My One Big Lesson On Culture - and Why It's So Easily Ignored

In this episode of Damns Given, Nick walks through the Trust-Made Growth framework's take on culture — one of the six core factors that determine whether a venture is ready to grow or quietly working against itself. He goes back to the literal definition of the word: culture is what you put in a petri dish, the organic matter from which everything else grows. In organizational terms it's simpler and harder than any offsite can address. Culture is just what an organization does, how it works, and what it is without pressure or influence.

He talks about how systems self-reinforce — why a good person in a bad team eventually becomes a bad player, because the system wins. How a leader's unspoken resistance to articulating values doesn't create a blank space, it creates a vacuum that people fill with their own interpretations, producing exactly the fractured, directionless behavior the leader didn't want. And why the only thing Trust-Made Growth is actually looking for in a culture is minimal resistance to organic growth — not kombucha fountains, not Silicon Valley theater, just healthy soil that lets things grow.

The weeds tell you everything. A garden full of weeds doesn't mean you have a weed problem. It means the soil is broken.

Questions about how this applies to your venture? Reach out at culturecraft.com or find the Trust-Made community at trustmadegrowth.com

Trust-Made Growth®

Leaders who want to understand how to reformat their growth strategies to address trust decay should explore more at CultureCraft.com

Independent Professionals can join the free community exploring how to return trust to our commerce and our communities at trustmadegrowth.com 

Have a business topic you want us to decide if it's working or broken? Have a question about the episode? You can email us at podcast@culturecraft.com.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

I'm Nick Richmeyer, and this is Dams Given, a podcast where we explore how to free your venture from the extraction economy, realigning it to the timeless ways that humans build, collaborate, and buy. After over a quarter of a century of working with ventures and companies and organizations of all kinds, I created Trustmade Growth to address this 40-year decline we're seeing in institutions, really across all arenas and across all types. And this 40-year decline is intentional. It's being made by systems and systems that repeat upon themselves. And so the challenge of defeating systems is you have to build a different system around it, underneath it, within it. And trustmade growth is really designed to be that system. Trustmade growth's purpose is to liberate ventures from extraction, to realign them to the timeless ways that people build, collaborate, and buy. The way we work is embedded in our minds, in our bodies. And when we return to that way of work, ventures are then freed to be successful and not be dependent on these systems. So when we're looking through the lens of trustmade growth, we're looking through six factors, six growth factors, trust factors that essentially, when we look at through this lens, we can say, is this venture ready to grow? Is it resisting growth? Is it got the systems in place, the understanding, then self-knowledge, the engagement with the right relationships? What are all the pieces necessary to make growth possible in an organic, natural, non-extractive fashion? So culture is one of our six factors that we look at when we think about trust-made growth. And when I say the word culture, I have a funny feeling your brain goes to a bunch of different places. It goes to cheesy PowerPoint decks or terrible onboarding meetings or off-sites and trust falls and all of this stuff that became culture theater in the business of businesses when uh, you know, budgets were sky high, money was money to spare, and we wanted to get everybody on the same page. We also had sort of a culture resurgence coming out of COVID because you know, now people were working remotely, and we got to get back to culture. We got to get back to culture. And there's nothing inherently wrong with those things. It just doesn't really address fundamentally what we mean by culture. And like with almost everything, trust me, growth related, I want you to think about this in really organic, human, natural terms. And culture is literally the stuff from which things grow, right? The culture of a soil, the culture of a petri dish, right? These are these is the organic matter from which everything grows out of. And so when we think about the culture of an organization, that's how we want to think about it. What is the goo that out of which everything grows? And the primary way we recognize that goo is it is the repeatable things that happen without pressure or influence. So culture is just what an organization does, how it works, and what it is without pressure or influence. Most of that is relay through relationships. So at a base level, we think about culture as the internal relational dynamic of an organization, right? Families have culture, neighborhoods have culture, businesses have culture. We have the capital C culture that sort of drives the discourse and what we go to the movies for and all those kinds of things. But really, it's these inherent embedded behavioral patterns of thinking, being, and doing. And those are really, really difficult to influence. So it's important to understand that all of these six factors represent systems. And systems have reinforcing factors, they have flows of energy and again, relationships. And when you're in a system, a system is generally self-reinforcing. So when you put something new into a system, you put like a good person, this is why you get sayings like you put a good person in a bad team, that person's gonna be a bad player, right? Because eventually the system wins. Eventually the goo wins, right? And so that's how we think about culture. And so the job of trust made in working with culture isn't to try to grab it and turn it 25 degrees or 30 degrees or any of those kinds of things, because again, a lot of this is embedded in genetic. What happens in bad cultures is people's internal resistance becomes normalized. And then that resistance produces reverse resistance. So, for example, if you have a leader, and usually the initial resistance comes out of the leader because they're the most powerful person in the room. You have a leader who's like, oh, having values is fluffy stuff. We don't want to have values, and we can just like put crap on the wall, right? That's so stupid. We're not doing that. And you can understand why they might feel that way. Because if maybe they work somewhere where somebody put values on the wall and it was really silly and it was a waste of time. But the problem is they have left this giant blank wall, figuratively and literally, of what this place stands for. And nobody knows. So that leader's resistance is now embedding itself in culture and it's leaving this open space, this mineral, this energy, this power that an organization can have to flow in a successful direction is missing. Well, that absence, then of course, absence, you know, a vacuum always invites something into it. That absence invites people to imagine well, based on the leader's behavior, based on how they hire, based on how he or she behaved in our most recent all hands, this is what we think the values are. And people start to sort of fill in the gaps. And that becomes another point of tension. Is one group thinks that the values are really this, another group thinks the values are really this. The leader's like, why are people behaving this way? They're always doing this stuff. That's not what I want from them. Well, you haven't been clear about what you want from them. And of course, we know that clarity is a function of not just words but repeatable behavior, right? So we're looking for coherence in culture. Um, but once a leader decides to move through their own resistance and say, okay, this tool, having publicly stated values, hasn't worked for me in the past. I have resistance to it. You'll notice that self-awareness plays a big role here. Out of that self-awareness, out of my knowledge of my own resistance, how can I do it differently that serves the culture I want to build? And then I can make different choices, right? And then I can start to experiment with those choices and see how culture can shift. So we bring down resistance. Right. So really the only thing we're looking for from good culture or bad culture, it isn't about ping pong tables or kombucha fountains or all that kind of garbage that came out of Silicon Valley in the 2000s. What we're really looking for is an organic matter that has minimal resistance to growth. If you're a gardener like I am, right, you know that really good soil doesn't tend to make a lot of weeds. You know, you're always gonna have some weeds. Weeding's a part of gardening. But if you've got a garden full of weeds, what's really telling you is the soil is broken.

unknown 7:07

Right?

SPEAKER_00 7:08

So when we have healthy soil, the the enzymatic factors in the soil, the things that are in the soil, the bugs in the soil tend to eat through weeds, right? And then feed health. And so that same thing is true of organizations, that when it's healthy culture, we have low resistance to organic growth. And organic growth is both numbers and sales and revenue and clients, but it's also the maturity of the staff, the ability to work in efficient and effective ways, uh, qualities of communication, leadership development, all of this multi-factor growth comes out of the soil of a place. And that's how trust happens. If we don't have that culture, you're throwing and spinning off trust breaking everywhere. No matter how hard you try, no matter how good the marketing is, no matter how much you train the salespeople, no matter how much you fix the product, if you're spinning off distrust out of the core culture, everything else is gonna suffer. And that's why we talk about these six factors in relation to each other, because they all impact each other. But at a central energy source really is culture. And working with leaders to to evolve this is a key part of trust made growth. And you have questions about that, we'd love to talk to you about it, how it applies to your venture and what you're doing every day.