Building a Culture of Collaboration with Larry Prince

Great things are on the horizon if you embrace that growth mindset.

Culture Eats Strategy for Breakfast

We discussed the concept that "culture eats strategy for breakfast," highlighting that while both culture and strategy are essential, they must work hand-in-hand for a company to thrive. Larry pointed out that many senior leaders have blind spots, particularly in differentiating between management teams and senior leadership teams. He stressed the importance of trust, collaboration, and a shared vision among senior leaders to drive the company forward.

Tease Key Insights

• A senior leadership team is not merely a collection of department heads; it is a cohesive unit that must work together to achieve the organization's overarching goals.

•  A culture that promotes growth is characterized by collaboration, trust, and a shared ownership mindset among senior leaders.

• A true senior leadership team operates with a collective mindset focused on the organization as a whole.

• Embracing a mindset of growth is crucial for organizations aiming to navigate challenges and achieve sustainable business success.

  
  

Why this Matters?

Collaboration among senior leaders is crucial for developing a strong organizational culture. Larry points out that great companies treat their people well and cultivate a mindset centered around growth, not just productivity. When senior leaders collaborate effectively, they create an environment where employees feel valued and empowered to contribute to the company's success.

This collaborative culture encourages innovation, resilience, and adaptability—key components for navigating the complexities of the modern business landscape.

Listen Now

Listen now and reflect on how these insights can be applied within your own organization. Let’s embrace the mindset of growth and collaboration to create a thriving workplace culture!

Larry Prince

Founder & CEO

Larry Prince, the Founder and CEO of PrinceLeadership®, possesses deep experience as a business growth and leadership advisor. His passion is helping business owners and executives build the company they envision. As a trusted advisor and authority, he applies creative ways to help leaders and teams solve critical business problems, make tough decisions, and lead through change - this includes how companies hiring and onboard people for success.

Full Episode

Megan:

Hello and welcome to Culture Conversations, the podcast where we explore the people side of work. I'm your host, Megan Robinson. For years, I've found myself deep in discussions about workplace engagement with industry experts. Now I get to share this wisdom with all leaders, new and experienced, on their journeys to build cultures that maximize potential. We spend so much of our lives at work. Let's make it a place where our teams can grow and succeed. Hello, and welcome to Culture Conversations. I'm Megan Robinson, and I am so excited to have Larry Prince today with me, here today with me. He is fabulous, a brilliant mind, and such an intuitive and insightful person that we are going to have such an intense conversation around growth and what that looks like from the senior leadership perspective. Larry Prince is the founder and CEO of Prince Leadership. He possesses a deep expertise as a business growth and leadership advisor. His passion is helping business owners and executives build companies they envision, and as a trusted advisor and authority, he really applies those creative ways to help leaders and teams solve those critical business problems, make those tough decisions, and lead with change. This includes how companies hire and onboard people for success, and as you will hear today, a lot about how they develop that right culture for growth. As a trusted advisor, he challenges conventional thinking and guides leadership to move forward boldly. His proven method of think, plan, and do leads to new habits essential for business breakthroughs and building the culture that leads to sustainable growth. Larry, thank you so much for joining me today.

Larry:

No, Megan, it's a pleasure. You know what? I love your energy and I love your passion. That's why people are so attracted to what you do. It's because it's, in part, your passion for what you do. So it's great. I have passion too, and I love what we do at Prince Leadership and what I do, helping companies grow, but build the right culture for that growth.

Megan:

Tell me more about that passion. Where does that passion specifically lie in the business arena?

Larry:

That's a great question. And sometimes I ask that of my clients too, and they pause like, I'm not sure. What is that? And we delve into that. I think for me, it's actually something I grew up in. My father and his brother owned a cosmetic manufacturing business. And I had an opportunity to see small business in action all throughout my childhood and play hooky once in a while to go with him where he would put me on the assembly line or mix powders or see how powders are designed for cosmetics for Revlon, Max Factor. I saw the energy and responsibility of what it takes to be a small business owner. And that entrepreneurialism, but also responsibility to do what's right for the business, but for all the people, I got to see that too. So you could say it's in my DNA, and I just love what small businesses do.

Megan:

Help me tie that to growth. And I don't want to get too personal, and this was totally not scripted. So did you get to watch that company grow, or did your passion about growing business and that responsibility take a different shape?

Larry:

Well, I got to see it grow. But important, I got to see it, at times, not grow and fail. And I got to see what a true business leader is like when my uncle and father pivoted and went ahead and went in a different direction. And they did that two times over a generation, right? And so the desire to be independent, to have freedom, to believe in building a team of people to achieve something together works, but sometimes it doesn't. And you gotta be really good at pivoting, being innovative to change as the market changes. So that I learned, and there's a passion for that. You don't give up. You're resilient, right? These are the things I learned at a young age that I carried with me. Now, my career took a different direction. And then later on, I've come to the more entrepreneurial side, working with businesses like my father's business. So I'm not sure if that answered the question directly, but I'm having fun just telling the story, Megan.

Megan:

Oh, it's a beautiful story. And I think Right before this call, actually, before we started recording, we were talking about how those young experiences really shape our lives in ways that we don't recognize until much later. And the passions that maybe start to get planted, those seeds earlier on, take root and look completely different later, or very, very similar, as sometimes it happens.

Larry:

True, true. And including within that, understanding risk, understanding that When you're in business, you're taking risks. There's trade-offs, and you're making these decisions. I went into my own business in my 20s, and I took that risk. I understood that risk, went in eyes wide open. It didn't work out, and I learned a lot. I couldn't do what I do today unless I gave it a shot on my own when I was young and learned so much from it not working out.

Megan:

I love that risk, that conversation, the dedication, the passion. comes together in giving you that incredible background to really support people, to really have a unique perspective. But even in that intro, those tough decisions, those risks, right? How they onboard people, how they make that happen. Tell me more, because I didn't want to jump back into growth. So we got way off side track because- Well, it's all good.

Larry:

It's all good, Megan. I'll connect the dots on this. Please. One of the things I learned very clearly is how great companies treat their people and develop a culture around growth. Not just a culture around productivity, but a mindset around growth. And to do that takes great senior leadership teams. People who are understanding together a collection of people called managers, directors, VPs, whatever, right? Who are running their functions or departments, but come together to collaborate as a senior team to make the company stronger. And that's what I got to see my father and my uncle do together, right? And I got to see when I spent a long career at Roche and I see with my clients today. The best companies, the one that grow and sustain have strong leadership culture and ownership mindset. And so that's a big heart or part of what I do is around getting senior leadership teams to be collaborative together and to problem solve together understand who to hire to build their culture and lead that together.

Megan:

I love that. And I will say from my experience as well, growth looks a little bit different for every organization.

Larry:

That's true.

Megan:

How do you really kind of define growth or work with your clients to define growth?

Larry:

Growth is just a word, right? It's a broad term that I think we could associate with plants growing, people growing, a little kid who's two years old growing to be a child 32, right? My child, children 30 and 32, yours too. So growth is such a positive word. In business, it means something very specific. It means creating sustainable and predictable profit cashflow, top line revenue, and the value of the business. And those have to be defined. So a lot of my work early on with a client is getting them to understand not just growth in general, but very specifically the growth they want and need for their business and how to see that over time with a particular vision or mission for their business. So we pinpoint what that is. Is it run your business more easily? Is it to grow the top line? Is it to grow value with an exit you have in mind one day? So we do that. And then we pivot and say, to get that growth, you need the growth of people. You need the growth of leadership teams and the growth of you as an individual leader, owner, CEO of the business. So there's this expression I love, culture eats strategy for breakfast. So the people side of growth is the culture. The business side is often driven by strategy. And one pivots against the other or competes. And we say, no, in the end it's culture drives strategy. But I'll say when you see a great company, you see both. And you see leaders capable of being strategic on defining that growth and how are we going to get there business-wise, but we also see how to get a culture developed with people and leaders to support that business. They go hand in hand.

Megan:

Do you ever see organizations actually take an opposite approach to that and say, you know what, if culture is going to eat strategy for breakfast, don't get me wrong, I've heard that a couple of times, how are we going to focus on the culture before we focus on the strategy? Or do you think it always has that, they need to have that anchor in that strategic approach in order to justify the culture work that they need to do?

Larry:

The best I could say is meet both. Great companies have both. And I think what I am concerned about is the belief, the over-reliance on one at the expense of the other. You don't get success without sustainable growth over time. without both. So at times you have to, it's like two ends of a balance, a scale, right? You want a balance. Once in a while, you say, you know what? We have to examine our strategies. At other times, sometimes we have to examine, really, and have tough decisions around our people, including leaders. Do we have the right collection, group of leaders? So we have to understand that balance, but I will never say one, regardless of any situation, over the other. So I don't, I personally don't see it that way in terms of one being more important than the other. They go hand in hand.

Megan:

I don't want to argue with that. I think the quote is misleading in that perspective, right? Because it does put a priority in one bucket versus the other, right? It does say that culture is going to be more important. I think without that, you get lost. If you're completely focused on the culture and you're just navel gazing at it, you're looking at everything internally, you're not going to have that direction. You're not actually going to achieve what you need to achieve.

Larry:

Right, right, right. You're not going to get the strategy achieved without the strong culture. And the culture, when you have the right, you say, well, we got the right team here. We got the right set of people here. Now we really need to have that strategy take us in the right direction together aligned. And that that's the key to aligned. around the same set of strategies that everyone sees the same way. Because you could say, oh no, we have strategies, but then you examine the senior leadership team and they believe that strategy and this group here believes in that strategy and they're not aligned. So culture, yes, foundation, align strategy to go together in the right direction.

Megan:

This might be a leading question based off of what you just said, but I was gonna say, what do you see senior leaders missing? the most? What are they not seeing? Where's their blind spot time and time again?

Larry:

That's a great question. They have blind spots. We all do. I do. We all do. And that's sometimes why we get hired is to help our clients see their blind spots. It's one of the opportunity points in our passion to coach and help businesses grow. What their blind spot is not understanding why, for some, understanding the why behind that culture. Right, but not just everyone, people say, well, we don't have a strong culture here. No, you have a culture, might not be strong, or we don't have culture here. No, you have culture, it's just not the culture you might need. The blind spot here is not seeing the difference between having a management team and a senior leadership team. and the difference between leadership teams and management teams. And when you get frustrated as an owner or CEO, the root cause often is not realizing you have a collection of people coming together as individual department heads or function heads, functioning independently, even if they come together as a management team in a meeting. versus them walking in the room with the mindset not about my department or about my function, but this is about the company. And what happens to the person here affects me, and there's this interdependence. And so owners need to really create this owner mindset and this interdependence. And if I'm not accountable and don't own my end as a functional leader, department head, it's going to affect you. It's going to affect you. And that is where a lot of my work is helping the owners and CEOs differentiate management teams and senior leadership teams.

Megan:

You're bringing up a conversation I just had last week on a coaching call specifically around this, and it was illuminating for the person I was chatting with because they were You know, they grew and grew, and now they're in more of a management, more of a leadership role, and they're talking to their senior leader, and they're having an inter-department conflict. And when I was chatting with him, he was so focused and it wasn't him, so focused on his team and his department and how do I clear the path for them and how do I help them grow and develop? And I will say, I do a lot of work with earlier stage leaders. They don't even understand that responsibility as a leader. Like there's even that level into that management of what does it really mean to be a department head, to be a leader for a team? That's that first level. And then just realizing that awareness, we completely pulled open that blind spot or address that blind spot of the other half of his role. There is an expectation there that they collaborate, that they work through these challenges, that they work with other teams, that they have that we mentality, that that's not something that anyone ever tells you when it comes to it.

Larry:

No. In fact, a lot of people think they have it, but they don't. because when you digest it, you break it down into its parts, you find out they might like each other on the management team, they might be collegial, but not collaborative. Sometimes collaboration creates conflict too, to get there, and you have to be good. So the foundation, a couple of thoughts here, the foundation is trust. Right? Lencioni's five dysfunctional teams. It's sitting on everyone's shelf, right? It's there. It's a great body of work. And I've expanded that because what I help do is help evaluate work with the owner and on a set of, including some of Lencioni's work and others I've included, 10 key cultural senior leadership behavioral factors. And what we do is on a scale of one to four, four being great and one low, I'll ask the CEO first to self-reflect, and then secondly, look at on those 10 behaviors, one to four, where the team is at as a team, then we'll break it down individually. So on one page, self, team, and then the individuals, we are looking at the big picture and key, not functional leadership, management, departmental behaviors, but senior leader behaviors. how you problem solve, how you go ahead and deal with change and uncertainty, right? How you manage conflict, how you communicate with each other. These are all the fundamentals that we have to look at for senior leadership teams. So there's the blind spot is not understanding that. And so how does that manifest? When a manager walks in or senior leader walks in, they might say level one, This is a waste of my time, I don't need to be here. That is a very departmental focused person. Level two, I wanna be here and I'm looking forward to getting something back to bring back to my department. That's not a bad thing. Level three, I'm walking in here, it's not about my department, it's about the company. And what happens anywhere in the company, I am responsible for as well And I feel the consequences, good or bad, of that. And so do you, and so do you, and so do all of us together. That's level three. That's where we gotta get people to.

Megan:

Did you say, was there a level four?

Larry:

I wish.

Megan:

Four is- I was waiting for something beyond that. I was like, holy moly, level three sounds good.

Larry:

Four is, you know what? I've never said four, but let's make four up right now. Four is when they self-realize it's working. And they say, we get it now. We'll call that level four. Level three is the positive intention. Level four is actually doing it and self-recognizing it.

Megan:

I love those three phrases. I'm like frantically writing them down because so often I've heard, right, this is a waste of my time. I don't need to be here. Right? And having that attitude, understanding what that means for the culture, what that means for that attitude, what that means for that individual and their own leadership level and what they naturally organically say and think. But that two, that two to three jump, I think is exactly what we were talking about before with the client that I was chatting with, right? How does that affect the company? What does that look like from a larger impact instead of just taking it back to the team?

Larry:

Yes. And our job as a trusted advisor is recognizing that and having, at times, a tough conversation to get them from here to there to there to level four. Now, in doing that, it requires trust in us as growth business advisors. It really requires trust. You can't just walk in. You walk in and tell people that, you're a consultant. That's different than being a growth trusted advisor. where you have earned the right for people to say, help me there. So it takes time sometimes for us as trusted advisors to build to have those type of tough conversations.

Megan:

I think you've made the argument successfully. Now, this was the intention, but that collaboration is probably that key mindset, that key component of a culture that without that ability to collaborate effectively, and it's a true collaboration, and especially being able to articulate it with the shared vision, with the shared goals, with the shared alignment, you're able to have that culture for girls.

Larry:

So there you go. You still need the strategies to go in the right direction together, but you don't get there without this building of a true senior leadership business ownership mindset collaboration.

Megan:

I'll ask the one last question then, so we can wrap up. But how would you be able to easily identify if you don't have a group of collaborative, a senior collaborative team?

Larry:

One of the things I do is I meet with everyone one-to-one. So I start, I meet with the owner and I meet with the CEO. It could be the same person. Sometimes ownership's different than who they hired to run the business. And it's really from my experience and there's a couple of ways I do it. One is I have an analytical business tool. It's an incredible tool that looks at 24 world-class best practices of businesses and it lines it up, understanding the strengths and weaknesses for growth. But then what I do is I delve into those to understand the why behind those answers, why the strengths, why the weaknesses. I meet individually with people and learn through interaction where they're at. And then I'll come back to the owner or CEO and I'll do that exam of the evaluation of the 10 key senior leadership behaviors. It's eye-opening because many times they never think of management teams in the sense of collaborative senior leadership behaviors. That collectively could take a couple of weeks to a month, depending on people's schedule, for me to walk away with really understanding the patterns and where they're at and where they need to go. So it takes a little bit of discovery work to do that.

Megan:

So if you're a senior leader, it's a lot of that reflection of what are those red flags for collaboration? And hopefully by listening to this and paying attention to it, you have that spidey sense that you're starting to build up and starting to really look and evaluate, identify where those opportunities are, where you're starting to see the mess. And then, of course, you bring in an expert that has a more robust and less emotional charge to illustrate that.

Larry:

Yes, but passion for them using what using we language as an advisor, not you language, we language. So they know that I'm there and care about their their results. Now, unfortunately, not everyone is going to resonate with this mindset. So there's three buckets. There's people say, I'm ready. Let's go. There's people in the middle who are looking left and right, and there's people who will never, they could be great at running their departments, but they're never gonna get there to be a collaborative senior leader. And the people in the middle, right, you know who your culture champions are, the carriers of culture in the one group, and you have to have them help you get the ones in the middle to bring them along. And sometimes the people over here, we have tough decisions to make depending on, on the future of the company, whether they're right for it or not. That's some difficult parts along the way as well. But it's all with the mindset of growth is fabulous, it is needed, and there's a business end, and then there's the people, leadership, cultural end.

Megan:

Beautiful. Is there any other final words of wisdom you want to let us hear?

Larry:

Larry, before we- You know what? Have fun exploring what's possible for your company and for yourself as a leader on understanding the difference between managing and leading. Explore it, embrace it, learn about it. Talk to Megan about it, right? Talk to me about it. Love to do that. And in that openness, I learned from Ted and Bert Prince, my father and uncle, in their ability to have those conversations together to lead their business and pivot when they need it to. Great things are on the horizon if you embrace that mindset.

Megan:

Very strong words of wisdom, very big impact. I do hope that you listen and pay attention to that, adopt it, go through with that new filter, new mindset through your work for the next day, week, month. year. And do reach out to Larry if you want to dive deeper into what that looks like for your organization, your leadership team, to get that clarity on how you can really elevate that culture, how you can bring in more of that so important collaboration, and ultimately the type of growth that will achieve. Thank you for listening so much. This was such a pleasure talking with you, Larry. And we'll talk soon. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Culture Conversations. I'm your host, Megan Robinson, founder of eLeader Experience, a professional leadership development company. Today, we shared actionable ideas to navigate the evolving workplace landscape, compete for talent, and build cultures that maximize potential. If you're looking to learn more about how to support your organization's leaders, you can learn more about our work at eLeaderExperience.com. Now get out there and contribute positively to your organization's culture with your own conversations.