Blue Collar Culture

Business Results the Old Fashioned Way

Darren Virassammy | Being Valued for Being Valuable

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In today’s episode of The Blue Collar Culture Podcast we chat with TEDx speaker, and co-founder of 34 Strong, Darren Virassammy. Not only is Darren an entrepreneur, but he’s also a bass guitarist, a dad, and a husband— an overall astounding guy! 

Darren is a leader who keeps an eye on his destination and initiates the practical steps to get there through awareness and the ripple effect. He is passionate about long term scalability and commonly steps aside to allow others to take ownership of their zone of genius.

We’ll chat with Darren about the biggest myths in his industry, as well as…

  • Client success stories he’s proud of
  • How a healthy work environment can drive the financial success of a company
  • How disengaged employees lead to disengaged clients— and what to do about it
  • Examples of company cultures that have gone from bad to good
  • The biggest hurdles to becoming intentional about company culture
  • And more

Listen now…

Mentioned in this episode:

Transcript

Ryan Englin: Welcome back to another episode of the Blue Collar Culture Podcast. I'm your co-host Ryan Englin and I am here today with Jeremy Macliver.

Jeremy Macliver: Welcome back, everyone.

Ryan: I'm really excited to speak to today's guest. We've been talking for a little bit actually before the show and there's so many things that come out. I'm not even sure where to take this episode, but I think we've got a game plan. So he is the co-founder of a company called 34 Strong and the name of that company is not an accident. In fact, I'm going to ask him to share where that came from and why 34 Strong. But he is actually going to be a TEDx speaker. He's a bass guitarist, a dad and a husband and he's just an amazing guy to talk to. Really excited about today's episode. Darren Virassammy, welcome to the show.

Darren: Hey, thank you so much, Ryan and Jeremy. What a pleasure it is to be here today.

Ryan: So I'm excited to dig into a couple of things. I want to ask the first question that I ask a lot of our guests. What is the biggest myth about your industry as a consultant?

Consultants Don’t Always Want to Stick Around Forever

Darren: I think the biggest myth is that all consultants want to become eternal consultants in any organization they go into, right? So where they kind of go in, put their, you know, set up their tent and then all of a sudden are just there for long, long periods of time. I don't think that is true for all. I've definitely seen some where that's the case. But that's not necessarily true for all.

Ryan: Yeah, it's interesting. Jeremy and I both in our respective companies, we actually have a graduation process with our clients to let them know, we don't want to be here forever. We want to teach you how to fish. We want to help you be able to solve these problems on your own going forward. So I think that's cool. And I imagine you share that same philosophy.

Darren: That's exactly it. In fact, a lot of our success stories were actually some of our clients have written case studies for us. There are clients that we're not currently working with, but because of the fact that we were successfully able to hand off the baton with them, taking ownership of transforming their culture. It's not us. It's them that are the ones that are making that. So that's really cool. I like that graduation ceremony idea.

Ryan: Yeah. So let's talk about that for a second. So you get amazing results for your clients around company culture. And culture is something that's near and dear to both Jeremy and I, hence the Blue Collar Culture Podcast. Let's talk about some of those results that you get. Can you give us some case studies or some things that you've done that you're just super proud of what your clients were able to accomplish?

Company Culture in Action

Darren: Yeah, there's actually one. So this echoes just on, this is actually on our website 34strong.com, but there's a case study by an organization called Cascade Health, that's up in the Pacific Northwest up in the Oregon region. And when we started working with them, guys, they were going through just financial challenge, just big squeeze and in that industry at the time, transformation of leadership, a whole bunch of different elements that were taking place, but they knew that anchoring to the strengths-based work that we do, we believe everybody deserves a great place to work and any workplace can be great.

So what's really interesting is we started working with their CEO, and she really got connected to the work that was taking place and transforming her culture. And it started to go throughout the organization. Now one of the hallmarks, I think this is important for everybody to think about whenever you're using a consultant and this is the way they approached us, we were not the change agents. That's an important piece to take away.

And I suspect you guys operate the same way, right? We're not the ones that are actually changing things, they are, because that makes them take ownership. And Cascade Health actually did that. They took ownership and it took time for people to buy in for their leadership teams to transform for their management teams to transform. They navigated successfully through a season of uncertainty through a lot of shifts, a lot of things going through. That same CEO was actually in the process of exiting, of retiring, as well. And there was a successful transition and transformation of the whole organization's culture.

They went from areas where employee engagement, people weren't really showing up knowing what was expected of them at work, weren't really as engaged in their work as they could be. They actually had significant shifts in the positive with their employee engagement results. What did they see from that, guys? They saw that their financial challenges that they had had for the time started to improve significantly and they got a lot better all in the season when they were going through a big transition in leadership as well.

And they ended up writing the case study as we wrapped up our work with them. That's one of the Hallmark case studies that's on our actual website. Not that we wrote, that one of our clients wrote So, and that was like, that was the ultimate gift as we were leaving/ They were like we'd be honored to do that. It really gets more into the metrics and all that sort of stuff in there too for anybody that's interested.

Ryan: Yeah, I love how, what you said that culture actually can drive a healthy company financially. Like I think there's, it's a leap for a lot of people to say, Well, if I have employees that are happy, if I have employees that are engaged, I don't know how am I really going to see that on the bottom line.

Darren: Yeah, that is so true. Now, think about it like this, right? If our employees are disengaged, the question I always ask is just straight, direct, right to the point. How are you going to get engaged customers and engaged clients from disengaged employees? Guys, you've never squeezed in orange and expect to get apple juice, right?

But when we do that, when we've created cultures that are really, where people actively checked out, where they're operating just to survive the day and working through that, they're not feeling like they're valued for being valuable. And what that does is it can, you know, take down the walls of trust, it can take down the walls of connection and people start playing not for the good of the team, but for the good of themselves to just survive, right?

There's this simple quote that we use and in teams that are highly engaged and where they're really aligned around the mission, of the work, of whatever It is that we have to get into. It doesn't have to be these aspirational missions it can be, again, we've done a lot of work with a lot of different manufacturing companies. But where people are aligned around a common goal, they show up with the simple statement, guys. I serve us so we can serve others.

So I serve this team and what we're doing so that we can go outside and serve others. And people actually have a lot of fun doing that, right? That can be fun. It can be hard work, but it can be a lot of fun as well in the process and some level of camaraderie where we can celebrate our wins together and going through that. I've had the privilege of living in those spaces where it's really good and it was absolutely atrocious where you were just trying to survive the day. So it's like, I lived in both of those spaces, you know?

Jeremy: I think we've all lived in both of those spots at some point or another. And, you know, taking that conversion from one, from a bad culture to a great culture is obviously a big challenge and I would love to dive into that a little bit. I give a quote a lot of times that, you know, leadership's customer is the employee and the employee's customer is the company's customer.

So I really focus on my leaders and managers like, hey, you're just trying to make the employees happy because employees, they like, just like you said, if they're smiling deep down and if they're bought into this company, they're gonna go out, they're gonna be upbeat, they're gonna tackle the customers' issues with resilience. You know, we've been on the phone with 1-800 who cares? And you know that you're pushing through the day, right? And it's, every once a while you get on the phone, you're like, wow, this person's like, engaged.

What's going on in that company? You started talking about that where there's, you know, some rough cultures, some cultures where we're just plodding along and there's some great cultures. And I know you've gotten to see and help take those companies from point A to point B. Can you give us maybe some how-to or maybe an example of one that's transferred and what they did to go from bad to good?

Why the Best Employees Stick Around

Darren: Yeah, so there's the one that was the Cascade Health. There's one piece of the puzzle was there. There's another company that's, in the manufacturing industry, that we've worked with, they work across the globe. They're kind of in a little bit of the foodservice world of some sort.

And what was fascinating was, there was a lot of silos in this particular organization. There was, you know, there's the production team and then there was the management team and then there was where the leadership team was and headquarters was versus where the production facilities were just scattered across and there was just a lot of animosity that was taking place going back and forth when this first started. What took place in part of the cycle, guys, was we had to go through and they were working to get through the season to get people aligned.

And their particular industry was facing some particular challenges through, they were being impacted. By just some of the changes that Amazon was actually making, and it was really a huge threat to their business. And what was fascinating was they went from being in a season with our work where they were just struggling to navigate through that, to recently here, they were at a point where they're acquiring other companies in their space.

And their CEO contacted my business partner in 34, Strong, Brandon Miller, contacted him and said, Guys, it's because of the work that you were able to do that helped us to transform. So where we went from being in a place where we were surviving to where we're actually dominating and actually growing in this space. And a particular example within that, that I think can really drive it home, there was on one of these teams, there was a one of the sales managers, she was in a position where she went through Gallup.

The Gallup organization has a measurement tool called q 12 and it measures employee engagement. It takes these 12 statements, one of them's the simple I know what's expected of me at work, right? And it goes through this process and that's how it measures employee engagement. Gallup found after 25 years of research that, hey, you know what, these are the things that allow the best employees to stay. That's what employee engagement is actually measuring.

Not why do people stay, why do the best employees stay. And it boiled down these 12 statements. Her scores, guys, they were not flattering at all. They were not good. And here she was as a manager thinking she was doing everything right and she wasn't. It wasn't clicking for her team and it was showing in her sales results and performance and kind of trying to survive and work through. She took that though. And she worked alongside of our teams and did the deep work to figure out okay, I didn't score great on, let's use that example on setting expectations for my team.

So you get these results and you're like, so what the heck do I do with that? Like, I got this number. What does that even mean? How do I move the needle on that? She did the deep work and there's some questions that she could ask to understand what it would look like for her team to score her really high, or that department really high on expectation setting and the shifts that she had to make as a manager.

She realized their lack of engagement was not just a function of them, it's actually a function of her. And this shift that she would make as a manager would impact that. And over the course of time, she did that work. She started asking questions, simple questions that I'll share that can be really useful on expectation setting with people on your team. Simple things that we overlook a lot of times, guys, like what is the most effective way you learn?

A lot of times as managers, we're teaching people in the way that we learn best and setting expectations the way we would do it for ourselves but never actually connect the dots to how to somebody else learn how did they take it in? This particular manager went through that, created some shifts. Her engagement scores went up. And as we've seen her engagement scores go up, as we've seen the sales shifts take place within that department, they've gone from surviving into a place of acquiring other companies. That's pretty powerful. And again, it's all because they were the change agents, not us. We were the tour guides.

Jeremy: I love that. I love the Patrick Lencioni quote. It's actually on my wall in my session room, to get all the people in an organization rowing in the same direction, you could dominate any industry in any market at any time. So I love that story where Amazon's coming in as a threat because I know we've had to work through with even some of our teams that Amazon's moving into their space and they're the big boy.

And just being able to create a company where everybody's shoulder to shoulder, they're all driving for it, they went from just trying to muddle through till they're acquiring. That's a great story there. So I love it. So what's one of the biggest things that holds businesses back from taking this transformation?

Attract and Retain Real A Players

Darren: Yeah, it's, you know, a lot of times there's a thought process that culture doesn't really matter. Doesn't really matter. Just get the job done. In our society across the board, we get stuck in the check the box mentality, right? Like we've got to cross this off our list. We got to get it knocked out. Hey, I was in construction for 10 years, it was all about having your punch list, getting things knocked off, getting things taken out and completed. And it's easy for us to overlook the importance of culture.

And we look at it as like, well, it'll just be there. It doesn't really matter. And you can have culture in one of two ways. It can be by intention and design or by accident. And a lot of times that accidental piece is what leads to revolving doors. And we don't look at that. And we miss the fact that, hey, that's actually really costly. It's really costly when we are able to attract in A players and end up watching them leave.

A good friend of mine, doctor Sabrina Starling, she wrote a book, How to Hire the Best. She's got a whole series on that. And she's got, she had the contractor edition that was released late last year. That was exactly one of the pieces that she talked about in that book was just how many organizations will go through and they'll figure out Oh, here's how we hire the best people. And then they just watch them leave because what they attract in is not a great environment for those people to thrive. And then we watch our best people leave.

And then we're left with our B and our C players who actually don't move us to where we envisioned that we could be. And again, that comes from the lens of looking at it through the focus of we don't have time for that. Well, it can get, you know, whether what as Henry Ford says, whether you think you can or you can't, you're right. But it will impact you by not having culture by intention and design. And you do have some controls over that.

Ryan: Absolutely. You know, I tell a lot of my clients that there's a culture inside of your organization. And ignoring it or turning a blind eye to it doesn't make it better or make it go away. It's still there. And I love that intentionality piece. In fact, a lot of times, one of the things I hear a lot, especially in the trades, is Oh, you know what, people are going to leave for a quarter more an hour. And that's just part of the industry, like they leave for more money and everything else. And we find that after becoming intentional with the culture, all of a sudden, people are coming to the company for 25 cents less an hour.

And it's not about the money, it's about I'm just not happy I'm not comfortable here. I'm going to go to a place where I'm more appreciated. And without that intentionality behind culture, the way you show appreciation as an employer is pay somebody more. And it just creates this cycle in these industries around this where they just ignore culture. And that could actually be one of their greatest strengths inside of their industry, especially as a competitive advantage for good people.

Darren: Your culture is truly your lifeblood, right? It's the lifeblood of the organization. You know, just like in our body, we don't see the blood flowing through our body every day, but without it, we wouldn't be standing, right? And that's what it is. And how people are feeling when they're going to work, it's easy to just say, hey, you just got to get the job done and go through it. That's important. We do have to do that.

But we have to also realize that because our work is such a big part of our life, if we have a bad boss, that bad boss, guess what? They're going home with you. They're sitting in the car with you when you're going home at night. They're sitting at the dinner table with you. They're waking you up in the middle of the night. That's with you. And that is a lens, oftentimes of people feeling valued for being valuable and feeling in a place where they can be trapped.

Your culture is a function of the habits that people collectively have. And I love that example you gave, Ryan, of people willing to leave to go work for someone for 25 cents less an hour because they can be valued for being valuable. The reason for that is the ripple effect that work has in terms of how it transforms us not only in our work and getting that pet job done, that box checked, things completed, knocked off the list, but how it actually impacts us to show up stronger in other areas of our life.

With a lot of the generational shifts that are taking place now, what people are seeing, what we're seeing more and more of is people want that more and are demanding that more and because of the transparency that we are seeing, in many industries with what it's like to work at a certain employer, people are going to leave for those aspects more. And that's what people want. And that's across the board in numerous industries.

Ryan: So what do you find is the biggest hurdle to becoming intentional about your culture and taking control and getting some of the results that you're talking about?

Darren: It's the limiting belief that I don't have time for this. And a big part of it ties in the fact that it's thought of that culture is this big, foreign thing that we have to go off. And it's, takes a whole bunch of time to do these elements. It does take time. But what is culture, guys? you guys know this. It's how we have conversations. It's how we, when we bump into each other in the hallway, you know, when we can actually do that again a little bit more frequently. I know we're doing that still. But when people bump into each other, how do they interact?

What are the habits? What are they saying about each other? About the organization? That's what it is. It's those shared values that people have. So how do we start to transform that? It doesn't have to be this big, nuanced, hey, we're gonna go shift everything. It's the micro habits. It's the little things. It's the questions that we're intentionally asking. If I'm a manager in a company and I'm actually willing to pause and ask the simple question that I shared earlier, how do you best learn? What's the most effective way for you to learn?

Something like that, or something along the lines of when you achieve your goals, how would you like to be recognized? You know, people don't think of recognition and learning and the importance of that in setting expectations. Here's one thing. Here's culture guys, expectation setting. It's actually in Gallop's research, it's actually at the core of one of the four needs of followers. The most weighted statement in their engagement survey is I know what's expected of me at work. That ties directly to trust. A confused mind does nothing.

That's a statement my business Partner Brandon Miller always says. A confused mind does nothing. So when we're talking about setting expectations, I know when I was in construction, I'm sure you guys have seen the old drawing of this, right? So somebody's giving the direction of like, Hey, here's what the blueprints say. So then the contractor bids it, the contractors bid something that they have, that's a totally different mindset, then they go out, field guide builds it and that's completely different, right?

Expectation setting, sometimes it's like playing a game of telephone. I don't know if you guys remember playing that as kids. You whisper something into one kid's ear, it goes down to the 20th kid, it's totally different. But when we're stepping into taking this back to building trust and culture, it's easy for us to overlook the importance of how people take in information. We'll fall in line and just say we just do it.

This is how you do it, go get it done. That's clear for us, but, clear for me, but maybe Jeremy, maybe you had another question. Ryan, maybe you had a question that would clarify that. So when we ask questions like, how, what's the most effective way that you learn? And then you close that loop with when you achieve your goals, how would you like to be recognized? Guess what you've done? You've closed the loop on expectation setting because if you find out that, hey, I'm naturally just going to tell you go do this and not give you space for questions.

And you tell me, hey, the way that I best learn is hear that, those instructions and ask a question or two that is helpful for me to understand. And then when I recognize you, it closes the loop by communicating to you that you hit the expectation. So guess what, the more that we celebrate the wins, the more wins that we have to celebrate. I think that's a quote from Oprah Winfrey. But we fall into that cycle. That's culture building. And you can start in a simple as two questions like that with recognizing some of those areas and those differences that can actually create our advantages.

Ryan: There was a lot that you just shared with our audience there. There were a lot of different questions you said to ask. If someone's listening and they're like, you know what, you know, Darren, I think you're right. I think this culture thing, I need to become a little bit more intentional about it. I need to take that next step, what's the first step they should take to really get their arms around culture and start becoming intentional with it?

Finding Grind, Greatness and Genius Zones

Darren: Self-awareness. The greatest leaders don't, they're not all visionaries. They're not all doers. They're not all great at building relationships. They don't share the same set of talents. We got to become self-aware as to who we are and who we're not. A great way to do that, to start, is just by going through the process of identifying where your natural talents are, where your natural strengths are. There's a couple of tools that people can use to identify that. We use the Clifton Strengths Assessment through Gallup.

It's an outstanding assessment that helps to identify people's talents, their natural patterns of thought, feeling and behavior that can be productively applied. And the whole foundational elements of that is simply, Clifton asked the question of what will happen when we focus on what's right with people instead of fixating on what's wrong with people. What we often find is when we go through that, that helps to give us inventory as a manager, as a business owner, right?

As a leader, where do we stand? How do we naturally show up? And also, what are the ways that others are different? So how can they potentially complement where we're at? An exercise that we have in our website that we're going to share a little bit later as well for people to start with, start with yourself on this, but it's actually a really powerful tool to use with those that you lead. It's identifying your grind, your greatness and your genius zones.

So the grind zones, guys, these are the things that no matter what you do, no matter how many times you've done them, they're just a grind constantly. You'd rather bang your head against the wall and do some of these tasks or tackle some of these things. Maybe you don't give a presentation, whatever it is, it's just not your sweet spot no matter how much practice you've had. And you just, you can get to the point where maybe you can do it but it's definitely not great.

Greatness are the things that you enjoy doing and you're really good at and you're strong and others can see that. And you can make a list of these things. On our website, we have an exercise where you can actually download and it's just a little form, different ways, describes each of these and gives you some ways that you can think about this in your work. And so that's what the greatness is. You can really make some contributions. Genius is elusive and here's why. A lot of times, the things that we're the best at are the things that we're going to say that's no big deal. Anybody could do that. How come you can't do that?

Even, these could be the things that we get frustrated that other people can't do because we're like, it's just so easy. How could you not know how to do that? That, more times than not, is the tell of they're like, you're really amazing at this. You really shine in these particular areas. ou contribute in these areas. And we oftentimes will undervalue them because we're not seeing them through that lens because they come so easily to us. It's a powerful process to do for yourself to take inventory of where you're at.

It's actually really a powerful tool that you can get started on as well in working with your employees. Have them identify what are your grinds, your greatness zones, you genius zones. What oftentimes emerges on teams with culture-building from that is you're able to then step into what might be in my grind zone might be one of your greatness zones or one of your genius zones, you're actually able to figure out the complimentary partnerships and relationships that actually exist in your team by getting people talking about that.

Ryan: Now, I love that. So step one, become self-aware. The Clifton Strengths Finder is a great way to do that. The online assessment and then you get this amazing report that just talks about the things that your best strengths and the areas that you should play to. And then what I heard was go to that next step by going to your website, 34strong.com. downloading, the Grind Greatness Genius exercise and figure out, are you actually working inside of your genius, your greatness, or are you just grinding things away?

But then step two, or maybe step three, is then get your team involved and make sure that they're complimentary to what your genius is. Because building out a really effective team is making sure that you've got people that compliment you, not just people you get along with. People that have their own set of strengths where you might not have the greatest strengths there. Did I get that right?

Darren: That's exactly it. And the Clifton Strengths is one tool. The Grind Greatness Genius is another tool. So it's actually two steps. You can use either or you can use both of those, okay? So the two steps are start with self-awareness and move from self-awareness to team-awareness. That's all it is.

Ryan: That's great. And if they want to get a hold of you, maybe they get stuck and they say are right there and I'd love to talk to you about how you can help me do this. Your website, that's the best place to find you?

Darren: Absolutely. 34strong.com is a great place to find myself, find our whole team. We've got a whole team that helps many organizations through this. They can find me there, they can find us on LinkedIn, Facebook, all the social media channels as well.

Ryan: You're an easy guy to find.

Darren: Or you can look at Darren Virassammy as well.

Ryan: Awesome. Hey, Darren, thank you so much. I really enjoyed our conversation today. Some great insight around culture and what we can do to take our companies to the next level. Thanks so much, Darren.

Darren: Thank you, Ryan. Thank you, Jeremy. It's been a true pleasure.

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