Episode 161-David Friedman on Building Your Workplace Culture-Building My Legacy with Lois Sonstegar

Welcome to Episode 161 of Building My Legacy.

In this podcast David Friedman — award-winning CEO, entrepreneur and author — talks with us about the importance of building cultures. David believes that, as a leader, if you don’t take control of your corporate culture, it will be created for you by the strongest personalities within your organization. In our discussion, he provides tips on how you can be intentional about culture and introduces us to the process his CultureWiseTM system uses to simplify the experience for you and employees at all levels of your company.

David explains how to implement the culture you want by defining it clearly and introducing “rituals” to implement the needed behavior changes in a structured, systematic way. He’s convinced that most employees want to do great work, but they may not understand fully what that entails and may not have the internal discipline needed to lead to success.

So if you want to know:

– How culture has an enormous influence over how employees do what they do
– Why the CEO has to be the chief culture officer, too
– What prevents leaders from being intentional about workplace culture
– Why it’s easier to coach someone about their behaviors than their values
– Why rituals are so important in the rollout and maintenance of your desired work culture
– Practical ways to measure the implementation of a cultural change


About David Friedman

David Friedman is a CEO, entrepreneur, author and renowned public speaker. As CEO of an employee benefits consulting company, he grew the business from a few people to more than 100 employees because of the culture the company had built. After he sold that company, he wrote his first book, Fundamentally Different, based on the insights he learned by intentionally building the right culture at his former company. He followed that up with his second book, Culture by Design, a “how-to” manual for building a high-performance cu