Culture Design Bootcamp for Purpose-Driven Small Business Owners

Instructional Objectives:

Module 1: What Culture Is and Where Yours Is At

• Understand what culture is and why it matters for the business success (and owner sanity!)
• Discover why you’ve struggled to optimize strategy, performance, marketing, customer service, systems and results without a clearly defined culture.
• Assess your current company culture and identify how it is or isn’t creating the results you want in your business.
• Understand your part in creating your current culture – for better or worse – and create a high level vision of how your ideal culture will feel.

Module 2: Create a Vision of Success

• Discover how to design a vision that inspires and motivates you and your employees and gets everyone pulling in the same direction.
• Design your vision to harness the power of specificity by completing our Vision Clarity Blueprint template that makes sure you have clarity in the core areas your business needs to thrive.
• Create an action plan to address the gaps in your vision.
• Understand the 3 leadership laws for accelerating the achievement of your business vision, assess where you stand and identify where you need to focus your energy to lead your team more effectively.

Module 3: Define a Purpose Beyond Profit

• Learn why purpose is a new imperative for business success and longevity in the 21^st century.
• Understand the different functions of purpose, vision and mission statements and how all of them work together to keep your people focused, energized and creating a positive impact on your business, each other and the world.
• Create several versions of your purpose statement and use our Purpose Audit™ method to evaluate which to choose or how to tweak them to create a purpose that will stand the test of time.
• Use our Purpose Alignment Checklist to identify your top opportunities to create more alignment with your purpose in your business.

Module 4: Discover Your Secret Sauce

• Learn how focusing on generic strengths like quality, service, excellence and innovation can leave your brand feeling bland, and how to identify the authentic strengths that create these qualities as a byproduct.
• Understand why you don’t need or want everyone to have the same strengths in your business and how clarity on your Strategic Strengths supports a diverse workforce to thrive.
• Go through our Authentic Strengths Mapping Process™ to identify what your current success has really been built on and use the Secret Sauce Accelerator ™ questionnaire to identify which strengths need to be added.

Module 5: Define Your Standards & Style

• Understand how to define and uphold your values, standards and brand personality while still respecting diversity and building and inclusive culture.
• Discover how and why values are a key source of energy and wellbeing for your team.
• Mining for values – finding the keys to focus and flourishing in the midst of frustrations.
• How to end the performance and fulfillment tug of war and find the place where what matters to you also matters to your people.
• Create your Values Alignment Blueprint™, assess your top opportunities to model alignment with your ideal values, and learn how to collect evidence to support your commitment to live them.

Module 6: Design Your Conscious Culture Compass™

• Bring all the pieces of together in your Conscious Culture Compass™ – a tool that you will be using to communicate the culture to your team.
• Complete our Culture Alignment Audit™ to rate your current level of alignment as a business, and as a leader with the culture you have defined.
• Draft your Culture Alignment Action Plan.

Module 7: Involve Your Team

• Understand the importance of involving your team in designing your culture.
• Learn techniques to introduce your initial culture draft to your team and give them the opportunity to impact it.
• How to avoid the top mistakes owners make in communicating their desired culture.
• Assessing current culture alignment gaps from your team’s perspective.
• Determining who to involve in the culture refinement process (and how to handle negativity and resistance along the way).

Module 8: Infusing Culture in Your Hiring and People Development Practices

• Why culture clarity makes it so much easier to find and keep the right people for your team.
• Integrating your culture in job ads, job descriptions, interview questions and other hiring processes.
• Designing culture-aligned performance development systems.
• How to develop your people to align with both your ideal culture and their own style, strengths and personality.

Module 9: Aligning Culture, Brand and Service

• Understand how culture informs and strengthens your brand.
• Explore how to infuse your culture throughout your marketing and ensure that your team are ready to deliver on your brand promise.
• Discover how your culture can help or hinder your efforts at providing legendary service.
• Assess whether your brand messaging and customer service are aligned with your culture and create an action plan to address key areas of opportunity.

Module 10: Infusing Culture in Your Systems and Strategy

• Assess what mindset your strategy has been based on so far and identify how it will need to shift to match your desired culture.
• Learn about Result of Note™ systems thinking and how to use it to fine tune every system in your business to resonate with your desired culture.
• Understand the importance of systems and habits, and how culture can sink your best efforts at getting your team to create and use both.

Course Format: Culture Design with Small Business Owners in Mind

Most programs on designing culture are geared towards much larger organizations with far more systems in place and a lot more people to help implement culture. They tend to be either:

1. expensive live programs worth tens of thousands of dollars that work with whole leadership team to address culture issues in a company with hundreds or thousands of people;
2. Public programs for individual leaders in larger organizations that focus mainly on theory and assume they have a whole team to help them roll out the ideas they will learn in the course; or
3. Self-directed online programs that are too general, too complicated, meant for a very specific type of business that is not quite like yours or require you to find the time in your busy schedule to apply what you learn.

The ones that are geared towards small business owners tend to be self-directed online courses that require you to do it all yourself – something you simply don’t have the time, or the expertise to do. (And for those who’ve tried these courses, they realize that it isn’t all that easy to get a good result. What’s worse, it’s possible to finish the course feeling more uncertain about your culture than when you started!)

In comparison to other courses on designing company culture, this course is designed with small business owners in mind:

• The hands-on interactive classes ensure that you will do the work during class time, so you don’t have to muddle through it during your busy work day.
• We provide concrete tools and templates to fast-track applying your learning immediately rather than having to spend a bunch of time figuring out how to apply theories in the reality of your business.
• We assume you don’t have a huge team to help you with this, so we provide doable action plans that can be fit into your busy schedule.