Does Your CEO Have Fun?

I've been fortunate to start or be a part of a number of startup companies which is something I thoroughly love to do. I've always been a "culture person" to varying degrees too, sometimes playing a big role in shaping or changing the culture, and other times just working as part of an existing company culture. By "culture person" I mean I place a lot of importance on the culture of a company and believe it is something that deserves a great deal of purposeful time, attention and personal investment. 

Sometimes you make a very active and concerted effort to build a company culture around a set of principles, like when creating BoldTech Systems, we decided we wanted to create a learning organization along with our other core values. We spent a great deal of time those first three years implementing processes to achieve this goal, like company off sites, learning circles, creative tension, focusing on personal goals and growth in performance reviews, and teaching many ideas from the MIT Learning Lab and Peter Senge's book The Fifth Discipline. As a consulting company, that meant some significant time was spent that wasn't billable, but the results created a great place to work and made attracting great people much easier. I was and still am very proud of the culture we created there.

My experiences are also that if you don't make conscious decisions about your corporate culture, one will form around you anyway, and possibly one you'll later wake up to and find you don't like. And not everyone is "touchy, feelly" and into the culture thing -- it's not everyone's bag, so to speak. But in either case, I've learned that in startups culture is always strongly driven by the top management of the company, and most specifically the head of the company -- the CEO, president, founder, etc.

Companies are strongly influenced by and take on the personality of their leaders. Even members of the executive team take their cues from the top person. My philosophy is that small companies are about personalities, and big companies are about politics. (This is a topic I plan to blog more about sometime.) Employees, execs and management within a startup quickly learn what the head person does and doesn't value, and behaviors shape around those values pretty quickly.

I've come to learn that if I'm going to work at something, I really want to have fun doing it. Fun not just in meeting revenue and business goals (and yes, it's a lot more fun when you achieve those), but fun while doing the hard work is takes for a startup company to win. Having fun is part of the human spirit, something we should NOT hide or suppress (Carol Ross blogged about this recently.) One of the ways I know I'm having fun is when I realize I've had a smile on my face during the day.

Fun is infectious. If leaders in the business are having fun, that's going to spread and have an impact on others. Someone who exemplifies that is the CEO of Absolute Performance, Jerry Champlin, where I'm CTO. Jerry has fun at what he does. He frequently walks around with a smile on his face. When you talk to him, it's not unusual for the conversation to have a light hearted moment or two. And when out with the troops, Jerry doesn't hesitate to let his guard down, be himself, and have a good time with the employees in the company. Its also created some strong, long term working relationships. Don't get me wrong, Jerry's not just some social butterfly, flitting around spreading good cheer. But when the CEO has fun, you can tell it has an impact on other people.

A company's soul is its culture. You can walk into a business and pretty much get a quick feel for the place. Is there excitement in the air? Are people engaged, interacting with each other? Is any one having fun? Or is the place cold, almost having a suppressed or even a dead feeling. I'll bet you can look to the management team and see if what they are creating is a vibrant culture or one that's all business. And I'll bet if people are having fun, there's a much higher degree of engagement, leading to more significant results and personal pride in those results.

So, I just wanted to thank Jerry for setting a good example about having fun and Carol Ross for blogging about not hiding the human spirit. It inspired me to write about some of my own thoughts about culture, having fun and showing others that it's okay to have fun while creating success.

Now... At work today, put a smile on your face, do something that brings fun into your meeting, conversation or personal interactions. And see what impact it has on others around you.