The One Shift That Determines What Your Entire Company Can Create

My Twitter handle used to be @AwesomeCulture.

I spent years helping companies build culture intentionally: mission, purpose, values, and all the scaffolding around them. Interview questions designed around the values. Culture-based performance reviews. Rituals, routines, decision-making frameworks.

And after enough years of that work, I felt a little disheartened. I kept noticing that even when we did all of it, a leader would get triggered into a reactive state and react from it. Fear would spread through the culture. And soon there was hypocrisy: we say we value this, but we don't actually live it.

Which is why, if I had to choose between putting effort into designing a founder's culture and putting effort into their state, I'd choose the state. It's much more foundational. Who you're being makes a bigger difference than what you're saying, because the moment those don't match, people believe who you're being instead.

From my experience, your company's success comes down to who's on your team and the state those people operate from. Together, those two things determine the density of creative energy directed toward creating your vision. And both trace back to the state you're operating from as the founder: a state of threat, or a state of presence.

Who's on Your Team

A critical part of scaling is building a leadership team you genuinely believe could run the company as well as or better than you could, without you. When you have that team, all you have to do is set the vision, create clarity around goals, and they mostly run without you.

What makes that hard is fear. It's what stops you from letting go of someone who isn't meeting that bar, thinking there'll be a gap and you'll have to do extra work, morale will tank, and other people will leave. From my experience, often the opposite happens. And when the search for the right person takes a while, that same fear is what tempts you to settle for a very good team instead of a truly exceptional one.

I understand the compulsion to settle. But when founders do, they spend the next years dealing with the implications. The drama. The constant need to motivate. The feeling that the company only moves when you push it.

The State They Operate From

Your state can't help but spread through your organization. If you're leading from fear, your team leads from fear. They're far more energetically sensitive than you realize: if you assume the worst, they become fearful, and if you catastrophize, they become reactive.Their creative energy gets wasted bracing against what's going wrong and what might go wrong next.

And it works just as powerfully in the other direction. When you're operating from presence, you create the conditions for your team to experience excitement, creativity, connection, and love.

For example, at Fetch Rewards, a multi-billion-dollar company that's grown tremendously, the CEO realized he was motivating himself and his team from fear: "guys, if we don't do these things, we won't be able to raise more capital." It was do or die. I challenged him to first shift it within himself: if we do these things, these good things will happen. Same thing, framed entirely differently. He started shifting the way he talked to himself, then his team, then at all hands. The tension started to loosen, and at the same time, the creative output dramatically increased. New ideas, new business lines, new products.

Now, I don't want to overindex on that one shift being the fix for everything. The CEO has been practicing conscious leadership for a while, but that one shift was really powerful.

Why You Can't See Your Own State

The hardest part of this work is seeing your own state clearly, and knowing how to effectively shift it, for both you and your team. Most of us are like fish in water, unable to see the water we're swimming in.

That's why I'm hosting the third annual Sun Valley Founders Retreat this coming January 20th–24th: four days of deep, transformational work with an extraordinary group of 12 founders and a team of coaches whose job is to see what you can't.

You'll release the old patterns and stories that keep you stuck leading from fear, and learn to operate from a state of love and flow more and more of the time.

That's the shift that changes everything downstream: you hold the bar you actually want to hold, your team rises with you, and their creative energy flows toward your vision instead of being wasted on fear and resistance. Which allows you to build a thriving company without having to sacrifice your life for it.

Enrollment opens August 25th. Early applications will be considered first.

​Click Here To Learn More And Apply >>​

With love,

Dave Kashen