Wake Up Inspired

Just like people, too many companies don’t know themselves. A company’s culture is its character, and every company has one. It’s the sum total of the unspoken rules about how teams work (or don’t work) together. About how management treats team members and how they treat one another. But those that consciously build the culture they want will become much better companies than those that just let it happen on its own. So how do you build culture? It’s a matter of committing to a set of acti...

Too many companies are doing a transparent juggling act—pretending for the sake of hiring and retention to care first about their employees, while their hearts really belong to the bottom line. Of course customer service matters. Of course sales matter. But these results are better served when you prioritize the well-being and professional growth of the front-line employees who build those relationships. The difference between lip-service and cultural commitment are obvious to everyone. Employe...

Fundamentally, what makes a company strong is a culture of trust. When workers feel trusted by and trust in their colleagues, managers, and leaders, they’re able to admit vulnerability and to learn on the job. This is the nature of a healthy organization—that everyone from the CEO on down feels secure enough to ask for help and to improve together for the benefit of the company.

How can you tell if you’re happy at work is the same way as telling if you’re happy in any human relationship. We have relationships with our organizations, with our jobs, as we have relationships with any tribe. If you’re a member of a club where you have unbelievable love and loyalty for the people in that club, that church, then you go do it more and you give lots of energy and time to it. Well, it’s the same thing. Do you wake up excited to get dressed and go to work? Do you dread Monday...

A vision is what gets you out of bed in the morning. It’s what validates an organization’s existence over the long haul. But not everybody is a visionary, spontaneously possessed with Joan-of-Arc-like certainty in their life’s mission. As Simon Sinek points out, there’s a lot of cultural pressure, especially within entrepreneurial spheres, to be Joan of Arc even if you’re not. But for those who aren’t sure where their personal North Star lies, he proposes a different approach—instead of s...