Want to Build a Positive Culture? Apply Four Bickisms

[Excerpts from an interview with Bick Whitener, currently principle with Bickley and Company.]

"I became the Director of Getting-Things-Done." That’s how Bick Whitener describes the way his boss acknowledged his leadership. Bick Whitener has a long, distinguished career in the property/casualty insurance world and has been with companies such as The Hartford, Prudential, Atlanta Casualty, Assurant, and many others.

I was privileged to consult to one of the companies where Bick was a manager and see the vibrant culture of accomplishment he created. He and his team were very different and getting more done than other areas. They were a "real" team and excited to learn new skills and approaches. The very positive culture he developed within his division stood in contrast to the overall company.

Rebecca Staton-Reinstein: Bick, you have a solid track record of changing the culture of any group you work with to make it more of an integrated team that gets solid results where people love being part of that team. How do you do it?

Bick Whitener: Let me start with what I believe is a simple statement. Culture change happens through people. I believe life is about two things. Life is about choices and life is about relationships.

Culture change happens through people. Have you ever noticed that people don’t like change? So if it is going to happen through people and they don’t like to change, leadership has to be both effective and efficient in helping them change, in helping with the culture transition.

Your people are your most valuable asset. Their time and their skills are your most valuable asset. You have to be wise how you spend those. People go crazy when I look at them and say, turn off whatever the notification is that tells you that you have a new e-mail. It is mail. How many times a day do you run to your mailbox? How many times a day do you run to the post office? Take your time and focus on the important things. The important things are "the right things."

Rebecca: Bick, I know you have a wealth of knowledge and wisdom you package in pithy statements you call Bickisms. Can you walk us through your steps for culture change with these Bickisms? (For a few more, check out Bick’s LinkedIn profile.)

 

Bick: Sure! 

STEP 1 Bickism: Never talk about culture.

Rebecca, let me start by telling you I’m a sneaky little devil. I never start out talking about culture. But what I do start out talking about is the vision that we have; that journey that we want to take, where we want to get to. So you have got to find people that want to buy into that vision. Clearly articulate that vision. Show them what that vision is going to do in terms of value to them in the future. Then find the people that want to buy in.

STEP 2 Bickism: Nothing anywhere ever gets done until somebody somewhere does something.

Don’t misunderstand. I like strategy. I like tactics. I like planning. I like locking myself in a room and talking about innovation. But I don’t like it unless things get implemented because brilliant ideas that are not implemented lose their value.

STEP 3 Bickism: Create a shepherding group.

Once you find people that want to buy in, you need a shepherding group. That is a tricky part of the process because the shepherding group has to have adequate spheres of influence. Otherwise you are going to get into trouble because those with the power will oppose the vision and the change and they will stop it.

In the early 1500s Niccolo Machiavelli said, There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, or more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain of success than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things. And almost 500 years later that is proving to be very true in our business environments today.

So never talk about culture. Talk about the vision, speak the vision, get people to buy in, find a shepherding group and start the process.

STEP 4 Bickism: Go for small wins.

Once you get the buy in you can actually start going for small wins. Don’t shoot big. Once you get a couple of wins two great things are going to happen. The first one is some fresh people are going to buy into the culture and the buy-in group gets bigger. And the second thing is you start to create momentum and that momentum becomes your friend.

It’s shared vision followed by wins. Celebrate the wins. Make them very, very visible.

Hear more Bickisms and gain more wisdom as Bick Whitener discusses his remarkable achievements and how he got them. Listen to the entire interview on Business in the Morning produced by Todd Schnick. http://businessinthe.am/bick-whitener/ 

An in-depth profile of Bick Whitener will be featured in the forthcoming book, Washington’s Shadow: How Leaders Cast a Long Shadow and Create a Positive Culture.

© RebeccaStaton-Reinstein and Advantage Leadership, Inc.

 This post also appears on LinkedIn

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/article/build-positive-culture-apply-4-rebecca or

http://tinyurl.com/Bickisms

Vision is NOT a hallucination

With the political season in high gear, there's a lot of talk about vision coming from all the candidates...and that's a good thing. We need to have a clear idea about where we're going before we set off in the wrong direction. But it's hard, in the middle of such contentious races, to talk about the candidates' visions without getting mired in their political views...

So here's something less controversial (except to New England Patriots fans.) After the Super Bowl cliff-hanging last quarter, the press talked to winning Giants' quarterback ELI MANNING, who was voted the Most Valuable Player. He talked about those last thrilling minutes when he threw the winning pass that won the game and described his thought process. "I was glad we were down by 4 points! If we were only down by 3, I'd have been tempted to go for a field goal. Being down by 4, I had to get a touchdown. I didn't have a choice. So I did."

Necessity forces us to translate a vision into reality.

That's what I think about when I talk about "vision." That almost calm determination. Manning believed he had no choice but to go for the winning touchdown. The founding fathers believed they had no choice but to go to world with Great Britain, the most powerful country in Europe. The framers of the Constitution believed they had no choice but to risk committing treason for the second time by overthrowing the Articles of Confederation and setting up a new republican form of government.

When I was interviewing CEOs and executives for my new book, everyone one of them told me something very similar. They looked down the road...they had a vision...they saw the future they want to create and they set about doing it.

A City Manager was called to city after city that had deteriorated. He looked at each one and saw a new city, vibrant and unique, waiting to escape from the urban decay. He shared that vision and city after city rose from the squallor and decay.

A banker looked out and saw a different approach to helping individuals who had accumulated great wealth look to their legacy. Knowing the predictive statistics that that fortune would begone within another generation, he fought back. He saw these peoples as wealth creators and their legacy families. He brought the entire family together to create a vision for their future and to create a plan and decision making process to protect that vision.

An executive, who had sold "tooth paste and sandwiches," was tapped to head a new healthcare delivery system of walk-in clinics co-located in other stores. He saw a chance to 'change healthcare' and is delivering on that promise, growing the business at a phenominal rate and being called on to advise industry leaders and the government.

A public servant took over an ailing healthcare system in a major urban area and in two years turned it from a problem-beset, crumbling system into a financially sound system with patient satisfaction soaring and people opting to use their services instead of going to private hospitals.

An engineer rose to CEO of a national engineering firm and set out to make it the "first billion dollar company with a culture!" He created a common vision for the seven merged companies that made it up and insisted that engineers become involved in the community as trusted advisors. Then with a simple statement, "Our offices ought to look like the communities they serve," he transformed the board, the staff and the company's vision for its future.

I could go on with these exciting examples. Each of the executives that I interviewed had thbe ability to turn vision into reality. They simply did not believe that it couldn't be done. As one executive told me, "I was too dumb to know any better!"

Stop a moment and think about the vision you have for yourself, your family, your company, your country. Vision is a powerful driver...It doesn't give you any choice but to succeed.

-- Rebecca Staton-Reinstein
Visit our website http://www.AdvantageLeadership.com/