0:12 good afternoon and welcome to the wayne wow people making money i'm your host kevin bemel and so glad you could join me this afternoon i'm going to be doing another solo session but uh never fear i've got some great guests coming up in the next few weeks i'll tell you more about them a little bit later but for today i wanted to address a subject that i think has become more important or people have realized is more important than perhaps they have in the past
0:49 so with all the um craziness that's gone on the last couple of years changing uh workplaces working from home working remotely um do i go back in the office all that kind of stuff um the issue of the culture of the company that you're working at i think is much more important now than it ever than well i don't wanna i shouldn't say that it ever was before i don't like to speak in superlatives but but hopefully people are starting to realize that uh these these issues are more
1:26 important than or it's it's it's more important to look at these issues up front rather than deal with them after you've already gotten a job or taken a position and with the labor market still relatively tight um although there's there's a few signs that may be loosening up a little bit and of course there's some big companies have announced some major layoffs for ford motor company is laying off a lot of people and so are a number of other companies but i i think still we're going to see a fairly strong labor market and so as you
2:03 think about your career finding a company culture that works for you is something you'll be able to be more selective about not not a great turn of phrase but accurate nonetheless so i i address this in several chapters in my book um i have a copy of the cover right back here you may not be able to read it quite well it's called uh well here you know i'll go ahead and share my screen you'll see a nice clear copy of it and here we go okay so the eight deadly sins of job
2:39 hunting uh this i call it the veterans edition avoid employment hell taking the only five steps necessary to get a high paying job so if you've watched some previous shows you you've seen my show on the five steps necessary to get a high-paying job i've talked about creating relationships and in particular using linkedin in order to build your network but today i'm going to talk about let me get to the right page here we go corporate culture
3:14 right and actually i think it's just a start yeah okay so we'll we'll talk about that on so that that issue on some other day so um you know i i and by the way if if you would like a pdf copy of my book all you need to do is send me an email i'll be happy to send you a link to my google drive and you can download a copy of the book it's it's very much a workbook so there's the chapters are very very short each one deals with one particular task and
3:49 then following the reading for the chapter which is only typically two to four pages there's a worksheet or some sort of some sort of device for actually facilitating your completing that task and if you start at the beginning and go through the end you will get a job now you don't have to go through it from beginning to end you can look in the table of contents and see where you might where your sort of weak points are in the job hunting process and then just focus on those that that works as well so again if you
4:25 just want to send me an email the link or my email address will be in the show notes after after this show posts and feel free to do that happy to share a pdf copy with you so we're this chapter 13 talks about the culture clash and i started out by telling a story that my dad uh loved telling to me especially when i was a boy so my as as those of you who watched the show before know my dad was a a navy officer uh in the uh mid mid 50s he was on active duty and
5:01 this of course was not too many years post world war ii uh and and the uh shall we say conflict between the navy and the marine corps was uh very much at its height so the marine corps as to hear my dad tell it we the the marine corps looked at the navy and said there you're basically water taxis to drop us off at the beach where you know the real hard fighting starts uh and and of course uh the the navy said the marine corps um
5:37 yeah you know you're just too chicken to fight it out on on the high seas because you know if your ship gets shot out from under you that's it you're you're done um the the navy guys called the marines jar heads which was uh evidently a a a bad thing to call them i'm not exactly sure why um and i'm not sure where that comes from i've never looked it up and the the marines called the navy guys swabbies after you know a mop they would you know swab the decks and that kind of thing and uh so my dad
6:13 related to me a couple of times when you know he was he was in a bar with some of his navy buddies and and and some marines would be there or they'd walk in or vice versa and uh uh you know they'd start swapping insults and one thing would lead another and there'd be a bar fight between the marines and the navy guys are but he said he said you know the interesting thing was as much as navy and marine corps culture clashed uh and and and in some ways still does um if any army guys walked in
6:48 immediately the marine corps guys and and the sailors got together to beat up the the army guys because the culture clash between the marine corps and the navy wasn't so great that it was you know bigger than the clash between the army and and what we're called what still is called the sea services so the sea services are the u.s navy the us marine corps the u.s coast guard and the u.s merchant marines so uh you know with embedded in this story was this idea that you know there was a different way of looking at yourself uh when you were in these different
7:23 service branches right and and i think most of us have seen you know world war ii movies especially classic movies that were made from the you know 40s through maybe the early 60s and you know let you take the uh well during world war ii was called the army air forces right the air force wasn't created until post world war ii the the was the they were all dashing these bomber pilots and especially the fighter pilots right you know with the with the leather helmets right this is and then the leather jackets right there
7:58 they're so beautiful and and uh you know they're always portrayed as as sort of these you know knights of the sky and all that kind of stuff um and you you know if you've ever seen um um they were expendable it's it's a john wayne movie set in the philippines around the time of the it starts out at the time of the um uh invasion of the philippines by the imperial japanese uh navy and uh it's a story of the uh what we're called motor torpedo boats or pt boats and and these pt boat sailors were
8:33 they you know really kind of gutsy you know with these very small boats taking on a destroyer or sometimes even bigger uh you know a big old cruiser or something like that um you know so that was you know part of the the different culture for each branch of the service so just like there is and by the way i i'll hasten to add just real quickly before i move on um there was uh quite a bit of truth to how you know these various branches of the service you know saw themselves um so the way the movies portrayed them it wasn't just you know sort of raw raw for
9:10 our side kind of thing there there definitely was um there was definitely was and still is very very different culture among the various um uh branches of military um you know the marine corps i call them the macgyvers of of the uh of the armed forces because i had a marine corps fighter squadron when i was an air wing chaplain and these guys had um some of the very oldest jets uh in the fleet they were what were called legacy fa-18s uh c's mostly i
9:48 mean they were constantly breaking down and needing to be fixed and and of course there's a huge competition among the various squadron cos to keep their jets flying and keep their flying hours as high as possible that gives them the uh the advantage when it comes time to get their fitness report and uh you know these marine corps maintainers i mean as i used to joke with them it's like you they kept these jets together using you know duct tape and shoelaces which is why you know macgyver if you if you ever saw the tv show from the 80s so he could he could
10:23 build you know anything out of anything kind of thing so um and they really you know the marine corps invests almost everything it has in its people whereas the navy has to spend a tremendous amount of money on ships and of course the air force on airplanes and the army on tanks and and and and guns meaning big guns um you know howitzers and that kind of thing so um so each each one has its own culture and that is true of companies today um and you know i i don't get into politics so i'm not going to be addressing that part of culprit of
10:59 corporate culture um and as much as uh there's a belief out there that that corporate culture is is all the same across the board um that is that is not the case um you know it i'm not even sure that it's more you know homogenous today than it than it was even 20 or 30 years ago um i mean if you go back to there was a very famous movie in the 50s called the the man in the gray flannel suit i want to say not gary cooper um the fellow who is in gentlemen's
11:34 agreement i can't think of the actor's name anyway a classic movie about the conformity in corporate america post world war ii um you know i don't think we have anything like that going on today and i'm not even sure that that was necessarily so accurate even when the movie was made uh it was but it was it was something that was kind of weighing on people the sort of um similarity of of how you had to dress and especially in certain businesses so everybody in the advertising business had to dress a certain way lawyers dress
12:10 a certain way you you really you don't see anything like that anymore and there's even more differences as as i noted at the beginning happening today now with uh all the the the the change in in workplace and where we work and how we work and zoom and whereby or something like that and there's all these you know remote uh conferencing tools and all that kind of stuff there's there's a great deal of informality in in the in the workplace now as well um it's it's a rare business where you know people address themselves as you know mr or ms or miss even for sure not um as
12:47 opposed to by first names from the ceo or the you know the founder of the company all the way down to the the most junior people everybody tends to call each other by first names so uh you know the military is one of the probably one of the few places where you know you don't see that a whole lot and even there um you will find people addressing you know even of different ranks especially if it's outside of work hours you will it's not unusual for people to call themselves by their first names um i think maybe the president united states is probably i can't imagine you know working for the
13:23 president united states and saying you know uh um you know uh all of a sudden i can't think of president biden's first name because i never call him by his first name i call him president biden um or you know or uh you know hi donald you know let's have our cabinet meeting you know something like that i just can't imagine doing that so um but maybe in congress they do as opposed to calling themselves congressman or congress persons or what however that would work i i don't know but i you know the the the workplace is a much more casual place in general so
13:58 i think that you know as as we work our way to wow and especially in the professional sense uh we really need to look at what is the car the company culture or maybe it's better to say the organizational culture because of course academia has its own culture and there and there's not just different cultures in academia based on uh you know a community college versus a four-year you know liberal arts college versus a research university but different parts of the country and and the culture of
14:34 different ivy league universities to just use that as an example but each one has a different culture they're not all the same uh because they're you know located in different parts of the country different states anyway so you know as we talk about organizational culture it's it's important to understand first of all what are the aspects of it that we we need to know number one and then number two how do we find out this information before we take the job right once we
15:10 take the job to a certain extent it's up to us now to conform to the culture certainly the pressure will be there to do that right so uh so you know we want to figure this out before we we we we take the job so now you'll notice i i left out one part of this and one very important part and that is we have to understand what kind of culture we want to be in right so you know if if if you come from um uh you know a sort of a god-centered
15:47 background and that's an important part of your life for example so you know do you want to be in a company where you can be comfortable expressing yourself in in those ways like you know saying saying something as simple as you know god willing you know in in i can imagine there are companies where or organizations where to say that some people might object to that uh and and others would be much more open to it or or even welcoming to that perspective right so we have to know what is the kind of culture we want to
16:23 be a part of right some of us may be much more comfortable in a in a culture where conformity is where there is greater conformity others may not be comfortable in that kind of culture at all and really need a culture where um you know one can be self-expressive right so when i was uh in in the navy and i i've mentioned this in other episodes i did a class on i did a series of classes on getting a
16:58 job after the military for the guys who were in the brig the the jail and one of the questions we talked about was how do you dress for a meeting to discuss a job or what most people call an interview and and and i and i suggest somebody said look one of the one of one of my recommendations is you whoever you set up the interview with ask them what is what is the dress code for the company okay and the dress code i i well i i assume for most companies the dress code is no longer suit and tie okay but whatever it is
17:34 and find that out now you have a choice then having having that information means you now have to make a choice are you going to conform to the dress code or are you not going to conform to it those are your two choices right and and both of them are valid choices in the sense that if you want to take the measure of how highly the organization values conformity dress differently than what they're asking for okay and see what response you get
18:11 okay now if a certain amount of conformity doesn't bother you and if the the standard dress code is okay with you then you can choose to conform to it knowing okay well that's one issue i don't have to deal with and i'm not going to raise that issue on the other hand if you kind of bristle about being told how to dress or what to do that kind of thing so uh look you may you may want to consciously not dress the way that the that is kind of the dress code for that organization knowing that you're going to take a risk that you know the moment you sit down the person's going to look at you and kind of go okay well this isn't someone
18:48 who either checked what the dress code is or if they did you know feels they have to conform to it and and they're going to you know size you up on that basis and by the way if you highly prize being able to be you express your individuality so i don't i don't know that that is a risk because if if if they're not if the person you're meeting with is not accepting of your individuality do you really want to work there is that is that is is that an environment in which you're going to be comfortable and i would i would say probably not
19:24 right so so you know again think of of all of these things as choices and and and how do they how do they relate to my own my own values my own beliefs right and and how do i really understand these issues before i you know accept a position now let me quickly add if you were considering starting a business it's core culture is going to be even more important because as the as the business owner as the
20:00 person who's responsible for creating the business you have an obligation to create its culture now you may not do that all on your own but you should be taking the lead on it and how you handle that is going to determine who you get to come work for you right so you know do that intentionally do it consciously don't let it just sort of create itself so all of the things that we talk about in this episode they will apply to you
20:38 as a business owner as someone who's starting a business now if you're already a business owner and you haven't thought about this issue before i i encourage you to think about a number of these factors as they come up and think about how am i dealing with this in my own company right and do i do i like the way it's working do i not do i need to make some changes you ask yourself those kind of questions okay so i want to start out by um talking about some of the uh ways that
21:14 um culture impacts where you work so um and and by the way you know i i have this you notice here topresume.com found that cultural fit is one of the top three factors professionals consider when making a career change and evaluating a position so i i i think that's something to to keep in mind it you know don't let your fear of not getting the job stand in the way of your figuring this out okay um you're you are not at all alone in in
21:50 making this a priority in your job hunt you know most other people it's like i said uh it's one of the top three factors so okay so aside from general comfort and rules behavior these are the things that culture affects right first of all there's the length of your work day and week right so are you the kind of person who wants to have you know set hours to work you maybe you want to work eight to five monday through friday you don't want to
22:26 be bothered with work outside of that and and so if if that's the thing that that's a particular type of uh culture that will support that now nowadays with so much remote work and that going on many people are not working those kind of set hours they're they're basically working the hours that they need to work in order to fulfill their responsibilities right and and that may be more or less than uh you know than than 40 hours a week um although it seems like it seems like it's
23:02 typically more because when when the work is right there in your house there there's a you know tendency to just sort of you know be added all the time right so the length of your work day and your work week how does that work out uh how how is that and and how does that play into other factors your compensation your family life those kind of things okay and this is a something connected with it the amount of time outside the office you'll have to spend dealing with work matters and or spending time with co-workers so i remember this is going back quite a number of years ago i was talking to one of my long-standing friends
23:38 and he's in the entertainment business he he's in the the the the technical end if you will among the things he does uh pyrotechnics and and camera work that sort of thing and he was talking to me about how um after a long day working sometimes you know 10 12 hours working uh a lot of his colleagues would go to a bar and drink for a couple of hours and he really didn't like doing that the problem is it's endemic to that business and that's where contacts are made for getting your next job so in the
24:13 entertainment business most people freelance and so you know while you may have a job this week next week you may not have a job and so you you're constantly looking for your next gig and so part of being in that business is doing a certain amount of socializing now for a single person that might not be particularly difficult because they don't have family responsibilities or they may or they may they may have children but they don't have a spouse that they have to be concerned about of course if you have young children it's obviously it's very difficult to socialize outside of work because you
24:48 need to spend time with your children but as well whether you're an introvert or an extrovert really is it can impact your desire to want to socialize after a long day working so we people tend to think of introvert shy extrovert not shy it really has nothing to do with that think of introversion versus extroversion as how a person recharges themselves so an extrovert recharges their batteries
25:23 by being around other people and and in essence almost pulling energy from those other people okay that's why for an introvert to be around an extrovert is very exhausting because that extrovert is is almost literally pulling energy out of you an introvert re re um i've just lost the word uh re-energizes uh by being alone and letting letting the battery just sort of naturally fill itself back up with electricity because when they're
26:00 with other people that's an energy drain right whereas for an extrovert to be alone that's an energy drain for them a lot of times because they there's nowhere for them to draw energy from and so the energy just kind of drains out of them while they're alone and they're not able to pull it back from some other source right so so in the issue of spending time outside of the office especially socializing with with colleagues or you know taking time to to you know see clients you know for for
26:37 dinner or for cocktails or whatever that that can be much more difficult for an introvert than it can be for an extrovert now i want to quickly add that doesn't mean that you know only extroverts should get involved in the entertainment business since we're using that as an example introverts have many inherents many inherent abilities that come with being an introvert that they can leverage so that they can be effective in a different way in their socializing so you know what you have what we have to understand is
27:13 how how effectively can we handle demands on our time outside of the office okay how much time can we devote to that are we willing to devote to it how often those kind of things so if you're if you're in a business that requires or if you're in a not not necessarily a business but if you're in a profession or a career that demands a lot of time outside of so-called work hours you know and you find yourself increasingly frustrated by that well so maybe it's time to
27:48 you know look at a different a different uh career or look at some career shifts okay so that's another issue to uh to take to take into account next one is the work environment employee interaction competitiveness among colleagues uh what it takes to be successful okay uh and and is you know what it was is it a fun place to work is it kind of not fun not horrible that whole aspect of it right so i was having a discussion yesterday with uh
28:24 a marine corps officer who's i i think he was still in the marine corps as of yesterday so but he's getting he's going to be getting out of the marine corps soon and he's interested in the real estate business and one of the things i told him about the real estate business is it's very collaborative and and in that sense it's very much like the marine corps and to a certain extent like the military overall of course there are competitive aspects to both um having said that because people in the real estate business are
29:01 so reliant on other people whether it's to find other properties for investors whether it's working with investors whether it's working with you know someone pick up people who want to buy a home whether it's finding uh loans for a project or working with managers working with all these different parts rarely does one company have all of these aspects in-house okay it's just just not that kind of business
29:37 so one of the worst things someone can do as a real estate professional is to be wholly transactional what and what i mean by that is only care about getting this deal closed because people who take that attitude oftentimes do things that negatively impact other people involved in the transaction and having having that happen once those people tend to not want to do business with that person again
30:13 and you can find yourself sidelined because you have a reputation for being transactional like that as opposed to being someone who's collaborative is looking to help people out um hey you know i i i heard you were looking for this kind of property i came across this maybe this is something that you can make a deal on or or whatever or i i heard you were looking for a lender um on this kind of property hey do you know the people at such and such let me make an introduction etc so
30:48 all of these aspects of the work environment play into the culture now by the way you may not be a particularly collaborative person or maybe you had to be in some other profession and career and you want to do something different you want to be able to just work on your own right so and that's fine that's fine believe me there are days when i feel like if i can just sit here on my computer and not be bothered by anybody that might be nice right i can just get my work done and and not have to interact with people
31:23 sometimes that that sounds uh you know pretty nice um you know having said that uh it's you know it's it's it's a hard thing to do in the world today but but if if you don't want to have to constantly be interacting with other people so then that too is uh an aspect of the of the organization's culture that you're going to want to know about and understand well so you can determine is this the right place for me right um i mentioned also how you know how competitive is is the
31:58 the business so i mean the entertainment business is notorious for being incredibly cutthroat um perhaps more so than any other business uh and um i mean i i think it kind of depends what part of the business you're in um having said that while there's a lot of collaboration that happens in that business it is true there is a lot of cutthroat behavior that goes on as well so it's it's not com a completely unearned reputation right and is is that now some people thrive on competition
32:34 they absolutely thrive on it they love it investment banking is another area where there's there's oftentimes the competition can be very cutthroat and in general you know the more income potential there is in a particular business uh the more cutthroat it can be um now part of that comes down to the factory i just mentioned part of also comes down to the organization's the culture of the organizations involved with it i think this is one of the things that's changing people are are realizing that a more collaborative workplace a more collab collaborative
33:10 organization actually is more sustainable in terms of keeping people in you know more deeply engaged in in the organization in terms of creating strategic relationships and partnerships with other organizations so i i my sense is that's changing um maybe more rapidly in some businesses than are some industries than others uh still nonetheless it's something you you want to take into account now by the way if you are very very competitive and you probably don't want to be in an industry where that's frowned upon because you'll
33:47 constantly going hey you know look i i did what it took to get the business this is what it's all about you know getting the sale closing the deal etc etc why am i being you know castigated for for doing that uh and and i think that's that's a reasonable question if that's your perspective on how things ought to work right so you know again it's as much knowing what you want in a culture as it is understanding the culture of the organization okay another issue oops here we go how you'll interact with other employees okay managers and and
34:24 senior senior people senior executives right how formal is the culture how informal is it is there communication between the most senior people and the most junior right so you know i'll take a military example here just to give you an idea on on a submarine especially a fast attack boat where you where the crew is actually pretty small it is not unusual for the most junior sailor to speak directly to the captain as they're going by each other the captain of the boat i mean as they're going by
34:59 each other you know in the p way in the passageway it's it's part of the submarine culture okay and and and that's because with such a small crew literally everybody is dependent on everybody else and so that kind of free flow communication is important now that's very different than an infantry where it would be pretty unusual for an infantryman to go talk you know directly to the you know brigade commander or even the
35:34 battalion commander that's probably not going to happen it might happen in the midst of battle out of necessity uh but it's not something that's going to happen you know when they're in garrison meaning when they're you know back at their base now in submarines it doesn't matter you could be out on a mission you could be you know tied up on the dock junior person can talk to the most senior person on the boat pretty much you know at any in any time um and and those interactions take place fairly regularly now the same thing can be true
36:10 in the civilian world right there are some businesses and some industries that are highly stratified and some that are much flatter right so you know again taking the entertainment industry it's fairly highly stratified so you know senior executives rarely uh are dealing with junior people now there's a reason for that it's because there's immense amount of money at stake there's huge projects that need to be managed and there's just not the the
36:46 time number one to do that and number two you know no idea is you know existential in in that sense so you know if you think about a submarine a junior person who's responsible to help maintain the nuclear reactor could come up with an idea that would materially impact how how the boat operates that's probably not going to happen at a at an entertainment company in in the sense that um whatever the ideas the junior person has is so time crucial that they need to go
37:21 you know directly to the most senior person it can the time can be spent to go through the different levels and have them you know vet the idea kind of level by level to see if it's worth taking the time of the senior people to deal with it and in general that's true of corporate america okay now um i i i'm going to talk about boeing here for a minute um and if you've been following the saga of boeing you you know that they've had quite a number of of problems with their engineering over the last few years they a few years ago they had a couple of very bad tragic
37:57 crashes um with their 787 dreamliner they had an incident where um during an inspection they found these little you know bottles of liquor that you get on the plane so they were empty left behind i think it was in the gas tanks and the wing of some of these planes that were being built it's like you right so one of the issues that was discussed is is the culture at boeing too stratified so that good ideas about how to build their planes more safely
38:32 um can't get up to the upper people there's some kind of blockage or or people just they just give up they don't they don't care that they you know it's too difficult to get any change to happen so there were discussions about that now i'm not going to say that that was the problem or is the pro i i don't know all i'm saying is you you can see where for a company like boeing that's building aircraft both you know both for defense com but not defense companies both for defense uh for militaries i should say and for the commercial aviation sector
39:08 quality control is a crucial aspect of their business so for them it might be better to have that flatter structure in terms of communication so that more ideas can get to the senior people more quickly in order to more effectively deal with some of these quality assurance issues okay now i'm my dad was a quality assurance engineer i'm not so maybe i'm completely off base here but i but it just seems logically that might be the case right certainly one would think you know like
39:44 in the running of a nuclear reactor you would want even the most junior people to be able to talk to the senior people if they see something amiss right it's like can't go through the chain of command gotta say you know hey chief of security here's what i saw does something need to be done right no no we don't want a chernobyl or uh nakashima or anything like that so so you know again that's something to look at in the company that that you know you're dealing with or i mean yeah in the companies you know with with which you're interviewing okay um you know again and there's just a
40:19 couple more here um what kind of this is this is an environmental factor what kind of office space are you going to get okay is it going to be a private office is it going to be an open plan with partitions are you going to get a window office is it going to be an interior office right how often do you have to be there so i was reading an article on the wall street journal this morning about how one of the trends that's been happening over the last actually several decades was the movement away from private office offices into big sort of um
40:55 community offices wrong name but these big open spaces with just partitions and cubicles and people it turns out people are not more efficient in in that kind of work environment as it turns out now you know one of the reasons companies are doing that is they they need less space to accommodate all their workers but now as we're going through this change in how and where i should say work is done and companies are reevaluating how much office space do they really need they're looking at that issue again and perhaps with a new set
41:30 of eyes on it right so uh you know what kind and by the way how do you work most efficiently okay now i know for myself i have a hard working in a spa an open space where there's a lot of distractions okay i'm you know especially when i'm on the phone i don't like to have to be sitting down with the phone in my ear first of all i work at a stand-up desk and i like to be up and i like to be moving and i think better when i move
42:06 um and i also tend to get a little bit excited have you noticed when i talk and if i'm on the phone with somebody you know to have to modulate be careful about modulating my voice can get in the way of you know getting something taken care of so uh you know i i think we need to know how the you know the the kind of office space or you know uh physical environment we work best in and and how does that compare with any particular uh you know organization that we're considering going to work with now
42:43 um i have setting the military aside which of course you don't work from home in the military at least not for the most part um but what you know having had my own company before the navy and and and working for myself now both um i've i've actually i had an office for quite a while when i had my own company before and then um i i you know started working at home uh in order to save money and i found that i really liked it so i i was an early adopter of of working at home um i loved uh i had i had a you know i turned one of the bedrooms in
43:19 where i lived into an office and it had these french doors that opened onto a little balcony i could get fresh air coming in my dog would sit in the chair the big fluffy chair in the office and and i could do my work and be on the phone and my dog never seemed to be disturbed by my talking or if i got up and walked around while i was talking or whatever you know and then you know i could take him for a walk when i needed to just get out and really stretch my legs so i've liked working at home having said that you know the downside is you know we don't have the opportunity to interact with other people and interaction with other people is is is a good thing so
43:56 you know now with zoom in these kind of things i don't think they replace in-person interaction but they certainly um make it better than you know better than not um because you can you can somewhat see people's facial expressions you can see their body language you can sense it and that's a good thing okay and then the last issue is you know what kind of training and personal development will you get in order to stay current for your job stay up to date on on future opportunities stay up
44:33 to date just in terms of the the the industry that you're in and how does your you know how does your organization deal with that so you know in the military there is robust robust training on all on all kinds of things so specifically for the military not only is there leadership training and job skills training and all of that which is essentially built into pretty much all of the service branches programs but they most of service branches have a tuition assistance program so that if
45:08 you want to go to college you can they have there's also the gi bill which after a certain amount of time on active duty you have access to even if you're still in the military so so there's it's it's a huge part of military life personal development and training it's it's absolutely essential now for some uh industries it it's it's it's built in in the sense that it's required right so if you're in the healthcare uh business whether you're a nurse a doctor uh
45:43 you know a physical therapist a nutritionist whatever it is all of these have continuing education requirements because most if not all of them require some kind of license or certification and so to maintain that you're required to keep up to date right and that's also true of of licensed professions so whether you're a real estate agent uh a a a licensed appraiser a mortgage broker all of these you know financial service and financial advisor i should say so life insurance
46:18 securities that kind of thing all of these require licenses and to renew those licenses means you have to have continuing education now some of it is is you know frankly pretty rinky dink i mean some of the continuing education i did when i was in the real estate business was really i'm you know quality not really um i mean back then like you know an escrow company might sponsor a seminar right and you chat for whatever it was you know 30 minutes and then you you know network with your colleagues over coffee and food for a couple of
46:55 hours and you get you know three hours of continuing education credit now i don't know how much of that goes on candidly because i'm not involved in that part of the real estate business anymore um but i but i imagine um you know it could still be going on uh a lot of continuing education of course has migrated online right so um i was uh sitting in on something yesterday and they were talking about how uh for people involved in the insurance business um uh not friendly fannie mae um fema offers a couple of continuing education
47:31 courses on you know fema you know insurance flood insurance uh i assume is because that's typically what fema's dealing with so you can take those and they count as continuing education credit if you hold i suppose a particular type of insurance license right um and i'm i mean i don't know if there's a cost for them or whatever but you know it's it's available he may have said that they're free don't don't quote me on that right call it fema hey you know kevin said that this was free classes why you're charging i'm i'm not i'm not 100 sure so so there's a lot of continuing education
48:06 out there the question is how does your organization deal with it so are you on your own to keep up or do they actively bring opportunities to you pay for those opportunities give you time during the work day to take advantage of those opportunities right how does that work um let's say you're you know you're you're in the healthcare business can you let's say you work at a hospital are they gonna let you are they gonna have seminars in the hospital that qualify
48:42 for continuing education that maybe you can go attend during work hours i i don't know i'm not in that business i just i just asked that uh or maybe you can go during lunch time so you know you it's easy to do you can pick up an hour here an hour there or whatever it is i i don't know but that could be potentially a huge benefit to their employees that they make that available for them it doesn't cost the employees anything they can bring uh they can bring their lunch and sit for an hour and get an hour of continuing education and boom they're done right so i do know for healthcare because this i used to be involved in
49:18 many uh healthcare providers have to be up to date uh certified in cpr uh cardiopulmonary resuscitation now um i you know that may be different now but in and when i was doing it they had to actually show that they could do it on a cpr dummy right so boy you know that's that's kind of a hassle right so we so we used to have um doctor's offices and hospitals they would have our organization come in and it would be provided to any employee who wanted to sign up um and and um you know we were a non-profit
49:55 organization so but i think we still had a kind of a cost per attendee but the the office or the hospital would just pay that for as many employees as wanted to sign up because it was a donation and you know they were helping the community out and all that kind of stuff so how does your how does the organization you're looking at how do they deal with that issue okay now that's just kind of keeping up with where you're at how do they deal with giving you the opportunity to advance okay so are there programs that would allow you to go to college um i don't know
50:32 maybe get an mba or get some kind of advanced degree if you already have a baccalaureate degree or if you don't have a baccalaureate degree can you go get one and the company will pay for it will they let you do your classes on company time okay now with you know more and more companies by the way are deciding that there's not really the kind of value in a college education that they feel there used to be so that may not be something that they offer they may however offer other types of
51:08 training that will still help you advance your career so let's say you work in the cyber security field there are all kinds of courses in that outside of the college environment right and if you want to advance your career you need to take these courses and get more certifications that's pretty much how that business works so will your organization pay for you to take those classes will they give you time to you know take the exams that kind of thing that that could be a tremendous
51:44 benefit to you as an employee in terms of your ability to advance your career now for companies who want to be able to promote from within i i could imagine that that would be a very valuable thing for them to offer now other companies you know they have a pretty steep pyramid so there's not a big incentive for them to pay for their employees to be able to advance because all they do is create a bottleneck in frustration among their employees who end up leaving anyway and and so then what has the company bought themselves um by paying for all
52:20 this uh training that they're not able to take advantage of that that could potentially be how they perceive it other companies may say hey listen if i if i you know help my employees get better trained better educated whatever that raises the overall tide and so we're going to make that investment in our people even though we know we're not going to be able to you know hire all of them or even a lot of them again that's part of the culture that's part of the culture so um i'm trying to think of of an example of a company i know that that does this so
52:55 um i'm i'm going i'm going a blank unfortunately so so uh there are i mentioned a minute ago there are companies now that are de-emphasizing having a college degree companies like ey google i believe home depot you know these companies they're looking for something else in their employees at least in certain facets of their business that a college degree doesn't necessarily mean people have those skills okay so let's let's take uh you know you hear this
53:30 this term thrown around quite a bit these days emotional intelligence right we used to just call them people skills to be honest i'm not sure what college does to enhance someone's people skills right there are things we can do to improve our people skills um but i don't think going to college is one of them right so um you know i i'm so here's a good example i have a friend i think he's retired recently but he worked for one of the big accounting firms and they had a
54:06 relationship with one of the um very well known um i'm sort of motivational speakers who you know help people start businesses grow their businesses that that sort of thing right and um people in at the in this accounting firm which was all over the united states maybe all over the world i don't recall anyway they could avail themselves of that relationship to go and learn more about the kind of people skills that this particular person trained right so and i
54:42 suspect that in many ways that was more valuable than it would have been for them to you know pay for their people to go get you know a masters in tax or an mba or something like that while having that intrinsic knowledge can be valuable what's typically far more valuable to an organization are the people skills sales skills uh the ability to deal with various types of clients the ability to problem solve especially problem solved among people in the firm the ability to mediate
55:19 conflict when it arises whether it's between um colleagues or whether it's between a client and and someone you know a member of the firm all of these are crucial skills so um you know i could imagine they might for example send some of their people to classes on how to do how to negotiate that's an a great skill to have there are there are some negotiation programs at some of the major universities harvard has one for example but most universities i don't think have um classes let alone an entire program on negotiation this is typically something
55:55 you'll you'll learn outside of that environment but is a very very valuable skill so um you know does your company give you access or will that or the organization you're thinking about working for give you access to those other types of training to help you personally develop and by the way if you're learning how to mediate disputes in the workplace do you think that will help in your family life i think it will right because relationships are relationships to a certain extent right so all of these things can be valuable now by the way
56:31 i'm i'm i've got to wrap up here in just a couple minutes um i know in the military for example there was lots of training available to help make to help marriages work better right and and in some cases service members could go to that training during work hours right because the military recognized the strength of a marriage oftentimes related very directly to how well that service member worked at his or her job right so again i don't know how um corporate america i put that in
57:07 quotes you know the private sector deals with that but that could be another area where there doesn't seem to be a direct correlation between a training offered and the workplace but you know if you have a happy home life or a less conflicted home life that certainly can pay benefits in the workplace right so those that's what corporate culture is next week i'm going to talk about how do you find this out okay here i'll i'll i'll give you a quick uh uh wait where is it uh okay yeah
57:43 gathering cultural cultural intelligence right so uh you know we're gonna talk about how do you find this information out that'll be our next topic that'll be our topic for next week and then after that i do i do have a guest uh quite a fascinating guest i'm not going to tell you what his name is you got to tune in next week to find out who he is um but someone i've not known very long but just has become one of my uh favorite favorite people i think you will absolutely love uh listening to his story so let's see i've got uh about a minute and
58:19 45 seconds left so i do want to thank you for joining me this afternoon it is always a great great uh pleasure for me frankly and i hope it is for you for us to have these sessions to talk about how we can find our way to wow through professional success and uh if you have a topic that you would like to hear about please let me know make make a comment in any of the social media streams or on the youtube channel and let me know or send me an email again a link to my email uh will be in the show notes for this show as it
58:55 is on on the other shows if you would like a pdf copy of my book again send me an email happy to send you a link where you can download it and i've got one minute left so that just leaves me enough time to say sign off the way i always sign off and that is to pay tribute to my my very dear friend who as shakespeare said shuffled off this mortal coil now uh not quite three years ago um and and to and to remind myself and and hopefully all of you
59:30 um how dear people are on our lives and how um their losses can affect us but hopefully their memories can can give us strength as we you know continue to face our challenges in life so marie darling you are still my bell thank you very much for joining me have a wonderful rest of your afternoon see you next week