Rebuilding Company Culture

Happy Thursday and welcome back to my LinkedIn newsletter! This week we have insights from the co-founder of Evernote and CEO of mmhmm , Phil Libin! As always, my weekly Newsweek interview series, Better, is today at 12 pm EDT / 9 am PT/5 pm GMT today. Today I’ll be joined by the author of The Ultimate Marketing Engine , John Jantsch!?

Effective communication has become a critical asset to companies now that so many people work outside of the office. My LinkedIn Learning course, Interpersonal Communication, was included in the Global Top 20 of courses on LinkedIn Learning this year, and is available free to all until next Friday, October 15! Strengthen your team community with stronger communication habits and take that course here .

People around the world are still taking their best guess at how their companies can effectively collaborate and connect in this new age of work. We’ve seen the surge of video conferencing, but know all too well it doesn’t compare to a conversation face-to-face. So what can we do to bridge the geographical communication gap as business moves forward??Phil Libin thinks maintaining company culture is an antiquated notion, and as we look ahead, we focus as a culture not on getting back to the way things were, but getting things to better than they’ve ever been. If you’d like to revisit our conversation from last week, you can watch that on my YouTube page . Here are a few highlights form how Phil suggests we can grow our company culture to become better than it’s ever been:

Don’t go back to the way things were:

“I don't think it's a good idea to maintain company culture. I think the whole framing of that discussion feels a little bit out of place. People ask, ‘How do we preserve our company culture? Why don't we go back to the company culture?’ Why? Your company culture was that amazing before? It's something you want to preserve or something you want to go back to? Screw your company culture. It was never that great to begin with. Don't think about how to preserve anything, let alone culture. Think about how to make it better. Think about how to go forward. It should be, ‘How do we want to build our company culture? How do we want to improve it?’ Whenever life gives you these massive changes, there are opportunities. It just becomes easier to change things. And so, it gives you an opportunity to change things for the better.”

Focus on improving the things that are working:

“Imagine you're sitting in a conference room and you ask your team for their opinions about whether or not you should buy a new company. Most of the opinions are going to be negative. They're going to be, ‘Oh, well, what about this problem? What about this problem?’ And then the next person is going to try to also be critical and negative. This is just common. If you're leaning into the positive, you're seen as a little bit naive. But I do it myself all the time, just in my own thinking about things. And so, the answer to this is very simple. It's not easy, but it's simple, and there’s a big difference between simple and easy. It's simple to see what the right answer is. It's hard to actually put into practice. I force myself to start looking at the things that are better, not the things that are worse, and then decide how to take the things that are better in whatever the environment is and how to really lean into them. How to take them from better, to ridiculously good, to amazing.”

Lean into rigorous optimism:

“If I feel overwhelmed with too much information, too much data, or the suffering in the world that is easy to feel overwhelmed by, the simple meditation is to say, ‘Okay. What are the things that are better this year? What are the things that are better in this environment than they ever were?’ Working from home was miserable if you hadn't planned for it. Your family situation was different. Your kids were out of school. People were sick and dying everywhere. It was extremely stressful, but certain things were actually nicer. I think of it as rigorous optimism. Rigorous optimism is, ‘I'm an optimist because I think the world can be made better, but I have to be rigorous about it because I think that that's only going to be true if I do it. If we do it.’ You don't get to sit back and watch the world get better. You have to have the agency and take action to do it. But if you do that, you have a plan. You execute. You double down on things that are working. You really can make everything better. You can be a rigorous optimist.”

Thank you so much for reading my newsletter! Next week, my guest will be Jenn Lim , author of Beyond Happiness! Jenn and I will talk about finding your personal purpose. For a calendar reminder, click here .

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Wishing you health and success -?

Dorie