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For Love of Team™ is THE podcast where Leaders Simplify Teamwork, helping you: SURROUND yourself with others doing work they LOVE. Business mentor and strategist, Winston Faircloth believes that it is your love of TEAM, and not just your love of products and customers that sets you apart in the marketplace.
As leaders, you make the best decisions you can with imperfect data, and then you ask your team to commit to it. And that's what One Team United is about. It's about about agreeing. It's about committing, and it's about being aligned. And that's certainly what we have built here at.
Craig Wood:Premier.
Winston Faircloth:Hey there, it's your host, Winston Faircloth, and this is For Love of Team, the podcast to helping you grow a team you love, multiplying your impact, income, and freedom in business. And we do this by unlocking two essential leadership decisions required to attract and keep top talent. First, a compelling why, coupled with second, a clearly stated what success looks like. That why and what together leaves the how to gifted committed collaborators bringing your vision to life. And in today's episode, we're going to continue our series on how values drive success in business, how having core values that drive your day to day work in business drive success.
Winston Faircloth:And we have a special treat for you today because we're bringing back one of our favorite guests recently from episode 78. This is Craig Wood, who's CEO of Premier International. Craig, our conversation a few months ago really spurred this topic for me in really drilling down into how corporate values drives day to day action and brings alignment to our team and more importantly delivers an excellent client experience because we are so aligned with those values. And the premier way that Craig introduced us to in episode 78, we're gonna drill into a little bit more here. I know you're really going to love this interview again with our friend Craig Wood, CEO of Premier International.
Winston Faircloth:Craig Wood, welcome back to the For Love of Team podcast.
Craig Wood:It is great to be with you again, Winston.
Winston Faircloth:You are one of our first repeat guests on this season of the podcast where we're talking about building teams that you love. And you were such a big hit from our first time that we had you that and you actually inspired this brand new series that's looking at company values. And so thank you for coming back. I'm so excited to dig into this piece of how you're building a team, a culture, a business that you love and you know, how you balance the love of clients and love of team.
Craig Wood:I'm glad to hear that. Really enjoyed our first discussion. I guess there's now a little pressure if I'm the first repeat guest to come back. But we're super proud of what we've built. It's taken time and intentionality and anxious to dig a little deeper into the Premier way and our core values here at Premier.
Winston Faircloth:Excellent. So for folks who didn't catch the earlier podcast, can you just give us a little bit of overview about your career and Premier?
Craig Wood:You bet. I am currently the CEO of Premier International. We're based in Chicago. We're an IT consulting firm that helps with a very specific part of a technology transformation. And that's getting data from an old legacy system into a new target system.
Craig Wood:My career has been grounded in data and consulting, sort of the combination of the two. I'm a professional services person trained in sort of the sales and marketing aspects of that, and have a history of building organizations that help companies understand how to leverage data, how to understand data and how to get the most out of their customer relationships and their employee relationships based on the information that they know. I came to Premier in 2018 upon the passing of the founder and CEO of Premier and came in and discovered an incredible culture that I'm excited to talk about. And part of the story will jump ahead that I know that those who listened to the first episode, not only was this person, the CEO and founder of Premier who passed, but he also was my father-in-law. So I came in with a heavy heart, a desire to honor his legacy and to honor his history with the company and take a great culture and try to make it even better.
Craig Wood:And so that's what brought me here actually three years ago today, exactly. So today is my three year anniversary.
Winston Faircloth:Well, and thank you for that overview and thank you for the honor of spending your anniversary with us.
Craig Wood:Absolutely.
Winston Faircloth:So that was podcast 78. If you want to go back and we'll link that in the show notes so that you all can access our earlier conversation with Greg. How would you describe the culture? I think in the earlier podcast, you described it as a blend of a client first and a team first culture. You may have had different language around that, but how would you describe the culture?
Craig Wood:Well, is the way I described it. And it was actually one of the first times that I'd put those two things together. And we explored a lot of that together when we spoke, which is how does that coexist? How do you become employee first and client first or employee centric and client centric? And too often you see organizations that I believe that try to be one and can't be the other.
Craig Wood:There's a ton of client centricity out there, client centric firms. They do so, I think at the expense of their teams. They do so by making sacrifices or asking their team to do things that they are just not healthy for the team. And then I've also found organizations that are so employee focused and so culture focused that they forget the client, that they forget how to serve the needs of the group that is paying the bills, if you will, and that is generating the revenue. And so we really tried to balance both of those.
Craig Wood:How do those two things coexist? And I've used the word intentionality a lot. And that's something I think is important is understanding that there are decisions you have to make and intentional pathways you go down to try to make both those things happen. Our values are part of what we believe have helped shape the ability to be both employee and client focused.
Winston Faircloth:So let's dig a little bit into the employee side of that ledger here in terms of company values. Just before we hit record, we were I was sharing how, at least my experience with a lot of company values, is that they're very pretty poster on the wall and that's it. So let's talk about the premier way, that's your values. Maybe recap a few of those for folks and then how you bring those to life in your daily work.
Craig Wood:You bet. To do that, let go back thirty six years when the company was founded in 1985. And founded by a couple named Jim and Doon Hempelman. I mentioned my father-in-law and mother-in-law. And it was founded to be a different kind of consulting firm.
Craig Wood:It was founded to be a firm grounded in ethics was Jim's priority. He wanted to build an ethical consulting firm that was not after the holy dollar, was not after, you know, the highest revenue, but was after building an organization that exuded ethics and ethical behavior. We've talked about it. It was in the mid-80s when that was not always the, you know, the mantra, right? Ethics were not talked about.
Craig Wood:Core values were not something on the wall in 1985. People really didn't talk about them even if they had them. And so we didn't have the Premier Way in 1985. We had a founder who was focused on building a different kind of company. And so part of what I would say is the values for us were not words on the wall that we then tried to live out.
Craig Wood:They were things that we lived out that thirty three years later, we found a way to describe them with words on the wall. And that's a really different approach. We did have what, what, what is a code of ethics. I'm looking at one in my office right now. It was five ethical statements that we made to our clients, we made to each other, that we hired on, and it became the foundation of our core values.
Craig Wood:And they were things like adhere to the highest ethical standards and place the client's interests first and serve all clients with excellence, maintain the professional attitude and preserve the client's confidence. We were dealing with data. We're dealing with confidential information. We were in the HR data business at the time. So the idea of having a code of ethics was a differentiator for us.
Craig Wood:And for thirty three years, those were the words on our wall. And it was the foundation of who we hired and who we worked with. And it served us quite well. When I arrived three years ago today, I talked about, you know, what makes Premier so unique and what is it that, you know, makes Premier Premier? And I got different answers from everyone, but they all sort of had the same core themes to them.
Craig Wood:It started with this foundation of ethical boundaries and ethical standards. And then it was, you know, that we always exceed expectations and we had a lot of fun together. But we didn't really have a codification, if that's a word, but we were unable to codify sort of in a concise way what made Premier, Premier. So we embarked on a process to do just that. On a process that said, we know we have values.
Craig Wood:We know we have a culture. How do we describe it? And what are the words or terms that could be used to talk about who we are as an organization? And that exercise, which took us about six months, It was part of a larger process of our EOS implementation. EOS is entrepreneurial operating system.
Craig Wood:It's a business process for small and mid sized companies. And as we went through the EOS process, we uncovered these six core values. And I won't bore you with the details of that process, but the point being, it was not overnight, but we knew what we had. We knew what we were trying to describe. And ultimately we got to what we think six core elements, the core tenets of who makes prem, what makes Premier Premier.
Craig Wood:It's the DNA of our organization, if you will, that's uniquely ours and uniquely a combination of things that helps make our organization so special. So let me take a breath and recite for you what those are just quickly. So we've gone from this code of ethics released in 1985 to in 2019, we released the premier way after internal group came up with these and lots of input from our, you know, 40 at the time, 40 person team. They are as follows. The first tenant is client first always.
Craig Wood:Second tenant is driven by integrity. The third is above and beyond. The fourth is rise to the opportunity. The fifth is confident yet humble. And the sixth and final one is one team united.
Craig Wood:Those six tenants, not individually, but collectively make up who we are as an organization. And those six tenants, I would say make up the employee focus of our organization. We look for people that live out these values in their personal decisions. They live out these values and how they treat their family and how they treat their friends and how they treat their clients. We focus on hiring for these values, for making performance decisions that are influenced by these values.
Craig Wood:As I like to say, these are the reasons why people join us, why they want to work for Premier and why they stay with us as long as they do. It's the reason why clients hire us and why they continue to come back to us is because I think they see these six values brought to life and how we interact with them on a daily basis and handling their data and our interaction.
Winston Faircloth:And I think that's super important. And let's go back to the client side of this for a second. When they see these values, it's not a surprise to them because they've experienced it.
Craig Wood:They don't, you know what, it's a great point because one of the things that we haven't done is posted these on the wall, they're on our website, but this is not something we say, hey, look, Mr. And Mrs. Client, we were client first always. And, you know, we're driven by integrity. And yet when we get feedback from our clients, it is not uncommon for them to actually use the words that we have in our values to describe what we did for them.
Craig Wood:I can't tell you how many times I've gotten a note from a client saying, thank you so much. Your team went above and beyond on this one. They really rose to the opportunity of this. They were one team together, one team united. So it's so validating to say that our clients see these values come to life in the work, because they've read them somewhere.
Craig Wood:I know they haven't read them on our website because most of our clients probably don't hang out on our website. Now I do know recruits read them because when interview someone, folks are getting very good at preparing for the interview, but it's really interesting to see how people in an interview process will try to share how they were client first always or how they rose to the opportunity. It's just, that's great interviewing technique A, but B, those are the type of people that we want. There are people who have actually explored our values, who have said, this is the kind of place I want to work and I want to show them that this is a part of who I am. Not that I'm willing to be this way, but this is actually a core element of who I am as a person.
Winston Faircloth:I think that's fascinating to me. And in this marketplace of employees, or potential team members, they can be very selective these days, as selective as employers, right?
Craig Wood:They can be. And I'll actually say what we're seeing now is there can be so selective that culture is rising to the top of what people are looking for. They're looking for a place that is a manifestation of who they are, of how they think of they want to be associated with it. People have talked about this with brands for a long time. You know, a brand is a reflection of who you are.
Craig Wood:If you're carrying a Gucci purse or Apple, you know, a laptop or whatever the case might be. I think the same goes for companies. They want to work in a place that reflects who they are. And that is at least different for me over my thirty years of leading organizations. That hasn't always been the case.
Craig Wood:Who's going to pay me the most? Who's the cool company? Who's going to help my resume be a brand name that I can go get another job on it. And we're seeing now that people are saying, well, the world has changed and I want to work somewhere that looks like what I see when I look in the mirror. It's a reflection of me and we're probably not for everybody.
Craig Wood:We love who we hire. We have 56 people as of right now, which is even more than when I was on the podcast a couple of months ago. We've hired over 20 people since COVID and we have 56 people, but I think Winston, the number is somewhere around 40 or 42 have never worked anywhere but Premier. And we don't have, I'm on the older end of our spectrum in my early fifties. Most of our team is in the early twenties to mid thirties and they've never worked anywhere else.
Craig Wood:This myth that millennials are going to job hop every three to five years, and we just haven't seen it. And I think it's because our culture is a reflection of who they are and they're proud to work here and they're proud to be a part of an organization that lives out what they believe is their core essence, their core being.
Winston Faircloth:And what I really love, and we're going to put the link to your website page that talks about The Premier Way in the podcast notes, but I love how you go on to describe in some detail and with very clear and sometimes emotional language, what it means to be client first or to go above and beyond. Above and beyond can feel like a little bit of a, Hey, we're going to do whatever it takes. In our earlier conversation, you really talked about how you, yes, we do. But to certain, there's still boundaries here.
Craig Wood:There are. And I appreciate you acknowledging because we've worked very hard not just on the words to describe our values, but on the words, the actual value themselves, should say, but on the words that describe the values as well. And I'll hit on a couple of them and end on the one that you mentioned, but the idea of the client first always, you know, one of the things that we said was that doesn't mean the client's right always, You know, client first doesn't mean that you always have to agree with the client. It does mean that the client's needs are primary for us and we want to make sure, but sometimes it's in the best angle for the client. It's in their best interest to say no to something or to say, we can't do that, or we're not going to work on a weekend or you don't need that.
Craig Wood:You know, we've oftentimes said, you know what? You don't need to spend money on us. Here's someone else that can do it cheaper than we can because it's not, you know, we're not the best resource for you. That's client first. That's not revenue first.
Craig Wood:That's not top line first. That's client first. That, so that's a good one. The other one I think is interesting is right as to the opportunity. You know, we always say that where others see a challenge, we see an opportunity.
Craig Wood:The gnarlier, the more complex, the more complicated the solution is. Know, we get people to say our data is so bad, you're never going to be able to work through it. And our team's ears perk up at that point because that's what they want. They want to be able to rise to that opportunity. We don't see the negative aspect of a challenge.
Craig Wood:We see a chance to exceed their expectations, which leads us to the one you brought up, is above and beyond, which is probably the easiest one to identify in behavior, both for us and our clients and the hardest one to manage. Because I'll, you know, in all honesty, this a tough one because we at sometimes believe that we have to do more than we probably do. And that we set the bar so high for ourselves. And then we try to jump over that bar that it takes its toll. And the example that I shared before is one where clients get used to that.
Craig Wood:They are expecting that and they sometimes will ask for things that probably are unreasonable. And yet I have a team and we have a team that's just willing to do that. And that sometimes manifests itself in a ninety hour work week or, you know, canceling a vacation or doing things that just not who we are as an organization. And we've had to balance that. We've had to actually say to employees, there is a boundary here and we need you to not say yes to this, but I'm supposed to go above and beyond, but it's client first always.
Craig Wood:And how do those things coexist? And we've had to have tough conversations and make some tough trade offs. We've had at least one client that just didn't really match our values and was expecting more from our team in a way that just was not consistent with who we are. We sort of mutually agreed to part ways at the right time. Was not a good cultural fit for us.
Craig Wood:And part of it was we were not treated with the respect that we expected and yet our team was having to do the things that were being asked of them. And it was creating a very unhealthy environment for a handful of members on our team. I'm grateful, so grateful that we didn't lose anybody during that because it would have been an environment where someone said the heck with it. I can't put up with it anymore. And I think that speaks to the strength of these values was that our team was able to get through a very difficult situation with their heads held high, proud of the work that we did, successful by all technical accounts, and we survived, if you will.
Craig Wood:And that's where these values become not just words on a wall. They become, what does it mean when going above and beyond actually is a bad thing for the company and how do you deal with that? And how do you maintain it, the balance, and how do you protect your team who really wants to exceed expectations to say, it's okay to only go here and allow yourself this weekend to reconnect and recharge your batteries because that's what's required for you to be able to go above and beyond next week. So those are good examples. And we try to convey that not just for people reading our website, but for our employees to understand this is what you told us.
Craig Wood:These are the words you said to us that were important to you as we describe what it meant to do and be these things. And the last one I would just hit on quickly is just one team united. Sometimes that's perceived potentially as we agree on everything. We don't agree on everything. We have a diversity of not just race and ethnicity, and that continues to be a priority for us in terms of how do we improve our diversity.
Craig Wood:But we also have a diversity of thoughts and ideas and voices and opinions. And we celebrate all of that. And we want to be a place where we can have healthy discussion and dialogue and potentially debates. But when we leave the room, we are aligned on where we're going and how we're going to get there. There's a saying I heard another leadership person speak about, which is, you know, what you want from your team is to be able to leave a room saying, I agree and commit, or I disagree and commit.
Craig Wood:And that, you know, it's that commitment that we're looking for that says, you know what, you might not fully understand or agree with why we're doing this or why we're taking, made this decision, but we want you to commit to it and be united with it. And we saw that throughout COVID, Winston, in all kinds of areas, right? We had to make tough decisions, whether open the office, close the office, wear a mask, not wear a mask. And while we had lots of good dialogue about it, ultimately as leaders, you make the best decisions you can with imperfect data, and then you ask your team to commit to it. And that's what One Team United is about.
Craig Wood:It's not about agreeing, it's about committing and it's about being aligned and that's certainly what we have built here at Premier.
Winston Faircloth:It's a great story and I want to go back to Above and Beyond because as you were describing that story in that situation with a particularly difficult client, the one thing that came to mind for me was you went above and beyond in protecting the team from, you know, a wrong fit client, potentially. I'm using stronger words than you did, but I think that taking those kind of counterintuitive actions really is a symbol that the company can go above and beyond too.
Craig Wood:Yeah, thank you for that compliment. Will follow this caveat by saying we tried to. We're not perfect as an organization and I'm sure there were moments where we sided with the client that probably we could have done a better job of taking care of our team. Overall, that was our intent. It was, you know, we uncovered it early enough to be able to do something about it.
Craig Wood:Like I said, before it became so late that we lost people on it. And I think that's the beauty of what above and beyond means. One of the things that we joke about is we don't just go above and beyond with clients. We go above and beyond in everything we do as an organization. Whether it be company parties, whether it be, you know, celebrations or happy hours or fantasy football bets.
Craig Wood:I mean, everything we do is above and beyond. We try to surprise and delight. We try to exceed expectations and that can be from the, PTO policy to what you do to protect your team in a sticky client situation. And that's why it's such an interesting mesh when you think about employee and client, right? This above and beyond is not just about client behavior, it's about internal behavior.
Craig Wood:Rising to the opportunity. That's what we think we did with COVID. We rose to the opportunity. It had unbelievable challenges and obstacles. And we found a way to have our best year ever.
Craig Wood:We found our way to grow more significantly than we ever thought we could and to set ourselves up for an incredible 2021 because we rose to that opportunity. And I think that that's where this becomes an interesting mosaic of client and employee, internal, external values become not just words on paper, they become the essence of who you are as an organization. And you don't leave that at home. You don't leave that when you're interacting with someone, you know, on a personal thing that It's really a description of who we have as our team are these six core values.
Winston Faircloth:So let's talk about how we bring this home in terms of a day to day experience. Maybe you can think of a recent story about how these values really kind of flow through the organization. Do you have like a fairly recent story about how these values are relevant in day to day work?
Craig Wood:Sure. I'll have to think about that for a second for a specific story, but I'll tell you a specific application that I think is interesting. One of our team members, as we rolled this out in late twenty nineteen, we talked about how can we celebrate this? How can we acknowledge this in a real time way? And her idea is such a simple one was we created an email address, the premier way at our website.
Craig Wood:And it's a way for our employees to call out people who are living out these values in the moment. And that email address goes to an email box that goes to the leadership team that we then share with the whole company. And I would bet that there hardly is a day that goes by that I don't see an email from someone to someone saying, Hey, Emmy, thanks for going above and beyond on this. Or thanks Nick for rising to this opportunity when I needed you. And it's just a, it's a beautiful reminder that we all want to be recognized that it's easy to find these values come to life in the mundane of our day to day jobs.
Craig Wood:And so I could read to you the last 20 of these that we received and they come from everybody. You know, people are writing them to the CEO and they're writing them to, you know, to the newest associate who just joined the company a few weeks ago. It's just a, it's a wonderful way to celebrate each other, but also to celebrate that the premier way is alive and well in the organization. You know, the most recent one I was involved with was a situation where we were not being paid in a timely manner. And, you know, client first always would tell you that you keep doing work for the client and you, you know, you just kind of wait for your payment to come.
Craig Wood:And we had to struggle with that. We talked about that, like, what's it mean to be client first always when potentially the obligations of the client aren't being met on their end. And that's where it's in our best interest to have that honest, authentic conversation. That's exactly what we did. It got escalated to the highest level and we navigated it and they appreciated how we approached it.
Craig Wood:They even called out to us like we were grateful for your patients, but we're also grateful that you called us on it and you've helped us identify some breakages in our system for lack of a better word that we need to address. And, you know, thank you for the partnership. And so it's just, there's example after example after example of that. And for thirty three years we did that, but I don't think we had, we didn't have that anchor to say this is what that was. For the last three years, what I'm so excited about is now people say that was the premier way in action.
Craig Wood:That was this value. That was that value. And really what we've done is codify and be able to bring into the light what really has been here for a long time. Beautiful. And I would, Dessa, I was just gonna say one thing is that as I think about you and the work that you do and your team does and your clients, I would offer this encouragement, is every organization has a culture.
Craig Wood:Don't kid yourself. You're starting an organization as a startup, you have a culture. The question becomes, you know, who is that culture and how do you describe it? And those to me are the values you're living out. There are such things as aspirational values.
Craig Wood:We want to be this, but I would be careful to understand what are your values today and what are your aspirational values for tomorrow? And make sure that you don't conflate the two because there's one thing to say, here are our values that we think we are, we are this, this and this. And if you don't live them out, you're going to actually be worse off than not having said what your values were at all. And case in point for us older folks, you know, just look back at what the corporate values were of Enron, right? They were the antithesis of what Enron was doing.
Craig Wood:They were aspirational values that they could not live out. So I would say from a practical bit of advice is understand who you are as an organization today and describe your core values and who you are today. If there are ones you don't like, or ones that you think are not who you want to be, then create some aspirational values to get to and find a pathway and a plan to get there. But don't kid yourself that you think that we don't have a culture yet or we don't have values yet. You have values in how you make day to day decisions as an organization, the led by which you make those decisions.
Craig Wood:Those are your values today, whether you're a one year old company or a thirty six year old company.
Winston Faircloth:Oh, so well said. That was, I think a very difficult balance for a lot of people who are beginning to codify these values is that they can be so aspirational, and yet, you know, employees and team members sniff out that delta in no time. Right? And they're like, well, that sounds great. And it goes in the wastebasket, never to be seen again.
Craig Wood:That is a great way to put it sniff out. People can see when you're not being authentic and it's going to start with your team. Who's going to say that's not who we are. You know, Craig says this, but that's not how Craig acts. And that is the death knell, right, of an organization culture is all of a sudden there's this alignment between who somebody or an organization thinks they are versus who they really are.
Craig Wood:And I spent a lot of time speaking about and talking about being the best version of yourself so much. So I think my team kind of gets sick of it, but when I talk about it, I think about the best version of yourself individually, but I also talk about what does it mean for Premier to be the best version of itself? How does that happen to a company? And the process is the same. I talk about understanding yourself, being self aware, being okay getting in the discomfort or uncomfortable places, and then kind of giving yourself grace and being able to say, you know what, I wasn't the best version of myself there, but I can be a better version of myself.
Craig Wood:Same thing applies to a company and to acknowledge that, hey, we're not the best version of ourselves or hey, we're not living out this value the way we want to. How do we get there? Give yourself some grace when you don't. Those principles sort of are easy to sort of understand from an individual perspective, but they're even easier to apply to an organization or a community or a communal activity like what we're trying to do here at Premier.
Winston Faircloth:And you just anticipated the question I was going for, which is how do you continue to improve and level up these values? And what you've just described is an ongoing evergreen process of growth, right? If I have to keep constantly measuring, am I showing up as my the best version of myself and therefore we as a team become the best version of ourselves, that's not a static place.
Craig Wood:It's not, it's not. It's probably a better term would be the better version of yourself because you're always trying to get better as opposed to the ultimate best. I do believe that these core values sort of stay, you know, they're the core of who we are. We have talked about every year we sort of reevaluate, are there any we should take off? Are there any we should add?
Craig Wood:And there's a couple that I would say as our culture continues to grow, as we grow as people, we talked about cultural ads in our last conversation as we add people who are bringing new things to our culture, we are growing and evolving as an organization. I wouldn't be surprised if two years from now, I'm back on your podcast that we've added a core value or the Premier Way now has seven things or eight things, because there's some things that are important to us that are actually living out how we interact that aren't reflected here. And that comes with time and that will be a better version of ourselves two years from now than we are today. And I would argue we're better today than we were three years ago. And we were better three years ago than we were thirty years ago.
Craig Wood:So it's just fun to watch this organization grow into the best version of itself, whatever that looks like and knowing that we continue to have a ways to go to do that.
Winston Faircloth:So does this, in terms of creating and stewarding and communicating this, you know, organizations feel like this responsibility resides in a single position. How how does this how does this come about in term if if we haven't yet codified it, if we don't have, is there an owner of this process or is this everything? Everybody owns this.
Craig Wood:Great. Great question. There's a lot of writing about that this that that values really often should and do come down from leadership teams because it's the leaders of the organization that are living this out, that are making decisions about where you spend your money and your time and therefore have the greatest influence on the values. And I can see that. And I understand that this culture for thirty years was a manifestation of who Jim Himmelman was.
Craig Wood:He was a great man and he had great ethics and we're proud to have that. He influenced it greatly, but it wasn't just that. And I would argue when I read these things in academia or I read these things other places, I would argue that, yes, that's true. And it also comes from the bottom up. As the organization, the people you're hiring, the newest employee who's adding something to your culture is driving what your values are.
Craig Wood:And you can't have either or you can't just have it be a bottom up, have it come from your team. And they can't just come top down from your leadership. We're a small enough organization that, you know, 56 people that we don't have a chief vision officer, a chief people officer, or someone who's in charge of culture necessarily. I do believe in my role as CEO, I have accountability for the culture. The buck stops with me.
Craig Wood:If we've got a cultural problem, this is not my leadership team's problem. This is my problem to help try to address. But that doesn't mean that those decisions emanate from me. It just simply means that I have the accountability for it. And it's my responsibility to make sure that when we uncover cultural issues or challenges that we are able to address them and that I'm making sure we're doing everything within our power to do that.
Craig Wood:Now, could you have a cultural czar or someone who sort of quote unquote owns the culture? I think you could. I would just argue, make sure that person is nothing more than an amplifier for the entire organization, not someone who sees their job as sort of dictating what the culture is. You can have someone who's in charge of communicating that and coming up with ideas and planning parties and that's all fun and good, but that person should not be the sole person responsible for describing and living out the culture that falls on the team.
Winston Faircloth:Well, I hope everyone goes back and plays this answer back because it is so wise and so true. You know, where we've seen this kind of continuum from everybody's in to one person and you described a great and. And that's one of the contributions Craig you make every time you're on this podcast is you bring a unique insight in terms of not or thinking, but and thinking is really part of your DNA, I believe.
Craig Wood:That's very gracious of you. Thank you.
Winston Faircloth:Well, thank you for this conversation. I know it's gonna spark some more conversation from our listeners. Let's just remind people how to connect with you and the premier way, Premier International Chicago. Let's just give folks a couple more reminders of how to connect with you. We'll put this in the show notes for everyone to reach out to you.
Craig Wood:Absolutely. Yeah. Thank you for that. And there'd probably be a link in there, but our website is premierinternational.com. We're on LinkedIn.
Craig Wood:My personal LinkedIn is there as well. CraigMwood as in Michael, and that's my Twitter handle as well craigmwood. So I love talking about this. I love talking about it with you in particular Winston, but I'm starting to do more writing and thinking and communicating about these topics and would love to get feedback from folks. I'd love to get into more dialogue about what does this mean in real life, not just in theory, but in practice.
Craig Wood:And I'm grateful, so grateful and appreciative for the opportunity to share this with your audience and to be with you and talking about things that I think are really, really critical to the success of business going forward.
Winston Faircloth:It's been an honor. It's one of the highlights of my years to reconnect, have been reconnected with you and going back as long as we have, it just feels like we just picked up where we left off. So thank you my friend, so glad you were here.
Craig Wood:Well, the feelings are mutual. I appreciate the opportunity and we'll look forward to the next one to be the first third time guest.
Winston Faircloth:You have a date.
Craig Wood:Alright, thanks friend.
Winston Faircloth:Man, did you all get some great takeaways in terms of these values and how they really align with client interest as well as team interest? There's going to be some good stuff coming out of this episode. I know as you think about building values and a culture for your team, whether you have a team today or you're about to start building a team, Craig just brings so many gems. I am so thankful, Craig, for your participation. Make sure to go check out all the show notes for links to the Premier Way, Premier International, and Craig Wood.
Winston Faircloth:He's a great follow on social media. I love him. He's such a wise and gifted leader, and I know you're gonna love, connecting with him. So you know what's really cool about this is that Premier International is a business that you love because it's supported by a team that you love. And as owners and leaders, what could be better than this?
Winston Faircloth:A business you love supported by a team that you love. And you remember that our client experience will never exceed the love we show to our team. And For Love of Team is a leading indicator of your future success, multiplying your impact, income, and freedom in business. Be blessed, I'll catch you on the next episode.