Craig Wiley on Building Enterprise Cultures

I was first introduced to Craig Wiley a number of years ago when I was starting my journey in executive coaching. The people that told me about Craig spoke about his integrity, his ability to think strategically, and help them as their executive coach. When we connected years ago, he was awesome, he was authentic, he was genuine, he had a clear vision for where he wanted to take his company, and it’s really cool to reconnect with him today and check in with him on where he’s at and where the company has gone.

So, a bit about Craig: He is the CEO and Founder of Transcend, a company that helps to transform C-Suite leaders and their businesses. He’s been doing this for over 2 decades as an executive coaching expert and business strategy thought leader, two spaces in which he really does live. He lives in almost this consultant, strategy, thought leader space, which we get into in today’s conversation along with this executive coaching space. Ultimately, he’s really passionate about driving continual innovation through what they have determined to be the best practice and the best solutions necessary to advance leadership within organizations. One of the key themes of today, and one of the things that we talk about quite a bit and Craig really brings to today’s conversation, is this ability for an organization to focus on their enterprise first rather than last (and a lot of organizations focus on their enterprise last). When he works with organizations, he helps them align their values, their purpose, their mission, to whatever it is they’re doing at the enterprise level. Then, they go from there to the team and then it filters down to the individual.

Craig had a number of amazing insights during our conversation. Some of them include:

“Every single day when we’re working with executives, they are being pushed and pulled in unbelievably dynamic ways” (6:05).

“If you’re a CEO, you really don’t have a community in your business” (6:25).

“The notion of resilience looks different to different people” (6:55).

“We think about individual performance, we think about team performance, but then we also think about how [an enterprise performs]” (8:50).

“We think about resilience through the lens of a community that is resilient in unison” (9:05).

“People love in engaging in things that are difficult when it’s meeting a bigger purpose” (11:15).

“The highest functioning organizations are enterprise first, team second, individual third” (11:50).

“We know that people are driven by impact and connection” (14:05).

“We invest a ton of time and energy in being an enterprise-first company” (18:10).

“As a coach or a leader, we have to be talking about the bigger meaning and the bigger purpose than this week’s game or this quarter’s deliverables” (23:05).

“It’s the CEO’s sole job to ensure that they have a dynamic, innovative enterprise” (29:05).

“Progressive business engages robust dialogue across all levels of the organization to build the future of the organization” (32:30).

“People want to have a meaningful existence and they want to have impact and they want to feel good about what they do every single day” (35:10).

“If [a private equity firm has] operating partners that understand how to take a company and make it enterprise first, team second, individual third, and understand how to create the highest performing ecosystems for people to flourish, the private equity firm wins” (46:45).

“Business dynamics are the most dynamic they’ve ever been” (51:05).

“You have to agility and resilience and innovation in organization” (51:20).

“When people are operating from one playbook, they perform better” (59:10).

“People came to America because they saw opportunity through equality” (1:08:50).

“Success is not purpose” (1:09:00).

Additionally, you can find the Transcend website here and connect with Transcend on LinkedIn. You can also connect directly with Craig on LinkedIn.

Thank you so much to Craig for coming on the podcast!

I wrote a book called “Shift Your Mind” that was released in October of 2020, and you can order it on Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Additionally, I have launched a company called Strong Skills, and I encourage you to check out our new website https://www.strongskills.co/. If you liked this episode and/or any others, please follow me on Twitter: @brianlevenson or Instagram: @Intentional_Performers.

Thanks for listening.