http://www.Perennialculture.com/

Perennial Culture, Milwaukee, WI (2026)

10/28/2023

🌟 Exciting Times in Boston! 🌟

I had the pleasure of hosting the Leadership Exchange in Boston this week, and what a learning experience.

Title: BUILDING AN ENGAGED AND PRODUCTIVE GLOBAL WORKFORCE

A heartfelt shout-out to our incredible partner HiBob and the insightful Dan Schawbel who generously shared his time and research with our community. 🙌

To navigate the ever-changing tides of today’s workforce, HR requires versatile strategies, a global perspective, and an agile workforce.

It’s time for a new era of global workforce management. Effective remote onboarding, trust-building, fostering connections, and performance processes are the keys to unlocking productivity.

Shoutout to the 30+ HR executives who joined at the Leadership Exchange Live for enlightening roundtable discussions covering:

✨ Cultivating a Positive Culture in a Hybrid Workforce
✨ Amplifying Engagement in a Hybrid Work Environment
✨ Optimizing Your Workforce Across the Globe
✨ Developing Essential Skills for Global HR Leaders in 2023

Let’s continue this transformative journey together! 🌟

05/08/2023

Do you want to elevate your company culture to new heights?

Consider this: every day, you and your team are either actively shaping your time or being controlled by it. The key to making the most of your time is to be intentional about how you spend it, ensuring it aligns with your purpose and drives meaningful impact.

Take, for instance, an hour of distracted, unfocused time each day. That seemingly small amount of time adds up to five hours of lost productivity each week, 20 hours a month, and a staggering 240 hours per year – the equivalent of 30 entire workdays wasted.

To foster a culture of high performance and engagement, it's essential to proactively block out time for the things that matter most and eliminate practices that hinder progress. Being intentional with your time is the cornerstone of success, as it empowers you to stay focused on your goals, rather than becoming overwhelmed by external pressures and distractions.

Let's face it – the world can be chaotic and unpredictable. But by taking control of your time, you can choose to navigate this space with purpose and intention, rather than being a passive victim of circumstance. So start today by asking yourself and your team how you can design your time to be impactful, intentional, and aligned with your shared purpose. The results may surprise you.

04/12/2023

Super excited to interview and be joined by Richard A. Moran tomorrow afternoon at 2pm ET.

Register here to attend live!

https://lnkd.in/geK5XUmi

Have any of these sentences ever came out of your mouth?
➡️Where do you want to go for lunch? Whatever!
➡️Which project team do you want to be on? Whatever!
➡️Do you want to meet with customers this week? Whatever!
➡️Are you interested in a promotion? Whatever!

Ok, maybe not that last one. But whatever... 😎

Author Richard A Moran, shares the word ‘whatever’ should never, ever be used.

It is a throwaway word.

Anyone who hears you say it thinks you don’t give a hoot about any decision that needs to be made.

The problem is not the word itself. The problem is that any time the word is used it means you are not making a choice — and life is all about small choices.

Especially within an organization - making quick and effective decisions are extremely important.

Seemingly small decisions are a part of each and every workday, and it is easy to ignore them. When the word “whatever” is used as a reply, you are simply not making a decision.

NEVER SAY WHATEVER makes clear the nuances of decision-making and how even the smallest decisions can affect both your organization's culture, individuals careers—and life.

Join us tomorrow to listen in from Richard himself!

03/14/2023

⭐ Do you ever leave an experience and still feel the energy and excitement weeks after? ⭐

Well, I for sure am experiencing that right now.

As someone that supports HR and people leaders every single day, I was so excited for the opportunity to come together LIVE in person, with over 100 executive-level HR leaders over the past two weeks.

What was extremely energizing about this room is it was filled with the pioneers that are going to lead the way forward in this next evolution of work.

We really are the new wave of leaders that are tasked with guiding our companies forward into the future.

The new models, strategies, and innovative ways to support our people will be used as the guide to be learned from in the next wave of HR leaders entering and moving up in the workforce.

This provides us with such an honorable opportunity to be curious, vulnerable, and most importantly, bold.

This leadership Exchange included peer-to-peer discussions as well as insight into best practices by a few industry leaders.

For some insight into the experience and the lessons learned, I expanded on my thoughts in this blog post that is attached.

Our first industry expert included the amazing Michael Landers, founder, and president of Culture Crossing, a global consulting company dedicated to finding innovative solutions for leaders and teams working in multicultural contexts.

We were then joined by Annie Rosencrans, People & Culture Director at HiBob. Sharing strategies around how you can support and scale your global workforce in times of immense change.

One of the final thought leaders to present with us was Anna A. Tavis, Ph.D, Co-Author of "Humans at Work" and Academic Director of the Human Capital Management Department at New York University.

She shared a framework that she calls the “4 Ws.” Work, workplace, workforce, and worth. What I loved about her session is how she laid out the evolution of jobs.

How in the past, jobs were about muscle, now they are about brains, but in the future, they’ll be about the heart. 💖

Read more on our website!

02/14/2023

In the spirit of valentines day, I wanted to share my notes of reflection from one of my favorite books, "Power and Love: A Theory and Practice of Social Change."

""
We often push love out of the workplace. With this belief that "it doesn't belong here..."

To me, love is one of my foundational values in life. I believe life is really a celebration of love. It's a very important symbol for me. Where there is love, we must embrace it. Where there is no love, we must provide it.

And in the workplace, love is the other-acknowledging, other-respecting, other-helping, drive that reunites the separated.

And love is the only emotion that expands our intelligence and drives us toward unity. Not only healing our broken systems but also healing ourselves.

At the heart of the highest performing and functioning teams, companies, and communities - love, as a base note, is the ore, and order, of the culture.

12/13/2022

Practicing Deep Listening

Do you ever get introduced to someone at a lunch meeting or a networking event, and before the conversation is over you forget the person’s name?

If the answer is yes, you’re not alone. According to most studies, the average person remembers between 25% and 50% of what he or she hears. That means that when you talk to your boss, your colleagues, or customers, they are likely to retain less than half of the conversation.

And it’s not so much that we have poor memories. Rather, it’s that most of us simply don’t listen well.

And... What happens when we don't listen well?

There is some interesting behavior that happens in our brains when people do not listen.

You may truly be actively hearing the words others are speaking, but your voice, vocabulary, body language, etc. can signal you’re not.

And when you show mixed signals on if you are listening or not, these wrong signals can trigger the wrong chemical reactions in the person sharing/speaking.

If a person doesn’t feel heard, that becomes their neurological and biochemical reality with you.

So I interact with you - I feel like you are distracted and not actually listening to me - I have a neurological and biochemical reaction from that experience that imprints you in my mind as someone who does not listen.

Now one time of doing this, not a big deal…

But if you repeat this not-feeling-heard chemical reaction multiple times, the person speaking will have neurons forming groups called neural pathways - Think of these as immediate roads the brain travels that link you to the negative emotional state you created from the sense of not feeling heard.

This means, the more we experience not feeling heard or listened to sensation with someone, the stronger this road forms within our brains.

And with that road created, here is the sad but true reality - People who don’t feel heard create pathways that release signals telling them they are not valued.

People who don’t feel valued don’t feel cared for.

People who don’t feel cared for don’t feel like they belong.

The funny thing is, the cost of listening is actually free!

12/06/2022

⭐The Essential Role of a Leader - Embracing "Both and" thinking.⭐

Ever since venturing outside of Wisconsin, and initiating what I am calling the "Adventure of Me (read more here - https://lnkd.in/gk_tWWvz)," I have been extremely fixated on the topic of "tension."

Partly because ever since I have been on my own and experimenting with different activities, I have naturally been outside my comfort zone the entire time.

I actually wrote about this recently and how noticing cultural tension is actually a positive sign that your culture is evolving and changing. So it's actually a good thing! (read more here - https://lnkd.in/guCitqRx)

As I experience my own tension (hopefully resulting in my own personal growth...😂), I have developed a few more thoughts around this concept and its relevance in the world of culture and communities - especially in our roles as leaders.

It's obvious from the state of the world today and the constant challenges organizations face, tensions are actually a normal experience and that our organizations are always in flux.

I think we have all heard that quote before that the only constant in life is change.

I have found that these tensions can often be viewed as polarities. That they are always in this conflicting implication. But I believe this is far from the truth. That if tensions are actually managed effectively, they can be powerful sources of energy.

Quite frankly, I would be alarmed if there was no tension in your culture or organization today.

⭐No tension in a culture signifies no aliveness, no learning, and no evolution.⭐

What is more productive is to embrace the tensions of life by choosing both-and thinking instead of either-or thinking. Every aspect of life consists of interactions between seemingly opposing yet complementary forces.

With each dynamic tension, two perspectives that seem to contradict each other are both true and valuable.

⭐Therefore, an essential role of leaders, then, is to sense and acknowledge tensions as they arise, to hold the tension between seemingly opposite paths, and to embrace both-and thinking when making decisions about what to do next.⭐

12/01/2022

Driving cultural evolution - A story about penguins. 🐧

Well, this was a fun one!

Enjoy the illustration, accompanied by a narration that walks you through a story about... well... Penguins.🐧And Culture 😎

Something I wrote about in the past was how utilizing the power of symbols can be extremely powerful in propelling your company culture forward. They serve as visual reminders of who you are, where you are going, and what you want to stay true to as you grow.

We decided at Perennial Culture that we wanted to incorporate more live-scribing practices into our sessions to capture the meaning into images - in end, providing our group visual reminders people can hold near them to carry the energy forward.

That's when I connected with one of the most talented thinkers and artists that I know - Bryce Coppersmith. Bryce has been an art teacher for a number of years and now has been taking his artistic talents into the user experience and design space. Something we have benefited greatly from at Perennial Culture.

To test out this practice of live scribing, Bryce went ahead and scribed this story from one of my culture design sessions this year. The session included a metaphor that made this even more fun to draw - Penguins!

Enjoy!
Zech & Bryce.
🐧🐧🐧🐧

11/28/2022

I’ve become absolutely convinced that the seminal difference between successful companies and mediocre or unsuccessful ones has little if anything to do with what they know or how smart they are, and everything to do with how healthy their culture is.

What’s great is, if you have a healthy culture is that your strategic direction and intelligence will grow over time.

That’s because people in healthy organizations, beginning with the leaders, learn from one another, can identify critical issues, and recover quickly from mistakes without politics or confusion getting in their way.

They cycle through problems and rally around solutions much faster than their dysfunctional and political rivals do. Moreover, they create environments in which employees can do the same.

Want to close out 2022 strong?

Make organizational health your priority and develop the single most significant advantage any company can achieve.

What is even better, it's simply free and available to anyone who wants it.

11/18/2022

As many of you already know, I recently took a step into a new chapter and initiated what I am beginning to call this "Adventure of Me" (Can read more about it here (: https://lnkd.in/gk_tWWvz)

This adventure led me to spend the next month in Asheville, North Carolina, and the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

As I was hiking within the smokies, I came across this posting that described some of the Cherokee traditions and rituals that they lived by.

And as I prepare for a workshop around purposeful meetings, this one stood out to me.

For the most part, we as individuals may have daily routines that we stick to and live by, but what I loved about this ritual the Cherokee did, it was something they did as a tribe.

It made me wonder, how might our teams within organizations have a daily ritual that resembles "going to water."

And how might we, as a collective, have more intentional check-ins every day to keep us connected to our purpose?

Maybe as a team, as the Cherokee do, come together each morning, do a check-in, and reflect on what we need to cleanse from the rest of the day that might hinder our ability to contribute to our purpose. What are the things that may hinder us from reaching our goals?

Heck, we might be able to get a couple of meetings off your calendar from such a practice because after setting intentions for the day, you realize these meetings don't actually contribute to the purpose and goals of the team... Which I think we all agree would be nice to eliminate.

11/08/2022

Hello again! It has been quite some time since I have been able to write and connect with you all. For me personally, October was a whirlwind of a month and I am so grateful for all of it.

[HEAD TO BLOG PAGE FOR FULL STORY AND FREE ACTIVITY]

Especially because this week marks the start of a new chapter for me and October gave me the opportunity to spend time with some of my favorite people and work on some of my most passionate work before I make the transition into this next chapter of my life.

Some of the items throughout the month included... Working on Wisconsin Tech Month with the Milky Way Tech Hub and Milwaukee with some of the most amazing people. (Joe Poeschl, Maggie Dauss, Michelle Spehr, MA, M.Ed., MCHES, CWWPC - Love all of y’all!)

So, what is this next chapter all about?

Well, I invite you to read the full blog about this here - https://lnkd.in/gk_tWWvz

But in short,

I believe this time is given to me to reflect and grow within. To visit my own relationship with myself. To think, and find clarity and peace around beliefs and negative emotions that still live within me. To journal, meditate, read books, become a stronger independent thinker, uncage my mind, learn acceptance, be extremely productive, and have deep self-exploration.

To use this as a time to slow down… to really slow everything down. This is a time to slow these moments down and live them. Breathe into them. To feel them!

It feels kinda funny the way I am doing this actually. Where I had to go "externally" outside of Wisconsin in order to go "internally" within myself.

This is when I really learned what this chapter is all about... This chapter is an adventure of me,

Perennial Culture

10/28/2023

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