:17.359)
My pleasure.

Jeffro (02:17.518)
All right, well.

Jeffro (02:25.166)
All right. Well, if you could scoot a little closer to your microphone, that would be great. But I can hear you. You’re fine. Just speak loudly and we’ll be good. So we were we were just talking about how, you know, this whole idea of company culture, it also affects your marketing, because if your people aren’t in alignment with your values and what they’re telling prospects isn’t going to line up either. So Bart, just let me know that this can apply to any size team, really, as long as you’re not just a solopreneur. You’ve got stuff to learn here.

gerald hannah (02:28.723)
Okay, is that better now?

Bart McCollum (02:38.911)
So, this is really interesting because this is one of those really squishy terms that gets thrown around quite a bit.

Jeffro (02:55.182)
So my next question for you guys is, what’s your definition of company culture?

Bart McCollum (03:08.559)
And I, you know, I’ve been working on and in various organizations now for coming up on two decades. And I’ve, I’ve never had a definition that I’ve been a hundred percent comfortable with. What I like is culture is what gets rewarded at an organization. So behaviorally, what’s good, what gets rewarded. So a lot of times that’s something that’s implied. It may be the way that the person that created the organization behaves and everybody kind of emulates that. Usually it’s not, you know, what might be written.

on a break room wall or talked about, it’s really how people treat each other. So it’s what’s reinforced in that.

gerald hannah (03:45.939)
Yeah, yeah, I would add that that culture are when I come to work every day, I know what’s how to act. I understand what’s expected. What are the values and behaviors that I’m supposed to show every day?

Jeffro (03:46.03)
Well, I like that definition. Go ahead, Dr. Hannah.

Jeffro (04:04.623)
Got it. So it’s more than just a pinball machine and donuts on Fridays. So what are some signs then of a healthy company culture?

gerald hannah (04:08.211)
Yeah, exactly. Right.

Bart McCollum (04:09.391)
Correct, yeah.

Bart McCollum (04:16.783)
Well, so, well, I mean, is the organization performing well would be one. And are the people engaged? And engaged is actually a, it’s a measurable thing. And so you’ll hear a term morale used a lot. Do the people that work within an organization have high morale? Morale is another squishy term that doesn’t necessarily have a specific measurable definition. There is something called engagement.

And so if you have a high performing organization and you have good engagement and engagement is typically pretty low. There’s lots of data on this. Gallup does a lot of research on it. And so if you’re doing better than average, I would say you have a reasonably good culture and if it’s important to you. So if part of your culture is improving that, if that’s built into your values, I would say that you have a high performing culture or you’re at least you’re on your.

Jeffro (05:06.926)
How do you assess your current culture, you know, so to even know if it needs work, especially if you’ve got a large team, you might not be in tune with everybody. So how do you go about doing that?

gerald hannah (05:18.419)
Well, I’m well.

Bart McCollum (05:18.607)
Well, so a lot of it is, so there’s two things. One is you can measure it. So Dr. Hannah and I actually, we use a survey, he co -developed it and it’s based on the Gallup stuff that I kind of just talked about. So there is a set of questions that you can go and you pull all the people that you work with and you want to do that a few times a year and you get measurable results. That’s an indication. Another one is,

if you have some of the competencies that we talk about in this book, one of them is emotional intelligence. And that’s another term that typically can be mismanaged or misused, or people can think of that term and have different definitions for it. But it’s a very specific, measurable thing. If you have that and you practice that, you can see in an organization how healthy the culture is. You can see, again, how people treat each other. Are they operating on a team?

Are they resentful? Are they happy? Are they productive? Are they trying to improve those sorts of things? So it’s really two things. It’s a subjective, but with some highly tuned eyes, being able to see how people actually act and behave and treat each other. And it’s also objectively measurable.

Jeffro (06:33.646)
Dr. Hanna, did you want to add anything?

gerald hannah (06:35.731)
Well, yeah, just to, the survey looks at three parts of a culture. My experience individually, my experience with my manager, and then my experience with the policies of the organization and how I’m treated by senior people. And again, Gallup’s been doing this for 30 years. And…

So engagement is a critical part, a piece of data that every organization needs to have.

Jeffro (07:09.966)
Okay. Well, that makes sense. And, you know, Bart, you mentioned the competencies, the behavioral competencies. Sometimes they’re called soft skills, right? Emotional intelligence, teamwork, communication, that sort of stuff. Now, I would assume that if you didn’t know about this when you were running, starting your company and you weren’t originally hiring for these traits, then you’re going to have a harder time turning the culture around. Is that true in your experience?

Bart McCollum (07:34.735)
Is that true in your experience? So like, you know, I think probably a lot of your listenership are entrepreneurs, and they’re certainly probably serving entrepreneurs. And so, you know, that prototypical kind of profile is somebody who is really high achieving. In our book, we have a character, and this is a novelization. It’s a super high achieving person who’s not great at teamwork. Sometimes you get a unicorn, you get somebody who’s an amazing sort of like,

you know, gunslinger when it comes to standing something up and getting it going, and then also scaling an organization and being a great team player, a leader of teams. That’s extremely rare. You’re talking about a Steve Jobs, a Bill Gates. I don’t even know that a Nealon Musk would qualify. And so, yeah, it’s, you know, you have to, entrepreneurs get to a certain point typically if they’re really high achieving and they’re really successful and they peak because,

the kind of things that they did to be able to create something in the first place and create some value for people and deliver some value to customers. Eventually, they’re having to do things that are completely alien to them in order to be able to get to the next level. And what we’re hoping to help people do is take that high achieving person who is now in a position where they’re actually having to change some of their really like their wiring. And…

develop some of these competencies. That’s how they’re going to be able to lead people and then take whatever they’re doing and then sort of elevate it to the next level.

Jeffro (09:07.822)
Okay, so whether they’re high achieving or not, if they just don’t have these skills, it’s going to take a little while to kind of instill those values and incentivize those behaviors, right?

Bart McCollum (09:20.239)
Yeah, most people will have some version of these things at some level. It’ll be kind of all over the place. Some people are naturally, you know, like endowed with being able to lead an effective team and be an optimistic leader. And I get, we have specific definitions for those things. But generally speaking, you know, what people default to when they’ve created something, marketing agency, brand, that kind of a thing is they have some kind of really strong vision and they’re very hard charging towards that vision.

That is one particular style. And you have to be able to inspire people to be able to go alongside you once you get to a certain point if you want to continue to be able to be successful in that. But you have to pivot and do other things. And you have to develop these other competencies, these other behaviors in order to be able to do that or you’ll burn people out. That sort of thing.

gerald hannah (10:12.243)
Yeah, I mean, again, small company. You could hire a person who has outstanding ethics and they’re a high achiever. They get things done, but they can’t work with people.

and they got promoted to be a manager or a supervisor and they can’t work with people. And the culture, if the culture is solid in terms of we treat people with dignity and respect, then that person is gone. I just had a phone call late this morning exactly about this. She’s in her 32 years old. You would hire her tomorrow and she would, you would have to dismiss her in six months because she’s

she couldn’t work with anybody and it’s just in a small company in particular.

Jeffro (11:00.814)
Hmm.

Jeffro (11:04.718)
So let’s say there’s a company that has no culture. They never put any thought into it and they’ve maybe created some bad habits. How long would it take to, you know, bring you guys in to read a book? Now they’re going to start applying this stuff to go from no culture to a healthy culture.

Bart McCollum (11:22.063)
Well, so I’d say every place has a culture, every organization, every team has some kind of a culture. The question is, how intentional are you about it? So I think kind of maybe what I’m inferring in your question is, what if they don’t have a particularly healthy culture or one that would attract people who would want to kind of go along whatever that ride is, what are we trying to accomplish? What’s our vision? Where are we headed? In theory, you could be doing this stuff immediately. Like this stuff is…

Jeffro (11:36.43)
Right.

Bart McCollum (11:51.791)
You know, one of the things that’s interesting about this material is it’s half a century of research behind us. This is stuff that Dr. Hannah has worked with and some very large organizations. It dates back to the 1960s and it is the most robust scientific backed research on how to get high performing teams out there. It’s been adopted and used by large organizations for decades. The problem is it hasn’t trickled into midsize organizations, smaller organizations, nonprofits, you know.

entrepreneurial places, marketing agencies, most marketing agencies are pretty small. And there are reasons for that. It hasn’t gotten to those places because it’s kind of scientific, it’s kind of academic, and we’ve tried to create a way for it to be digestible by any person. Any person can pick this up and start doing it. And so it isn’t that hard, it’s simple stuff, but it requires you to create the habits. You gotta do it every single day. And so until it’s important enough for somebody to…

Jeffro (12:26.67)
Mm -hmm.

Bart McCollum (12:50.543)
make time to do that stuff every single day, then it doesn’t stick. But it’s actually pretty easy to start working on and practicing and rewiring the brain and so on and so forth and turning that culture around if that’s what you need to do.

Jeffro (13:04.27)
Got it. Well, I almost feel like it would be easier to do this in a smaller medium -sized team because in the larger organizations, a lot of this gets lost in translation, doesn’t scale as well. And you know, you got to figure out a way to infuse your culture and values into everything without it feeling like just another corporate slideshow that I have to sit through so I could tick the box that said I did my required trainings this quarter, you know, because I’ve wanted to poke my eye with a stick after going through some of these trainings and…

gerald hannah (13:32.787)
That’s right.

Jeffro (13:33.294)
They would say, yes, we have culture. See, everybody took these trainings. They know our values, right? So what do we do about that?

gerald hannah (13:39.635)
Well,

Bart McCollum (13:41.583)
Yeah, so this is like, you know, this is there’s nothing passive about this. And so, you know, Dr. Hannah is a behavioral psychologist and the key word there is behavioral. This isn’t sitting on a couch and psychotherapy or anything. It’s not passively watching some webinar, you know, doing some corporate training that doesn’t actually change behavior in most cases. This is very, very simple, you know, journaling every single day and.

picking what are the top three things that I want to work on, again, based on the material in the book, based on the scientific research and deliberately reflecting on it. I know a lot of your listeners are probably familiar with meditation and probably have found good use of that. This is not meditation, but it’s something similar. It is a very deliberate daily short practice that literally rewires your brain. It literally makes new connections in your brain and creates habits around these behaviors. And so,

It is easier to do that in a smaller organization if it’s important enough to the organization because it’s fewer people that actually have to engage in the process.

gerald hannah (14:45.331)
Yeah, just let me give an example of Bart’s done a good job in talking about the practice every day. So self -awareness. Self -awareness is where I am aware of my thoughts, feelings, and strong emotions. And only I, only the human has control over those things. There are a lot of things in life you have no control over, but you have control over your thought process, your moods, your emotions.

So the neuroscientists have showed us how to create that as a habit. Every day at the end of the day, you think of two conversations you had and you log one sentence, what I noticed about myself. I was bored. I was this. I was that. And that neuron, that neuron that runs up to the amygdala gland is now getting you customized to being aware of yourself so that when you’re

when you’re having a conversation with your boss and your boss says something that’s stupid, that amygdala gland in the brain gives you about a second. And if you don’t catch it…

then it continues that thought and then the amygdala gland controls the muscles in your face, your pulse rate and it’s like, what’s wrong, Jeff Rose? Something’s going, did I say something wrong? So when you practice it, then you become really good. Then you can control yourself.

Bart McCollum (16:14.767)
So this is the final base.

gerald hannah (16:21.299)
So this is the foundation of being an outstanding person as well as a leader, is being really good at self, the self -awareness piece.

Jeffro (16:33.55)
So you’ve really got to get everyone on the team on board with doing their own personal development through this deliberate practice. Otherwise you’re not going to get anywhere.

Bart McCollum (16:34.927)
it’s not

gerald hannah (16:42.579)
Exactly right well and again that comes back to the culture and our so our expectation is you’re going to really get good and and we’ll call it social skills or emotional intelligence which has four part we’re all going to get good at this this is required or you know

Like 32 year old this morning. She’s dismissed and and she’s an outstanding performer, but she There’s bad, you know, there’s baggage everywhere and it’s a small company. It’s about less than 200 about 200 people

Jeffro (17:24.91)
So I think everyone’s coming from a different starting place though, right? So how do you put in fair expectations for people as you’re moving forward? Is it okay in 30 days if you’re not a team player, then you gotta go? How do you assess that?

Bart McCollum (17:35.407)
in 30 days.

Team player.

Bart McCollum (17:43.055)
Well, I would say, you know, if it’s important enough to you to sort of bring this into your organization, you know, everybody can read the book. It’s very entertaining. It’s, it’s super engaging. It’s very digestible and people can, can be working on it immediately. You know, again, as to whether if you’re an entrepreneur and you own a, own an organization, you’ve started an organization, you’ve got people and you have.

people issues, which everybody does, it’s up to you to answer the question. Well, I have somebody here who’s super talented at X or Y, like my SEO team, for example, or my creative team. My creative team is probably really creative and maybe they have a lot of strong ideas and maybe they don’t get along with some of the other folks that I have. Very common thing inside marketing agencies and other similar enterprises. It’s up to you to decide, well, gosh, how long am I going to tolerate this? And if I’m seeing nice improvement in this area, is that good enough for me?

So it’s really up to the, you know, how dysfunctional or functional is that teamwork happening that would dictate again, how much patience you have with it. The nice thing about this stuff though is a person who is willing to invest in that small amount of time to go and actually kind of do this development work for themselves can make improvements in a very, very short timeframe. So you can see major improvements in a month or less.

Again, if somebody is taking the time to do this deliberately every single day.

Jeffro (19:12.942)
Got it. Can you guys share an example of a company that kind of followed some of these methodologies and what did that look like at practice before and after?

Bart McCollum (19:22.479)
Yeah, so I think I don’t want to speak for Dr. Hannah. Some of the primary kind of research that was done on this was through a consulting company. I think it’s called Corn Fairy now. They’re a big, big company. They did this, I think. What was the what’s the big insurance company they did it at? It was a project that you were on.

gerald hannah (19:42.743)
Well, American Express. Yeah, it’s been that project’s been written up. Yeah, State Farm Insurance. So real quickly, State Farm Insurance in the mid 90s.

Bart McCollum (19:44.879)
State Farm, I think. Yeah, it was like tens of thousands of people at State Farm.

gerald hannah (20:00.019)
was controlled 80 % of all insurance and auto and home. And McKinsey came in, did an analysis at their request of their future strategy. And the report basically said, you’re not gonna be controlling auto and home anymore because of the internet. And secondly, you need to broaden and you need to get better talent and so forth. So we all hire you.

I love this story because it’s true. Mackenzie goes, wait a minute. We don’t do the work. We do the analysis. Call the Hay Group. They were called the Hay Group. They’ve been around since 1942. So we came in.

and help the leaders of Stay Farm create the culture. They had something like 25 ,000 agents. They wanted us to assess all of them. We said, no, we only want to assess your outstanding, what you considered outstanding. And so we get into all of that. And lo and behold, you know, Stay Farm not only survived, but really became a great company to work for. Before then, they were just sort of

Jeffro (20:56.91)
Hmm.

gerald hannah (21:15.045)
sort of moving, you know, hey, we own everything, we control everything. Didn’t care, yeah. No, it’s a great company. American Express is another IBM, they were in the early stages of creating behavioral competences.

Bart McCollum (21:36.303)
And Dr. Hannah and I have taken this model and we’ve implemented it at a bunch of different organizations. And so I was CEO of a health care payments company for a long time. And Dr. Hannah worked with me and our leadership team there and actually still does work with the leadership team at that company. I now am on the executive team of Line Media Group, we’re one of the largest experiential marketing agencies in the country.

Jeffro (21:36.75)
Okay.

Bart McCollum (22:04.463)
And we use these methods here. And it’s helped us grow and scale our organization. And a lot of our cohorts, a lot of our competitors, again, don’t get beyond a certain point because you have a lot of really smart, creative people. But scaling that requires teamwork and requires a certain kind of humility. It requires being able to practice these competencies, these behaviors. And that is often very, very difficult, a left turn to make when you’re used to being in a kind of creative atmosphere.

Jeffro (22:33.918)
Well, and I like Dr. Hanna, you mentioned that you don’t have to assess everybody. You just got to get an understanding of the teams and the culture so that you can make adjustments and then it will affect everybody. Right? So that does mean there’s hope for those large organizations. So I also want to make a point here before we get to the end of our time. So building an internal company culture, it kind of sounds just like inward focused marketing.

gerald hannah (22:46.867)
Exactly right and then everybody will come on board right exactly

Bart McCollum (23:00.879)
like in the focus.

Jeffro (23:02.958)
Right in other episodes. We’ve talked about how to convey a message to your prospects on your website This is kind of the same thing only you’re communicating your values to your own team Obviously the message is gonna be a little bit different because it’s more about how we act how we treat our customers what we care about etc But you’re coming up with ways to Convince them or persuade them of the importance of this and get them to be on board, right? Do you agree?

Bart McCollum (23:13.775)
message you’re going to be able to put in there that, I wouldn’t do that test if it wasn’t terrible, et cetera. But you’re coming up with ways to convince and appreciate them of the importance of this and get them to be on board. Do you agree? I would say, so this gets to the heart of kind of branding and marketing, which is you want, whatever the brand is, it needs to have the same, it needs to have a consistent message. It needs to be very, very clear to whoever is experiencing that brand.

And so sometimes what people will do, frequently what people will do is they’ll say, okay, here’s our values, here’s our culture, here’s our brand, here’s our internal brand, here’s what we want to create, here’s the experience we want our employees to have. And again, they’ll create some really pretty materials and might even throw it up on the website, they might apply for some awards, throw it up in the break room, et cetera, et cetera. If it’s not backed up by actual action from the top down, then again, it becomes not credible.

And so what I have done successfully with Dr. Hannah’s help is these competencies that we talk about in our book, connect those to actual statements of your value proposition at your company. And so when we have a company culture, we actually have some values. At Line Media, we have love, accountability, and evolution. Those are kind of our three company values. Well, we don’t stop with that. We actually have a list of like, it’s around 21 specific behaviors that roll up to those values.

Those behaviors are tied back to these behavioral competencies that we talk about. So again, it goes back to the science. It goes back to the actual things that make people work well in high performing organizations. And so the culture, we have this cool sizzle with what the culture is and we have, you know, artifacts, we have marketing material, we have copy, we have branding, we have swag that we wear. You can see my hat. We have cards that people carry around in their wallets.

That’s all great, but it has to actually tie back to something tangible and something specific. And that’s the practice that we’re talking about. And it’s what we talk about in the book. So without those two things, it’s just, it’s kind of toothless.

gerald hannah (25:20.467)
It’s all talk. Right.

Jeffro (25:20.75)
Got it. Well, that’s a great summary. And I think that’s kind of a great thought to wrap up on because once you understand that, then you’ve got a lot of possibilities there in terms of moving forward. So thank you both for joining me today. Personal development is a huge part of entrepreneurship. This discussion is a great example of that direct connection between the leader and the team and ultimately the effect it has on the business. So for those of you guys listening, check out the links in the show notes.

Bart McCollum (25:22.415)
They’ll talk, yeah, that’s right.

Bart McCollum (25:35.215)
Absolutely.

Jeffro (25:49.454)
Go pick up your copy of You Before Me and give it a read. It’s a very entertaining novel version of a business book where you actually get all this value while watching it being applied, which is a really kind of cool way to learn. Last question for you guys today. What is the single most important behavior someone can improve upon if they want to be successful?

Bart McCollum (25:53.231)
It’s a very entertaining novel version of a business book where you actually get all this value while watching it being applied.

gerald hannah (26:10.739)
well, it’s yeah, yeah, it’s it’s the emotional intelligence. It’s your ability to manage your yourself. And from that, I’m able to I’m able to be aware of what’s in front of me and listen and connect and be a good listener to others. There’s a part there’s a thing called inattentional blindness. You couldn’t find your car keys this morning and they were right in front of you.

Bart McCollum (26:12.975)
You got your answer? Go for it.

gerald hannah (26:40.691)
because your thoughts were somewhere else. And so it’s getting really, you know, this age now is we’ve got to be able to manage ourselves, our thoughts, our feelings, and be able to engage with people. And so that’s something.

Bart McCollum (26:59.759)
Yeah, my answer is the same, Jeffro. It’s kind of the foundational thing. You have to kind of build that foundation before you kind of stack things on top of it or everything kind of topples over. So it’s developing the behaviors within emotional intelligence.

Jeffro (27:00.43)
All right.

gerald hannah (27:03.763)
Yeah.

Jeffro (27:13.966)
Yeah, and that’s obviously a skill that’s going to apply elsewhere in life too, with all your relationships. So…

gerald hannah (27:17.459)
absolutely. Right.

Bart McCollum (27:19.151)
Yeah, at the end of the day, this is all about people. So absolutely, absolutely.

Jeffro (27:24.942)
Okay, well that’s awesome. Thanks again for being here guys and thanks to all of you for listening. Please be sure to like and subscribe, share this episode with someone who might like it. Take care and I’ll see you all back here for the next episode of Digital Dominance.

gerald hannah (27:27.539)
Thank you.

Bart McCollum (27:32.463)
Thank you.