Start With A Win - Jim Stevenson: How to Build Team Culture in 2025

Episode Date: September 17, 2025

This episode of Start With a Win dives deep into the heart of leadership and culture with Jim Stevenson, founder and CEO of The Bletchley Group. From global brands to scrappy startups, Jim has been in the trenches helping businesses transform, scale, and thrive. Adam and Jim uncover why culture is the true engine of growth, how leaders unknowingly sabotage their teams, and what it really takes to build organizations that win. Packed with candid stories, hard-earned lessons, and bold insights, this episode challenges leaders to rethink how they hire, trust, and empower their people. If you’re ready to sharpen your leadership edge and uncover what truly drives sustainable success, you won’t want to miss this one.Jim Stevenson is the founder and CEO of Bletchley Group, a renowned International Growth Consultancy with 23 years of expertise in strategy, transformation, and growth. He established Bletchley Group with a fundamental belief that while technology is powerful, it should always serve a meaningful purpose. Jim's unique value stems from his diverse background, having worked in numerous roles across a wide array of companies. This experience has provided him with a valuable bird's-eye view of business operations, enabling him to identify common mistakes made by businesses.00:00 Intro02:38 What is first to focus on, if you get it right everything else becomes easy? 06:01 Customer this is the key point!07:43 Great concept is…10:02 Follow special forces on this…14:30 Might need to check your HR process…17:02 Your job as a leader is to do this!  23:30 Common problems from leaders and stop doing them.26:02 I realized and I changed my routine…w: www.bletchleygroup.coml:  http://uk.linkedin.com/in/jimstevensont:  http://twitter.com/JimStevenson===========================Subscribe and Listen to the Start With a Win Podcast HERE:📱 ===========================YT ➡︎ https://www.youtube.com/@AdamContosCEOApple ➡︎ https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/start-with-a-win/id1438598347Spotify ➡︎ https://open.spotify.com/show/4w1qmb90KZOKoisbwj6cqT===========================Connect with Adam:===========================Website ➡︎ https://adamcontos.com/Facebook  ➡︎ https://facebook.com/AdamContosCEOTwitter  ➡︎ https://twitter.com/AdamContosCEOInstagram  ➡︎ https://instagram.com/adamcontosceo/#adamcontos #startwithawin #leadershipfactory

It's better to have a hole in your organization than an asshole in your organization. And I love that. I love that. If you've got someone that is not working for, you're the organization. You can't let it go. You've got to. You've got to address it. You've just got to.

It all comes down to culture. If you get the culture right, everything else becomes easy. If you don't have the culture right, any transformation is just an uphill slog. And to be honest, more often than not, you will fail. Welcome to start with a win, where we unpack leadership, personal growth and development, and how to build a better business. Let's go. Coming to you from Area 15 Ventures and Start With a Win headquarters, it's Adam Contos with Start with a Win. Today, we're diving deep into business growth with a guy who knows a thing

or two about it. We've got Jim Stevenson, founder and CEO of the Bletchley Group, an international growth consulting firm. Jim isn't just talking theory. He's in the trenches with businesses, helping them with strategy, transformation, and growth. He's worked with the business. He's worked with everyone from tech startups to global brands and has a track record of turning things around and boosting revenue. Get ready because Jim is here to drop some serious knowledge bombs. Jim, welcome to start with a wind. Thanks for having me. You do a lot of great work with businesses and leaders. Tell us a little bit about your company and then let's dive into some of the theories and philosophies that you do to help struggling businesses and grow leaders.

Sure. To be honest, that's a great, great starting question. Bletchley Group, which is my company, I named it after Bletchley Park because it was where we created the world's first modern programmable computer, but it had a purpose. We needed to break the German Enigma code, so we needed to create technology to achieve it. And when I started out 25 years ago with Bletchley Group, it worried me that we were doing technology

just because it was cool technology, and I wanted to make sure I had a purpose. So Bletchley Group started out as a technology-based consultancy, but as we got more into startup culture, the start with Y, the Eric Rees book, lean, all those types of

methodologies. I started to apply those to businesses generally and I found that they worked incredibly well. So taking the mindset from a product mindset essentially, a startup mindset and applying it across an entire business, whether it be marketing

or sales or customer service, whatever operations, whatever that is. So Blaseley Group today is much more of a strategic advisory. We do a lot of corporate finance stuff to help companies to find the money to grow. We do a bit of fundraising. We do lots of M&A work. Gotcha.

And I love how you have identified frameworks that help business start. You talk about lean, you know, agile, some of these different concepts. You know, a lot of people focus on the framework more than the people. But I know your people first. Tell us, why is that? I can't remember who it was it said. I think it was either Peter Drucker or the editor of the Harvard Business Review. I don't know who gets the credit.

But I read years ago, someone had said that culture beats strategy for breakfast. And my entire experience over the last 25 years of running Bletch the group is that's entirely true. I've been asked to do digital transformations, business transformations, agile transformations. It all comes down to culture. if you get the culture right everything else becomes easy if you don't have the culture right any transformation is just an uphill slog

and to be honest more often than not you will fail just because it's an uphill stroke the culture is the most important thing I did one for a client in Switzerland I use them all the time as an example and I hope they're not upset with me because I think it's a brilliant example

and they did a huge amount of really good work the first thing I did with them was literally move people's desks and it sounds incredibly stupid but they had structured themselves the logical way you would structure a business we've got a marketing team we've got front end developers we've got back end developers we've got

user experience in graphic design they're designing type people and what you found was they were all in different floors of the building but actually when you broke it down they were all servicing the same customer so you wanted a few of the front end a few of the back end a few of the graphic designers all in the one team so that when

they actually had to ask questions they just turned around and asked a question whereas when they were in different floors they booked a meeting room the meeting was always two weeks away and so everything was just slower it was a lot more structured which is good, don't get me wrong

well not too much structure but some structure is good but it allowed them to move much more agile it was that they were a team so the team was no longer the graphic design team or the user experience team their team was we're fixing this business problem for these users and we're all here together fixing it

Just that incredibly simplistic thing changed the culture fundamentally. So when you started talking to them about applying data to their customers, it was like, yeah, that makes sense. Let's do that, as opposed to we need a meeting in two weeks time. That's a great concept. And it's definitely Peter Drucker, Culture Each Strategy for Breakfast. I mean, great management consultant, and I guess he's the father of modern management. Absolutely.

I love this, you know, start by moving the chairs around. type idea the it's it's interesting you say that because um i remember when uh when we moved our company we went from two floors where everybody was really crammed together very tightly culture was fantastic you know we would have happy hours we would get together and and just you know celebrate things and talk to each other everybody knew each other's family and then we went to 12 floors and it built so many silos so quickly where people did not integrate their their department culture with the organizational culture and it really was impactful. So, I mean, I love that point.

I very often talk to clients about breaking down the silos because that's what it is. If you're in a marketing team or a sales team or customer service team or whatever team you're in, that's your team. And it's kind of, well, yeah, maybe within the organization structure, the org chart is very vertical. But your customers come in and they're horizontal. Your customer doesn't care what team you're in. Your customer just cares that the handoff between marketing and sales, sales to operations,

operations to customer service was terrible and I got a bad experience. Yeah, you've got the best marketing team and the best sales team and the best operation team and the best customer service team, whatever your structure is. But if they're not handing off, if you've not got those silos broken down, there's a big gap between those verticals that we all have in our organization chart with what the customer experience is. And you've got to focus on the customer experience. So why are we as leaders? Let's say you're in the C-suite and you know, you have the C-suite leadership and then you have different department managers. Obviously, a department manager's job, it seems to be, is to protect their team.

Whereas, you know, they're protecting their team from the other people and from the C-suite. So you've got this, you know, these firewalls that are built up around the company. Why don't we as C-suite executives are key leaders in the organization think ahead of that? How do we get trapped in this? I think it's legacy. I think there's a lot of ego. I think it's a lack of training. So you have managers becoming direct.

becoming leaders, but without being trained in between. I mean, and I completely agree with you, but the mere fact that you're talking about protecting my team, the fact that I feel that I need to protect my team is the number one flag. It's just a huge red flag. If you need to protect your team, the organization has got a fundamental flaw in there somewhere. But the other concept I really like is first team, second team.

If you're the chief marketing officer of a company, your first team is the marketing team because you're a marketing guy. If you're the sales director, your first team is the sales team. And that's fundamentally wrong. If you're in the exec suite, your first team is your fellow peers on the exec suite. That's your first team. That's the team that's going to drive the business forward. That's your number one team.

You need to support that team and do whatever you can. You lead your marketing team. You lead your sales team. You lead. They're your second team. The number one team is your peers. The second team is the team that you lead. They're not looking for your friendship.

They're not looking for you to be the best mate going for a beer in a Friday evening. They're looking for your leadership. They're looking for your direction. They're looking for you to stand up and lead them and tell them what they need to achieve to be successful. So your first team is your peers in the exec team. Your second team is the team that you're leading. And I think far too many people forget that.

And I think that is because essentially it's the Peter Principle. We're promoting people to a level of their own incompetence almost. I don't think people are incompetent. But we don't train them from going from a really good operator at this function to a manager at that function, a director of that function, to a leader of that function, we just assume because they're good at it, they'll be good at leading people. And it's a different skill set entirely. Totally. I love the reference to the Peter Principle, promoting people to their level of incompetence. That happens so much in

business. It seems like it's happening more frequently now than ever, because to me, I'm not seeing as many organizations focus on leadership development than we may have had in the past. Because a lot A lot of leaders in the past came from, you know, military or government, command and control structure. There was leadership development because there had to be for the battlefield, you know, implementation of leadership. But the reality is now we have people that come through higher education. They're taught how to compartmentalize their, their companies subconsciously.

Why are we missing leadership training so much? I mean, you go into so many businesses and you might identify that and go, when's the last time you trained your leaders? They go, what does that mean? Yeah. Yeah, I never got trained. Why do I need to train that? I love that question, but your podcast may be four or five hours now, if I give you that answer. I think you're entirely right. And I love the military, I love the military management training that they give. I think the problem is that we try and replicate big companies in the same way as you with a thousand man military battalion, to be honest, or a 300 man battalion. And what we really should be doing is we should be falling special. forces. Structure your team as four or five troopers and the SAS deltas, whatever your special forces flavor is, give them an objective and trust them to go away and deliver.

And that way actually, when something happens that you didn't plan for, the team know what they're trying to do. They're trained enough to get there. They will flex. They will pivot. They will do what they need to to achieve the outcome. But we get into this whole big, I'm the boss. I've got 300 people below me.

Aren't I great? It's an ego boost for me. So I want you guys to do this. And essentially it becomes 300 people doing what you want, as opposed to 300 people doing what you need the organisation to achieve. And I find that quite bizarre in that kind of structure. But I'm also trying, and I'm going through a lot of thought experiments at the moment, round about being an old foge.

Because I think fundamentally business is changing. I think the idea of having an employee going forward is going to be a remote idea. You've got millennials coming up and they're into the gig economy. They want flexibility. They don't be tied to desk nine to five. And I think that is changing how we need to manage more so into the special forces. Here's your objective. Come back and tell me where it's done.

But I think there's a lot of training that needs to happen within that. And I think while I'm a huge proponent of bottom up leadership and bottom up training, while I'm a huge proponent of that bottom up thing, I think there's far too many organisations from the board down that are stuck 20 years ago. They've not noticed that society's changing. They've not noticed that what young people want in a working career is not to join your company and be there for 30 years

and retire and get the golden watch and leave. That's not always floating their boats. I think as leaders, we need to start accommodating that within our structures but also within our cultures and within how we manage these individuals and our teams to achieve that. You've said a couple of important things here, Jim. I mean, one of it means to work. I don't normally do that.

One of the things I want to start with is trust. And you didn't talk about just trusting the leader. You talked about the leader trusting the people also. That was really important because a lot of times you see leaders saying, oh, they're not getting done what I need them to get done. And that's because there's a lack of trust and giving them the freedom to do so. So, I mean, it's fascinating when we talk about this. and then going from a large organization down to a smaller, you know, call it a startup or, you know,

a SMB of some sort, small, medium-sized business, the reality is most of societies made up of small businesses. So when we take a look at how the leadership integration happens in small businesses, we've got to have that trust and we've got to have that agile working environment that, you know, you reference to special forces type. team because your, you know, your entire staff that is on during a day might be five or ten people completely for the entire organization. So how do we capture the culture of leadership? Obviously, we have, you know, the leader runs in. They go lock themselves in their office for the day and then they look at the results at the end of the day. How can they integrate their thoughts more with the people so that the culture is one of,

excellence and winning and accomplishment versus, you know, this founder syndrome of do it my way and I'll make all the decisions for you. And, you know, let's, let's turn these people loose to run and let them show results for our companies. Are there anything to come to mind that you talk to leaders about? Yeah, this is another four-hour answer, to be honest. I think the challenge with what you've said is there is no one thing you can do. I think it's a web of things. If you just say to your team, I trust you, go away and do things, that will not change their behaviours because it's your actions that will change that.

But again, it goes beyond not just your actions. If you are feeling that you don't trust someone in your team, chances are you're hiring policies wrong. You've hired the wrong person. So it goes all the way back from before that person even started working for you. Did you interview the right person? Did you hire the right person? Did you bring them into the team?

When you brought them into the team, have you made the environment safe for them and secure for them? Do they feel that they can challenge your decision? And you don't want people to challenge your decision when you're into implementing things, but you absolutely want to challenge your decision when you're making, which direction are we going, what are we doing? Because that's where the creativity comes from.

So it's a whole holistic environment within your company that you need to get, including where you're going to sit them. You sit them next to the bathroom because they're a new guy and that's the worst seat in the office. It's like, oh, hang on. that's probably not the right way to enter someone in. So you're onboarding and it is that entirety of everything.

It is do you value them? Have you given them enough? And I'm going to say the word incentive. And for me, incentive is not about money. Partly money, yes, absolutely. We all need money to live and grow. But for some people, the incentive is, do you know what?

I hadn't even thought about that idea. That was great, fantastic, keep it up. That will change someone's day in a heartbeat. And it didn't cost you a penny. That's it. It was just, so it's that entirety, it's the holistic view of how you're running your team before the start, how you get them. In fact, even before before they start, it's the job advert you put out there. Who is it you're attracting into that process to bring them in?

And if that doesn't change and the whole, then you're never going to succeed. So again, senior leadership, whether you've got a five-man team, a ten-man team, you need to be leading the team and you need to be very clear. has to be part of your DNA, essentially. And if it's not part of your DNA, if one part's not right, you should ask your team, what's not working? What do we need to fix? And that's a self-confidence in leaders that I don't often see.

What I very often see in leaders is, I got the business here, I know what I'm doing, you just need to trust me to lead you and tell you what to do, and we'll be fine. And then the leader goes back into their office and thinking, I've got no idea what's happening. Ah, man, I've never been doing this before.

And it's that kind of a, it's the hero complex effectively. It's like I'm going to fix everything because I've been here before. I've done it before I've read the business to hear. And actually, yeah, it might work for you. It very often does work for you. But it's significantly easier to get your team.

Hire the right team. Let them help you. I think I can't remember who it was. It said it was a saying in the UK, you don't buy a dog and bark yourself. I think Steve Jobs said you don't hire smart people and tell them what to do. But it's exactly that.

is a leader taking your ego out of it. My job as a leader was never, ever to lead teams. My job was always to create an environment, create a structure, and tell them what the objective was, and then watch magic happen. And it very often does. I love that. I mean, people don't focus enough on that hiring and onboarding process, it seems.

You know, especially onboarding, I mean, that's where people really start dropping the ball. There's no clarity. You can walk up to somebody in. so many different businesses and say, what do you do, what are your goals? Do you have what you need in order to accomplish those goals? And are you supported by your leadership? And they'll just look at you with this blank face and you know that they have not been onboarded properly. Yeah. And I mean, it goes beyond that. I mean, we all make mistakes. We all hire their

wrong people at one point in time. Right. And it's then it's then addressing it quickly. And addressing it quickly can either be giving them additional training, supporting them through an issue that they've got helping them, or it can just be having that really brutal but honest and genuine conversation that says, you know what, this is not the right for you or me. I don't want to cut you tomorrow, but I'm giving you notice. This is not working. You need to go and look for something else. In the meantime, can we focus you in these aspects that we know you're good at? And then once you find something, we'll kind of put a time scale and we'll plan around about that. I did a bit of lecturing at Cranfield University in the UK and they had a great say. It's better

to have a hole in your organization and an asshole in your organization. And I love that. I love that. If you've got someone that is not working for, you're the organization, you can't let it go. You've got to address it.

You've just got to. And again, I remember in the UK, I had a guy who was part of a seven-man team that I had. And he was never where he was meant to be. He was never doing what he's meant to be doing. He was always late. He was always AWOL. He was just, for one of a better term,

he was just terrible. and eventually I kind of sat down and spoke to him and said look this is just not working to it and in the UK the employment law is slightly different so if you resign you don't get any social security benefits because you resign but if you get fired in the UK you get unemployment benefit right and he was actively pushing me to fire him and he was as frustrated as me because he was pushing me to get fired and was wondering why after two months I hadn't fired him yet and I was wondering after two months why he wasn't pulling up his socks and getting the job done.

And it suddenly occurred to me at that point in trying to be fair to this one guy, he was essentially being an asshole because he wasn't part of the team, he wasn't contributing to the team. But in trying to be fair to him and giving him a second chance and a third chance and a four chance, what was actually doing was there was being entirely unfair to the six other people in his team who were making up the difference for what he wasn't doing. They were showing up in time.

They were getting the job done. They were driving the business forward. And I was being unfair to them. How insane is that? So yeah, I firmly believe part of this whole culture thing is the right team and probably the right team. If you make a mistake, own up to it, be honest. You don't have to cut them tomorrow.

It was your mistake to hire them so you don't want them to suffer from it. You don't want it to run on for months, but come up with the plan. It says this isn't working. Just be really fraught. It's difficult to do, but it's the best thing you can do for your business, and it's the best thing you can do for them and the rest of your team. Some great points there. I'll tell you, Jim, the quote of the day is it's better to have a hole in your organization

than an asshole in your organization. I genuinely love that one. It's broke. And yes, it's so true. It's easy, but it's so true. Oh, totally. I mean, clearly it's a shared responsibility. If you're a bad employee, you have a responsibility for being a bad employee.

If you have a bad employee, you have a shared responsibility as the manager or the leader of that bad employee to either fix them or get rid of them. And it's fascinating. You know, we don't, and we don't have. have the requirement in the U.S. the same way you have in the U.K. with regards to, you know, the payment. Granted, we have unemployment, which essentially is kind of the same thing. But the reality is you're killing your organization by keeping the wrong people in place. It's just, I mean, it's not worth it. I completely agree with that. I split my time now between L.A. and

so I see the U.S. version. And while the law doesn't say that you need to treat your employees that way, I still think that you should. Because what you do not want to do is you do not want to hire someone, fire them within three days because they weren't the right person. Because the message that's sending to the US of your team is, you don't get a second chance. We're not going to work with you. We're not going to train you.

If you do have an off day, then it sets that kind of hire and fire kind of culture. So I think if you do hire someone, although you've got the right to fire them tomorrow and just say, don't show up. Personally, I think that's sending a bad organization to, a bad message to the rest of the organization. So I would treat them with a bit more empathy. It was equally your mistake that they got there as much as it was theirs. So treat them with a bit fairer. Have a little plan, have a week or two, three weeks, whatever you think is fair to them and to you and to the rest of the team as opposed to just kind of firing on this. Unless they've done something bad,

which that's entirely different. But I think the culture part that we were talking about, I think there's a bit incumbent on that to say, I made half of that mistake. I need to take the tax, the pain of that half mistake, and I'll work with you to move you out the organization and give you time to find something else. I love that. And fundamentally, you know, do a better job hiring people, folks. Yeah. You know, take a little bit longer and make sure they're the right person. And that's not by sitting them down and going, what was your biggest challenge that you've overcome? And, you know, tell me about yourself. Have some genuine vetting processes for that position in the business so you know you're getting the right person and somebody who's going

grow with a company. So hiring is very important. Don't just put it on HR shoulders and say, go find me somebody. If you're the leader, you need to be a big part of that and make sure you are putting the right person in your team because they will have a massive impact on the outcomes that your team creates. So Jim, this has been incredibly valuable, this different information here. Let me ask you this in closing up. What's the common problem you see leaders continue? to execute on, you know, that pops up more than anything else. I mean, what, what are they doing wrong so that we can, we can tell our audience, stop doing this.

Is there anything in particular, maybe it is hiring the wrong people, or maybe it is only under the wrong people too long. I have thought about this a lot. And I think if it's okay with your, I'll give you one or give you three. The first one being culture, culture is huge. Do not ignore your culture. You have a culture whether you know or not. And if you don't know it, you've got a bad culture.

If you know it, then you can work towards a good culture. I love that. The other one that I think is really important is leaders chasing too many things. Okay. You can't do everything. So if you've got a 10-man team and you've got 15 things on your priority list for this quarter, I'm going to say you're going to miss most of those. Your team isn't going to be able to flex and do anything meaningful

if you've got so many priorities and you're chasing something. Or even if your priorities are changing week to week, This is a priority this week. We've not finished it yet, but we're going to stop that and do this next thing. So be very focused on what it is that you're doing. And then the last one that I like is what Warren Buffett calls busy work. Way too many people mistake activity for progress. I work hard today.

Yeah, but what did you achieve? Right. I didn't achieve anything. But it was a really tough day. I came into the office at eight, left at six, worked. I didn't even get my break. And it's like, yeah, but what did you achieve? Yeah, I don't really know that achieved anything.

So that mistaken activity for progress is another big one. But it all comes down to that culture, focus on what's important to you, and then make sure that everything you're doing is driving you towards that. And I think if you've got those right, pretty much everything else then starts to become less important and you can pick those things up over time. Some great, great points there. Everybody, make sure you go back and listen to those and write those three things down. hold up the mirror, focus on, are you executing on those things? And I love the final one. Don't be busy, be productive for crying out loud. Big difference there. You can find Jim at Bletchley Group.com, also on LinkedIn, on Twitter. Jim is all over the internet with his

wisdom of leadership. Make sure you check him out. He's got some great wisdom bombs that he's dropped today. Jim, I have a question. I ask all the amazing leaders on Start with a Win. And that's, how do you start your day with a win? Again, I love this question because I've only just changed my daily routine. I was finding that I was getting derailed far too often too quickly in my day. So actually, what I'm starting my day now with is two things. I do a complete mental reset. Whereas I need to achieve today to achieve what I won't achieve tomorrow and next week and next month.

And then I always, always start with a quick win. and a quick win could be as simple as overnight I've got 200 emails I want to clear my emails that's clear the decks let me get it clear I'm scheduling in time for focus work so that quick win is either something that is really short but really important for me

or it's clearing the decks so that I've got the visibility in the space I need for the rest day but it's those two things rather than one but it's that mental reset in the morning and then it's that quick win whatever that is first thing. I love that. I feel like you read my book. We talk a lot about quick wins in that. This has been very insightful. Thank you for dropping all of this leadership information on us. We all have some work to go do in our businesses to, you know, really work on

that culture, break down those silos and work on how we are growing our employees effectively in order to be that Agile Special Forces team. Jim, thanks for all you do and thanks for being on Start with a Wind. I love the conversation and I hope your audience found it useful.