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The Build a Vibrant Culture Podcast brings together amazing leaders, entrepreneurs, and experts to share the successes, challenges, and secrets to living and leading as a VIBRANT Leader.
Tune-in each week as Nicole Greer interviews a new Vibrant Leader.
Email her at nicole@vibrantculture.com
Nicole x Mark Budzinski
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Announcer: [00:00:00] This is the build a vibrant culture podcast, your source for the strategies, systems, and insights you need to turn your dreams into your destiny. Every week we dive into dynamic conversations as our host, Nicole Greer interviews, leadership, and business experts. They're here to shed light on practical solutions to the challenges of personal and professional development.
Now here's your host, a professional speaker, coach, and consultant, Nicole Greer.
Nicole: Welcome, everybody, to the Build a Vibrant Culture podcast. My name is Nicole Greer, and they call me the Vibrant Coach, and I have another amazing, talented, unbelievable guest on the show. And so let me tell you a little bit about Mark. Mark is a management executive focused on the unique challenges facing leaders of small businesses.
Are you working in a small business with challenges?
Okay. And so he can help. So I'm so glad he's on the show today. And he has [00:01:00] held an abundance of C suite, say that three times fast, C suite roles in technology. Okay. So don't miss that. Not only did he have his own technology as a C suite member, but then he was trying to fix everybody else's. This guy's amazing.
And he can also be reached at Mark Budzinski at gmail. com. And he wrote a book. Look at this book he wrote, everybody, and he sent me one in the mail. It's called Peer to Peer Culture. So today, Mark is going to talk a little bit about this, and I'm so glad you're here! Mark, how are you?
Mark Budzinski: Well, very well. And I'll tell you at the risk of sucking up, I've been really looking forward to this opportunity to talk to you.
I've been a fan of the podcast and I would say without hesitation, your listeners you know, they get a lot of nice content from who you have on the show. So thanks for having me on today.
Nicole: Yeah, it's my pleasure. I'm delighted to have you here. And so you've been working in small businesses. You've been in the C Suite.
What are all the C positions that you've [00:02:00] been in? A lot of times when I'm teaching I call you guys the C's and the O's and the E's and the O's. So what are all your letters?
Mark Budzinski: Well, yeah, you make a good point. General management for the last decade or so so call it CEO for lack of a better vowel that we can put in between the C and the O.
But really, I really cut my teeth, Nicole, through the years in in sales and marketing. So, VP of sales, VP of marketing, chief revenue officer, those kinds of roles which, you know To be honest, really shaped my thinking about general management, because when you're in a sales role, thinking about customer acquisition, customer satisfaction, obviously, they roll over in a pretty acute way into general management.
Nicole: Yeah, of course. Yeah. And well, the old saying is, nothing happens till something is sold. And that is absolutely true. And then the second problem is, Oh, we sold it now. How do we get it to the client and make them happy and buy another one or another thing? Right? So that's the whole trick.
Well, I love the fact that you wrote this book. Let me [00:03:00] tell everybody again, because I said it really fast earlier, peer to peer culture. This is the book. You can get it on the Amazon. It'll be in the link down here. All right, so, when you think of the notion of culture, because, that's my gig, culture in the workplace, how do you conceptualize your point of view?
Mark Budzinski: Very insightful question to kick this off. First of all, kudos to you for that. But I would go so far as to say it goes beyond passion. It's very personal for me. And I say that because I had the opportunity to manage a number of companies, but the last one that I managed, it was a software company in the business to business paradigm.
So we had salespeople running around, we had developers making the software, uh, customer sat service people, making sure customers were happy. And, the product was perfectly adequate. There was nothing wrong with it. But there were a lot of products in the market that were doing what we were doing, right?
So how did we succeed to the level that we did? And I think it's [00:04:00] undeniable. It was about what you call culture. It was about the way people behaved in the in the workplace. So, it's the sort of thing that you know, at face value, well, culture's nice, culture's great. Isn't it feel good to be part of a good culture?
It was deeper than that. And I think that's where the personal take comes from. We had very aggressive goals to grow the company. We had anxious investors looking over our shoulder. Having the people prevail was everything. And I think I learned really through that endeavor. I really learned two things.
One is that culture can be prescribed meaning we can articulate what we want it to be and actually translate that into the behavior that becomes prominent. And I think your listeners, if they reflect on their careers, right, a lot of times culture is sort of organic. And if you're in a really small company, that organic culture probably reflects the personality almost of the [00:05:00] founders, right?
So if they're if they're tend to be autocratic or they're tended, they tend to be more committee driven. Based in the way they make decisions, those things ripple through to culture pretty quickly and people kind of catch on to the act. If you're in a large company, all right, if you're in a Microsoft or some ginormous company culture tends to take on the organization that you're in, right?
So it's your department, it's your building, it's your floor tends to have its own organic or organic thing. I think when when we talk about a small to mid sized company, That's really the ideal place. And that's where I live right when still live where you can articulate the culture that you want and actually exercise the reality, if you will, the way people actually have it go down so you can implement the poster, right?
So, again, go back to the big companies, the poster in the lobby, the catch phrases, like, we love our customers, the bumper stickers and stuff like that fabulous ideas, right? But in reality [00:06:00] is the way that a customer experiences your firm consistent with. We love our customers, right?
You think about all the different ways a customer interacts with a company. When you buy something, it's a salesperson. When you get a bill, it's from the accounting department. When something breaks, you call the service desk. And these are all separate places where you interact with the firm.
And so do we really love our customers? Right? Well, in the case of a midsize company, I think you have an opportunity to not just say it, but to actually do it.
Nicole: Yeah, I agree. Always what I do, Marcus, I listen to what people say, and then I like want to highlight things, and one of the things that he said is people behave according to the culture, right.
So behavior and culture, like what, If you go to Italy, how do people in Italy behave? I don't know, they eat pasta, maybe they talk with their hands. That could be a stereotype, I'm not sure. I'm going to go to, I've got to get to Italy, Mark. They speak Italian, right? They have a language all their own, right?
And if you go from [00:07:00] Sicily to Rome, there's going to be differences because those two cities actually have their own little culture, right? You can go to Naples and it'll be different. So that's, those are the three I want to go to, Mark. But. What he's saying is that it's a people thing. Culture is a people thing.
And that is why Mark's book is called Peer to Peer Culture. It's about people to people. And the other thing that you said that I thought was so good, as you said, you can articulate it and then identify the behaviors. That embody the culture. I want to stop right there, though, and ask you a question about that.
Kind of follow that energy. So articulating the culture. Who does that? And how do you articulate it? What do leaders do to get that in place?
Mark Budzinski: Yeah leaders roll all the way up, right? So I take the point of view that it starts with the CEO. And
Nicole: I agree.
Mark Budzinski: And not to say that others HR professionals the other senior managers and [00:08:00] mid managers don't have a role to play.
We all have a role to play, but I think to articulate it from the top does a couple of things. One, it expresses the seriousness of what's going on, right? This is not just a poster. This is not a nice to have. This is an intrinsic, critical part of the way that our organization is going to operate. Number one.
Number two, it sets the tone in terms of by example, right? So, be careful what you ask for, you might get it. The senior leader has to behave in a way consistent with what we're asking others to do. Again, everybody plays a role. And I think again, in larger companies, the HR professionals get it almost an unfair ask, define the culture, implement the culture.
It's helpful, and it's important. So I don't want to dismiss it, but it's in and of itself. Insufficient right you've got to have you've got to have your practitioner leaders, the ones that are on the ground doing the work, [00:09:00] exhibiting the behavior, and to the extent we can articulate it, that helps in the job interview that helps in the employee assimilation process.
It helps in the way that we bring clarity to interacting with customers and partners. Everything becomes sort of clear. The fog lifts and we all know how we're supposed to behave.
Nicole: I love it. Okay. And don't miss he, he slid an oldie, but a goodie in there. He said it, it's this leading by example thing.
People are like, what do leaders need to lead by example that it's been around for forever and it's still true today. So I love that. Okay. And I love your little quote. This is not just a poster. We have to embody the culture. All right. I love it. And then you teased out one more thing I don't want to miss in that first little bit that you were talking about, is you said, it comes from the senior leader, whoever is in charge, the personality of that person. Sometimes if it's a small business, it's a startup, that person's bringing this huge energy and attitude and behaviors [00:10:00] to the party. And then you said, if it's a big company, you could have several different cultures under one roof. And I saw a diagram one time, Mark, where it had a big circle and it said culture.
And then it said cohort, cohort, cohort, cohort, little circles in the big one. And it was saying this culture could be a 180. This little cohort culture could be a 180 from this one over here. And I think that is absolutely true. So it could be confusing. People have been in the marketing department and then they went to over here. Oh, wait, what happened? My company just left.
Mark Budzinski: Right? Well, I I tend to think in sports metaphors so not to overjock the the broadcast.
Nicole: That's good. We like the sports. It's all good.
Mark Budzinski: You know, teams typically have a culture, right? So a football team, a baseball team they tend to have a culture that's consistent with the way that they want to play the way they want to create competitive advantage, the way they want to attract and keep players on the team. [00:11:00] So if we think in that analogy, like a company is like a team. Well, that's more like a small company and you can get your head around. They have consistent. They have an opportunity to have a consistent culture, right? If you think about a big company like the league, like the NFL or the NBA. It's like, Oh, okay. This is not a simple thing. This is a conglomerate, perhaps, this is at a minimum this is a mix of different functions. So inevitably, though, those those organizations do have leaders, right? So if it's functional, sales, marketing, engineering, or perhaps it's Eastern region, Western region, perhaps it's Europe versus America.
I mean, come on, there's obvious cultural differences in the way that different parts of the world perceive themselves in the workplace, what they expect from a culture in the workplace, to what extent they can bring their sort of self interest or they have to leave those at the door, right? There's differences around the world.
But I think back to what you're saying, the [00:12:00] idea that a senior leader, however we organize it, right? The coach of the team, the Something that the folks in the organization have a direct relationship with, right? So it's not ethereal, it's not just some across the pond executive that's, that's talking about culture, if I happen to live in Amsterdam. It's the people I interact with, day in and day out.
Nicole: Yeah, for sure. And I love your football analogy. So I'm all about the sports. I don't play them. And when my husband's watching football, I'm usually reading a book or a magazine, but it's okay. I'm keeping up and we are together. So that's important.
But it's like, I know that the the Carolina Panthers are playing football. And I know that the the Seahawks are playing football, but they're playing all they're playing their culture. The locker room is different. So it's really about getting these leaders on the same page is what I think.
Okay. All right, so you wrote a book. Why did you decide to do that? Sounds like you're busy enough. [00:13:00] You're running the IT thing. You're doing all this stuff.
Mark Budzinski: I manage I manage a firm called Clean Data today. That's an advisory firm in analytics, but I find that the way people behave and the way that Analytics comes together. There's sort of almost like a violent collision between data and people's behavior, right? Certainly in the modern day. Frankly, Nicole, I just had an opportunity, right? I was between day jobs and I'm like, you know what, what we did to grow a company, put the founders or the investors in a position where they could exit successfully. And we had such an amazing dynamic experience where people just felt that they were committed, they were enrolled. And you're going to think I'm making this up, but over the course of seven years, we didn't lose one person to involuntary turnover. Nobody left, right? So we had to fire a few and that was largely due to non compliance with the culture as much as competency in their job.
[00:14:00] But the idea that you know, culture was so important. I thought, you know what? Let me reflect. Let me try to almost reverse engineer what we did, how we did it and try to capture the themes of that and those themes, as I thought about it and wrote it down, were really fivefold. The first was trust and we talk about trust and culture all the time.
But I think we had a unique spin on it in the sense that it was so explicit and we essentially developed our policies and the way that we interacted with our employees and our customers from that frame of trust. There was secondly exordinate emphasis on teamwork and that teamwork had again behavior that went well beyond the poster, right?
So we had an opportunity to define what we were all after together and and chase it together. So, you know how we did that we can talk about momentarily, but teamwork, number two, number three, and you don't always see this in culture, certainly not [00:15:00] explicitly stated, and that is what I call empathy, having empathy for customers having empathy for each other, and how that manifested itself in the way that we were successful to essentially, work together.
The fourth attribute was honesty. And I really mean honesty, most directed towards tough communication So when you think about confrontation and how do we deal with rough situations where it's not just a dream, right? How do we deal with that? So there was an honesty dimension to it.
And then the last one I call dynamic action. That was really about how to be swift with decision making and underpinning that was what I call unambiguous communication. So you think about corporations that love their acronyms, their little secret speak about things, their catchphrases. We would challenge ourselves all the time not to do that, right? So if you want to say something, say it explicitly. We're not talking about customer [00:16:00] engagement models. What the hell does that mean? We're talking specifically about some set of actions and some decisions related to interacting with customers, right? And again, I suspect your listeners, if they reflect on their own careers and the meetings that they're in and the nonsense that goes on where we're all hanging on to these phrases and some are pretending we even understand what they are, but difficult endeavor. So, Trust, teamwork, empathy, honesty and dynamic action that basically defined the culture and as I wrote it down, it's like, Oh, yeah that's what we did.
Nicole: Yeah, fantastic. And don't miss this, leaders who are listening. You might have a little book inside of you. Right? Share with us what you're learning, right? And don't miss that he said, I had a space where I could reflect. And I will tell you, every piece of research, Mark, that I ever read about what do leaders need to be doing, reflection is like number one. Stop. What's going on with you, your team, your company, [00:17:00] your customers. You have to stop and think a hot second.
Mark Budzinski: Yeah, and you suggest people writing books, right? There was never an intent on my part to go Harry Potter, right? There's not a bestseller thing I was trying to do. It was literally just writing it down to a large degree for my own well being and the fact that you can organize your thoughts like that and then be crisper, certainly in the way that I operate today in my advisory firm, right? We're much crisper about the way we talk about things. And, you know, I think that's, I think that in and of itself is its own benefit. Don't be afraid to write.
Nicole: Yeah of course and don't miss this. Mark sits down and he talks to somebody he's going to work alongside. He can hand them this book.
You know, this is how I think about things, and a lot of leaders will say to me, Mark, Why don't people think the way I think? And I'm like, because you haven't back to his word at the beginning articulated how I think and how I see things and how I want us to like, this is how we need to roll. So [00:18:00] I think it's fantastic.
So congratulations, by the way. So fantastic. All right. So let's tiptoe through those five and highlight some things. I'd like to do that. Would that be okay?
Mark Budzinski: Yeah, by all means.
Nicole: Okay, trust and teamwork are fabulous, right? And I love what you keep saying. It's not a poster. And you know why Mark is saying that? I bet. I'll roll the dice here. Ready? I'm rolling the dice. I'm betting on myself. Back in the day in the 90s, early 2000s, there was this place called Successories. And they would have these posters you could buy and hang around your office. And one of them said, Teamwork makes the dream work.
Like it was a poster. It probably sold millions of copies. It was a picture of I don't know, people at Harvard sculling or something.
Mark Budzinski: Yeah. Right.
Nicole: Is that the poster you're talking about?
Mark Budzinski: Yeah. Well, I kind of am. Yeah. I mean, that's there's a... Trust and teamwork are like motherhood apple pie.
It's like, who wouldn't want that? You know, but it's, You don't just say it and it happens, right? So how do we communicate a [00:19:00] senior leaders in a company that we trust our employees? Well, first of all, we tell them. So, I became famous for giving trust at the door. You think about in our personal lives, how trust has to be earned, right? You don't just walk around trusting people. So that was one thing that was pretty explicit. So we're going to trust you and be like, really? And once they got that, there was a burden associated with that trust. It's like, oh my gosh, there's no hiding. There's no storytelling. There's no I can't get away from this, right? I'm gonna be trusted. So we implemented a set of policies. All corporations, all organizations have policies, right? So one that's en vogue right now is the work from home thing, right? Coming out of COVID. All organizations have something to say about this, right?
And we were in this mode before, certainly before COVID, but I think it applies today, which is if you're going to trust your people, then trust them. You want to work from home, work from home. You want to work from [00:20:00] your mother in law's guest bedroom because you're there, do that.
You're in a hotel, do that. And if a middle manager says, Well, no, Mark, you know, it's important that we for this marketing project that we collaborate. So, our people are going to come in Thursdays and Fridays. Good for you. Come in Thursdays and Fridays, right? There's, but there shouldn't be, in my opinion, a prescriptive notion. It was so bad, Nicole, early in my career, I worked for Intel and I can pick on them because I know this culture has changed over the years. But in those days, Andy Grove, the founder, he actually had the late list that was kept at the front door. So if you were there past 8:05 in the morning, you were on the late list, you got an email from Andy. So what do people do? They game it, right? Okay, you want me there by 8? I'll be there at 8. And the first thing I'm going to do is go to the cafeteria and get a coffee and talk to my colleagues, right? So, yeah, they came to work, but did they really come to work, right? The idea that you can establish policy... Another good example is, in my [00:21:00] opinion, is travel policy, and big companies, okay, I'll give it to you, you have a different set of problems, but certainly medium sized companies, again, think of your personal life.
If you and your husband are getting ready to take a trip, and you're looking for a good fare, and there's an opportunity to upgrade your seat to, um, Premium cool class extra leg room and the upgrade is 10 bucks. You look at your husband and you go, Hey, this it's only 10 bucks. We should do this.
There's 20 bucks. We got a better seat. If the upgrade is 200 each, you probably tough it out with some cramped knees. And but the point is, you make your own decision by definition in your own personal life. That's what you're empowered to do. Well, why don't we do that in the workplace? Why can't we tell our people, you know what? Yeah. Our travel policy trusts you if you get a 10 upgrade, buy it. If you have a 200 upgrade, don't buy it. How else just apply your own logic as you would, right? So that's a, those are examples of setting policy where people go, Oh, wow, they really do trust [00:22:00] me. And so therefore I expect the same behavior from you as the employee when it comes back.
Now. You mentioned trust and teamwork together. I really do think of them like peas and carrots. They go together emphatically. And teamwork, again, it's not rah, rah, we're all on the same team. And the poster, like you say, has the picture of the rowing across Harvard. I mean, come on. So if we're on, if we're on the same team in the workplace, the first thing I discovered was teams need scoreboards.
So again, go back to my sports metaphors, right? You're at the basketball game or the football game, there is no ambiguity about where we are in this game, how to score seven points for a touchdown plus extra points. We're losing 14 to 7 at halftime. Everybody can see it right? In business, it's not always that simple. In fact, I would argue often it's not that simple.
So Let's develop, first of all, a scoreboard that says, what are the corporate goals? [00:23:00] What do investors want? What does senior managers want? And let's build that scoreboard in such a way that we're all seeing it. And I don't care if you're in customer service, engineering, marketing, whatever. But I actually took it a step further when it comes to actually putting my money where my mouth was.
I developed a bonus program where I paid every employee across the board, so from janitor to VP of marketing and everybody in between on the scoreboard itself. So in our case, we were about revenue growth and market share. So we assign scores associated with those. And every month, everybody in the building could see where are we? Did we hit our goals? And if so, they got a piece of their pay paid immediately, immediate satisfaction from that effort. And wow, I would describe this to people you know, out in the wild at a cocktail party or something. And they're like, This is madness. So you pay your engineers like a sales commission.
I'm like, no, not really. I [00:24:00] pay them based on the goals of the company that at that point in time happened to be sales. And you know what? They were enrolled there to get a product to market on time. With the right features important for sales, right? Customer service, the easiest customer to sell to is the one you already have, right?
So how do we make sure that customer sat is at a high level? So everybody felt their connections. So again, football analogy, the left guard is blocking very different than the tight end who's running down the field catching a pass, right? So we're all doing our roles. It's not to dismiss the competency of what we have to do as professionals.
But if I make a block, right? And we still lose the game. I don't run around the locker room. Wasn't I great? Look at all the blocks I made, right? We're all feeling the sense of, oh, man, we lost. We have to do something better. And maybe I, as a seasoned left guard blocker, maybe I need to help the right guard blocker with some of my technique.
I take a proactive stand to try to nurture and help that person. [00:25:00] Do I bring other ideas to the table about the team at large? Hey, my observation about what I'm seeing on defense is I'm standing on the sideline. Is such and such. So the point, Nicole is in enrollment, right? If we can create real trust and real teamwork and again, if we can not only say it, but we put policy in place that demonstrates we're serious about this, we put pay plans in place that demonstrate we're serious about this. Next thing you know, you've got an infectious culture.
Nicole: Yeah, absolutely. And I love this idea of the scoreboard being up. And, here's the thing that I also find, Mark, is that people don't understand how their role connects to the revenue growth or the company's growth or the customer satisfaction.
It's like you said, all the way from the person who is like your janitor, the engineer. When you do good, this is how it affects the customer, right? Like we can't invite the customer over to the home office or wherever if it's not clean, if it's not [00:26:00] cleaned up. And I think that's a big part of a vibrant culture or a don't miss this, we're talking to Mark Budzinski on "peer to peer cultures." If you don't tell them, they just don't know. Some people just don't understand how it all works. And the other thing is, is when you tell them your job connects to the bottom line, then they get it and they, they get some bad business acumen that they might not have had.
And the last thing I'll say about what you said, I think is important is I'm a big believer in open books. Are we making money? Where's the money going? People want to know.
Mark Budzinski: They sure do.
Nicole: I don't know what your thoughts are on that, but
Mark Budzinski: No, totally. We were transparent and I am transparent in the firm I work with today at Clean Data.
You make a very good point, right? So the sense that people want to feel connected, isn't it? It's a, it's like a human, You know, humanity.
Nicole: I'm part of the success.
Mark Budzinski: People, people want to feel connected. They want to make a difference. They want to matter. And when you can tie everybody [00:27:00] together and say, we all matter.
So I don't care if you're blocking, throwing passes, catching passes. We all matter. And we can talk about that with transparency on an ongoing basis. Wow. Yeah it's pretty spectacular. No question.
Nicole: Yeah, love it.
Announcer: Are you ready to build your vibrant culture? Bring Nicole Greer to speak to your leadership team, conference, or organization to help them with their strategies, systems, and smarts to increase clarity, accountability, energy, and results. Your organization will get lit from within. Email her at Nicole at VibrantCulture. com And be sure to check out Nicole's TEDxTalk at VibrantCulture. com
Nicole: So, in your book, you talk about empathy. That's one of the five. So why is that important in a peer to peer culture to have empathy?
Mark Budzinski: Yeah, it's it's really a subject that I take a lot of I'm just personally attached to, right? It makes a massive difference and I don't think it [00:28:00] gets talked about out in the wild nearly enough. It all started from a very, you know, sort of selfish point of view, which is frankly, I absolutely loathe the notion of negotiation.
So when I was in all these sales roles, sales leader roles and so on, negotiation is inherently part of what you do, right? You have to cut the deal with the customer. And. Wow, people put their hats on, they come to the table, I'm the customer, and I'm supposed to get the better of the deal.
You know, I need a good deal. The vendor comes to the table with their hat on and say, No, no, no, we got to get a, we got to manipulate them, if that's what it comes down to, to get them to buy this thing, to get them to sign up for a five year subscription, as opposed to a one year subscription, right?
So my sales goals are such and such. So you enter into this concept where We're trying to, we're trying to play this game, right? We're trying to outmaneuver each other and I just find it distasteful, right? It's it's so mean-spirited to [00:29:00] operate that way, right? And I'm not sure I'm alone when I say I loathe negotiating, right? If you just get honest and you say I'm getting ready to go buy a car this weekend, everything's great until that opportunity that presents itself where you've got to go deal with the manager and no
Nicole: Right. You sit down with the finance guy.
Mark Budzinski: Yeah. And what's the first question your neighbor asked when you pull in the driveway with your new car? Oh, did you get a good deal? What kind of deal do you get? Right? So we're conditioned, I think, just in society to have this, I win, you lose, or at least I win more than you won. And I just think it's all crap, right? At the end of the day, Can we take an interest in the other person? So in the case of a customer,
Nicole: Yes we can,
Mark Budzinski: what is it they need? Why do they need it? And that, you know, as I started to read books about this subject, there's a guy you probably know, Carl Rogers, who was around in the 1950s, who did a lot of
Nicole: I'm not that old, Mark.
Mark Budzinski: Yeah, well, maybe, maybe you've seen the movie. [00:30:00] But you know, he had a very distinct point of view when it came to dealing with other people, he called it unconditional positive regard. And translated, that just means in plain old slang, forgive me if I just drop a cuss word here, it means give a shit about what the other person has to say, why they're saying it. And if you apply that to the workplace, right? Everybody has a point of view that they're trying to represent their organization. They're trying to represent themselves and their job so that a purchasing agent, perhaps may need to shave 5 percent off of the already agreed price in order to sustain their, you know their sense of they're doing a good job. Like what do people need and what I have found is if you can talk to people with this unconditional positive regard and you're sincere about it, obviously you can't be, putting your own facade on. You got to be sincere, but if you are, wow, do people warm up to this and customers will confess other [00:31:00] departments in the building inside. Other people will confess. You know what? I have this point of view, and this is why I'll tell you one of the internal things that I found to be really powerful on this subject, and that is the relationship between a sales organization and a marketing organization.
So marketing tends to, in most companies, be responsible for, of course, branding and all that, like, who are we? But, ultimately getting new customers interested into the door. So demand creation, lead gen is the term that's used. And so those leads are important for the marketing organization as measured by, well, I have to have so many per dollar per week, per fortnight, per this, per that, and there was all these stats about how many leads do I bring in, but that doesn't matter if the salespeople aren't acting on those leads to actually get them turned into, some kind of business. So I think for the salespeople to have empathy for [00:32:00] marketing, this is not just to annoy you when they bring you bad leads or unqualified leads. They're actually doing this to help.
Maybe we should be working together more proactively and more cooperatively. So if sales could better understand the motivations and the way marketing people think, and the way they're you know, the way they put their programs together and vice versa, when the marketing team goes, wow, we've generated 300 leads. I don't know why revenue's not up. It's not our problem. We've generated the leads. Must be them. That's not helpful either, right? So how do you get people to work more acutely together, trust, teamwork, but I think empathy is big, right? The fact that you can understand each other's point of view sincerely and act on that.
Nicole: Yeah, and really, as I'm listening, like, there'll be no trust, there'll be no teamwork if there's no empathy. It's almost like the empathy is kind of the linchpin part of your peer to peer culture, philosophy. Because if I think everybody in revenue thinks [00:33:00] it's my fault we're not selling, they're pointing a finger at me. I don't like them anymore. They don't have any empathy for me. I don't like them. No trust, no teamwork. So when you call for something, I'll just take three days to get it to you.
Mark Budzinski: Totally! I call it gaming, but it's people behave in all kinds of funny ways when you lose those attributes.
Nicole: Yeah. Yeah. And the other thing I think this unconditional positive regard, I wrote that down.
I circled that. I'm going to go search it up. Roger. The other thing when you think of that unconditional positive regard, there are some skills to empathy, like how to build rapport. Understanding people are different. Like we want everybody to act like us and they don't, they never will. Everybody's different. And like I've worked with people that are really straightforward, like they've got an opinion on everything and they tell [00:34:00] it like it is, and they don't want to hear your story and they don't want to talk about the weather well, you know, in 58 years of being on the planet, I figured out that it's not personal.
Mark Budzinski: And it's you're absolutely right about that. If, , again, I go back to teamwork and scoreboard. If we're all looking to get to the same place, then by definition, our intents are sincere. So even though you express your intent differently than I do, or perhaps you don't even express your intent, I just see your behavior and I listen to your words, we have to assume positive intent, right?
And that's, I think that's 70%, if not more, of the battle right there, right? This other person does not have an in for me, they're not trying to take the organization in a different way they're, So my job is to understand that right in the questions are always about why and how so you have that point of view. Great. Why do you have that point of view? And when I know why you have a point of view, [00:35:00] whoa, do the floodgates open right? My opportunity to actually work with you. And then you feel heard. You feel understood, right? Like, okay, this Mark, I like him. He's a good guy. Well, that's all just a euphemism for I listen to you. I care about you.
Nicole: Yeah, yeah. And and here's the thing. Um, just be kind. You know, a lot of times us HR gals, I've got a lot of HR people listening to this, a lot of us, and guys guys and gals, gals and guys we will hear how a manager has spoken and their demeanor to an employee. And we always look at both sides of the situation. We try to be fair, fun and friendly. Those are my three HR words, fair, fun and friendly. And and the thing is, you know, I always tell a manager who's probably overstepped, I say, what if, think about this, if your child. Was at work and was spoken to like that. What would your reaction be? And they'd be like, I'd [00:36:00] be angry. I'm like, I know! That's why this employee is angry. You know, you just have to be have empathy and be kind, and you can still correct people. You can get them back on the right path. You can do all the things. Just do it with empathy. Oh, so good.
Mark, so good. Much more in the book. Did I tell you to buy the book? Everybody go buy the book. Peer to Peer Culture. There you go. It's on the Amazon. Mark Budzinski. B U D Z I N S K I. All right. It's hard to forget that last name. We'll talk about that last name maybe before we get out of here. All right. So the last question I have for you is instilling a good and vibrant culture. A peer to peer culture is just such a good thing. Okay. Okay, we articulate it, we get all the leaders on the right page. How do we keep this up? We got so much else to do.
Mark Budzinski: Yeah. That is the $10,000 question at the end of the day, right? So, day in and day out stuff happens. And one, I think we talked about the senior leaders exhibiting the behavior. So can we be good [00:37:00] examples? Number two, can we continue to articulate, the culture overtly, so nobody loses track of what we're doing here. But I think where it really comes to roost is in what I would call enforcing the culture. So every every company at some point or another has had their star salesperson or their star engineer/inventor who's just been a prima donna. They've been above it all. You know, this culture is for everybody else. It's not for me. And It's difficult, but it's necessary. You either rehabilitate those people or you remove them. And that's like, whoa, we're going to, you know, that salesperson was salesperson of the year last year. Well, yeah, that's maybe true, but we can't have the culture talks, intoxicated, messed up from somebody's behavior. And I think when we talk about trust, there's a second layer and I call it trust the trust. So if employees are running around saying, Okay, well, this is a [00:38:00] trustworthy environment, but I'm watching somebody who is essentially going, Oh out in a ditch and they're not behaving accordingly. The first cool thing, Nicole, is and it's part of the notion of where I came up with the phrase peer to peer, their peers will rat them out, right? So it's, if we're all trying to get to the same place when the game scoreboard's clear, our bonuses are associated with it, we're all going the same way. When somebody misbehaves I will come to you as your peer and say, Hey, that's not cool. Let's what's going on here. And if it's truly prima donna behavior, then okay, that's going to get escalated to me as the CEO. And, but I, as I said, at the outset of our time today, I think over seven years, we may have we may have had to fire six or seven people. And it was all for this reason, right? So you can work with competency issues. to a large degree, right? You can train them. You can have driver's ed. You can have somebody in the front seat driving while they're in the passenger seat learning as we go. So I've [00:39:00] never had any problem with competency as much as this, right?
So how do you keep it? I think you have to be clear that it's important. You have to keep it front and center in the way that you talk about the business. And then you have to be prepared to enforce it up to and including removing the people that aren't keen to be part of it.
Nicole: That's right. That's right. I love that what you said they might be the number one salesperson. I think that's what you said, or salesperson of the year. But if they're also the jerk of the year, they have to go, you know, and I do so much leadership development training, Mark, and, I will have a room full of leaders and I'll say, I'm going to give you a scenario and you can only answer yes or no to this question. There will be no in between. And I did it on Monday and I did it on Tuesday this week. I said, if you have an employee, they have all the competencies, but they are not user friendly. Are they a good employee? And I am shocked at how many go, yes. And I'm like, no, he's missing. She's missing [00:40:00] 50 percent of the equation. Gotta be good people and good at the task.
Mark Budzinski: Yeah. Well, and I say, trust the trust. Imagine if the sales So good.
Nicole: Trust the trust.
Mark Budzinski: Imagine if the salesperson of the year continues to be the jerk and we tolerate that. What does that say to everybody else? Oh, the culture is important unless you're a salesperson of the year, then you can do what you want. Right? That, we just can't have that.
Nicole: No and eventually they look at the leader who, they're not, your employees are so smart. Let me just say that right now. Your employees, you're not pulling the wool over anybody's eyes. They look up and they go, Mark is allowing that to go on. And you know what he says about culture? He says this, this and this, but he sure isn't making him do it. And so the guy who's not doing it isn't even the focus of the angst. It's the leader.
Don't miss that. All right. Oh my gosh. We have to stop. Mark, write [00:41:00] another book. Come back and see me. Let's hang out some more. So maybe he does have a Harry Potter thing going on. We'll see. We'll see what unfolds in the next few years. But this is Peer to Peer Culture. It is by Mark Budzinski. What it takes for small businesses to grow up.
But I bet you if we got this to a big company, it would help them too. That's what I'm saying. All right. It's so good to have you on the show. Where do people find you if they want help with their data? They go to cleandata.com.?
Mark Budzinski: Well, that's well, and it's all you know, this is the interesting thing about the evolution of of my career is we're finding that organizational behavior the way people work together and their thirst for data to make better decisions and advance the agenda of the firm.
They have a collision, those two things come together. So my firm is an advisory firm, clean data, and we do those two things. We talk about organizational behavior. And the nuts and bolts of how to get your data organized, but do it in such a way that we're bringing real business value to organizations that want to see results.
[00:42:00] So cleandata.com, cleandatainc.com. And, uh, yeah, thank you, Nicole. It's been great.
Nicole: Yeah. All right. Don't forget cleandatainc.com. Don't miss the inc. Just go right. It's right there. Scroll down. Keep going. Keep it. There it is. All right. Very good. Good to be with you all. Love to have you on the show, Mark.
Let's build vibrant cultures everywhere we can. If you, if I can help, you can reach me at vibrantculture. com. Thank you, Mark.
Mark Budzinski: All right. You're the best. Bye bye.
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