KCB Boiler Room After Hours: “Creating a Dynamic Company Culture”

With a packed house on a Tuesday night, we hosted our last event of the year. The subject at hand—company culture—is a perennial hot topic, and our panel delivered a riveting and often hilarious discussion of it.

Moderated by Kevin, the panel featured Eric Adams, co-founder of Adams + Beasley Associates, Tiffany LeBlanc, founder and principal of Tiffany LeBlanc Design, and Matthew Cunningham, founder and principal of Matthew Cunningham Landscape Design.

Opening the discussion, Kevin asked Eric Adams to elaborate on how core values impact company culture. Before Eric shared the five core values of Adams + Beasley, he shared a moment he had with co-founder Angus Beasley, with Angus describing how he and Eric are “macro managers,” saying that “because we have a strong skeleton of ‘shared values,’ we don’t have to insert ourselves as leaders on a daily basis…b/c they’re [the core values are] so clearly defined. They’re part of our annual review process. The only fireable offense is not living up to these values. Not making mistakes.”

He, of course, went on to list those five values as “Delivery excellence, show you care, rise to the challenge, win as a team, and bring your joy. In any given situation, those are the ones that we consistently come back to.” He also singled out the last and newest value—bring your joy—with the origin story of its inception on the list.

 Tiffany LeBlanc’s approach to company culture is less articulated but more holistic. “When looking at hiring people,” Tiffany started, “my brother is a corporate guy. We talked years ago [about this subject matter], and he said, ‘Tiffany, I always look and say, ‘Do they have a can-do attitude?’ You have to have a can-do attitude. So our analogy is: do we want you in the boat with us if it’s sinking? Will you help get the water out of the boat so we don’t all sink?” (laughter) And when times are tough we look at each other and say, ‘I want you on my boat.”

Eventually Kevin took to the mic, sharing KCB company values that find as their throughline quality. It’s “our number one core value—the quality of our team, the quality of how we do our work, looking at ourselves. If something goes wrong, we look at ourselves first. We try to find our part in it, how can we improve ourselves with an attitude of ‘This is within our control.’ And it’s not something that’s happening to us, it’s something that we’re all doing together.”