Stan Slap on the Art of Building Effective Employee Cultures

Commonplace Expertise

Stan Slap is the founder and president of SLAP, an international consulting firm that helps organisations get maximum commitment from their manager, employee, and customer cultures. SLAP has worked with the who's-who of the Fortune 500, companies that you've heard of like Costco, Oracle, HP, Caterpillar, Microsoft, Amazon, General Electric, Intel, Viacom, Tesla, Glassdoor, Warner Music Group — and some companies that you haven't; all told, SLAP has worked with companies doing business in 44 countries. Stan is also the author of two books: Under The Hood and Bury My Heart in Conference Room B.

This podcast dives into Slap's ideas about understanding, managing and shaping effective employee cultures. His model for culture is the first coherent model that I've found that is useful and tested at scale; it is therefore more powerful than most other formulations of employee culture that you'll find.

SLAP Company — https://slapcompany.com/
Under The Hood — https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22571574-under-the-hood
Commoncog summary of Under The Hood — https://commoncog.com/under-the-hood/
Bury My Heart at Conference Room B — https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7810760-bury-my-heart-at-conference-room-b

• (00:00) - Introduction
• (02:32) - Employee Culture is About Business Performance
• (06:56) - What a Culture Is
• (10:21) - Thinking About Culture as an Organism
• (19:40) - What Management Gets Wrong
• (22:56) - What To Do When You've Lost The Culture's Trust
• (26:36) - Tension Between Managing Individuals vs Managing Culture
• (30:09) - Giving a Culture Energy
• (35:16) - Introducing Change to a Culture
• (42:28) - Doing Cultural Understanding at Scale
• (50:48) - Four Step Process for Cultural Commitment
• (01:00:04) - Danger of Corporate Values
• (01:04:29) - Managing Culture in a Rapidly Scaling Company
• (01:10:51) - Dealing with Bad Subcultures
• (01:18:14) - Stan's Closing Message
• (01:25:49) - Where Folks Can Find Stan