Abigail Lucier November 22, 2019 As I continue to think about our culture and what will make it strong, I notice that many companies fall short of creating great cultures because they only focus on the positive. While positive recognition is certainly very important and completely missing in many workplaces, it’s only half of the equation.

It’s important to recognize hard work, great efforts, and outstanding performance results, but you’ll fail to optimize your culture if you neglect to recognize and accept mistakes as genuine human error. This second piece is equally, if not more, important as you give people the time to find the right answers and prevent the same mistakes in the future. To achieve this, our leaders must extend a measure of grace to each of us, and they should know our capabilities and motivations well enough to know that we’ll get things right when given the opportunity to grow and learn from a mistake.

Personally, I don’t think that all leaders are capable of this. In fact, this is probably one of the biggest factors that separates the great leaders from the mediocre ones. One thing that seems to unite all of us as humans is not our capabilities, but rather our ability to fall short of a goal. We are united in the fact that we all mess up from time to time. Nobody is perfect. We messed up yesterday, we might mess up today, and we could fall short tomorrow! I think what’s important is what you learn from these shortcomings and failures. If you have a leader that’s there to coach you through a mistake and help prevent it in the future, that’s worth its weight in gold. Instead of beating you over the head with your mistakes, a great leader will position you for success moving forward. You’re ultimately going to win in that situation, every single time.

Don’t get me wrong, while I firmly believe we should all extend a certain amount of tolerance for honest mistakes, that does not excuse poor performance on a consistent basis. The employee must display an aptitude for personal and professional development for these methods to work effectively, or you could find yourself spending calories on someone that would be better suited in another position altogether.

When leaders work with their people to create a culture of grace and equip people to do better—as good people want to do—the right culture is going to emerge. Then, you will have a cultural cornerstone of honesty, where leaders are free to say, “Hey, you made a mistake and I didn’t like it, but here’s what we’re going to have to do to make up for it as we move forward.” At the end of the day, if that same leader can stress to you how important you are to the team, and how they cannot do this without you and they don’t want do this without you, you’ll be able to forge a genuine bond and trust. Leadership that understands human error is inevitable and coaches their team through failures, will not only create a happier workplace but a more productive one as well.

Honesty and trust. Grace and equipping. These are the values upon which we are building a great culture here at Celero.

Kevin Jones- June 27, 2019 I’ve reached a place in my career where I choose the people I work with, whether it’s our employees, our strategic partners, or the kinds of customers we bring in to Celero. That’s not something to be taken lightly, and while that’s an incredible place to be, it comes with a high price. That price is constant mindfulness of the needs of others, and how best to take care of their needs. The key to our success is empathy.

When I first began managing people over 20 years ago, I knew that in order to motivate people to succeed for themselves and their customers beyond their wildest dreams, there couldn’t be a “Kevin Jones Way” of leadership. Instead, I decided to make each relationship about the other person, thinking that if I gave them what they needed—confidence, encouragement, tools, and sometimes an appropriate dose of tough love—they would not only play their role on the team, but be the ultimate teammate.

Early on, I could see that this path to leadership was a formula for winning—and winning big. When people know that you believe in them, consider their well-being in an authentic way, and invest in them for the long-term, their performance, productivity, and happiness know few boundaries.

The same dynamic holds true for partners and customers. When you extend empathy and try to walk a mile in the shoes of those outside your company, great things happen. In the business-to-business world, business owners and managers are looking for someone that transcends the traditional vendor/client framework, wanting trusted partners. When you live with empathy for your partners and clients, you can even transcend the trusted partner level and become more like a teammate or even a friend or family member.

What I’m talking about here isn’t a normal approach, but I think it’s what the best companies do best—empathizing to better understand employees, partners, and customers. And this abnormal approach definitely yields abnormal responses, underpinned by a higher level of loyalty.

Here’s the best part: when you choose to lead with your values, first among them empathy, but closely behind come teamwork, accountability, respect, and positivity, success is sweeter. It’s sweeter because you share it with others, with your employees, partners, and customers. I like to think of the difference in a way that many can relate to immediately. I enjoyed my life immensely before I met my wife. My life was certainly good, but I had no idea how great it would become, first through sharing it with her, and then with her and our children.

Anybody who knows me at all hears me talk a lot about concepts like loyalty and culture. Loyalty is something we create through individual relationships, and so is culture. But culture is what happens through the exponential power of all of those individual relationships when you bind them together in the service of a single mission. And the key to all of these wonderful elements of a company is empathy.