Culture Code Champions

Building a winning team culture produces great results. Host Bill Higgs chats with Wendy Stevens, a world-class athlete who also coached and built one of the best lacrosse programs in the United States, about the seven steps to help build a culture. Wendy shares how she was able to build her tight-knit team through her own winning program and how she guides her athletes on giving back to the community. She also gives some great nuggets about recruiting and training girls with their hustle, the championship culture, and hard communication.

The culture is a reflection of the leader. Equipping you with the formula of formulas that will help you develop a business that matches who you are in the leadership position is Sean Callagy, one of America’s top trial attorneys and creator of Peak Performance Technologies. Sean speaks on how to make our culture count by improving ourselves as leaders, detailing the models and systems for self-mastery, influence mastery, and process mastery. Sharing his sales method, he introduces the concept of integrity-based selling and lays out the four steps you have to do to close a sale.

The people you have in the company are just as important to your success as the systems you have in place. A key contributor to Mustang’s unstoppable take off from its inflection point, Mary Needham – senior-level leadership recruiting specialist – talks with host Bill Higgs about how she helped Mustang as well as others do market entry and find the right people who allowed them to succeed. Diving deeper into culture, Mary shares its relationship to sales as part of the Culture Code, which is to sell while the shop is full. Helping the leaders to build a people-first culture, she also talks about some of the biggest leadership challenges and how to overcome them.

There is more to leading than simply being a leader. Greg Sills, the Managing Director at Apollo Global Management LLC, lays some of the groundwork to talk about management and leadership principles. As a leader himself, he shares some leadership techniques that he teaches his team, including the seven steps of culture building. Greg also talks about the Atlantis Project, the complexities that came with it, and how they met the challenges of the world-class mission. Learn more about how to manage and lead people in this discussion.

Businesses, at the end of the day, always come back to its people. It is with this that company culture is so crucial to having business success. At the center of this is the role of the founder or CEO who are the ones steering the entire organization in the right direction. Greg Higgs, the Founder and CEO of Fab Fours, sheds light to the challenges that come with these leadership positions. Taking us through his own experiences growing his manufacturing company, he shares great nuggets of wisdom not only on leadership but building a team and dealing with clients. Greg also shares how he set up his yearly planning cycle and some methods that help keep his team on schedule and on budget.

Who says marketing is only for your products and services? In this episode, we go beyond the surface and take a closer look into marketing cultures with world-class marketing professional, Dena Lee. Dena takes us through the process of marketing internally and, later on, externally to clients, suppliers, fabricators, and the like. Working with Bill Higgs at Mustang, she also talks about what it is like to be working with the company, letting us in on her role of facilitating culture change and growth along with the teams. Join in on this insightful conversation with Bill and Dena and learn more about marketing cultures.

The world is continuously changing that if you don’t adapt to it, you will get left behind. Within organizations, that means going through the motions of change when it comes to leadership and culture. Chris Widener, a world-class thought leader and motivational speaker on leadership, culture, and success, takes us through the different dimensions of leadership and building great team cultures in companies and organizations. Pouring in lessons he learned from his speaking career, Chris talks about helping leaders learn to speak and position themselves to influence others. He also talks about what we need to keep when culture becomes institutionalized and how we could continue to balance it with multiple generations involved.

When we talk about war, we often think about the people being deployed to support the effort. However, the people that get left behind – their families – need just as much support. Deanie Dempsey, the wife of US Army General Martin Dempsey who was the 18th chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, graces today’s episode. When General Dempsey got deployed to the forward operating bases, Deanie assumed a major role in supporting the families left behind. Today, she talks about the importance of supporting unit families through deployments and her role in building a strong unit culture that included the families.

It’s inevitable that the Baby Boomers are going to go out and the Millenials are coming up to take their place. As a CFO or any leader of an organization or company, do you handle the communication bridge from one generation to the other? Our guest for this episode is Charles Wilds, a Strategic Business Development and Operations Executive Coach for the SOS Group Inc. Charles has helped hundreds of leadership teams find their true north and coalesce into dynamic teams. Today, he tackles leadership development and management, and shares how he’s preparing CFOs and other leaders for the change that’s occurring across generations and cultures, as well as how they can connect at a deeper level with the second, third, and fourth generation leaders who will eventually be running the company.

When we want to find the best people in the industry, the answer is pretty simple – we need to take good care of them. As an HR professional for Mustang Engineering, Thuy Geraci says the biggest selling tool to bring in people are the employees themselves. When you build a team that everybody else wants to join, it’s easier to hire good people and get them to come to your company. In this episode, Thuy shares a little bit about her experiences when she first joined Mustang before diving into culture coaching and Mustang’s philosophy on how to take care of people.