2 min read

S6E32: 6 Layers of Culture to Make Your Brand Effective

Best Christian Workplaces : October, 11 2021

Workplace Trends Culture Nonprofits

You've heard the phrase, "Culture eats strategy for breakfast." Mark Miller and Ted Vaughn, Cofounders of the Historic Agency, talk about how bad culture eats your brand for breakfast. Mark and Ted outline five pillars of your brand promise and six layers of culture to help your brand be effective.

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In this episode:

How Mark and Ted came to create their firm (02:31)
Solving organizational, culture leadership problems with better marketing and design (02:55)
Being intentional in how you communicate and how God has created you to serve a specific audience (03:21)
Signs of a broken culture and a summary of what some of those warning signs are (08:09)
When you've got values that are core to your very culture and yet your people have no idea how they apply to them (08:36)
"Being healthy organizationally is having people how are on brand." (09:35)
"Breakthrough brands have a marquee culture where their people who are healthy and on-brand." (09:51)
"The behaviors are not lining up with the brand or their not healthy." (10:29)
How you hire, how you fire, how you communicate, how authority and power is divvied up; if it's not aligned with your brand, it will slowly erode and of your goals (11:10)
In a Marquee culture, your people are the brightest, shiniest part of your brand (15:55)
At the core of these relationships is trust. We often describe the trust between leaders and staff are the key to culture. The book addresses two types of trust. How to identify the two sides of trust (17:20)
"Relational trust vs. functional trust." (18:06)
You cannot require trust. Trust is always at the discretion of the individual. (20:14)
What is so important about investing in culture? (22:20)
"The culture is going to be the thing that ultimately accelerates you or kills you. It's just a matter of time." (23:15)
Outline a framework for brand and culture alignment. A short summary of the key pillars for our audience (27:27)
The first pillar is culture: who are you? (27:47)
The second pillar is your story (27:50)
The third pillar is product or service (28:05)
The fourth pillar is experience (28:20)
The fifth pillar is identity (28:45)
6 layers of culture: principle, architecture, rituals, lore, vocabulary, artifacts (30:49)
Measuring the effectiveness of culture. Doing audits and health assessments; that's a huge part of healthy culture (41:54)