The Truth About Company Culture, Trust & AI at Work

0:00There's a real chance that none of us are going to trust emails, phone calls, video, anything that an AI can make or do for us. because I mean, just think about this podcast. You want to know if I really understand what we were going to talk about, when I'm going to be there. Can you imagine if I had an AI answering all that stuff and I didn't ever really read it and I didn't really know. And then I show up and I'm like, oh, I read a summary of what the AI told me, but I didn't really get it. We're going to have a bad interaction. And so it could push us the completely opposite way of where we've been going, which is like, I don't trust anything unless I'm sitting in front of you.

0:38I'm looking for diversity of thought. I want different people who think differently. I'm not necessarily looking for like, I need more of this person or that person or this color or this gender. Like I'm interested in, we've got our people, who are we missing in the conversation to help us be better? Drunker said it, culture eats strategy for breakfast. We're with the man on strategy, Chris Dyer. And that was when I kind of had this realization that what I am focusing on, What I allow to happen will continue to happen. What I focus on grows. And we have to kind of lean back into what makes us human.

1:16Seven pillars of building an amazing culture and the radical transparency. Here's Chris Dyer. All right, Chris, how do you define success? You know, that's kind of a tough question to answer. I guess it's, you know, every person has their own individual answer. So I look at it from the, are you doing the things that you want to do? Are you reaching your goals? You know, are you ultimately, because we could say success is you need to have X amount of dollars in the bank, or you need to do this or do that. That's not necessarily true for everybody. So are you intentional about what you want? And then are you doing those things to make it happen?

1:54And I think that's success, right? Ultimately. Now, did your definition of success change over your life, do you think? Or did you always see it the same way? or how's that been for you? For sure. I mean, it's easy as you're growing up to look at certain people and be like, well, I want to be like them and I want to have that car or have that money and think that that's success. When you start having kids, you look at other families and the people who've raised kids and you go, well, you want your kids to turn out well. So is that success? Yeah, so for sure, some of that has definitely changed.

2:26But, you know, that definition is still the same. Yeah, and when you go into business for yourself, it's obviously, you know, then you look at how does business, And how do I want to define success in business? I mean, and when you start off, it's like, can I afford that can of tuna next week? I mean, that's. Yeah, yeah. So obviously, a part of your definition of success in business was being a great place for people to work. Tell me more about how that became your thing and how you sort of focused in on that. Well, it became a thing because I was completely screwing it up. so we were we were growing we were doing well I had thousands of employees I had fortune 1000 clients and I'm miserable and my employees are miserable and you know and I'm mad at them they're probably mad at me and then you know one day I'm walking down the hall and I look in the mirror thinking I'm gonna give myself a pep talk and the light bulb went on and it was like oh wait a minute you're the problem, Chris.

3:28You have created this culture. You've created this place to work. It's functioning the way in which you allowed it to be created. And that was when I kind of had this realization that what I am focusing on or what I allow to happen will continue to happen. What I focus on grows. And so these different kind of realizations that came in are what I'm allowing to continue is going to continue to happen. You know what I mean? So you have these different realizations as a leader that I'm allowing this, right? I've let this stuff go on. I'm allowing, it's my fault. It's not anybody else's. And so that was the moment that I got really curious about, okay, I'm going to fix it.

4:16You know? I mean, we want to take it to like sports. I mean, like pick a sport. You're doing the thing. You're swinging the bat. You're kicking the ball. You're running down the field, whatever. And you're like, how come I'm not as good as everybody else? Okay. What am I supposed to do? What's the technique? What's the thing? How do I go do it? And that's what I got really interested in. And as I started to discover these things and we started implementing them, I got happier. My people got happier. I stopped firefighting and the companies exploded in sales. We started keeping our people and the metrics were all there like it was working yeah yeah i think you know at some point we have to realize that business is to serve us not us serve the business type thing and um how did you start to define what you wanted to change what was sort of the first three or four things that you said i got to change this and this and this first yeah um for me it was starting with transparency um i was essentially upset that people were not coming up with great ideas, that they were not being innovative, that they were leaving it to me, like they weren't doing these things, right?

5:31The problem is, I had not given them the information that they needed to ultimately be successful. I had not shared with them the things that I knew that were in my head in order for them to be able to do those things. And so I had to change what we were doing. Because again, what you are not changing, you are choosing. And what I wasn't changing, I was choosing to happen. And so I wasn't changing anything there. So I changed, hey, here's our P &L summary. Here's how we make decisions. Here's why we made the decision. Here's why we actually got rid of this person. Let's not pretend that Joe never existed after we fired him.

6:15Let's be open and honest in front of everyone and say, Joe was not cutting it. He wasn't meeting our values or he was being inappropriate with people or whatever it was. And that's not cool. And we're not going to accept that. And that's why that's personal. We're being radically transparent about everything we could. Now, not every employee wanted to know everything. That's cool. That's fine. But we at least provided the opportunity and provided them the space to share everything that we could. And that began to change that sort of the friction in the company. Now we had to do lots more things to make it run better, but that removed the friction when people understood, okay, this is how we make money.

6:57This is how we spend the money. This is why they made that decision. Even if I don't like it, I understand why so I can navigate things better. Got it. So ultimately you found this idea that culture makes and breaks companies. It just does. I mean, Drucker said it. Everyone's at some point said culture is the thing. What are the fundamentals in your mind to creating great cultures and performance cultures and cultures where people enjoy working and can succeed? So what's cool is I have got these seven pillars and it doesn't really matter if you want to be a high performing culture or a family culture, or you want to be a kumbaya or you We want to, whatever, we know there's lots of different ways.

7:40I mean, so one size fits one. I'm not asking you to go be Amazon. I'm not asking you to go be Google. I'm not asking you to go be General Motors, like whatever. They all have their own way of doing it. But what we found is that they're really good at these seven things in their own way that makes sense for them. So transparency we talked about, that's number one. Positivity or positive leadership. So focusing on what's working first. Being able to say yes. Being able to look at what's working. Not walking around the office focusing on problems all the time. Measurement. Being really good at measuring what matters so we actually can figure out how to get better.

8:20Uniqueness. What makes us unique? That's marketing. That's sales. That's our people. How do we get diversity of thought in the room? Right? So really being interested and curious about uniqueness. not about sameness. I don't want to be just like my competitors. I want to be different, you know, right? Those kinds of things. Listening. So how do we listen to everyone in that ecosystem? Our clients, our customers, our employees, our vendors, everyone. Then we have recognition. So the best companies have a great recognition program. And I think I'm on the last one, mistakes. So all those other ones were like positive things.

9:02And the mistakes one is kind of like, how do you deal with mistakes? The best organizations leverage mistakes. They build on the mistakes. They celebrate mistakes and terrible organizations punish, fire, yell and scream. You can't ever do anything wrong or you're out of here. And you're never going to have a better company if that's how things exist. Yeah. I love your definition of transparency. I want to hit on the positivity one just a little bit. If someone struggles with that, what's some of your hints to help them move in that direction faster, more, et cetera, to focus on what's the good?

9:39Yeah. So I'll give kind of like two easy examples. The first one is if you just spent all day today saying yes to everything, go give it a try. Now, a couple of helpers. Don't tell everybody you're going to say yes to everything, right? Don't put yourself in a bad position. and then you can say yes and and yes but so you could ask me any question right now and I could find a way to say yes to it you know you might say hey Chris let's go build a meth lab in our basement and let's start selling illegal drugs to children and I could say yes but you're gonna have to get the law changed because like I don't really want to break the law so like you know sure I'm interested in talking to you about your business venture here uh Brad but you know go get the law changed.

10:24So I can say, even though that's ridiculous, it's an absolute extreme. I had to learn this, Chris. I really had to learn this with my kids. Having five kids, the arguments is like, dad, can I have ice cream? Yep. You can have ice cream tomorrow after dinner. Yep. You can have ice cream. Now, do you have the money? You don't have any money? Okay. When you get money, you can have ice cream. Just all of those sorts of things. Okay. Saying yes, good. Yes. And yes, but yes, if. Yeah. So that's the way to internalize it personally. But if you want to look at it from a larger scale, how do you get interested?

10:56So what I did is I realized I was a problem solver. I was walking around the office solving problems all the time. So all you saw was problems. Focusing on negatives. Focusing on what wasn't working. And so what am I doing? I'm putting light and attention and I'm getting people, people are getting their attention from me by doing the wrong thing. The people doing the right thing are what? They're getting ignored. and so what I did is I said you know what I this time I had like 20 salespeople and two or three of them were killing it for us and what did we do we were like leave them alone don't bother them like don't screw things up like they're doing great and then there was like you know 10 15 in the middle of doing okay and then you had like you know I don't know four or five people whatever the numbers left.

11:48That just sucked. Like you were about ready to fire them. They weren't doing well or they had just started. And so what most managers go and they put those lower people on a pip. They're on every phone call, copy me on every email. I want to look at every one of your proposals. They're just like all over those people who aren't doing well. What should you do? You should go get really curious as to why those three people are doing so well and find out their secrets, get them to teach everybody else, not you as the boss go tell those people, well, Jane and Tom are doing great and this is how they do it.

12:27You need to do it their way too. But getting them to share, this is what's working. Here, we're being transparent. We know these, got three people, they're probably doing it three different ways, but here's some ideas on what we know is working. And you can go change your behaviors and do better or not. And then we we won't feel bad about letting you go if you can't do it there, right? And to the three people doing amazing, how else can I help you? Can I get you an assistant? Can I clear away clerical stuff? If like you get$5 million in deals a year and all you're doing is playing golf, how do I get you to play more golf?

13:06I don't need you in Salesforce more. I need you on the golf course more. So like how do I figure that out? And so when we started getting curious about that, then our sales just went crazy because we were kind of unshackling our people. But I was reinforcing, I like these behaviors. And these behaviors over here that I don't like, I'm not giving you any time and attention. You're getting ignored. So change your behaviors or leave. And that happened very quickly. Yeah, I love the positivity. Our Monday meetings with my executive team, the first thing we do is, what was the greatest thing that happened in your week last week?

13:42And the last thing we do is give a shout out to someone who did something amazing. So we start and finish feeling great. It's definitely I know measurement and I love measurement, but I want to skip to uniqueness and focusing in on why that's massive in your mind. It's massive in my mind because it's, I think it's a more palatable way to deal with this idea of how do we have diversity? How do we have inclusion? Why do we have this stuff? And there's been a lot of talk and politicization about this, especially in the United States recently. And it's because, you know, what we've been trying for a long time to do something that maybe hasn't, we haven't reached the goal or we haven't gotten where we wanted to go.

14:26And I think my approach is I'm looking for diversity of thought. I want different people who think differently. I'm not necessarily looking for like, I need more of this person or that person or this color or this gender. I'm interested in we've got our people. Who are we missing in the conversation to help us be better? And I can give you some really practical ways we attack that. But it was really important for us to find that. It was really important for us to talk about what made us unique in meetings, not what made us the same. It was really easy to be like, oh, well, you're a Dodgers fan.

15:04I'm a Dodgers fan. You're great. You're great. oh you don't like the Dodgers well screw you like you know like you want to connect with people and you end up like excluding people by doing it that way um and then of course you have to get really good at giving your unique value proposition out in the marketplace too right this is not just about culture it's also about marketing it's also about sales like you have to be able to articulate that and apple is like a really great example we've saw about this for years right they could really articulate what made them different, even though they're still selling a computer, they're still selling, you know, like the early iPod sucked.

15:41Like the Microsoft Zoom was way better. And yet we ended up with the iPod rather than the iPod because their marketing and their unique proposition was so much better. Yeah. I think that from a business standpoint, defining your uniqueness, how do you help people with that, Chris, when they're so stuck on the inside, you know, looking out, they can't even see what's unique about their business. How do you help them find that? Yeah. So sometimes I start with a simple exercise of asking them, imagine that you are selling those yellow number two pencils we had in school that we used, you know, to fill out stuff.

16:20Your company, all they do is sell those yellow pencils. Okay. How do you stand out? How do you be unique? And so when you remove them from their world and they go into a different world, it's a little easier to like race from and they they will come up with well are our materials recyclable you know are they made in our country um maybe they're made in a particular city or a state um maybe they have a different color eraser like they start come asking questions and coming with different things and realizing there's ways you know they can market it you know maybe we don't maybe it isn't going to be yellow maybe we're going to make those same pencils red or maybe We make them green or whatever the thing is.

17:00But how is such a boring product, a basic pencil? How could you possibly stand out? And they come up with all these ideas and we come up with that. And then we take that back into their world and say, now think about it the same way. Are we, I mean, let's just say your company is based, all based in one place. Is that a part of your messaging? Does that make you unique? Definitely. Definitely. Maybe it does. Maybe it doesn't. but you have to figure that out. You touched on mistakes, but I'm a firm believer in fail fast, fail forward, make the mistakes. If we're growing and scaling, we're going to make mistakes and you got to support those risk takers.

17:43What are some of the keys to really giving that support to the risk takers that are making the change? So clear distinction here. There are errors and there are mistakes. And so we don't want errors. Errors need to go away. And if people want to keep making errors, then they're not going to be around very much longer. And so let's define real quick, what is an error? Error is you haven't been trained properly. You don't care. You're apathetic. You went out and had five beers at lunch and you came back to work and you don't know how to properly run your forklift or whatever. Those are things that are not cool to do.

18:19You haven't slept in three days because you were playing video games all night and you can't work. Those are all like the error stuff. Mistakes are I was trying to do the right thing or based on all the information I had in that moment, I made that decision believing it was the right decision. Now it turns out it wasn't the right decision. And what we need to do is say, well, thank you for trying to make the decision and celebrating that person going out on a limb, trying to make the right decision. We can retrain. We can talk about how they could make, deal with that differently or what we need to teach them so they can make a better decision next time.

18:54That's a very different response than, you know, treating them the same way we would treat somebody who is apathetic, who doesn't care about that decision. And when we do that, if we treat them all the same, then people just sit there and they go, well, I don't want to make a decision. They just keep coming to you. Hey, boss, here's another decision to make all day long because they don't want to get in trouble or they want to screw it up. I literally went for an entire year and every time someone came to my office and said, here's the deal. What do you think? I would say, you decide, let me know what you come up with.

19:28Let me know how it goes. Now I put a little guardrails on it. It was a few times they were like going to do something illegal or do something I know is going to cost us like way too much money and I would like have to stop it. But like, even though I knew they were going to go screw it up, if it wasn't really going to hurt us, I let them go screw it up and come back to me and tell me what they learned and what they figured out so they could get better and better. And eventually, I didn't have anybody come in my office unless it was something really, really bad. They knew how to make decisions, which means I could spend more time doing what I was really good at and help the business grow.

20:04So I got to ask, remote work, virtual work, hybrid, How has that impacted culture these last few years? Well, I mean, it's a really tough thing to answer because it's not like we just did remote or just did hybrid. We also had a pandemic in there and we also had, you know, temporary. We had some people do it permanently and some people say permanent and then went back. I mean, there's been this crazy thing. It's like an experiment. It's like we've done this massive social business experiment and it's like, OK, what did we learn? Yeah, under duress, by the way. Not like we didn't even choose it.

20:44Now, my company was fully remote. And so when this happened, we were already rocking and rolling and it was fine. The pendulum has swung and it's swung back some. The good news is we have more people still today. If you kind of take the pandemic out, more total people who have remote work, who have hybrid work, have some workplace flexibility, which is awesome. because that allows more people to contribute and to be active in the workforce and actually contributes to more productivity for the company. Because if I don't have to take a whole day off because my kid's sick or because I have a doctor's appointment and I can go and do that thing and come back and work, that's huge.

21:24On the flip side, how do we do culture? How do we connect? And And the problem that companies have really struggled with is that they are trying to do the same techniques and the same management style to a remote or hybrid team. It doesn't work. Can you imagine when Henry Ford had the first couple of cars roll off the line? If he would have said, well, we're going to take a saddle from a horse and put that in the seat because that's just what you all are used to. It doesn't make any sense. So we have to have new techniques and new things in place in order to deal with the new experience that our people have.

22:04And I'm happy to give you one of my best suggestions for leaders, if they want, on how they can connect better with their people when they're not all in one place. For sure, yeah. Yeah, so there's an exercise called bonding. And I love to do this with my team every single day. If you could get it in three times a week, you're doing great, so don't stress. But you only do this with the people you work with on a regular basis. We have high psychological trust. If you only see Bob in accounting at the holiday party once a year, we're not doing it with him. And what we do is in a meeting that's at least 30 minutes long, we're going to show up and we're all going to go around and answer this question.

22:47How are you showing up? The words are extremely important. Do not change them. How are you showing up? go around the room. I'm doing great. I'm okay. I'm a little tired. You know what? I have a new puppy and I've been trying to crate train that little, you know what? And I'm exhausted. Like I haven't slept in three. Ah, that's a cue to everyone else in the group. Okay. Well, Jason's a little, uh, a little grumpy for a reason. It's not that he hates me. It's not that he doesn't, it's that he's has this puppy thing. Okay. Can we help him? Can we step in? Can we do something? and we just, I don't know, whatever.

23:24But the group can better understand those dynamics. Okay. Now, really key, if you are the leader, you got to go last. Do not show up and say, I heard Chris on this podcast, if you're going to do this exercise, I'll go first. Because you are the leader. If you say you're doing terrible, you're doing great, nobody's going to share honestly. So let them share. And if they are all doing okay, then that's a great moment for you as their leader to actually be vulnerable and tell them how you're showing up. If they're not doing well, shut up. Don't say anything about your stuff, good or bad. You can go talk to your boss about your problems and just be there for your people and support them.

24:10Okay. Now I'll give you examples. I've had people literally say, I just found out my mom passed away. And I'm like, what are you doing here? Why are you at work? And they're like, I just didn't know what to do. Like, I'm kind of in shock. And we're like, okay, you need to go. And we would immediately, the team would get in triage. How do we cover your work this week? You need to go be with your family. We'll cover this. Forward all your emails to this person. We would get them out of the meeting out to go be with their family. And that kind of empathy and that kind of action as a leader, right, really lands and creates this sort of like bubble around your people that makes them unpoachable from other companies.

24:52And you're actually showing up that way. Now, at the end of the meeting, we ask them all, how are they leaving the meeting? A little different question, a little different answer. That tends to be more about the meeting we just had, not so much like me as the human being. And I swear, this happened to me all the time. I would be like, we had a great meeting. We just solved all these problems. They're all going to say they're leaving and they're happy. And they would be like, I'm a little nervous about this. I don't know, Chris, I think the client's going to not like this solution to me. And I'm like, where was that for the last 30 minutes?

25:28We've just been talking. What do you mean? So this eliminates the passive aggressive, that friction between us and our people where we think we've made a decision and we think they agree and we think they're going to go do what we ask them to do, but then they drag their feet because they don't really like the decision, but they didn't want to tell us that. Right. And so again, they got to go first. And if they're all good, then you can say how you're leaving as well. And if not, then you got to deal. I've had times I'm like, okay, let's put a pause. Clearly, I didn't get this. We'll have another meeting in an hour or tomorrow.

26:03And let's go a little deeper to make sure we're all on the same page, right? That little bit of delay actually would speed us up in the long run because I didn't have people dragging their feet all the time. Well, hey there, and thanks for listening. I've noticed that 78 % of you are brand new, which means you haven't hit the subscribe button yet. By subscribing, you help us bring on even better guests, better quality content, and serve you better with even more podcasts. So please hit that subscribe button. It only takes a second. It makes a huge difference. If you support us, we're going to support your success and help you achieve big success together.

26:42Yeah, I feel like the ability for a leader to actually be, I guess, open or vulnerable enough or compassionate enough to actually ask that question is probably going to be scary in the beginning. It's a little scary in the beginning, but the good news is, is your people aren't going to really open up that much in the very beginning. It's going to take them a little bit of time to get comfortable and for other people to share and then to see that when somebody is struggling, you actually did something about it. And so this is a good place to talk about this stuff. Like, you know, you're not going to do it more than once a day.