Ep. 539 What To Do As A First Time CEO – Ron Swidler, CEO of The Gettys Group

And looking back now, now it's been three years, how did you-- Like, what worked in terms of getting the culture to buy in to this new culture, this new feeling, this new, this new vision?

You wanna talk about what didn't work? [laughs]

That might be more helpful, actually.

Yeah.

[laughs]

[laughs] Um, you know, I- I'd say what, what worked was having a, um, an understandable vision that could be clearly articulated and could be restated over and over again.

You know, I w- I was thinking about, um, Meta and, and Facebook earlier today as, uh, I was, um, preparing for this conversation, and there was some work that we did with them then.

Uh, on the walls in my office is actually a, a poster from their print shop when we were working with them.

They print out some of what they believe in and hang them on walls all over their campus, uh, to remind people of what's most important.

And I found myself having to do that without the benefit of posters at Gettys, to be able to remind people that we had-- we, we, we are a company that is one company.

We're thought of as one company, that, that we are one culture even though we provide different services, and we have-- we had, frankly, some silos within our organization.

The people who specialize in procurement have a certain kind of mindset.

The bespoke interior designers who work on luxury hotels around the world have a certain mindset and style of working.

Our graphic designers and branding people have a, a certain kind of philosophy and mindset.

And getting people with different experience, uh, and points of view to come together around a common vision is not easy to do.

So I think what worked was simplifying the message, reiterating the message regularly.

Um, I'll tell you, I tried something that, um, [lip smack] I know that, uh, Jensen Huang does not believe in, which is having one-on-ones with my entire senior leadership on a weekly, weekly basis.

But I felt that that was incredibly helpful.

All my senior leaders, and we're 75 people in our company, um, but I had 11 senior leaders who I was meeting with on a weekly basis, and I know that sounds like a lot.

But, uh...

And I mention Jensen Huang only because NVIDIA doesn't-- he doesn't believe that you should have to dedicate that much time to your senior leaders, and I shouldn't be arguing with his success, uh, because obviously he's been incredibly successful.

But, um, but I felt like I needed to go on a listening tour right away and understand where others felt that we could be better.

And as soon as I opened up my ears to what other people thought we should be doing, then it became my burden to act on it.

And I wanna go back to "Ted Lasso" for a second just because it was-

Please