Notes
Every company has a culture, whether the owner picked it or not. Eric has led in-person teams and remote teams, and his view is that the pros and cons of each cancel each other out. What decides the culture is the leader. So if your company is going to have a culture anyway, you might as well be intentional to build it, even if right now it is just you.
Eric lays out six types of company culture (transactional, asynchronous collaboration, results oriented with autonomy, highly social and collaborative, innovation driven, and shared mission) and says plainly that none of them is wrong. His own preference is shared mission. Then he gives four keys that apply no matter which one you choose: foster the culture with mission, vision and core values in writing; treat communication as everything, which for his team meant moving off pure async to weekly one on ones and a weekly leadership meeting; focus on results instead of micromanaging your way into being the bottleneck; and remember you are leading, not managing, because a great manager will run your company into the ground over time.
The second half is the practical part. Eric opens Friday leadership meetings with a team time question, keeps one all-team channel that is never used for work, runs a picture scavenger hunt over a weekend so people get out with their spouses, and uses async video for house tours across a team spread over several countries. He also explains the family fund his team receives after five years, roughly two months of salary for many of them, set aside for one purpose: time together as a family. The episode closes with the leadership tip of the week, that the core of leadership is courage.
Key Highlights
- Every company has a culture, so you might as well be intentional to build the one you want.
- Write down your mission, vision and core values even as a company of one, because overwhelm makes it easy to compromise.
- Manage through email, but lead and coach through video, because you can manage a system but you cannot manage a culture.
- A great manager will run your company into the ground over time, because managers keep things the same and your company has to evolve.
- The core of leadership is courage, the courage to have hard conversations and to end the workday when your family needs you.
Key Takeaways
There’s no doubt about it. Creating and leading a remote team has got some challenges to it that you don’t face when you bring a team together in one place. However, though, come to think of it, as somebody who’s led both in-person teams and virtual teams, both types of teams have pros and cons. And at the end of the day, I think they completely neutralize each other. And I don’t think one way is better or worse than the other. I know that’s not a popular opinion with a lot of people, but I just don’t see it, because it all comes down to the leader creating a company culture. So how do you create a remote team culture and lead it from afar that has people wanting to stay with you for the long haul? Let’s talk about that in this episode.
My name’s Eric Dingler. I’m a full time digital nomad entrepreneur, traveling around the world with my wife and kids. And I am so thankful to have you here listening today to this podcast episode.
Now, I talked a little bit about remote teams with some guests, with Tim in one episode and Stephanie in another. Those were back in episodes seven and eight. But today I want to focus on leading the team to achieve a culture that you want your company to have.
Now, real quick, if you’re listening and you’re like, I don’t have a team yet, it’s just me. That’s all right. This is where culture starts. What you do now is starting to create the culture of the type of company that you’re eventually going to grow into, if that is your desire. But regardless, you’re going to have a company culture. So if your company is going to have a culture, you might as well be intentional to build it.
Now, what I mean by culture, well, what I mean by culture is that thing, it’s almost an intangible. But you know it because you experience it. In fact, I think for businesses, there are six kinds of company culture. And I’m going to list those real quick and then I’m going to talk about how you can work to create culture, and specifically the type of culture that we have in my company.
So what is culture? What is culture? Well, it’s how you do what you do. It’s the language you use. It’s how you talk to people. It’s the atmosphere and all of this. And it’s different when you’re remote, but it’s not impossible to have a great team culture.
Now, first off, I don’t want to define in this episode, or really, you know, for that matter, in any episode, I don’t want to pigeonhole people into thinking that there’s one specific right way to do it, and how I do it, how I run my business, is the way you should run your business. That’s not true. And so these six different types of culture, if you will, I don’t care which one you choose. It’s just, you’re going to have one of these. So be intentional about it and own it. And maybe you’ve never thought about this before.
Number one: the first type of company culture is a transactional type of culture. It’s a transactional culture. Okay. There’s very clear expectations, and that’s good, but it’s purely transactional. It lacks any type of engagement or connection that keeps people fulfilled beyond, here’s what I need you to do. Great. It’s done. Here’s the money, and that’s it. All right? It’s just that. It’s transactional.
Number two: you can have a company culture that is asynchronous collaboration. Now, this has a lot of flexibility in it, and that’s great, but it has very limited interaction, or at least face to face time interaction. Your employees might miss any social connection whatsoever and not really have a sense of belonging that fosters loyalty. But again, if that’s not important to you, then you can totally have a company that runs that way.
Number three: you can also have the third type of culture, which is results oriented with autonomy. Now, in this type, this can kind of be a balance between the first two. But if autonomy becomes too isolated, employees might not feel valued or part of the team at all, and this could potentially increase turnover. Now, maybe not. If you are very upfront in the recruitment and onboarding, then you can set people up and they work and they just continue to work and produce. And there’s not a whole lot of checks and balances with it. And you can have the right person that really is kind of out there doing their thing, or several people that are out there doing their thing.
Number four: the fourth company culture is highly social and collaborative. All right. There’s a lot of fostering of connectivity here, and this can really significantly reduce turnover. However, ensuring that everyone feels included in this can be a bit challenging, because this is where you really start getting into mixing introverts and extroverts and all those things. Not impossible, but can totally be done.
Number five: then you have the fifth type, which is innovation driven. This is a culture that’s very engaging. But if experimentation leads to instability or lack of clear direction, it might cause some employees to seek a more structured environment. You start to see this in physical office buildings, you know, where they try to get away with no walls or no doors, and there’s all kinds of ping pong tables and foosball tables and bright colors and everything like that. Again, nothing wrong with that. There’s nothing wrong with that. You still lead through that, but you just have to be very intentional with that. And you can do the same thing with a remote team.
Number six: and then the sixth culture, and this is the one that I strive for the most, maybe have a couple of these mixed in, but primarily for me, I love the shared mission. This is all about setting out a strong purpose in front of people that’s very motivating. This reduces turnover, and as long as everybody sees how their work is contributing to the bigger picture, there’s a high buy in to this. And so I love having a shared mission, a big vision, with a team that’s working together.
And that’s just my preference. And so that’s the type of company that I know how to build. And I used to do this in person. I used to run a summer camp for 15 years, and that was all about bringing a group of 18, 19, 20 year olds together, summer after summer after summer, to achieve a mission. Our vision, how I planted the church, and, you know, very much on the mission there, and now in the marketplace. I just brought all of that into what we do as a company.
Now, no matter which one of these, again, you choose, I don’t think one of them is right or wrong. Just choose it and begin to implement it. Now I am going to share with you four keys that go into creating company culture, even really no matter which type of company culture you choose. These are kind of four keys that go into creating the company culture that you decide.
But before I share these, I just want to take a second to highlight this episode’s Spotlight Resource. It’s a tool I use called Nozbe. N-O-Z-B-E. Again, N-O-Z-B-E. This is my digital memory. If it doesn’t go in Nozbe, it doesn’t get done. It’s just that simple. I’ve used Nozbe as my to do list for, my gosh, probably 15 years. I absolutely love it. It’s so simple, it’s so clean. It integrates perfectly between my iPhone and computer and iPad, and I’d be totally lost without it. And so if you’re someone that’s struggling with a to do list, or looking for a tool to help yourself get a little more organized, then I would definitely recommend you check it out. Get a 30 day free trial at DNEPodcast.com/nozbe. N-O-Z-B-E.
All right. So what are these four points that I think it takes to be focused on as a leader to work on creating your culture? And then after that, I’m going to share with you some fun things that I do with my team to help us build connection and that sense of camaraderie and being on a team.
All right. So the four things I think you need to focus on as a leader to build your culture.
Number one: you’ve got to foster the culture. All right. It’s not going to happen otherwise. You have to own it, even remotely. Like, you have to make it happen. And to set up a strong team culture, you need three primary things. You need your mission. You need your vision. You need your core values. Even if you’re a company of one.
And here’s why. When you’re a company of one and you set out your mission, vision, core values, and you read them every single morning, it’s a reminder of what you’ve said is important. Now, sometimes it can be really easy to have some core values, to have a mission, a vision, and then get so caught up in the day to day running of your business, especially if you’re in that stage of business where you’re in the All-In, or even just Weekend Warrior, and it’s like it’s all your responsibility and there’s not enough hours in the day, and you just feel like you’re constantly going after and chasing the next thing. You’ve got to get that next sale. You’ve got to get the last thing delivered, and you’re just going and going. It’s really easy in that sense of overwhelm. It can be really, really easy to compromise.
And so having a set of core values, having a list of, you know, 6 to 10 things that says, here’s how my company does things. You know, we never compromise on quality. Understand the other person’s point of view. Communicate on a cadence. Whatever your cultural core values are, then you need to put those in writing and remind yourself of those every day.
Now, I don’t do that anymore. I used to. I used to look through my core values, my mission and my vision every morning to get things started. It really was a big part of me helping to see what I was doing, not as a hobby, but as a business, something that existed that I had the responsibility to steward.
But having this mission, vision and core values, in fact, I had a leadership team meeting today with three of my leaders, and I talked about one of our core values, and constantly talking about our mission, vision and core values. And having those core values makes it a lot more comfortable hiring someone. Because you talk about these things as you’re hiring your team, and then as you train them to do it, and you ensure that they’re doing their job based upon your vision, mission and core values, it’s going to be easier for you to go on a ten day trip, a 20 day trip, a 30 day vacation, because you’re not going to be worried about, are they doing things the way you would want it done, because you’ve already ensured that that’s happening. You’ve established your mission, vision, core values, and then you’ve trained yourself on them and your team on them.
So that’s number one. You have to foster a strong team culture, leveraging mission, vision and core values at the core of that. Now, if you don’t have mission and vision and core values, or you’re a little overwhelmed by the idea of creating those, I have a one time 90 minute coaching roadmap where I can help you create these three things. All right? I help you start to craft out that mission, vision and core values. And then after 90 minutes, over the next couple of weeks, you’re going to work on that. You bring it back to me and I’ll help you do some of the final wordsmithing on that, if that would be helpful for you. For more on that, just go to DNEPodcast.com.
All right. So our second skill, if you will, or focus that we have to have as leaders to grow the company culture, or to have and foster a company culture. Number two: communication is everything. Communication is everything. And what you communicate is critically important. Kind of going back to the first one. What’s one of the things you’re going to communicate over and over and over? Vision. Mission. Core values. Communication is critical.
Now, there was a season in my business that we were almost entirely asynchronous. Like, I would send a message and I’d get a message back from Peter, and I’d send a message, I’d get a message back from Peter. And we had no standing meeting, no standing one on ones. He would work, I would work, we would send Loom videos and stuff back and forth. And that worked for a while.
But as the team grew, and my portfolio of my job started to shift as I was able to hire other people and take responsibilities off of my plate and really start to own the CEO role of my company, I needed to really pivot the way we were communicating. Asynchronous just wasn’t working for me. And so we’ve gone now to a standing meeting structure. I meet with each of my direct reports one on one every single week. I have a leadership team meeting with my three top leaders every single week. And for anybody on my team that is leading a direct report, I require them to meet one on one with their team members. Communication is absolutely everything.
Okay. Number three: focus on results, not micromanagement. If you focus on micromanagement, and you focus on delegating out every single little task and evaluating every single little piece of work, and not letting anything go out until you see it, you’re going to be the bottleneck, and you’re going to stay in that transactional type culture. Now, if that’s what you want, okay, you can do that. You’re going to be very limited to what you can do. But if you want to expand out and have a company that’s growing, you really need to shift to focus on results and not micromanagement. Your team is going to become to feel very empowered. They’re going to understand that you trust them. They’re going to feel more loyal to you. And honestly, they’re going to work harder, because they know that the results matter, the journey matters. You’re not micromanaging every little thing, but you’re staying focused on keeping the main thing the main thing.
Number four: my fourth and final tip here is, remember, you’re leading, not managing. All right. Now, there is a world of difference between leading and management. A great manager will ruin a company over time. All right. I’ll say that again. A great manager, the most ideal, perfect manager, will hopefully run your company into the ground over time, because managers manage systems and they keep things the same. They work to maintain status. They embrace, this is how we do it. And they just do it. And because it’s how they do it, it’s how we do it. That’s how we do it. Here is what we do. And they just keep doing, and everybody that they’re managing, they keep everybody on track as that as well.
The issue with that is, over time, your company has to pivot on some things. There has to be some change. Your company has to evolve over time. And a manager won’t do that. A manager is showing up to manage. You are leading. You are leading. There is a very big difference between leading and management.
Now, sometimes I have to manage, but when it comes to culture, I can’t manage culture. I lead to create culture. So as I’m running my company and working with my team, I manage through email, but I lead and coach via video. Even though my team is, you know, I’m in Costa Rica, and I’ve got my Director of Web Services in Bulgaria. Our Director of Digital Marketing Services is in El Salvador. Our project manager is in Ohio in the USA. Our client support specialist is in India. I mean, we’re kind of just all over the place. We’re onboarding a new team member in Mexico. We’ve got a part time team member in the Ukraine. I mean, like, we’re all around the world. And so I have to manage my team through email, but I lead and coach my team through video. And we have a lot of fun. We have a great company culture.
Now, how do we do that? How do we have company culture that’s not just, well, I only see them on video, and I just send them what to do, and we don’t have the proverbial water cooler and stuff like that? And I know some business owners. I’ll tell you something right now. There’s a guy, Dave Ramsey, EntreLeadership. The guy is phenomenal. I read all of his stuff. I listen to his podcast. I’ve been to his trainings and workshops. The man is a money genius. He is a business genius. I mean, he’s been doing this so much longer than I have. I love learning from Dave Ramsey and the Ramsey organization and EntreLeadership. But one thing I totally disagree with him on is he is dead set against remote teams. And that’s fine. I don’t have a problem with that. I understand where he’s coming from, but I just disagree with him, and I’m allowed to. You may disagree with me, and I know he would disagree with me, but that’s okay. That’s okay. I think you can create a company culture and have high work output from a remote team, and it’s all great, but it takes some intentionality.
So how do we do this? Well, one of the things that we do, it starts with leadership. So with my leadership team, I start our Friday leadership team meetings with some type of question. We call it team time. And it’s a question. Today’s question, as I’m recording this, today’s question was, if we visited you where you are, and you could only take us to one place within an hour of your house, where would you take us and why?
And it was fascinating to hear, like, one person wanted to take us to their favorite amusement park because they love adventure and they love riding roller coasters, and that was exciting. Another person, she went, oh man, this beautiful beach. And she loved it because it’s like a gem of a country. And you could just tell the pride she had in her country, in this beautiful place. Another guy, he’s more adventurous. He wanted to take us to see these caves. And there’s this restaurant there, and there’s this one special food truck, and oh my gosh, it’s so good, and just the whole experience. And as they explained these places, they describe them in a way that you just get to appreciate the love of their community. Okay. And we all sense that. We talked about that for a little bit afterwards. So that takes, we have about 15 minutes that the four of us talk through those. And so I just have a whole list of questions that I’m asking from, and I’m constantly adding new questions to.
We also play games as a team. So every once in a while, we have an all team chat that is not to ever be used for work related things. We have channels for work, but we have one channel in our project management software called Hive. We have one channel that’s everyone. And I just like to, every once in a while, post a question. The other day I posed the question, if you could get one thing for your birthday, no matter what it is, what would it be and why? And it was so fun. Like one of the guys was like, I’ve never been able to travel by airplane. I would love to fly somewhere and be able to travel and see someplace new. One was, we’re doing some renovations at our house and really working on the outside area, and I’d love to have a new barbecue grill to really add to that, have a place to entertain. And the list went on and on. It was fun to read through.
Next week, we’re actually going to be playing a game. We’re going to have a scavenger hunt. We’re going to have a picture scavenger hunt. And so I’ve come up with a list right now. I’m going to work on it probably a little bit over the weekend with my wife, and even ask my kids to contribute some ideas. But I’ve got a list of 24 things that you can find almost in any urban environment. You know, traffic light, road sign, park bench, the front of your house or apartment, a Coca-Cola logo. And there hasn’t been a country yet I’ve been to as a digital nomad that I haven’t seen Coca-Cola. And so anyway, we’ve got all of these different things, and we’re going to have a WhatsApp group just for this, and we’re going to have this scavenger hunt. And I’m going to give everybody a week. And by the end of the week, we’ll see whoever gets the most gets a prize. And if there’s a tie, that’s fine. Everybody that ties gets a prize. And there’s a special prize if you’re able to get everything on the list.
And so we play these games, and what happens with it is you start to see these fun pictures of parks that you’ve never been to around the world, or just different things from different cities. And so you have to post a picture of it and describe it. And I was telling the team about it today, and said, we’re going to do this, and it’s going to run over a weekend, because I want to encourage you to go out with your family. All of my full time team right now that participate in this, they’re all married. And so I was able to say, I want you to go out with your spouse. Just have fun.
Well, what am I doing there? I’m saying, listen, we think family is important. In fact, we encourage you to spend time together as a family. One of the things that my wife and I do is we’ve told everybody on our team that after you’ve been with us for five years, you get a special family fund. And this family fund is a couple thousand dollars, and you can use it to invest in family activities. Buying season passes to an amusement park, taking it to go on vacation, buying season tickets to a sporting club that you like. You just have to share with us what you used it for, to invest time in together with your family. And this is, like I said, you get it after you’ve been on my team for five years full time. And it’s a significant amount of money. For a lot of our team, it’s the equivalency of two months salary. So it’s a pretty significant chunk of change that we budget for. And they have to come in, say, hey, listen, this is what we’re going to do. And again, we don’t say no. It’s just, this is what we’re going to spend it on, and this is what we’ll be doing together as a family.
And that’s important to us. So we want to show that to our team. We want to model that. We want to equip them and empower them to go out and do those things. And we have fun as a staff. We play games remotely, and it doesn’t take a lot to figure out what can we do with some of that. We use the app Marco Polo, which is asynchronous video. So again, it’s kind of like sending text messages, but with video. Love it. But there’s been times we’ve done office tours and house tours and a tour around my block, and you just start recording the video and you walk out and you just show everybody, right, this is where I live and stuff like that. Because if we were working together in a community, there’s a chance you might get invited to somebody’s house for a birthday party or something like that. But that doesn’t happen here, because we’re all over the world. But we can still do things that bring people together. And we feel like we’re a team. We feel connected.
So these are just a few of the things that we do. If you like those ideas and you want to hear more of those ideas, just let me know. Reach out, let me know. Send me an email, and I’ll be happy to put together future podcast episodes where I talk about team building, things like that. So, team building activities and different things that we do like that to work on having a culture for our team that is fun and exciting, and they feel like they’re part of something, even though they’ve never met each other in person, because we’re spread all around the world and different time zones.
All right. Well, what I want to do now is I want to share with you this week’s leadership tip of the week. Now you may be thinking, what is the leadership tip? Eric, this is my first podcast episode of yours. Not exactly sure what that means. Well, leadership is one of my favorite topics to talk about. And I think your leadership capacity is the capacity of your business. Like, your business is not going to grow beyond your leadership skills. And so if leadership is going to play such a major, important role in the success of your business, and with my goal with this being to help you with your business, I want to make sure that I give some leadership tips.
Now, this whole episode has been focused on leadership. All right. There are five core areas of a business that need your attention as the owner. Leadership is the first one. You’ve got to give attention to leadership, lead generation, lead conversion, collecting and managing money, and project delivery, project management. And so you’re constantly having to focus on these five things. But honestly, none of them are as important or more important than leadership.
So what is this episode’s leadership tip of the week? The core of leadership. Are you ready for this? I’m going to tell you right now what the core of leadership is. What does it take to be a great leader? You know, what is a leader? A leader has influence. A leader leverages influence to add value to those around them. That’s what a leader is. But what does it take? What is the core of leadership? You might think it’s a desire to help people, but it’s not desire. It’s not wish, it’s not hope, it’s not assurance.
You know, the core of leadership is courage. It takes courage to be a leader, because it takes courage to keep your mouth shut when you want to lash out at someone. It takes courage to be patient, to lead people to discovering truths that you want them to own. It takes courage to say, this is what we’re going to do, when others are telling you that’s not a great idea. It takes courage to sit down and correct someone and say, listen, I can’t allow this to continue. If this continues beyond this point, we’re going to have to give you permission to work for someone else. Like, it takes courage to have hard conversations. It takes courage to end the workday when you need to end the workday and go give time to your family.
The core of leadership is courage. I’ve never met a weak leader. If I’ve met anyone that is a weak leader because they had the title of leader, they were no leader. They were never a leader. They might have been a manager. You know, they may be a boss, but they’re not a leader. The core of leadership is courage.
Well, my friend, thank you for listening to this entire episode of the Digital Nomad Entrepreneur podcast. I would love it if you would like, subscribe, share, leave a rating or review. Do all the things that are nice to do for a podcast, and I’ll see you in the next episode. Until then, chase the big dream, lead with courage, and safe travels.
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