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Guest: Lisa Tanzer, a coach at CEO Coaching International. Lisa is an accomplished executive with over 30 years of experience, including 10 years in CEO and president’s roles and 10 years leading marketing teams as the CMO. She’s worked with Fortune 1000 companies like Gillette, Staples, and Hasbro, as well as privately held and venture-backed companies across a range of industries.
Quick Background: Nothing can move the needle on your company’s ceiling quicker than talent. That’s why great companies hire the best people, period. But how do you know if your teams are coalescing around the company’s BIG goals and cultural values?
On today’s show, Lisa Tanzer details the five traits of high-performing teams and her proven approach to building and managing the talent CEOs need to Make BIG Happen.
The Five Traits of High-Performing Teams from Lisa Tanzer
1. Living the mission, vision, and values.
There’s a BIG difference between having a poster in the break room that lists your company’s values, and a company where those values course through everything that every employee does.
“The highest performing teams have a common purpose they’re living every day,” Lisa says. “Companies that are living their values, their consumers see it. And they can build true authenticity and trust and loyalty with their consumers. But the employees also feel like they’re part of something bigger. They feel a sense of purpose and they know why they’re showing up to work every day and they’re passionate about that.”
For example, one of Patagonia’s core values is, “Protect our home planet.” They’re so committed to sustainability and reducing their environmental footprint that they design long-lasting products so that their customers will actually buy less stuff. Patagonia also gives its employees paid opportunities to volunteer, helps them make eco-friendly home upgrades like solar panels, and closes its offices on election days. Plus, as founder Yvon Chouinard writes in his excellent business book Let My People Go Surfing, employees have a free pass to hang ten any time the waves are good in Southern California — as long as they finish their work, of course.
Lisa was part of the brainstorming team that helped office supply store Staples and its mission-critical “Easy Button” reposition itself in the age of Amazon.
“My project was, how do we operationalize easy?” Lisa says. “And this was a two-year project from the customer standpoint as well as the employee standpoint. So for customers, what’s the store design like? How are you greeted? What kind of credit do we extend to you for small businesses? What’s the website usability? Is this as frictionless and easy as possible? But then we did a whole project with the employees and understood their pain points. How do you get your supplies at work? How do you communicate with your coworkers? How does the cafeteria work? We looked at all pain points from an employee standpoint so that they could understand the difference between what’s something that was currently not easy and how to make it easy and how it feels when that friction goes away.”
2. Owning company culture.
“The best teams I’ve seen, company culture is owned by everybody, not just the leadership team,” Lisa says. “It’s understanding what’s important to the company. How do you define what’s important? How do you measure it? And how do you evolve it?”
Over the course of her career, Lisa has developed a deck of culture questions that she uses to measure what is really important to employees, what kinds of challenges they’re experiencing on a daily basis, and what’s motivating their performance — or lack thereof. Some of the questions that Lisa would ask employees twice per year include:
- Do I know what is expected from me at work?
- Do I have the tools, equipment, and resources I need to do my work?
- Do I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day?
- Have I received positive comments about my work?
- Do I feel like I’m part of a team?
- Do I know who to turn to if I have a problem at work?
- Are my coworkers committed to doing high-quality work?
- Does my opinion count?
Based on these answers, Lisa recommends that CEOs pick two or three critical issues that they can focus on and determine action steps that will help employees own and embody the company culture. For example, you might use the company’s meeting rhythm to encourage employees to share their opinions and to publicly recognize top performers for going above and beyond.
3. Hiring and firing for both competency and culture fit.
Big smiles, winning personalities, and sparkling resumes often lead CEOs to hire the wrong people for the wrong reasons.
And longtime employees are often among the hardest to let go — even if they’ve spent more time grumbling lately than executing at a high level.
But your company’s culture is simply too important, and too vulnerable, for CEOs to tolerate employees who aren’t buying in.
Look at Zappos, a company that places a very high cultural premium on “Delivering happiness” to both customers and employees. They will actually pay unhappy employees to quit, because they believe unhappy employees won’t be able to deliver on their BIG cultural value.
“I’ve exited people for that reason,” Lisa says, “and it’s hard to do. ‘But they’re great at their job’ — yeah, but they’re making everyone miserable around them. They’re creating chaos and negative attitudes. You don’t need to fit perfectly. It’s more about being a cultural asset. At Life is Good, we had Superpowers. Those were our values: Openness, courage, simplicity, humor, gratitude, compassion, fun. I would ask employees, ‘Which of these superpowers resonates the most with you, and why?’ I really want to keep asking you why and how that shows up for you and what that feels like in your everyday life. You have to get beyond the superficial with somebody and ask questions very specific to their values.”
4. The goals and objectives of the business are part of the everyday conversation.
As we head into Q4, every CEO should be looking forward to their 2025 Annual Planning Session. But as important as it is to set BIG goals, executing on the daily, actionable, measurable steps that get you closer to those goals is arguably more important.
“The cascading goals are critical,” Lisa says. “I’ve even seen where, at the end of the year, employees are like, ‘Oh, I didn’t know that was one of my goals.’ How could you not know? So you have to measure, and you have to measure on an ongoing basis. Managers have to make it part of their one-on-ones and document progress monthly. Make it really important. The company is celebrating the goals that we’ve accomplished. What’s the most important thing? These goals. There’s a lot of other stuff that goes on in the day-to-day where people lose track of what they’re supposed to be doing. So to me, that is a management and leadership responsibility to ensure that goals are part of what you talk about. Always.”
Often, BIG goals just aren’t motivating enough by themselves. Yes, employees should feel challenged and inspired. But they also have to see how helping the company’s progress will also help their progress, personally and professionally.
“Aligned incentives are everything,” Lisa says. “If it’s not important to you, why are you going to do it? I love companies that have incentives that go top to bottom. We all win and lose on EBITDA, if that’s important. It matters to everybody because you need to make these metrics work in order for anyone to get their bonus. I did this at one company where literally, top to bottom, warehouse worker to leadership team, EBITDA drove the bonus. And then how do you make a metric like EBITDA relatable to everybody? Every single company meeting that everyone was at, we described EBITDA. We all had the same goal. And I remember one day walking through the distribution center and someone says, ‘Hey, Lisa, I found this new packing tape and it’s one cent cheaper. That’s going to help EBITDA, right?’ Exactly. Everyone knew it. You have to make sure their incentives are aligned with their goals.”
5. Caring.
“The highest performing teams care,” Lisa says, “and they care a lot. They care about the company. They care about their teammates. They care about their customer. They care about their community. Those highest-performing teams are fully invested, 360 degrees. And when you care like that, work doesn’t feel like work. That’s when you know it’s the right team. They’re living it as part of their own value system.”
Your scoreboards and meeting rhythms are going to keep employees focused on the numbers you need to hit. But a caring and compassionate company is going to take its cues from the CEO. Employees notice when you stop by their desk to ask about their kids as well as their progress on a top project. They notice if your door is always open and if you follow through when they raise serious cultural issues. They notice if they feel nurtured and encouraged to grow along with the organization, versus feeling pushed to do more, faster, without any commensurate incentives.
People are your company’s most important resource. But if you treat them like a resource, you’ll never tap their full potential.
“A lot of companies say they care about people professionally, their development, their careers, all that stuff,” Lisa notes. “But how about caring about the person on a personal level? If something’s going on in somebody’s family, know that, acknowledge it, realize that everybody’s human. And team members care. So they’ll cover for each other. They’ll help them through a tough time. If I looked across the whole team, I could look at someone who’s a little bit less skilled than someone else, but if they care the most, they will be part of the highest-performing team members by far. They’ll go the extra effort, they’ll be creative, they’ll be resourceful. Leadership sets a lot of that example about showing that they care.”
Top Takeaways From Lisa Tanzer
1. Live your culture and your employees — and customers — will follow you on your mission.
2. Align incentives from top to bottom of the company so every team member is focused and moving in the same direction on your firm’s most important objectives.
3. Care about your people and they’ll care about your business and each other.
Links:
4 Steps to Building a Powerful Organizational Culture – CEO Coaching International’s Jaime Cohen Szulc discusses four strategies to strengthen organizational culture so CEOs can create a team that backs the company’s mission and values.
Turning Your Company’s Culture into a BIG Competitive Advantage – Marty Parker, the founder and CEO of Waterstone Human Capital, provides a deep dive on the specific, intentional ways that CEOs can transform culture and create a high-performing organization that attracts and retains the best people.
About CEO Coaching International
CEO Coaching International works with CEOs and their leadership teams to achieve extraordinary results quarter after quarter, year after year. Known globally for its success in coaching growth-focused entrepreneurs to meaningful exits, CEO Coaching International has coached more than 1,000 CEOs and entrepreneurs in more than 60 countries and 45 industries. The coaches at CEO Coaching International are former CEOs, presidents, or executives who have made BIG happen. The firm’s coaches have led double-digit sales and profit growth in businesses ranging in size from startups to over $10 billion, and many are founders that have led their companies through successful eight, nine, and ten-figure exits. Companies working with CEO Coaching International for two years or more have experienced an average revenue CAGR of 31% (2.6X the U.S. average) and an average EBITDA CAGR of 52.3% (more than 5X the U.S. average).
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