Theory and Application of Culture

So what do I even know about culture?

Recently, I was traveling and reading another book around organizational psychology. Being the people person I am, I ended up chatting with the gentleman sitting next to me on the plane. By the end of the flight, he commented on the book I was reading.

He scoffed and said, “Most of the people who write those books have never had any experience leading an organization or even being a boss.”

He’s not wrong. There are a lot of “leadership experts” out there who don’t lead teams. There are a lot of “workplace consultants” that are terrible bosses and don’t practice what they preach. I found his comment interesting and couldn’t help but think about my own story — what experience do I have?

Right now, I am wearing multiple hats, at multiple organizations. I work for CoreBuild helping small businesses define and build intentional cultures. I am also working at the Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts on their events and hospitality team.

When I started at the Kauffman Center right out of college, I was just a bartender. I was quickly moved into a leadership role in under a year. I immediately became curious about what it meant to be a good boss. I wanted to know why some employees were responding to me rather than other managers. I was determined to get peers to now respect me as their boss when most of them were old enough to be my parents and they’d been there longer than me.

I wanted to be a successful and high performing Event Manager. I had a desire to build relationships with clients, “wow” guests and create memorable experiences. I yearned for events to run smoothly and efficiently. With that in mind, I needed employees to clearly understand what was expected of them because in the heat of an event, there is very little time to manage in the moment. I wanted to empower them to own their space and make smart decisions when I wasn’t around.

Through my work with CoreBuild and lots of research, I’ve discovered various exercises, techniques and principles that create effective and happy teams. At the Kauffman Center, I’ve had a playground to test these out. I wasn’t just learning, I was doing.

I have had lots of time to practice having uncomfortable conversations. My fellow managers and myself thought hard about the employee experience we wanted to create and the place where we wanted to come to work everyday.

We’ve hired tons of great people while also painfully weeding out some misaligned and bad eggs in the process. Through this application of theory, I am proud to say I have now had the experience of consciously building a strong and successful culture and scaling it as we have continued to grow our event operations. We now have over seventy people on our crew that work extremely well together with most of our events being executed without a hitch, at least on end.

Were not perfect, but it’s a pretty great place to work that is always continuing to evolve like a thriving organism or healthy culture does. I am confident we have the best event management team in Kansas City.