Culture expert Peter Phelan of ValuesCulture joins us to discuss the critical role of cultivating the right organizational culture in securing business success. He emphasizes the impact of healthy cultures on the shape and performance of your team, specifically talent attraction, and retention. He outlines his data-driven approach to defining and implementing values within an organization, ensuring they actually resonate with the people and not simply remain words on the wall. Peter also exposes the common pitfalls in culture building and offers practical advice on tackling disruptive behaviors.

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Peter Phelan – Getting To The Truth Of Your Culture

Welcome to the People Strategy Forum. Today, we’re going to dive deep into the essence of organizational culture with Peter Phelan, the founder of ValuesCulture. With over two decades shaping the people strategies at leading tech firms, Peter has become a beacon for those aiming to create not just a workplace but a thriving culture where value speaks louder than words.

At Values Culture, Peter has successfully guided companies towards achieving significant milestones through strategic values-based approaches. Peter also is helping bring in some strategic leaders overall. As we look at his bio here, Peter has placed more than 125 people talent leaders across the globe. He’s setting that values culture from the top overall. We’re going to talk a little bit more about that. His insights have helped shape businesses to become magnets of top talent with culture at the center of the workplace. It’s focusing on making sure that people are looking at their most valuable asset, the people themselves.

Join us as we explore Peter’s strategies on how to reveal the true spirit of your culture and transform the workplace to where we are looking at the heartbeat of the organization and transforming it into a place that attracts the best people and retains your top performers. Welcome, Peter. How are you doing today?

I’m very good, Sam. Thank you. I am blushing at that wonderful flattering description. It’s a whole series of reactions to the flattery and seeing my own photo.

We were talking about how time slips from us early in the call here. The beauty of youth here, we’re sharing with the world today.

Thank you. I appreciate these happy memories.

Understanding The Need For Cultural Change

First of all, how did you get into the business of helping companies change their culture for the better and identify their culture? Tell us a little bit about the history there.

I’m going to go back pretty far, but fair warning, I’ll move quickly through the years. In my bachelor’s and master’s programs back in Ireland, that kind of motivation and organizational culture side of things was what fascinated me the most. I was taking lots of other classes in business and management, but that was what lit up something in my brain. We then went to work and I was lucky enough to get a green card. Work for me has been in the States. My first and every job has been here.

You do these smaller pieces of the puzzle. I did some total rewards stuff which is a very important piece of the puzzle as, specifically, benefits were my commitment within that. As I worked in different industries, tech was a recurring theme, but other industries as well. I got to see what was maybe motivating people effectively in good economies and bad economies, and times in employment, markets, and soft employment markets.

It kept striking me that you could get a lot of ROI from having a very healthy culture, one where the organization is keeping its promises, where there is minimal friction from tolerating poor management practices or sending employees mixed messages, like keep it simple, know thyself, and good things will happen. These could be things that are relevant for 2024 with this unusual market we have with maybe a sky-high stock market, but at the same time, employers trying to be very capital-efficient.

In other downturns, by having a good culture at our organization, we were able to be a talent magnet, even though we weren’t able to offer more money for capital-efficiency reasons. People would make a lateral move or even take a little pickup to get away from a toxic culture and come to a place where they could flourish. After twenty years of doing this as a W-2 person and people leader in-house, I decided to make the leap and do it for more than one company at a time through this culture in 2016. That was a little bit of a long answer. Hopefully not, I didn’t lose everybody.

You were talking about the ups and downs, the changes in culture, building organizations, and helping leaders. In all of this, we have to keep a good sense of humor. One of the things that you’re good at is looking on the lighter side. Would you say that, Peter?

I think that helps. A separate but not a different discussion from curating positive culture. Some of the cultures that I’ve been in either as a consultant or as an employee back in the day are ones where leaders didn’t take themselves too seriously. They had that approachability factor where they could take a good-natured ribbing. That helps a lot because if you can’t be honest with the fear leader, then communications already have a huge disadvantage.

The chance of having healthy feedback loops up, down, and across the organization, the culture where employees can expect clarity and promise-keeping is already at a disadvantage if there’s no fun. Fun signals are being sent from the top. I do enjoy a bit of HR comedy and have taken a stage or two or a couple of dozen stages in my time, and trying to look at the lighter side of HR.

If you can't be honest with the leader, the communications already have a huge disadvantage, so the chance of having healthy feedback loops is already compromised. Share on X

When companies call you in, is it because they’re struggling with their culture or they need help finding their culture? What are they looking for?

Typically, when I get the call, the email, or the referral from a mutual friend, it’s more for good cultures that want to be great. That’s been the trend. If a culture is in trouble, they probably aren’t culture-oriented enough to want to call a culture doctor. They might think culture is who we are, and spend money and time talking to that guy.

 

Typically, it’s a culture that’s been very small but might be struggling for a natural reason, like growing pain. Maybe they’ve done a number like 150 people, give or take. They suddenly don’t know everybody personally anymore. They’ve been all smiles, high retention, and high business success up until that point. Now, it seems like they’re almost a victim of their success with scale. That intimacy factor is being lost.

A number of clients have had that situation and they’re like, “We based our success and our wonderful chemistry on everyone knowing each other and that’s no longer. It’s beginning to not scale very well. What other infrastructure can we put in place to help?” People know what’s expected of them without the benefits of the CEO stopping by their cube every week.

One way to do that can be to define that secret sauce that has made you successful today, what that is. Maybe they need to define their values for the first time. That’s been the case with a lot of Series B or Series C tech companies. That’s when they get the call. It’s like, “We’re losing our mojo as we grow. Help us make it a bit more scalable with infrastructure that goes beyond seeing people every day.”

The Core Concept Of Company Culture

Let’s dig into that a little bit. What defines a company’s culture? How do we define that?

There are some great definitions out there. I’ll be standing on the shoulders of giants with this. In a nutshell, it’s how we work together, how we collaborate, and how we get things done. I worked at this one client in the tech space a few years ago, a very positive culture, amazing Glassdoor scores, amazing internal employee survey results, and great business success. They hadn’t ever thought about their culture and how you would even put it into words because they’re having fun and being successful to worry about it.

Before they called me in, the CEO had said, “Maybe we can figure out ourselves what our culture is about.” We had some executive team meetings. We had the HR leader ask around for the survey. They were getting a lot of work-hard, play-hard type stuff, which is a bit vague and maybe not necessarily actionable.

What we needed was a set of detailed values that were quite actionable, were a source of strength based on client feedback, based on employee surveys, and were granular enough to where if there were key decisions that needed to be made and they needed something to tie break, they could go to these values as they’re Rosetta Stone and help them get to a yes or a no, expand or don’t expand right now by using these as a decision rubric.

Often, companies go through identifying what their values are, what their culture is, and those things. It becomes an exercise and then they forget it. They put it on the website and they forget it. Having those guiding principles that they can come back to and remind themselves whenever they’re doing a major initiative or before they’re starting.

The Practical Aspects Of Identifying Company Culture

It could be anything. You talked about some of the tough times such as layoffs, which was one piece. Maybe we should take a glance at our values and our culture to see where we stand and put this in that context. You mentioned that in identifying the culture of an organization you’ve used surveys. Is this your main method of starting the process?

There’s always some kind of survey involved. You want as many fingerprints on this as possible and a lot of data coming out of the row. People have done that. That’s why the values don’t propagate throughout the organization because the executive team might have an offsite. Their trust falls and cocktails. They’re like, “These five words encapsulate us,” but then it stays in PowerPoint or a drawer if you will because they don’t believe it.

They maybe suspect that if they present that to the entire organization and try and make it part of internal communications, maybe all town hall meetings, the topics are organized that way or split all of the website or put it into performance and management tools, it won’t ring true because it was based on cocktails and trust falls and not a thorough process.

How to do it so it can be propagated throughout your employee life cycle tools and internal communications with credibility would be using as many data sources as our already available. Maybe you’ve got client feedback on what stands up about why customers are comfortable paying you for your goods or services, board decks, and investor decks what unique differentiators have made you worth investment and those could also be maybe haven’t got investors recently but strategy decks, in general.

My process also involves personality assessments, where we do a disc profile, for example. There’s an already existing tool like a predictive index or whatever in-house that people already like. We’ll have a look and see which areas or what promises are going to be easier to keep versus others for this executive team, for these founders based on the way they’re wired.

By the time you get a range, you’re pretty hardwired already in how you react to stress. You can try and change yourself, learn, and grow, and hopefully, we do that. A lot of it is pretty baked in. You’re putting these executives at a disadvantage if you’re like, “Be like,” and this is the opposite of what they are. I guess to wrap up this excellent question and the discussion, the way I think about it and the way the approach is, it’s almost like a Venn diagram. The overlap is probably where you can place your bets on what the bankable values are.

 

We look at one Venn diagram. It’s that client feedback, like why you’re loved, kind of the investor voice, and then the personality assessments, then another very important piece is competency rankings. This is like a survey where we will pull in the executives because they have an outsize impact on the culture, how they work every day, and how they manage others, but also we’ll recruit culture champions, people who are successful in the business from various geographies, various departments, various levels.

In most of these projects, the culture champions in aggregates have a bigger impact on shaping the process than in fact, the executive team does. That’s partially a function of them having maybe more time because the executives are so busy. They don’t have a ton of hours to give the project but they’re also the ones in the trenches and feeling that trickled out of good or bad or a mixture like most realities that’s coming from the executive team.

I like the Korn Ferry Leadership Architect tool with 38 competencies. We have all these culture champions and the execs and one-on-one settings with me. There’s no politics. There’s no, “I better say what the boss thinks are our strengths. Otherwise, I would get as good as an equity grant.” They rank the competencies, like what is commonplace here, what’s a mixed bag, and what’s scarce. That’s a survey of sorts, so we get a lot of good data from there as to which are the themes that maybe values could be based on those competencies that keep on coming up as things you can count on. Not just from the leaders but from the majority of the team most of the time. If the investor lens, the customer lens, and then maybe a full team survey, which wouldn’t be as intense as the competency ranking. If they all agree with that, then you might be on to a winner.

Is there an actual number of values or it depends on the organization? Some organizations can go crazy and high-level with 50 values that don’t make any sense.

There had been some doozies in the past. I know that the old Uber values, not the new ones, were not only weird but also very numerous. There are like 12 or 13 of them. Many of them were less than enlightened but in my experience and the research I’ve read, there should be a few enough of them to where you can remember them. Anything more than five is probably a challenge. I’ve seen a few sixes that were okay, four, or maybe even better. Less than four, you’re probably not communicating enough in terms of guiding behavior, but four or five true solid data points to help guide decision-making and encapsulate your culture is probably the optimal number, four or five.

I like that you mentioned the multi-layered approach in that Venn diagram and looked at different facets of how people interpret the culture. Often, when we look in the mirror every morning, we see what we’d like to see and what we want to see, and then we fail to ask for feedback from others about what they perceive.

Leadership Perspectives And Challenges With Employees’ Perceptions

I like the fact that you’re looking at multiple angles there to define the overall culture. Have you found situations where, I imagine you have, where some leaders have found, “I don’t like to be looked at in this light, the way that my employees see me, the way that my customers see me.” What are some of the things that you found there?

That’s normally true. There are normally some surprises in these processes. I had one amazing client a number of years ago who continues to be amazing IN their businesses, Unstoppable even in the economic ups and downs. The CEO was confident that they would have communication and transparency as one of their contenders from that 38 competency process. That was one of his top five. That’s a shoo-in. When a couple of dozens of culture champions and executives weighed in, out of the 38, that ranked 33rd.

There was very little support for his theory that their communication transparency was a towering strength. There was a reason why he thought that. One stakeholder group, the clients, and they spent a lot of time with clients felt that was a towering strength because it was in the attic ecosystem and they were one of the white knights of transparency and what can be smoke in the mirrors industry at that time, but more so. There was a reason why he thought that they were going to be getting tons of votes for that.

However, the employee experience was very different. They had rapid growth. They had lots of different sets of geographic centers across North America, Europe, and elsewhere, and a pretty empowering culture such that people were running with new products and ways of engaging with clients in one geography. People in a similar department but different geography had no clue. The right hand did not know what the left hand was doing. Their internal communication had problems and they were feeding some pain through the growth internally that the CEO wasn’t necessarily feeling, but we have the data.

He saw the results. He’s like, “I get this. Transparency in the attic ecosystem.” “Yes, a healthy communication infrastructure internally does not even flow.” He was like, “We’ll invest in that to potentially be a value in the coming years and will work on us. We’ll build infrastructure. We’ll hire people who are good at this,” which is a pretty common story where you look in the mirror and you see some stuff you don’t like, but there are also hidden strengths which can be fun as well.

It’s like, “You’re not quite as good at that thing as you thought, but look at this. Number three is something you hope you could train to be, but didn’t dare. The team thinks you’re already there because it’s even good enough to be a value.” It’s always a bit of a mixed bag. Something that is pretty common but has to be handled with care is the idea of aspirational values, where it’s super important to the business you want to be good at but you’re not quite there yet.

Something pretty common, but must be handled with care, is the idea of aspirational values. These values are super important to the business. Share on X

HubSpot is famous for its culture deck. Speaking of standing on the shoulders of giants, theirs are top of the shoulders of the even more famous Netflix deck from fifteen years ago. What HubSpot did was put an asterisk beside the values, where they knew they weren’t quite there yet. They couldn’t say victory, but they were investing in training, hiring for it, and doing the work, and they got the credibility, they passed the credibility test by having that asterisk. Whereas if you just try and magically say, “We’re amazing at X,” and noboody agrees, then all of a sudden, even the values, which were true on your list begin to be questioned.

For example, the CEO in my earlier story had said, “Communication,” then as it has to be on the list, and then it’s like the whole process is going to suffer now because of that shoo horning. He didn’t even think they were close enough for what HubSpot asked us. He didn’t even try at that time, which I thought was the safer play because it was 33 out of 38. Maybe if it was in the top ten, you could do the asterisk.

I think that’s a great strategy because you’re communicating what is important and what are we striving for, and being true to yourself and to your people and your customers. Everybody likes that vulnerability.

We’re not there yet.

The Complexities Of Cultural Differences Within Multinational Companies

Nobody is perfect and things change. Somebody moves the cheese and all of a sudden, we have to focus on different things. It’s right and true that we should continue to change and aspire to new greatness as we go along. That’s great. One thing I want to bring up that you mentioned is talking about how there’s some difference in culture. A multinational company in its different locations is going to have potentially a culture that’s different in one location and then another. What degree of variance is good and healthy? Where does it start to become an issue where there are different cultures?

Excellent question and true. As soon as you even have two departments in your little startup, there will already be some cultures within your broader culture. Self-awareness again is the key. If you need to operate, and you probably do it slightly differently in an engineering function versus the sales function because those people are quite different, or in a Singapore office versus an Omaha office. I think the key is staying true to your core values.

I’ve been in organizations where they’re getting big and complex. We even had a nice amount of data from maybe doing the original process of defining the core values that everyone could get behind. We did a secondary analysis of maybe one geography versus another or one department versus another and there are these recurring themes of what came in. Let’s say there were four core values. What was looming large as number five or number six in engineering or Germany, you’re like, “Oh, wow.”

Those things are super important for this ecosystem that function or department or regional offices operating within. Maybe those should be reflected in a leadership expectation. We’re not calling upon other core values because those are company-wide. There was another team that was inescapably important in the localized setting. We captured it in a different way and as that team’s behavioral expectations, that was important to capture the bigger you get. You can get away from these inescapable priorities that aren’t quite core values.

 

If I heard what you’re saying, it’s not that the core values are changing. There could be differences in how they are implemented and reinforced in different locations.

Precisely. Yeah, these are a supplemental leadership expectation for that setting because maybe you might be a big player in the US but in say Japan, your business is all about partnerships versus just having the muscle to make it on your own. Your ability to partner as part of an ecosystem where you are the top dog becomes super important. That might be a leadership expectation beyond any manager’s job descriptions as you post them in that setting. That’s always a bullet, but that might only exist in headquarters because it’s not as germaine.

One of the things that US companies get criticized a lot about is the fact that we’re too US-centric and we are expanding our culture, our values to other locations globally that may conflict with some of their local values. How do you guide leaders through this important topic?

I think it’s a problem and a challenge. You want that unified set of behavioral expectations because maybe the office in Europe of an American company, that team is engaging with headquarters a lot. You’ve got your internal stakeholders who are expecting people to respond in a certain way, collaborate a certain way, and meet the collaboration expectations that are captured in the values so the whole global ship can keep moving effectively.

In terms of how they may be engaged with each other and locally or engage with clients, there could be a little bit of wiggle room, and more encouragement there, where you’re not saying, “You must do XYZ because that’s what Houston wants.” It’s about having that level of flexibility around the edges to where you’re being smart about how people and cultures operate, and how that’s different in Stuttgart versus Dublin versus Sydney.

The Driving Forces Behind Cultural Change

We talked about the Venn diagram earlier as far as looking at different ways to see how cultures are interpreted by different groups, but who is driving? If you need to change your culture, if you need to change the way things are, who is driving that difference? Does it come from any particular groups such as leadership versus the employees as a whole?

I think so. These people officers or chief HR officer or whatever the title may be might be more so the Jane Goodall or Jack Goodall of the situation versus the Silverback. I don’t know if you’re getting my analogy right here, but the leadership will be setting the tone and you’ll have your chief people officer, hopefully, as the eagle-eyed cultural anthropologist, making observations, providing actionable feedback to where things are not going well or wonderful praise for where, “Oh my God, CEO. That was a terrific town hall.” You already embodied the values in this way and that or positive reinforcement, as well as negative.

I think it’s a leader’s job and every employee’s job. Even if you might not have a manager title, if you’ve got values that the entire company has aligned around, hopefully, you’re thinking about that as you engage with your peers and others cross-functionally. In terms of casting the biggest shadow on the organization or spreading the greatest amount of bright light, it’ll be leaders. That’s what the CEO can make or break and a set of cultural pillars. The first thing they do as soon as they’re published and propagated through the employee life cycle tools and whatnot is to violate them or tolerate a jerk who’s not abiding by them because they get good results in their jerky way, and then you’re in trouble. It has to cascade from the top and through every level.

Every employee's job, even if you might not have a manager title, is to think about the values as you engage with your peers and others cross-functionally. Share on X

Should there be some assessment of the values as part of performance evaluation?

Yeah. My advice is when we’re doing that implementation roadmap, another reason for getting lots of culture champions involved in creating a set of values is that they’ll often help divide and conquer on the implementation so the marketing person might be good at getting the values into anywhere where people are researching your company, your social media footprint, and your careers page. You want as many cooks in the kitchen who will then end up being the folks who are getting these teams to show up in all the right places. In terms of performance management to your question, that’s probably going to be an initiative led by HR because we project-managed that stuff.

The recommendation would always be that the behavior of employees would be in some way shape or form judged upon their adherence to the values and, to an extent there, a culture champion if you will. You probably don’t want to judge people in a September performance review and you just rolled out the values in July. After an appropriate amount of time and warning that this is an expectation, absolutely. As a matter of fact, your values will probably never stick if you don’t.

How To Address Cultural Misalignment

Taking us back to the leadership piece that you were talking about, Char usually is one of our colleagues here who helps with these questions but she was telling us a story not too long ago. She’s a serial entrepreneur. She starts all these companies and runs them and so forth. In one of the companies she had, she told a story about the fact that one of her leaders was not in alignment with the rest of the culture. It was destroying the culture of the organization in some ways. She had to deal with it. I imagine you’ve probably run into a situation like this. How do you advise the leadership team to handle such a situation?

That is a situation that requires addressing. It’s probably something where you’re going to follow the standard performance management or performance issue protocols where this person will be made aware of the impact of their behavior on the culture that they’re trying to foster in their organization and how their behavior is at odds with it. Some people are oblivious and they need to be told, “This is what’s happening and you might not realize this but this is how people are being turned off by your behavior and the negative impact of it.”

On some occasions, that’s enough, and then if that isn’t working, you will escalate and maybe have to introduce new steps, some kind of performance improvement plan, and some strategy for supporting them through the change, through coaching, and then if they are too hard-wired as some of us again in adulthood are to maybe make that shift, it’s possible that they could be better off in a more attuned culture.

There are lots of successful hard-wired, hard-driving cultures out there where those personalities are making assumptions about how they were being disrupted, but to the point would be successful. That’s where they should be, not in this organization maybe where their approach to leading people sticks out like a sore thumb in a bad way. The know thyself principle applies.

My son is studying business and we got awarded that if he does go into investment banking, it’s going to become a bit of a slog for a few years as he pays his debts and proves himself with a lot of other hard-driving type-A people around him and it’s going to sign on for that early days. We’ll see which part of the banking he ends up driving towards. Maybe it’ll be a less intense one as the years go by.

That’s okay. As long as you know yourself and you’re not advertising, “Come work at X Investment Bank. You’ll have a wonderful work-life balance.” No, you won’t. Tough truth. Maybe this person who was so disruptive in the culture that you’re talking about needs to be in a different culture where they’ll be wildly successful because they fit in perfectly.

My wife is in the accounting field. She’s having a hell of a time right now in terms of both attracting and retaining people. A lot of them were working very seriously in terms of changing the culture and allowing more work-from-home opportunities. They’re trying to make a major change in their culture and environment. Have you seen that done successfully?

Yeah, for sure. I think it’s not easy to change a culture. Some of these changes you’re talking about in terms of location and flexibility have their own logistical complexities for sure. If you aren’t changing the expectations of how work gets done with which internal partners and by which deadlines, then just change the location, meaning that somebody could do this same stuff a couple of days a week from home, that’s an easier change to make.

I would not even necessarily call that a cultural change per se or core cultural change. That’s more logistical in nature. Not to make the life of it, it’s still not easy to pull off. I think that’s been something that a lot of companies have challenged within the last few years, both running away from the office during COVID and now, running back or slowly walking back like Amazon made their announcement about corporate folks being in five days a week starting January 1.

That’s a tough stand for a lot of people who made a move under previous rules or regimes. At least they have given a few months’ notice. That might be enough or not enough if you move your life across the country. I think those kinds of changes that are logistical in nature can be made in months, not quarters or years. The core cultural changes probably take a little bit longer than that. They’re more the quarters and years. One of my recommendations is not for ongoing business, but you might not need me to do it, and for my clients, where we do set the values in this very thoughtful Venn diagram multi-faceted way, is that they don’t take it for granted that the world is going to stay the same.

The world, as COVID taught us, does not stay the same nor does an industry or this technology. AI is a big disruptor there, but even just your team. Even if you got high retention over the course of eighteen months, people get promoted, and they’ll have a bigger impact on their new spots. Other people will move on. You’ll get some great new talent from the outside world. Each hire or departure is a micro shift in your culture. If there is a C-suite, it might be a lot more than micro.

My recommendation is that every eighteen months, you revalidate maybe in a less intense way than the first instance whether your values still reflect your secret sauce of success as a business. Assuming that they are evergreen and such a dynamic internal and external reality would be probably a bit naive. Hopefully, they don’t change too much. Maybe you tweak the phrasing of one of the values but the value itself doesn’t change. That’s often what I’ve seen happen, and it’ll update but chances that something is shifting are pretty much guaranteed.

We started off the show by letting everybody be aware that you’ve helped hire 125 or more than 125 leaders across the globe. Would you agree that this type of approach of introducing new leadership to an organization is probably a rapid way to change organizational culture?

I think so. If you include my in-house days, it would be thousands of hires. A great wild show in C-suite hire can be transformative in terms of reinforcing the culture you want to set. It’s one of the quickest ways to do it. You’ve got a whole set of teams under their leadership who will get in this new positive direction. That can be pretty transformative. In terms of the culture doctor work, I do this analysis and culture studies.

That’s one thing, but the key senior higher level is the culture surgery. That could be a good thing. Not necessarily removing a cancer. I can’t come up with a good analogy, but maybe adding a great prothetic for a missing limb or something. That can be a transformative moment. In my culture doctor days in the last eight years or so alongside the culture projects I’ve been talking about, the placements I’ve done have been very influential, but they are fairly narrow in scope.

They’re all people and talent folks. All under the traditional banner of HR. I’d like to think that in that limited way where you don’t have as much impact from that seat as you would from a CEO seat, you could still be an amazing Jane or Jack Goodall and have this transformative impact bringing in great cultural line people through your talent acquisition efforts, through your performance management system, which great cultural leaders would hand and they’re fine, where it’s encouraging the right behaviors and business success through positive culture. A key hire like a people leader hire can have an amazing accelerator effect on great culture and atrial practices in general. We talk about culture today, so yes, absolutely.

The Key Takeaways From This Conversation

Thanks, Peter, for that. As we come to the top of our time here, what are the main things that you want our listeners to walk away with from this conversation?

I’d say knowing thyself is key. One of the ways where I’ve tried not to take myself too seriously is when I was doing my stand-up comedy that you mentioned earlier. We dust on it. When I was originally new to the States, I would make jokes about my coming from Ireland and the complications of the adjustment process to life in America. Similarly, I would say and maybe using humor, to be humble as leaders about not having all the insights that you might and think you have in terms of setting a culture.

Look at it from a multi-lens perspective, whether or not you’re using a facilitator like me to gather the data or whatever. Try and guess client perspectives and every department involved. You might be pleasantly surprised by some hidden strengths. As a leader, you might be sad that these people don’t think you’re as great as this one thing you thought you were awesome at when the data comes in.

Stay humble and keep on monitoring. Once you’ve done this big culture project and maybe occasional eighteen-month check-ins to see if you’re macro culture is still what you thought it was, eighteen months is a long time. You should be talking about culture and the health of your organization on a much more frequent basis than that. Just from your regular employees’ surveys, they’ll give you early warning signs of maybe behavior that’s at odds with the culture you’re trying to foster. Keep an open mind. Keep gathering data. These would be key things for cultural success. I think also having a sense of humor never hurts. It keeps you humble.

Having a sense of humor never hurts. It keeps you humble. Share on X

Many of our listeners out here are thinking, “Where can I hear Peter?” I know that you are going to be speaking at the Transform Conference in March in Vegas. Is that right?

Yes. Saint Patrick’s Day. Thank you for mentioning that. I’ve been looking up to go to conferences for a number of years, including doing some HR stand-up comedy there a couple of years ago. That’s a very fun event and they’re expecting 4,000 attendees this year. It’s growing like a weed and a nice crowd to very growth mindsets, progressive people, a fair amount of tech, a fair amount of HR tech, but all industries.

It’s a great idea-sharing place. If people are local to the tri-state area, I know how it is. I’m also looking forward to a couple of speaking engagements in the next five weeks at Disrupt HR, the South Jersey chapter, and the Westchester chapter, where I’ll be doing HR comedy, and in this challenging disrupt HR format with the twenty slides in five minutes. Wish me luck.

I know you’ll do wonderfully there for sure. Peter, thank you so much for sharing your wisdom with us today in the People Strategy Forum. It was a great conversation.

Thank you so much for having me.

 

Important Links

• Peter Phelan on LinkedIn
• ValuesCulture
• Korn Ferry Leadership Architect

 

About Peter Phelan

Peter Phelan is the Founder and CEO of ValuesCulture, a consulting firm established in 2016 that specializes in optimizing organizational cultures to enhance employee engagement and retention.

With over two decades of experience in global People & Culture leadership, including Chief People Officer roles at MediaMath and Shutterstock, Phelan has been instrumental in driving cultural initiatives that have earned companies recognition on platforms like Glassdoor and Crain’s New York Best Places to Work.

Under his leadership, ValuesCulture has partnered with over 125 organizations, leveraging data to define strong, values-based cultures that align with business objectives. Phelan is also a recognized speaker on HR transformation and has contributed to various industry events and publications