0:00:00.0 Junior: If you're seeing that your employee engagement's inconsistent, especially spotty throughout the organization, you probably can tell, there's Legacy Culture that you are battling.

0:00:14.0 Tim: You're probably going to be dropped into this kind of a situation sometime in your professional life.

0:00:17.2 Junior: What do you do when you're met with this? You just blow it all up. You just come in guns blazing and you dismantle the whole institution.

0:00:23.0 Tim: When companies start to lose their moat, how they retreat into a place of willful blindness.

0:00:30.6 Junior: If you see that they're playing defense and trying to preserve image more than they're trying to create value in the marketplace, gotta go.

0:00:40.5 Tim: You can build a coalition that is with you, that is aligned, that will help you make the changes that are necessary to make.

0:00:48.7 Junior: Hierarchy and decision making, process over outcomes. We're so focused on adherence to the process that that takes precedence over the outcomes that we're looking for.

0:01:00.4 Tim: You get paid for competitive advantage, and so your job should be to disturb the status quo.

0:01:06.1 Junior: You can't take that fence out until, you know why the fence was there.

0:01:11.0 Tim: The culture has stood still, the culture has calcified, and the environment has moved on.

0:01:27.3 Junior: Stop, look and listen. That's what you do when you're met with a Legacy Culture. That's also what you do when you cross the road. They're not too dissimilar.

0:01:36.4 Tim: That's true.

0:01:37.5 Junior: It was interesting that that was emergent. I was... What's a one liner that I can use at the beginning of the episode?

0:01:42.8 Tim: Hey, that's pretty good.

0:01:44.9 Junior: Hey, well, it worked out.

0:01:46.3 Tim: It works.

0:01:47.1 Junior: So that's what we're gonna talk about today. Crossing the road, being met with a Legacy Culture. You stop, look and listen, and then you get to work. Tim, have you ever seen or been in a Legacy Culture?

0:02:00.6 Tim: Yeah. All around us. We live in legacy cultures. We create legacy cultures. Yes. They're everywhere.

0:02:08.4 Junior: Tell me more. Tell me more about it.

0:02:09.5 Tim: Okay. Well, let's talk a little bit about the nature of culture. Culture, culture naturally hardens, it calcifies, it fossilizes, for example, think about, so listeners, viewers out there, think about your team, think about the attitudes, the beliefs, the assumptions. What happens to those over time? They become orthodoxy, which means now it's a little more strongly held and they keep going until they harden into dogma. Now, that's a strong word, but what do we mean? So the assumption, for example, let's just take an assumption. We start with an assumption. It becomes orthodoxy. It hardens into dogma. By the time it does that, it takes on the status of a fact. So an assumption over time, we treat it as a fact. Is that dangerous? It's very dangerous. We lose our adaptive capacity. Think about what's happening. We lose our agility. We're not open-minded. We are not collaborating. So you can see the liability that comes with that process. Now, that's not always gonna be true, but what always will be true is that the culture is going to settle in. You're going to move into a state of equilibrium and there is going to be some calcification, and that can get in the way.

0:03:49.6 Junior: It can get in the way.

0:03:50.7 Tim: So there's an overview of how culture behaves.

0:03:53.7 Junior: Well, let's define Legacy Culture.

0:03:55.0 Tim: Sure.

0:03:56.9 Junior: A Legacy Culture is an entrenched set of values, norms, and behaviors that have defined an organization for years, but may no longer align with its evolving goals. So, a Legacy Culture's characterized, you might say, by someone saying, well, we've always done it this way. If you've ever heard, we've always done it this way, subscribe. You have to.

0:04:20.1 Tim: Yeah.

0:04:21.6 Junior: When's the first time you were met with a culture and thought, "Oh, this is interesting. This is definitely a Legacy Culture?"

0:04:32.0 Tim: Well, there's a kind of a pejorative definition of Legacy Culture, right? A Legacy Culture means the culture, you inherit, the culture that exists, the incumbent culture, the culture that is there. But when we say Legacy Culture, there's kind of a... There's a negative connotation to that. We're thinking about the liabilities. We're thinking about the fact that the culture has stood still, the culture has calcified and the environment has moved on. There have been changes in the environment that would necessitate a change in culture, but the culture has not kept pace. It's behind. It's outdated. It's antiquated, it's outmoded. It's not doing the job that we need it to do. I think that's what we're saying.

0:05:26.5 Junior: Here are a few symptoms that you can look at to diagnose whether or not you're in a Legacy Culture. Number one is resistance to change. This characterizes almost every Legacy Culture. It's so entrenched that we feel pushback immediately when we try to suggest something new. Hierarchy and decision making. Legacy cultures are going to be more hierarchical by nature. Decision making is going to happen in a more concentrated way, and it's going to be slower, process over outcomes. We're so focused on adherence to the process that that takes precedence over the outcomes that we're looking for. When you start to go after a certain outcome and you're hung up in process, another symptom that you're in a Legacy Culture.

0:06:15.6 Tim: Junior, it gets to the point where the process becomes proxy for the goal. It almost replaces the goal.

0:06:23.6 Junior: Yeah. We did the process.

0:06:24.4 Tim: Yeah.

0:06:25.4 Junior: Congratulations, but it was the wrong one.

0:06:28.1 Tim: It's really not what we're looking for, but that's what happens over time.

0:06:30.7 Junior: Yeah. Long tenure, slow turnover. Long tenure and slow turnover is characteristic of Legacy Culture because you're not getting the type of fresh perspective that you need and the slow turnover. This isn't always bad, but it can be characteristic of Legacy Culture that's damaging because that long turnover, especially if you're not innovating on the front lines of product or your model's not changing, you're gonna find that that slow turnover eventually damages the organization irreparably.

0:07:11.7 Tim: Interesting that you should say that. So just this week I was at dinner with the chairman of the board, the CEO and the chief HR officer for a Fortune 500 company. And one of the comments that I made in that dinner was, "Your tenure is your greatest asset and your tenure is your greatest liability." And all three of them nodded their heads in agreement.

0:07:40.9 Junior: So they know it.

0:07:41.3 Tim: So they know it.

0:07:42.2 Junior: That's interesting.

0:07:43.0 Tim: There you go.

0:07:44.6 Junior: Inconsistent employee engagement. If you're seeing that your employee engagement's inconsistent, especially spotty throughout the organization, you probably can tell that there's Legacy Culture that you are battling. Especially when it's very high in a business unit or a certain geography and very low in something that's right next door. When you see those types of differences and there's dissonance, even intra-function by team member, you can start to see and peel back the layers that something's going on there. How do we get to this point? So, now if we know that we're in a Legacy Culture, what happens such that it became legacy? This is sequential. And I think we've reduced down the steps that have to happen in order to get a Legacy Culture.

0:08:32.1 Tim: So you're gonna take us on a little bit of a journey here, Junior.

0:08:34.9 Junior: Yeah. And ironically, or maybe unironically, we start with success.

0:08:38.6 Tim: Yes.

0:08:39.6 Junior: Success is the first ingredient in dysfunction. So success creates inertia. What do you think of when you hear that?

0:08:48.8 Tim: Well, I think it's true. The success immediate... Well, gradually breeds complacency. I think we know that. Because we're succeeding. So, we look around and we congratulate ourselves and we keep doing what we're doing and we keep having continued success, and pretty soon we lose the vigilance, we lose the attentiveness. And we're just not playing offense in the same way. We're not taking in the competitive environment in the same way. We're not competing at the same level.

0:09:33.5 Junior: If you look at that culturally through the lens of culture, you look at success, you'll see that we institute values really early on that lead to the success. It's not that success comes from nowhere. There's some set of norms that produces the success because we're working interpersonally. We're in a team environment. When we see that those values, let's say that the value's hard work or it's initiative or it's perfection or whatever the value is, if that results in success, that value's codified. That's what makes it so dangerous. If we say we're just here, hard work produces the outcome that we want, well, we're gonna then lean into the value of hard work. How does that become difficult? Because that never leaves. If there's not room for a new set of values to come in and produce a different outcome, then we end up in this place where it's cyclical. We never fall out of it. You may then enter a situation where you need a new set of values because you have a new environment. You succeeded your way to a new marketplace or a new playing field. And what worked then is not going to work now.

0:10:43.7 Tim: Well, what's interesting, I'll just make one more point on that, Junior. Success gives you data, and the data set is telling you that you're successful and it's reinforcing itself and you don't need to change. But at the end of a competitive cycle, the success is a false positive. You're succeeding at the tail end of a competitive cycle, and you're not paying attention to what else is going on around you. You're not... You don't have the contextual understanding that you need. So there's a false positive at the end of that experience.

0:11:21.5 Junior: And strategically, this is something a lot of people miss when we try to reverse engineer successes, is we pull out the variables that are non-controllable, like luck or timing And so you'll often reduce down, you reverse engineer to try and find the ingredients of what happened such that we had success, but you're missing maybe 40% of the variables. But what you can see is, well, this I know happened and we had this outcome, so therefore I'm gonna assume that it's causal when it's not. And you reduce down to the things that actually aren't the ingredients you want.

0:11:56.9 Tim: Now, here's one more irony. Sometimes in those very situations, even when we get to the point where we can see and acknowledge changes in the competitive environment, changes in customer preferences, right. We cling to our status quo even harder. Isn't that interesting? So we just tighten our grasp around what we're doing and so we're even less agile, ironically.

0:12:33.4 Junior: Yeah. Let's go to number two. Legacy cultures form when leaders never leave. We talked about tenure. And this is precisely that. When leaders never leave, we'll talk about how they get into that scenario and why they don't leave. But we'll leave it there for now. Legacy cultures form, when risk aversion increases.

0:12:53.8 Tim: Well, hang on a second Junior, leaders never leave. That's continuity. Isn't that great? Yeah. You gotta qualify that. So, it provides the continuity, it provides the consistency, but again, it's entrenched.

0:13:13.0 Junior: Yeah. Well, what happens if those leaders never leave? What values are they going to reinforce? They're going to reinforce those values we talked about when the success was created.

0:13:22.2 Tim: Exactly.

0:13:23.6 Junior: And so when we have Mr. Hard work, who says, that's how we got here. And they never leave. They're gonna perpetuate the hard work value. Not that that's a bad value, but that's what they might lean on going into the future. When that happens, we get risk aversion. Why does risk aversion increase? 'Cause we already succeeded. We're in the position now. We've got the title, we have the authority. So why would I jeopardize that?

0:13:53.0 Tim: Well...

0:13:53.8 Junior: The organization may not require me to go do the same thing 10 times over and innovate, innovate, innovate. Maybe we're happy with where we are today. So, I'm gonna keep what's mine. And this is where the fundamental shift happens that I think a lot of people miss out on. And let me explain it. When I'm early in an organization, we're competitively early, we have new product, we've entered the market, what am I concerned about? Competitive performance. I'm concerned about the market, I'm concerned about product, I'm concerned about the financials. I wanna make sure that we can go and win and compete in the marketplace. When we do that, we have the right inputs such that we succeed in the marketplace. Iraq focus away from marketplace, and a self preservation as it relates to image and the title, position, authority, that I now have.

0:14:42.9 Tim: Status, rewards, incentives, the status quo is rewarding you from every angle. So, now that all of that is at stake, and so your risk tolerance profile goes down and you're thinking, oh no, I'm gonna go back to what I know. Back to what brought us success in the first place.

0:15:07.3 Junior: If you think about leaders, it's this shift from offense to defense. Think about leaders that you know and ask yourself, are they playing offense in the marketplace? Or are they playing defense relative to title, position, and authority? If you see that they're playing defense and trying to preserve image more than they're trying to create value in the marketplace. Gotta go.

0:15:33.7 Tim: Yeah.

0:15:34.2 Junior: Gotta go. But that's what happens is they don't go.

0:15:36.8 Tim: They don't.

0:15:37.7 Junior: They stick around.

0:15:38.0 Tim: They hang on.

0:15:39.1 Junior: We increase our risk aversion. And then what do we get? Number four, organizational bureaucracy reigns. We institute bureaucratic practice to preserve our position while simultaneously hamstringing the organization competitively.

0:15:55.5 Tim: And then it buries you.

0:15:57.1 Junior: And then it buries you. If you do this across functions, you look at the top of the organization, what are they doing day to day? Not as a rule, but many organizations will spend time at the executive level managing the interpersonal dynamics such that they can stay there. Not do the things that got them there. Do a different set of things that keeps them there. Because tomorrow's problem is going to be for somebody else.

0:16:27.6 Tim: So the chief impulse, this is really quite interesting, Junior, the chief impulse becomes preserving the status quo. But hang on a second, that's not what you get paid for. You get paid for competitive advantage. And so, your job should be to disturb the status quo and continue to achieve and sustain competitive advantage. But it shifts. And so, you kind of shift from change leader to caretaker. You've kind of become the caretaker of the institution.

0:17:06.6 Junior: That's good.

0:17:06.9 Tim: Right?

0:17:07.9 Junior: Yeah.

0:17:08.0 Tim: That's a very different role. Very different behaviors, very different patterns, very different motivation.

0:17:15.9 Junior: Yeah. That's an interesting reflection opportunity. Am I a caretaker? If I'm a caretaker, I need to leave the caretaker's quarter.

0:17:26.4 Tim: You need to leave. Yeah.

0:17:27.1 Junior: We gotta go and contribute.

0:17:29.7 Tim: You're putting the entire organization in danger. But it's the Hemingway pattern, right, Junior, it's going to be gradually and then suddenly that you lose your relevance. But make no mistake, it's happening. If you've shifted into a caretaker role and you're preserving the status quo and you're not disturbing it, and you've really lost that competitiveness and that vigilance, you're in trouble. It's often hard to see where you are though, in the degradation of your competitive advantage and your relevance. It's hard to see. Right. Where am I? Well, I think I'm fine. I think we're doing fine for a long time when maybe the opposite is the case.

0:18:15.6 Junior: Well, often with long tenure comes insulation, you become insulated from the market. You become insulated from competition. And so it's easier to hide. And when you hide, there becomes even more incentive for you to stay hiding because you don't wanna be found out. If you're forced to leave your organization and go and find somewhere else to be and compete, the chances are you're not gonna do very well if you've been hiding. That's why this becomes more and more dangerous over time, because if you've been doing that for five years, you're not gonna go and compete in the marketplace. You're gonna go get stomped on. So, you're just gonna hide in your cave and hope that no one finds you out. And what are you gonna do to put up your fence and your moat? Not competitively, but interpersonally we're gonna institute bureaucracy and anything in self preservation. So you can see why this becomes problematic competitively for an organization, because they can't.

0:19:15.0 Tim: I'm amazed at how when companies start to lose their moat, right? So it starts to get narrow and it starts to get shallow. How they retreat into a place of willful blindness and they're looking at the lag indicators. The lag indicators are market share, profitability, all those financial measures, and even those are receding and they're still hanging on. They're still in denial. They're still preserving the status quo. It's fascinating. Willful blindness.

0:19:53.0 Junior: Well, it's like the it's fine meme where everything's on fire and he's just like, it's fine, right? There's a lot of that.

0:20:00.0 Tim: There's a lot of that.

0:20:00.9 Junior: It goes on in organizations.

0:20:01.4 Tim: It does.

0:20:02.4 Junior: So number five, you lose external perspective. We talked about this in a recent episode where fear breaks the feedback loop and that's what this alludes to. You lose external perspective when you're so focused on what's going on right in front of you to protect image. And so, when your head's down and you're only interested in what's right in front of you as it relates to reputation, you lose competitive information, you lose product information, you lose your perspective inside your own organization. I've seen that before, or cross-functionally, they have no idea what's going on. Someone will come into a meeting and talk about some initiative and like no idea.

0:20:44.8 Tim: It's true, Junior. Confirmation bias is on steroids. Where you literally are taking in the evidence, the support that you want. You're dismissing everything else. And you're blocking the feedback that you need. You're operating on an old set of assumptions that have become dogma. Watch out.

0:21:12.7 Junior: So what are the consequences of what we've talked about so far? The inability to innovate, that should be obvious. Talent drain, that should be obvious. And customer disconnect, which should be obvious, but might be a little less so. Do you think that you're focused on your customers when you're managing internally for your own status? No, that's the last thing on your mind, right? That's true in for-profit institutions. It's certainly true in government. Like, are you concerned about the constituency? Or are you concerned about maintaining where we are? You can see how these incentives work, regardless of the organization. Doesn't matter the type of organization. Anywhere there are humans, we're subject to this.

0:21:56.9 Tim: I think the pattern is that you're gonna become more transactional, regardless of where you start from.

0:22:03.3 Junior: Yeah. So you may hear all of this, all of this context setting and think, well, what do you do when you're met with this? You just blow it all up. You just come in guns blazing and you dismantle the whole institution.

0:22:15.4 Tim: The whole Legacy Culture.

0:22:16.7 Junior: You rip it down to the studs and you just go for it. There's a time for that. But what did we say at the very beginning? Stop, look and listen. So number one, stop. Number two, look. Number three, listen. Before you pull out the sledgehammer and the crowbar.

0:22:35.9 Tim: And begin the demo.

0:22:36.4 Junior: And begin the demo. You have to figure out what's going on. You have to take inventory. You have to open the aperture, take it all in, and get good information before you do anything. What do you think about that?

0:22:51.8 Tim: I completely agree because inevitably in your Legacy Culture, you're going to have some assets that you need to hang on to that are durable, that will serve you well as you go forward. And so, you've gotta be able to understand the culture really well. You're gonna have to be very careful as you assess that and then as you think about changes that you need to make.

0:23:24.0 Junior: I'm gonna share a quote from GK Chesterton. "I don't see the use of this. Let us clear it away." Talking about offense they find, which someone representing the status quo responds, "If you don't see the use of it, I certainly won't let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it." So, the traveler comes across the fence and says, Well...

0:23:57.5 Tim: We don't need that.

0:23:58.8 Junior: We don't need this here.

0:24:00.4 Tim: Especially not here, yeah.

0:24:01.7 Junior: Sledgehammer and crowbar.

0:24:02.8 Tim: Yeah, take it out.

0:24:03.9 Junior: Take it out. You can't take that fence out until you know why the fence was there. This pertains to Legacy Culture because as you said, there are some assets that are in there. There are some things that might be hiding. There are some what maybe what appears to be a bureaucratic process is there for a really good reason. And when you go in and you blow that up, maybe there is an unexpected, an unintended outcome that is really bad. And your likelihood of success, I'm interested in your perspective on this, your likelihood of success going in too aggressive, it goes down. Because you'll get pushed out too early for you to make meaningful contribution. So, you may be right on, but you don't understand the players, you don't understand the landscape or the political situation well enough, to go and do what would really be meaningful.

0:25:04.9 Junior: This is where a lot of well-intended people get hung up, because they'll see the dysfunction and they immediately wanna go at it at the throat, not realizing that they have to be a little bit more tactful and play the longer game if you're gonna get anything done.

0:25:22.5 Tim: That's true, they'll come in as a wrecking crew and it's not gonna go well. Plus, Junior, I think we need to acknowledge that when you go into a Legacy Culture, you've got to give due deference to history. You've gotta respect the institution, respect the people, respect what they've accomplished. That means that you have to understand it. So, you've gotta go to school, and you've gotta gain the contextual understanding that is probably going to take longer than you think it will. There may be some things that are very evident, very obvious from the beginning, okay, fine, but stay with it a little longer. There's more to it. There are layers, there is nuance that you've got to understand to be able to do this right. Not only that, there's an informal power structure. There's an informal network. You need to be able to tap into that to understand the influence traffic, how it flows, how this organization really works informally in addition to formally. And that, you've got to respect that.

0:26:43.3 Tim: You've got to respect that and there's a price to be paid to get to the point where not only you understand it, but you can build a coalition internally that is with you, that is aligned, that will help you make the changes that are necessary to make. If you have no coalition, you're not gonna win. You will not prevail and it will be a war of attrition. They'll wait you out and you're not gonna be successful. So again, the respect and deference that you give to the people, to the history and to the achievements I think is very important.

0:27:26.6 Junior: Many people listening have probably had the experience with a new hire or someone just new in a situation who comes in as wrecking crew and says, rip this out, tear this out, I can't believe this is even here. What's your emotional response to that person? Whoa. Hang on. I helped make this.

0:27:50.4 Tim: You don't appreciate, you don't understand.

0:27:52.5 Junior: Yeah, and maybe they're right. But that emotional response is not positive. I've had the opposite situation as well, where you have a new hire come in and they start by asking questions. Oh, help me understand why this is set up this way. Oh, that makes a lot of sense, how you've set that up. I think I have some ideas, but I can see why that's there. Completely spins the situation around, which leads us into the next slide, which is kind of two sentences, approach with curiosity, not contempt, and begin with inquiry, not advocacy. So, the first one, curiosity, not contempt, is a big one to manage the emotional response of the person on the other side of the table.

0:28:44.4 Tim: Oh, it's huge, Junior. You may even say compassionate curiosity.

0:28:48.9 Junior: Yeah, yeah.

0:28:49.0 Tim: Because that kind of curiosity expresses appreciation and respect for what's been done. It's a different kind of intent. It feels different. It's expressed differently. And people immediately, they pick up on that. They understand where you're coming from. You're engaging them in joint discovery if you're expressing that curiosity. Oh, so help me understand, let's go on this journey together. That's a very different thing than indicting the status quo, passing judgment on where we are. It's a very different thing.

0:29:35.0 Junior: Well, indicting is such a great word because there's disdain for what you're seeing in front of you. Like, I can't believe that this is the way that it is.

0:29:44.6 Tim: You do things this way.

0:29:45.0 Junior: I can't believe that you've set this up this way. And I've been in situations like that where I've come out too hot and I poked at something, and then I learned later, oh, there's some information that I didn't have access to, I'm sorry.

0:30:01.7 Tim: I'm very guilty of that myself, Junior.

0:30:03.5 Junior: And so, I've learned over time to not come out as hot, or at least I'm in the process of learning that. And starting with this next piece, which is inquiry, not advocacy. You don't wanna jump to advocacy too soon. You don't wanna enter a Legacy Culture and begin advocating for something right out the gate.

0:30:23.6 Tim: Especially if you have positional power, because that will censor your team, that will censor your direct reports, your colleagues, whoever it is that you're working with. That is so critical.

0:30:37.4 Junior: And often you can end up doing your advocacy through inquiry.

0:30:41.5 Tim: You can.

0:30:42.2 Junior: And you can end in the same place.

0:30:43.8 Tim: You can.

0:30:44.5 Junior: Just through questions.

0:30:45.6 Tim: But let's get the order of operations right here. Inquiry first. And it's gotta be real, it's gotta be done in good faith, it's gotta be genuine. And then we can, at the appropriate time, we will synthesize our findings, our point of view, and we'll advocate a course of action. Okay, fine. But let's make sure we do that right.

0:31:08.0 Junior: I'll also say that one positive consequence of doing it this way is you're tapping into the intellect and the problem solving capacity of everybody that's there, and you're not assuming the role of all knowing, right? I'm not this omniscient figure who comes in with all the answers and just advocates. I'm assuming that you all have the answers or can help me figure it out. And so, an advocacy statement might be, well, we need to implement this and do this this way. Inquiry might be, so what do you think would happen if we just left everything alone?

0:31:45.9 Tim: Right, yeah, it's very different.

0:31:47.1 Junior: It's so different.

0:31:48.4 Tim: It feels so different.

0:31:49.3 Junior: If you are the one on the receiving end...

0:31:50.8 Tim: It's not imperial. Junior, it's not imperial. That's a word that I like to use a lot because it's not invoking hierarchy. It's not patronizing. It's not elitist. It's no... Let's do this together, Let's collaborate, let's think through this, let's analyze this, it's very different.

0:32:20.4 Junior: And here's a little tidbit for how to spot the best leaders and also the smartest people. They are gonna go here to inquiry and not in advocacy, which may seem backwards to people who aren't thinking hard enough about it. So they might want someone who comes in and says, this is exactly what you need to do. Right? There's almost no one on planet Earth can do that well without context.

0:32:50.3 Tim: You can't.

0:32:51.8 Junior: If they don't have context, why would I assume that they know what they're talking about? You might have a marketer, a salesperson, some leader who comes in and says it needs to be this way. You don't know anything about what we're doing. You know the good ones when they come in, they sit down. And what are they? Compassionately curious, and they start with inquiry. "Hey, set the table for me. Help me understand what's going on. Oh, that's really interesting. Tell me more about that." They're absorbing all of it. They don't move into advocacy for a lot longer than someone who's less... I don't even know if it's experience, but just who's worse. You gotta do this. If you aspire to become a good leader, as I think we all do, this is one of those most basic things that we need to get right.

0:33:44.7 Tim: It really is.

0:33:46.8 Junior: Well, Tim, as we wrap up today, what are your final thoughts?

0:33:52.6 Tim: I just keep thinking about, if you have a Legacy Culture, there probably will be some big components and central features of that culture that you need to change, but you can't do that by yourself. You need a coalition. Number two, don't think that you really understand it right off the bat. It's going to take some time for you to get that contextual understanding that you really need and so be patient with the process. I see the most effective leaders taking that approach.

0:34:35.4 Junior: So spark notes, organizations succeed into inertia. That inertia creates a fundamental shift away from offense and toward defense. We lose focus of the competitive landscape, and we become preoccupied with managing our own position, our title, and making sure that that doesn't go away. That neutralizes us competitively. We no longer innovate. We stagnate. And the organization goes the way of the dinosaurs. We're often dropped into those cultures. They have a lot of great stuff from a long time ago, they have a lot of stuff that they've acquired along the way that's slowing them down or hurting the organization. We start with compassionate curiosity, as you said. We start with inquiry. We figure out what's going on and then we move.

0:35:34.6 Tim: I just wanna add one more comment, Junior. That is, you're probably going to be dropped into this kind of a situation sometime in your professional life. And you're going to be charged, part of your job is to do the cultural inventory, to do the cultural audit. And so, I just hope that people understand that this is qualitative research. Yes, you can look at quantitative research and you can look at financial results and you can look at engagement scores. But your real knowledge is going to come from the rich complex information that you gain when you are interacting with people and you're in inquiry mode and you're really drawing them into discovery with you. It's a qualitative journey and there's a price to be paid to be able to do that well.

0:36:29.4 Junior: Oh, so when you're dealing with a Legacy Culture or you're crossing the road, stop, look and listen, and then cross the road. If you liked today's episode, let us know. We'd like to know what about the episode was your favorite part. Leave us a comment below, share with a friend, and subscribe if you haven't already. With that, we will say, see you next time. Bye bye, everybody. Take care.

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0:37:00.8 Jillian: Hey, Leader Factor listeners, it's Jillian. If you liked the content in today's episode, we've compiled all of the concepts and slides into a downloadable resource for you. Click the link in the description or visit leaderfactor.com to explore our full content library. Don't forget to subscribe and we'll catch you in the next episode.

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