Ann Rhoades is featured on The Cranky Middle Manager Show. Visit the site to download the audio podcast or listen to it online.  Useful and practical ideas on shaping your company’s organizational culture. Below are the show notes of topics covered in the podcast:

Today Wayne Turmel talks to author Ann Rhoades about her new book: “Built on Values, Creating an Enviable Culture That Outperforms the Competition”.

• Can you consciously create a culture or is it something that happens by accident?

• How do you decide on your values and how can your company actually stick to them?

-Show Notes-
0:00 Welcome to the show. Today we’re talking about starting a company with values in mind, which puts in mind the RCMP and its founder, George Arthur French. Standards and style either get determined on purpose or they happen in spite of you.

4:25 The quote of the week is from Henry David Thoreau- not one of my favorites but occasionally said something worth hanging onto and he’s a more impressive credit than quoting me….

5:10 Welcome Ann Rhoades to the show. She’s going to talk about building a company on values…but since she helped start Jet Blue she knows a bit about the topic. I’m a bit jaded on the topic so why should we care?

7:15 Ann left SouthWest and helped start JetBlue. How do you go about blue printing your organizations values and the behaviors that exemplify them?

11:00 Hotels and airlines lead the league in complaints and bad experiences so how do you incorporate organizational values into the business plan? Admittedly it doesn’t take much to exceed expectations but you have to try. What do you do when someone just doesn’t fit in?

14:45 What do you do as a manager with something like “safety” as a value. How do you manage to it? It’s all about identifying behaviors then keeping people accountable for it.

18:30 There are real bottom-line results to this theory…. and they’re impressive. What do you do when something bad happens to test the organizations values? Can you recover? Here’s a case study you might not be familiar with but should be.

24:10 How do you identify people who will fit with your organizational values during the interview process instead of getting surprised? It’s all about behavioral interviewing rather than skills interviewing. A players have skills, but that’s not how they get to be A Players.