Over the past decade I've worked as Head of People & Culture at some of the best advertising agencies in the world, transformed the culture of teams at the likes of Playstation, uncovered and operationalised the purpose and values of ASX listed tech companies, coached founders and leaders of businesses with 200 people down to 2 people, created and facilitated more training workshops than I can even remember... and had some incredibly moving and fulfilling conversations with individuals who just needed a hand (or an ear).

I am haunted by the idea that most people will spend the majority of their life working in jobs that, at best they "kinda like" and at worst suck the energy out of them. Even worse is the idea that Founders create companies and end up "trapped in the prison they built", with no idea how to get out.

My mission is to teach 1 million Founders and Leaders how to create Fulfilment-Led Companies; where they achieve massive business success AND fulfilment for themselves and their employees.

Clinton Parr

Your company doesn't have a culture problem, it has a clarity problem.

I've worked with dozens of founder-led companies over the past 8 years and I keep watching the same pattern repeat.

Founder starts a company with a clear vision. 
Hires a small team. 
Things are great. 
The energy is infectious.
It feels like a family.

Then the team hits 20, 30, 50 people and something shifts.

Every decision crawls back to the founder's desk. New random weekly meetings appear in the diary and no one is totally sure who started them or why they're there. The speed, energy and beautiful chaos that made the company successful transforms into bottlenecks and babysitting.

The founders, who started building this thing for freedom, creativity, better work, a better life, now spend all their time dealing with people's issues instead of the things that are actually going to drive revenue, sales and growth. They love their team but resentment is creeping in. 

The thing that was supposed to be their dream now feels like a prison they can't leave.

So they do the obvious things. Create a leadership team. Write values on the wall. Launch it with a nice deck... Nothing changes.

Here's what I've learned: it's never a people problem. It's a clarity problem.

The vision, the standards, the way things should run,  it all lives naturally in the founder's head. It's never been translated into something the team can actually follow.

Vague motherhood statements like "Be Curious", "Collaboration", "Push the Boundaries", "Don't be a Dick" do absolutely nothing to guide decisions, prioritise work or teach people what "good" actually looks like.

That's what the Culture Compass Sprint does.

Two days. We translate what you know and feel into actions, standards and behaviours your team follows, so they stop orbiting around you and start propelling you towards your vision.

You leave with a clear description of what you're building and where you're headed. What "good" looks like (and what doesn't). How "we do things here". An operating rhythm for meetings and comms. The rituals and language that make you "you". And a 90-day roadmap to roll it all out.

This is not about adding a whole bunch of new things. It's about identifying the needle movers.

I've delivered this work to dozens of companies inside bigger engagements over the years, but I'm now taking a founding cohort of 3 companies at a fraction of the usual investment to launch the Sprint and help me refine the experience.

If any of this sounds like your company, drop COMPASS in the comments and I'll send you the one-page Culture Design Guide.

Founder, Employee Experience Consultant and People & Culture Geek | Teaching Founders and Leaders how to use personal fulfilment to drive business success

Your culture is likely the worst version of you.

Unless you’ve consciously designed it, your culture will have evolved overtime in response to your worst moments, not you at your best.

The underlying reason for this is that humans are hard wired to pay more attention to negativity (failure, criticism, fear, threats, pain) than positivity (achievement, praise, opportunity, safety, joy).

This means, all those terrible, scary, embarassing moments are the ones that will have shaped how you act:

The time when Janet was “working from home” and you later found out that she stopped working at lunchtime to go water skiing. So now all employees have monitoring software, which you claim is for safety and productivity, but deep down… it was Janet.

Or the time Terry missed an important deadline, which led to the loss of a major client. Now, every Monday morning there is a 2 hour long WIP meeting, where everyone provides updates of how busy they are. It is apparently to help with alignment and productivity, but really, it’s just a shit way to start the week that could be replaced by a spreadsheet.

Or the time that Gordon promised a new feature to a client that was impossible to deliver within the agreed scope and budget, which ended up costing the company thousands of dollars. Now one of the Founders has to be in all client meetings, which creates bottlenecks, disempowered staff, and extra stress for everyone.

The other way this shows up is when Founders or Leaders are dealing with situations that they’ve never had to deal with before: employee’s wellbeing, managing hybrid teams, underperforming employees.

When they’re not sure what to do, they often design for worst case scenarios, or the fearful “what ifs”.

Clint… surely there must be a better way? I’ve got you, my friend.

It starts with stepping out of that default, stressed state and getting clear on what the best version of your company could look like. Where clients, money, time, trust, purpose and fulfilment are abundant.

How would that company operate? How would the employees act? How would they serve their clients? How would they communicate with each other? What would it look like? What would it feel like?

Get hyper specific here. No vague "we'd be the market leader" statements.

Now objectively look at your company:

What are you currently doing that the other company isn’t? Stop it.
What are they doing that you aren’t? Start it.

In my experience, a lot of this will start with leaning into optimism over fear, and trusting people more than you’re comfortable with and giving them a chance to impress you.

If you want help with this, I have distilled 10 years of experience working with Founders and Leadership teams into a 2-day sprint. Comment COMPASS below, and I can shoot you the Culture Design Guide, which could be the first step in becoming the best version of yourself.

This is the one bit of advice I'd give "young Clint" when I started A Lion & The Vibes all those years ago...

8 years ago, having not long been made redundant, I sat at the cafe with my 2 year old daughter. It was 10am, and I was supposed to have dropped her a

Open article: A Little Fulfilment Friday: The advice I'd give myself when I started A Lion & The Vibes. by Clinton Parr • 2 min read

A Little Fulfilment Friday: The advice I'd give myself when I started A Lion & The Vibes.

You made 47 decisions yesterday. You remember about 6 of them. The other 41 are quietly building a culture you didn't choose.

Not the big ones. The ones you barely clocked as decisions at all.

Here’s what’s going on…

The Founder Override: 
Someone on your team made a call. You didn't love it, so you "added some context" and quietly reversed it. They noticed. So did everyone else. Your team has stopped making real decisions because they've learned they're not actually theirs to make.

The Competence Illusion: 
You're still deciding like you're a 10-person company. That's when you built your instincts. You're 40 people now, but those instincts still feel like wisdom. Half the time, they're just habit.

The Sycophancy Trap: 
The longer you're in charge, the fewer people tell you the truth. Not because everything's fine — because challenging you has costs. You're making decisions in a vacuum and calling it leadership.

The Consistency Trap: 
You let one person work from Bali for a month because the circumstances were unusual and you knew the context. Your team only saw the exception. It's now become the new standard, whether you meant it or not.

The 11pm message: 
I get it… you just want this off your plate. But you're setting the expectation that everyone should be available at 11pm. The boundaries you don't set on yourself become the unspoken rules for everyone else.

Here's what NONE of this feels like in the moment: a culture decision. It feels like pragmatism. Flexibility. Good judgement. And that's exactly why it's dangerous.

The gap between the culture you think you're building and the one you've got lives in the decisions you're not paying attention to.

I've created a short quiz to help you identify where your decisions might be causing cultural issues. It’s 10 questions to identify blindspots, with specific fixes for each one. Comment QUIZ below and I’ll send it across.

Here is how I get past the awkward and uncomfortable phase of tough conversations with employees.

There is a very specific look that people get on their face when they walk into a conversation that is obviously serious, but they’re not exactly sure

Open article: How I get past awkward & uncomfortable when you need to have tough conversations with your team. by Clinton Parr • 2 min read

How I get past awkward & uncomfortable when you need to have tough conversations with your team.

How many people did you hire to make life easier? And how many hours do you now spend explaining things that should be obvious?

You've got a 2-hour WIP meeting every Monday that exists because Janet missed a deadline once. An approval process for client emails because Gordon over-promised. A person whose main job is translating what you actually meant in Slack.

None of these are solutions. They're rubber mallets.

Here's what I mean:
American car makers in the '70s had a bloke at the end of the assembly line whose job was to bash car doors with a rubber mallet so they'd close properly. 

When those car makers visited a car manufacturing plant in Japan, they couldn't see the guy with the mallet. They were confused. 

The Japanese manufacturers simply explained, "we design our doors to close properly from the beginning" (hat tip: Simon Sinek)

Your business is full of mallets:
- A person whose job is just to translate what you meant
- A meeting that only exists to catch mistakes
- A rule that treats everyone like they're Gordon

Here's what actually happened: something went wrong once, you were stressed, and you designed a workaround. Then it became policy. Then it became "how we do things here."

The fix isn't working harder or hiring another person to manage the people managing the workarounds.

It's taking 2 days to codify what good actually looks like: the decisions you'd make when you're calm, the standards you hold when you're at your best, the judgment calls your team should be able to make without you.

So they stop needing the mallet. And you stop being the mallet.

Comment COMPASS and I'll send you the guide.

Have you ever had to have a tough conversation with someone in your team and left it thinking “that could not have gone worse”, or just avoided the thing altogether until it reaches the point that it feels weird to bring it up? 

I’ve spent 10 years helping managers avoid that moment. 

The main issue is people focus too much on being “a manager”, forget they are a human being talking to another human being, and then overcomplicate the whole thing.

Here are 3 bits of advice that have helped managers and leaders communicate like great managers and leaders:

1. Teach your mate to snowboard
Imagine you’re a kick-ass snowboarder and you’re on the slope with your friend who keeps wiping out because they’re not bending their knees.

How would you feel towards this person?
Would you wait until the end of the holiday to review their performance? Or would you say something in the chairlift and show them how to do it better on the next run? 
How do you think they would respond if you showed them a better way?

That's all a good manager conversation is. A more experienced human, who actually gives a shit, helping a less experienced human get better.

2. Give advice, not feedback.
The thought of giving or receiving critical feedback makes your tummy tighten… and not in a good “I’ve been going to pilates” kinda way. 

It focuses on the WHAT, and it makes people defensive. 

Advice focuses on HOW they can get better. And when it comes from genuine experience, people actually listen to it and appreciate it.

"When I had to deal with something like this, here's what worked for me" lands completely differently to "here's what I noticed in that meeting."

3. Frame the conversation before you have it.
This is the one thing that eliminates 80% of the anxiety on both sides.

Three parts: tell them exactly what you want to talk about, tell them the positive outcome you're hoping for, then ask if that's ok.

"Hey George, I want to chat about the Penske file. At the end of this I want to make sure you're clear on expectations and have a plan if it goes sideways again. That alright?"

Three sentences. Gets buy in from the employee. And it completely changes the energy of the room and the outcomes you’ll get.

Manager and Leader conversations have a disproportionately large impact on productivity, performance and culture.

I've spent the last decade coaching managers on this stuff; feedback, career conversations, delegation, motivation, all of it. I've just packaged it into a group coaching program for managers who want to get genuinely good at this.

If your team is avoiding conversations, having them badly, or you have managers who need to level up, reply or comment TRANSLATOR and tell me what's going on. I'll tell you if the program is a fit.

JB Hi-Fi

Store Manager

Store Manager at JB Hi-Fi. 
Over 25 years Management and Sales experience in the Retail and Consumer Electronics industry. 
Focused on Leadership and Staff development.

Beauford Club of Newcastle President http://beaufordclub.com.au

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