This week on the podcast we have Brett Putter. Brett chats with me about all things culture. He is the CEO of Culture Gene and has a large emphasis on making sure people fit in the culture their company creates. It was a great conversation about what this looks like, the best practices of culture, and what to look for when joining a company, or changing your culture from the leadership perspective. He also talks about his books that focus on making culture unique and valuable. Click here for the link.

Find Brett on his website Culture Gene or email him at brett@culturegene.ai

Full transcription below (May contain typos...):
[00:00:00] Brett: [00:00:00] But you couldn't really take one. They can copy it because that would be copying somebody else's culture and that doesn't work like that. You can't copy another company's culture. Your culture is unique to you.  

Keerstyn: [00:00:11] Welcome to the podcast, Brett. I am really excited that you're here today. Can you just tell us a bit more about how you got involved in it work and then what you do now?

To really change the world that 

NA: [00:00:21] we live in today. 

Brett: [00:00:23] Yeah, sure. Thanks, Kristen. It's great to be involved. And thanks for having me. I prior to setting up culture, Jean, I ran an executive search firm for 16 years based out of London and I worked with high growth, early stage companies. And I was lucky enough about five years ago now to work with three companies almost in a row where the leaders had a very clear understanding of the culture of the company.

And so I was asked to find candidates that had specific skills, experiences, et cetera, et cetera. But also I was asked to find candidates [00:01:00] that matched the values of the company. And this was a much harder search to do, but the process and the interviews, and then the resulting impact that the hand the candidates had on the companies was like a wow moment for me.

There was just that much better, and that's where I started really digging deep into company culture. And a year later I started culture, Jean. I interviewed had to speak to 500 companies to interview just over 50 CEOs of high growth companies that had done a very good job of embedding their culture.

I've written two books on the subject now and yeah, we've got a software driven process that we run with companies to help them define embed and manage their culture. 

Keerstyn: [00:01:40] Yeah. So I guess one of my first questions would be where was like, what differentiates really good culture from like mediocre culture.

Obviously everyone can say that they have good culture and actually most companies do. But what does that almost defining line of? This is an amazing culture and companies are really thriving from it too. This is a [00:02:00] mediocre culture and they can obviously 

NA: [00:02:01] do better. 

Brett: [00:02:04] Okay. So there's only the only time.

A good or bad culture is a relevant question is in relation to me or you would, I enjoy working there or not, but within a company, there's no such thing as a good culture. There is only a functional or a dysfunctional culture, a strong or a weak culture. So a strong culture may not be the kind of company I would want to work in.

So for example, the mafia. Have a very strong culture and I wouldn't want to work in it. So it's not good for me, but it is still a very strong, functional culture. Scientology has a strong culture, but I wouldn't want to work in that environment either. So the way to look at culture is it strong and functional?

And what strong means is it's clearly defined it's everybody loves it. It's really embedded into the leadership team, the general [00:03:00] team, the functions and processes of the business and a functional culture means that the way we do things actually accelerates the business. Rather than decelerates the business.

So an example of a dysfunctional culture might be a company where there is a lot of politicking going on and the politics ends up slowing the company down because it's more about me, the individual versus the company. So you can have a strong, dysfunctional culture. Or a weak functional culture and a mix of those.

So my, from my experience that the stronger the culture, the more the leadership team and the CEO and work on it, focus on it. They embed it, they treat it like a business function and the weaker, dysfunctional cultures, the CEOs leave it to develop by default and don't rarely treat it respected in any way.

Keerstyn: [00:03:58] Yeah. That's [00:04:00] thank you for that differential or differentiation. I think that's really good to understand because oftentimes people say I want to be part of a great culture and that's obviously we can't just say you want to be part of a great culture. You need to look more in depth about it. So yeah, I guess what are some of those things that people should be looking for when they're looking for.

For jobs, like how did they see their own personal, like what they want in a culture and how do they define that? And how do they look for that in a company? Just like you have done with multiple 

NA: [00:04:31] companies in the past. 

Brett: [00:04:33] Yeah. So this actually isn't is is not an easy question to answer, really.

Especially if you're a candidate, because most candidates haven't actually gone through the process of really defining their values. They feel that this may be good or not. And frankly, most companies will have done some of the superficial stuff around the values and mission and vision, but they don't embed it.

But if I was interviewing for a position now I would be asking [00:05:00] these companies, tell me about. Your culture. And I would ask each individual, I interviewed with these questions in exactly the same way and look for consistency. So I'd say, describe your culture. Tell me why you work at this company. If you what's the one thing you could change, if you could change anything in this company and why.

Okay. All your values and mission and vision lived in the company. And the reality is the person you are, who's interviewing you. The person you're talking to will, will be honest in the most cases with you, because they don't want you to join the company. And then you realize they lied. So you can ask these questions.

Maybe not like pretty harmless questions, unless of course the company doesn't have a very strong culture and you can then dig a little bit deeper by asking each person  these questions. What I would do now particularly is I'd be asking, what are you [00:06:00] doing around transitioning to remote work or hybrid work?

What are your communication tools look like and how synchronous versus asynchronous is your communication? What does the documentation look like? What are your processes defined? I would be going into this sort of level of detail because if a company isn't transitioning to a hybrid or remote environment they will not have these in place.

Which means that it's much harder for me to do my job if I want to work remotely some of the time or all of the time. And so companies now that are building strong cultures for hybrid environments are the ones who are going to be able to attract the best talent. It used to be campuses and three food and et cetera, et cetera.

Now it's going to be your culture. Tell me how your is in getting enabled me to work. 

Keerstyn: [00:06:59] Ye...