Sam Penny (00:00)
Welcome back to Built to Sell, Built to Buy. I'm your host, Sam Penny. Today, we're diving into the heart of what makes businesses truly valuable, not just on paper, but as living breathing organizations, people actually want to buy, invest in and be part of. My guest is Chris Dyer, a culture builder, bestselling author, and the former CEO of People G2. Long before remote work was cool. ⁓
Chris built a fully virtual company, scaled it into an Inc 5000 success story and eventually sold it all while creating one of the most recognized best places to work. Chris is known worldwide for his seven pillars of company culture, his groundbreaking insights on remote and hybrid leadership and his belief that culture isn't just a buzzword, it's the ultimate driver of performance and enterprise value.
So if you've ever wondered how to build a culture that attracts talent, keeps people engaged and makes your business more attractive to buyers, this conversation is for you. Chris, welcome to the show.
Chris Dyer (01:02)
Hey Sam, thanks for having me.
Sam Penny (01:03)
Now, you're worldwide pretty much as the culture builder disguised as a CEO. So how did you first realize that company culture was the key to business success? And was there a moment early in your career where that really set you on your path?
Chris Dyer (01:19)
Yeah, for sure. So I realized it because I was screwing it up, right? It wasn't like I was doing everything right. And then went, oh, I could do something better. was no, things were going bad. And, you know, we had big recession 2008, 2009 in the United States, I think worldwide as well, but certainly it was hitting us extremely hard. And I was frustrated that my people were not coming up with more ideas. They were not bringing me better solutions. And I was like, you know, are they apathetic?
Do they not care about the company? Do they not care they might lose their jobs? Are they just, maybe they're just stupid and they don't know how? I I went through this whole thing and I suddenly realized like, no, it's me, right? Like I've built this culture where I'm the idea person. All ideas come through me. I'm the bottleneck. And they weren't really taught, incentivized and really kind of guided into that process of how do you.
think strategically, to reward that kind of thinking internally. And so I kind of really set out to change the culture. ⁓ Honestly, that we didn't know what else to do. Like I tried everything else and I'm like, maybe we just make this a lot better place to work. We really focus on our people first. And it was just shocking, like within just even a month of working on that, how much just, you could just feel the shift from everybody, right? And you could feel how much better the ideas were and how...
people showed up to work differently. And I was hooked. As soon as that happened, I'm like, that's it. I'm not helping in sales, I'm not helping in marketing, not helping. All I'm focused on is the culture every single day, and I never looked back.
Sam Penny (02:58)
So you famously took your company, Peopled 2009 middle of the GFC, the global financial crisis. And this was really long before remote working was pretty much mainstream. So what drove that decision and how did that experience really shape your whole approach to leadership and culture going forward?
Chris Dyer (03:20)
Well, you once we started working on the culture and realized that we needed to do something different, that was one of the big ideas that came out of that is how do we save the company? it was, well, if we send everybody home, we'll save on the, you know, our lease just happened to be coming up. You know, it was going to be to renew. We can remove all the phone costs and the lease costs and the food costs and, you know, all those things and send everybody home.
thinking this was going to be a temporary solution. That we would do this for months, a year maybe, and then we would all come back together when things got better. Within two weeks of doing this, every single employee had sent me a note or called me and said, I love this. Please don't ever make us come back. I'm so much more productive. I get so much more done. can think like they were just blown away at like the difference in a positive way, you know.
Not everything was perfect, but they were on board and really happy to kind of do that. And then, so then we were like, cool, this is the way we're going to operate. We're not going to tell anyone about this because to your point, it was not cool to be remote back then. If you were either a startup or you were some scam operation, if you were all remote, like this was not something that people did. And we had to figure out like, how do you put together a business with shoestrings and duct tape?
We didn't have all of the cool tools we had now, right? Like my people use ⁓ Skype to make their phone calls and like the olden days, right? And like, know, free conference call.com to like have our team meetings. And we found these little tools that were very, you know, early adopters of this kind of working and figured it out, you know? And then eventually we figured out so well that when people were asking us for help, you know, during COVID, did 200 trainings for companies that were just
Sam Penny (04:53)
The olden days.
Chris Dyer (05:16)
How do we do the remote thing? How do we even communicate? How do we meet? And we had years and years of data and experiments to be able to come back and tell them how
Sam Penny (05:28)
you developed a framework which you call the seven pillars of company culture. For the listeners, can you just really explain what that is?
Chris Dyer (05:37)
So these are the seven things that we see consistently over and over again. And if it's a great culture, if a company's been consistently named the best place to work and they are a market leader, right? We figured this out on our own. We went back and tested this with hundreds of other companies. I even had universities run testing and in their own programs and they validated the same thing. And that was, if you're good at these seven things, you're going to have a really great culture.
It is impossible for you to be good at these things and not fear people not to be happy, for you not to have high performance, high productivity and high profits. Where we see people having a problem when they are, you know, maybe not quite hitting the mark, they're not quite keeping their best talent. One of those seven is messed up. So the seven are in no particular order, transparency, positive leadership, how do you deal with mistakes, measurement,
listening and recognition. You have to be good at all seven things.
Sam Penny (06:42)
So can you unpack some particular elements that really affect an organization the most out of those seven?
Chris Dyer (06:49)
So I always start with transparency because we as leaders often make a big mistake of not sharing more information with our people. In fact, I believe we should share as much information as we can to really help them. So when we do that, they fill in the gaps with the right information. Our brains do not like
not knowing things or having this sort of like inconsistency existing. So if I understand like 10 % of the story, the first part of the story, maybe I understand the last 10%, our brains don't go, I'm cool not knowing the rest of the 80. no, no, no. We make up the next 80%. We fill in our own past experiences, usually negative, come up with our own stories and our own narratives to make sure that we can explain what we do know. Okay, this is a...
Sam Penny (07:45)
So
is transparency where you find most leaders struggle the most?
Chris Dyer (07:52)
Yeah, yeah, because they're not stopping to share that information. And so people are walking around with the wrong ideas and coming up with bad solutions because they don't know everything. They don't understand really how to help the organization. So we started giving everyone a copy of our P &L, the summary P &L, every single month. This is what we spent money on. This is how much money we made or didn't make. Right. And then people started having really great ideas about how to help us instead of us just saying, well, we need to save money.
Well, what does that mean? We got to save money. Buy less pens. Where are we spending the money? How does that, where can I actually make an impact for the organization? So sharing as much as we possibly can, I think it's impossible to get to 100 % because there are legal compliance, confidentiality, things like you can get into 90 percentile of like how much you are sharing with people.
Sam Penny (08:45)
So most leaders, CEOs would probably ⁓ be scared of sharing their P &L, particularly sort of this is how much money we made last month. ⁓ How hard has it been in the transformations that you've done to convince a CEO that sharing the P &L with all the employees is a good thing?
Chris Dyer (09:08)
What's funny is it's only the CEO and the senior leaders that I have to have this conversation with. They're the only ones that are stuck and believe that this is going to be a challenge. And yet every single time we've done it, it's gone extremely well, employees love it, and then they start radically improving the business in ways they had never thought about. We got 35 % more profitable in one year.
And I never asked anybody to go and find me savings or to go make us more profitable. I just started sharing and they started connecting the dots in ways I wasn't seeing. Like, why do we spend so much on that employee health plan? My brother-in-law can get us a better deal over here. Or why do we have two vendors over here in this area? Can we just combine into one and get a discount? Like they just started connecting dots that I couldn't see or didn't have time to see and they made us better.
Right? What I usually have to tell remind leaders about is that, yes, you always have that maybe somebody could come and ask you for a raise because things have been going well. But they also get to see when things aren't going well, how do we respond and how do we communicate? And what ended up happening is when things didn't go well, we had a few bad months, my people didn't freak out because we had gone through that before.
When I communicated to them what we were going to do, what we were seeing, how we were going to change, what we were going to do about it. And they were like, OK, cool. Chris has got this. I'm going go back and do my job. I'm going to work hard. We'll come back next month, see if it's changed. Again, no one filled in the gap and said, oh my god, the company is going to go out of business. I'm going to go leave, go to a competitor. That's the price of not being transparent is you lose great people.
Sam Penny (10:54)
So then as a leader, as the CEO, sharing that P &L, when you're those tough times, those tough months, tough quarter, whatever it is, do you feel personally that you're sharing the burden and being able to have much greater open conversations?
Chris Dyer (11:11)
Exactly. So it often we talk about it feeling very lonely at the top because the farther up you go on that ladder in your career, the less people you generally have to talk to, unless people really understand the problems and challenges that you have. And that will always be true to some extent. Like as the CEO, I knew all of the like terrible things happening in people's lives or maybe like the medical things they were going through that maybe they didn't want shared with the rest of the company. And so there were
moments, there were things I knew and I had to carry that other people in the organization didn't. But for the most part, when we were going through an economic challenge or we lost a big client or something like that, I could share that burden with the team and they could help me rectify it. They could help us figure out what we did wrong or how we could avoid that outcome next time. And it's the power of the crowd. mean, we see that now, the power of
lots of heads, lots of people really coming together to solve big challenges and big problems. know, I love it. There's a lot of these great books that are kind of do biographies of some really famous people. One of them would be like Steve Jobs, right? If you ask the average person how Steve Jobs got where he got, they would tell you he was a genius. He went out there and did it on his own. He figured it out. If you read any of the biographies, he had an amazing team with him.
He had incredible executives that were with him and executing all along the way. Yes, he was a visionary, but that guy did not do anything alone. But we get this mistaken thing that we have to be the ones to come up with all the ideas. We as the leaders have to be the ones to figure it all out and that is dead right.
Sam Penny (12:58)
So sharing all this information with the team, with the employees is a one-way communication. You mentioned as one of your pillars is listening. What kind of framework is necessary to build in a listening ⁓ module, I guess you want to call it, ⁓ to collect that group think from the team?
Chris Dyer (13:22)
Yeah, so when we talk about listening, it's not just listening to the team. It's listening to your clients. It's listening to your vendors. It's listening to your employees, listening to their families. Like how do you collect as many data points? And so there's lots of different things we need to do to ensure that we ⁓ create the environment that people want to come and tell us things. But if you as a leader, if are not reacting the right way, if you're not leaving that channel open for listening, you're missing out on
hundreds, thousands of data points every month, every year that you could be using to make small shifts in the business. If people don't want to bring you things because you don't ever change or you don't listen or you get mad and yell and scream, then they will just keep all those data points from you. And that should alarm you. That should really freak you out as a leader that you're not getting data points. I remember it was great story from World War II. And they were trying to figure out
what how to better help more planes come back safely. They've sent on these planes on the bombing raids and they wanted the planes to more planes to survive. And they were studying all of the planes when they returned where the bullet holes were and all of that. And they were just about to put more armor just on the wings based on that data. There was some really smart mathematicians that got involved in this. They decided to send
the same thing to some mathematicians to see if they would get the same result. And they came back and said, you're missing data. You don't have any data on any of the planes that crashed. You're only surveying the data of the planes that made it back. And so you have no idea what will help these planes come back because you're not studying any of the ones that crashed. And they ended up figuring out it was better to put more reinforcement on the entire plane.
Right? was actually, that was the better solution. But this is the problem. If we don't listen to our people, if we don't listen to our vendors and to our clients, you're missing so much data, you're making really bad decisions based on a limited data set.
Sam Penny (15:34)
I know that research is absolutely fascinating, particularly when you deep dive into it. And it seems obvious from the outside, but when you're in it, when you only see what you think the problem is without questioning everything else. And it's amazing when you do open the problem up to a lot more people. It's like, who wants to be a millionaire? You can either go ask a friend or you can ask the audience. And the audience is always much better at coming up with the solution, isn't it? Now you've... ⁓
Chris Dyer (16:02)
Yeah, yeah, unless you have
one of those Jeopardy geniuses as one of your friends, right? Yeah, they're always going to get the crowd.
Sam Penny (16:08)
Yeah, 100%. Now, this framework, your seven pillars, absolutely fantastic for being able to change culture. But the question, I guess, is how do you apply this with a team that isn't under one roof? Because you have very much championed remote work, and you've been championing that since 2009. Now, hybrid work, it's everywhere. ⁓ Many organizations are trying to do it.
and really struggling with it. So what unique challenges do you think that leaders are really facing when they try to go remote or hybrid?
Chris Dyer (16:45)
So, I mean, imagine that, you know, we're back in the time when we're all riding horses. And then Henry Ford goes and decides to invent the right, invent the car, but comes flying off the assembly line. And somebody said, you know what? I really enjoy my saddle. We should put a saddle in a car too, because I sit on that saddle. That's a great saddle. Let's put it in the car. That's a great idea. We can all sit in saddles.
No, that's ridiculous, right? We came up with a whole new solution for a whole new mode of transportation. And yet, I see time and time again, leaders say, let's go do the same crappy thing that we were doing when we were all together, where we only had 33 % engagement anyways, and let's put it into hybrid and remote, right? You get terrible results and people, they go, ⁓ it doesn't work, and we can't get culture, and I don't know.
people are doing it. No, that's your fault because you took old crappy ideas and try to bring it into a new process. So we went back and figured out there were some really key things that we had to do differently. I'll give you three. Like one, we had to meet differently. So we had to come up with very different meeting types. Two, we had to stop meeting one-on-one. We removed almost all one-on-one meetings. Now, could you do a one-on-one because you're in a project with someone? Sure.
Coaching, HR, issue yes. But we got rid of the managers having these one-on-one meetings every week with their 10 direct reports, trying to talk to them about stuff because that doesn't work. Because there's no visibility to that. We don't know if it's really happening. And decisions move slowly. Hybrid and remote work actually allows you to go faster. And we can be communicating in Slack and Teams and moving quick.
And we should be talking in our teams. We should be having group meetings, team meetings, project meetings as our default so that we go faster and create more transparency, more clarity, and are more accountable to one another. And when we did that, and then we added in a third thing, which was called bonding, which is how do we really connect with our people at least once a day having a really meaningful way for us to understand
how are they doing and are they okay? That helped us really level up our ability to connect and have a good culture inside the organization. And I'm happy to like dive into one of those three or all three if you want, but just as a proof point, I sold the company at the end of 2021. And I just visited one of my former employees, I was up doing a keynote and he lived in the same area.
And we went out to dinner and we were hanging out and at after dinner, we went to some drinks and he said to me, you know, I'm still mad at you. I'm like, what, what do mean you're mad at me? He was all mad at you for selling the company. And I'm like, but you got a big fat bonus and you got a new kind of promotion and you make way more money now in the new organization that you did ever did for me. And he said, I'd give all the money back to be back doing that work we were doing back then. Right.
That was the most meaningful work I ever did and that was the best team we I ever worked with like it was the good old days Right. That's the kind of outcome. We're trying to create by making these changes It's not just to make it a little bit better or to make people a little bit happier We're talking about creating an environment where people can do their best work of their life
Sam Penny (20:25)
So one of the greatest concerns I see of ⁓ moving to a hybrid or fully remote workplace is trust. And leaders often have trust issues in someone who's at home working. How do you overcome those trust issues?
Chris Dyer (20:43)
Well, they probably need to go therapy first, but I always say what you focus on grows. So if you want to walk around focusing and being worried about all the time about whether or not they're doing enough work and this and that, that's what's going to happen. That's what's going to get bigger. I guarantee it. But if instead what you focus on is rewarding those people who are doing a great job, who are meeting their goals, if you're worried about making sure it's very clear about what you expect from them.
what their output should be, what their goals should be, all of that. You're focused on those positive things. And you are calling those people out, doing that amazing job in front of everybody. That, people will level up to that. But if you go around going, wonder, is this person really in the office at 4.58 on a Friday? did they really start their work at nine, by nine one, were they working?
on a Monday morning, like if that's what you're worried about and maybe we're going to install a software to keep track of people and see what they're doing. You're just going to get passive aggressive teenagers basically as employees. You will. I was like, listen, you got to come in at nine five because you can drop your kid off and like, you know, whatever. I know you'll work hard. I know if I need you to, you know, get a little project done this weekend or work till five five, if I occasionally need you to.
Sam Penny (22:02)
.
Chris Dyer (22:06)
help me a little with something extra. I know my people will do that. So I'm not going to worry about five minutes here or that their lunch was 65 minutes versus 60 or whatever. That's just that was only going to create problems for me. I never once I had thousands of people. never once had an employee we ever had a fire because they weren't working or they weren't doing what we expected. Now, did they not meet their goals? Were they not performing? Yeah, we had those problems and we maybe let people go. They couldn't get there.
But was never because like someone was on the couch eating bonbons, you know, all day and not working. It just didn't happen.
Sam Penny (22:43)
So the mindset shift of getting people to, know, clock on clock off, which is so typical of a workplace, a physical workplace, creating a structure where everybody's measured, everybody is accountable. ⁓ How hard do organizations find to put in a structure where everybody knows exactly what's required of them and a measuring framework?
Chris Dyer (23:12)
Yeah, mean, it's a process, right? I mean, this is not something that you just flip a switch one day and it's all magically figured out. I mean, we have to go team by team. I mean, you've got to start at the top of like, what is it we expect for our company? What is our big, hairy, audacious goal? What is our realistic goals, you know, this year? What does that mean for every team and every leader? And then what does that mean for every person? And we got to work it down and it's got to be figured out. And then we've got to...
really bring that to light. Again, that's part of that transparency. If you and your boss are the only two people that know what your goals are, that is not going to work. As a boss, you want everyone on your team to know everyone's goals, and you want every team to know every other team's goals. Because then again, we can be more accountable to one another, we can help one another. I if I know that like, I know what your goals are, and here we are, it's almost October,
And I'm like, I'm going to hit my goals for the year. I'm doing great. And let's just say you're having a bad year. You're going through a divorce. Your dog just died. Like all this stuff's going on in your life. And I go, I can step in and help you, Sam. Like, hey, let me come in and carry the load for a little bit. Let me help you out. Like I'm doing really good over here. You're on my team. I want you to succeed too. And I'm in a position where I can help you. Isn't that what we want? Do we want our people to succeed and our teams to succeed however they figure that out?
But if I don't know what your goals are and I don't know what's happening in your life, I can't step in to try to help. And that's what we have. That's how we have to do it. One step at a time, like 1 % better all the time.
Sam Penny (24:51)
Now, I heard that you reinvented how meetings work, particularly at PeopleG2 to suit ⁓ this framework that we're talking about now, remote teams. You have meeting types like Cockroach, there's Tiger Team, ⁓ Feed Forward Instead of Feed Back. Explain to me what these strategies are. What do the meetings look like and what is this Feed Forward Instead of Feed Back framework that you talk about?
Chris Dyer (25:18)
You want to start with feed forward? this is actually something I learned from Marshall Goldsmith, who had been a mentor to me as a famous speaker and author. ⁓ And one day he just said this to me and I was like, I'm sorry, say that again. What did you say? And it just, it hit me so hard. And I went back and put it the organization and they just gobbled it up. Like it's such a great shift of perspective. So if.
Sam Penny (25:20)
Yeah, let's do that.
Chris Dyer (25:45)
You and I, let's say you and I are on a team together, we're in a meeting, I'm your boss, and every time we have a meeting, you won't shut up, right? I can come to you and hey Sam, I want to give you some feedback. Like, you're talking too much in the meetings, you keep interrupting Sally, she's getting frustrated, and what are you going to do? You're going to be defensive? You're going to try to explain yourself? You're going to try to tell me why that is the way it is? I mean, we're going to have a negative interaction. I think...
feedback, the way it's structured is inherently negative because you can't change the past. Right? And it's too late at that point. But if I go to you and say, hey, and I'm not even going to say feed forward, I'm just going to do feed forward. I'm going to say, hey, Sam, in the next meeting, can you make sure everyone gets a chance to talk? Can you make sure when Sally talks that you don't interrupt her? You know, she needs a little help like getting her thoughts out and all that. And you'd be like, yeah, sure, I can do that.
Yeah, no problem, right? And if for some reason you can't, like we're going to have a much more meaningful conversation because you might say, well, you know, I did this project. Like I did this thing in my last company. No one else on the team has ever done this before, which is why I've been talking more. okay. That makes sense. But you know, we still need to hear everybody out. Like we can have a really constructive conversation. So this is a really positive way for us to get people to change their behaviors. I've literally said to someone,
Hey, in the next meeting, can you not be such a big jerk? And they were like, yeah, I can do that. And I was like, I can't believe they didn't get mad at me for saying that. Like I took it as far as I thought I could take it. They're like, yeah, I can do that. And they kind of laughed. like, yeah, I was kind of being a jerk in the last meeting. Like, my gosh, okay, cool. So ⁓ it's just a great tool for leaders on how to handle those conversations much better.
Sam Penny (27:15)
You
So we can put in great culture, we can put in remote strategies. What I see a lot of leaders facing these days is disengagement and quite quitting. It's almost like a new buzzword. There's a lot of talk these days about quite quitting. So essentially this is where employees are doing the bare minimum. And in a poll that was done by Gallup, it showed that 50 % of people were disengaged in the workplace. So what do you think is really driving this widespread disengagement today?
Chris Dyer (28:04)
I think we have to be a little careful with the quiet quitting on what's really happening there. Because there was really two ways that we were seeing people kind of reacting, right? And this was really came out of COVID when people were kind of really overwhelmed. And it was either one, go and just do like what you're supposed to do. Don't do any extra. Just do what you're supposed to do.
And actually that kind of makes sense, right? I mean, is that really that absurd? hey, these are my goals. This is my job is what I'm supposed to do when I'm getting paid for. And it was this idea of like, just do that. Don't let the company suck you into doing 500 other things that you're not going to get paid for or that was not originally in your agreement or your contract. So think it was helping people create some boundaries. think the way it was being said though, kind of came off as like, well, people are being lazy. You're either doing the minimum. I didn't really take it as them.
doing the minimum. To me, that really felt like a reaction to, you're not really being transparent with me and you're not really recognizing what our relationship here is, right? And I think that's where there was a lot of poor leadership coming into play. Instead of saying, hey, your role is shifting here, let's talk about what that means. Let me pull this thing off of your table. I need you to do this new thing because you're awesome. But let's pull this other thing off of your.
Instead, we just kept piling on to people and saying, do more, do more, work more hours, until we burnt them out. So I think burning people out is really bad. And I do think it's really bad for people to say, well, I'm going to do the bare minimum. But most people were actually saying, I'm creating boundaries here. And that was a reaction to really bad leadership. So I'm really advocating how do we do something better? None of those things have to happen, if that makes sense. Right? And that we are...
I mean, every time I had someone take on a new project or a new responsibility, I would ask them which thing are they going to get rid of? And they would look at me like I was crazy. And I'm like, I can't give you something new and then not have you take something else away. Like delegate that out to somebody else below you. You know, who can do that? Like, I can't give you five new things and you keep performing at the same high level. That's just not going to work. And people aren't used to thinking that
Sam Penny (30:30)
So then using your seven pillars, Chris, how can you address this phenomenon of quiet quitting?
Chris Dyer (30:37)
Right, so we want to be transparent as much as we can about how the rules might be shifting, how things might be different. And really it comes down to this thing I like to call shrinking the loop. How do we help people do their jobs, get decisions made faster, have more check-ins with their team? How do we get these little situations that occur to where they're here.
and they want to be doing the thing. They've done all the things you've asked them to do to get that project going and now it's actually going. How do we shrink that time? AI is helping us shrink that loop in a lot of ways by being more productive and being able to get projects done and all of that. But like, we still have this human problem of I still need my boss to say this is okay, yet I can't get my boss on a call. My boss has canceled my one-on-one the last two weeks and like I'm stuck.
Right? We have got to help people. Then that was the situation I had before I changed the culture is people were waiting for me all the time. You know, and I just couldn't get to everyone and help them shrink those loops to go faster. So being more transparent is definitely the way is number one way. And number two is probably we haven't talked about yet is measurement. How do you know one of my pillars is measuring what matters and then how do we get better and better at those things?
where we do really well and how do we find those things where we're struggling and we again, find ways to shrink that.
Sam Penny (32:10)
So for many, ⁓ many people listening and many of the listeners are business owners. I want to connect the dots because we're talking about culture and many people see it as a really soft part of a business, but how does culture really tie into a business valuation?
Chris Dyer (32:32)
Well, I can tell you that when we sold, certainly got finally a buyer we thought that was going to pay us what we thought the company was worth. And as a coincidence or not so much a coincidence, they were buying us for our people. mean, they flat out told us we're buying you because you have this really great team. You've got great managers, great people who work really hard. And, you know, I think that what was really true was that I didn't have anybody
any more special in my company than any of my competitors. It really was the culture. It really was the way in which we worked that allowed my people to work at their highest levels, right? With the most satisfaction. And so most of them, I'm sure not all of them, but most of them came to work with a smile on their face. They were happy to be there. They were doing great work. They felt like they were being seen. They were being heard that what they cared about mattered to the organization or mattered to their team and to their boss.
And so ultimately, you know, our buy, I've seen this hundreds and hundreds of times. was lots of different CEO groups and seeing them have these things. When their culture was not good, not only did they have a hard time selling, but then like when they bought things didn't go well and they ended up not making as much money because it uses like an earn out based on performance. And if like you remove the leader and then the company just crashes and burns, that can really impact your exit as well.
Sam Penny (34:02)
So then what do you see as some of the biggest red flags in the culture? Because you've worked with a lot of different organizations and is there always a recurring theme of red flags?
Chris Dyer (34:17)
Certainly the red flags are a little different, but I would say one of the big red flags we're seeing right now is that if people are having the same meeting over and over and over again, and they are also the same time complaining they don't have time to get their work done. Okay, because we're having the same hour long meeting or the same 30 minute meeting, and it lacks a proper agenda and it kind of goes too long and like, it just feels generically the same.
Our meetings should be radically different based on their purpose. Are we coming to solve a single problem? That's one kind of meeting. Are we coming to help figure out a problem or provide information? That's a very different meeting. Are we coming to brainstorm and solve a really big challenge? Again, that's a different meeting. One of those meetings could be 15 minutes and another one should be two hours or all day, right? With a massive agenda and lots of prep time. But I see people have sort of settled into this
Well, we'll just keep meeting for an hour. And it's this generic meeting and no one's getting anything done, right? They're never shrinking that loop. They're never getting to that point of something getting done. And that creates so much frustration and burnout with people. They just want to know what the answer is. They just want to know, can I go now? Can I do the thing? Can I tell the client, yes, can I, can we just go please? And when we fix those meetings, that's a big shift for companies.
Sam Penny (35:46)
Good meeting structures really are the pulse of an organization. And I've seen many organizations try and put in things like daily huddles, but have always struggled with them. So what is it that is really going to bring alignment and structure to an organization via meetings?
Chris Dyer (36:06)
I mean, you got to figure out what the right meetings are for you and what the right cadence is per team. I had teams that met every single day, right? My sales team, my customer service team, they had daily huddles. My ops team, they probably huddled up two, three times a week. That was enough for them. They didn't need to do it every single day. My ops team had a weekly one hour meeting. My customer service team, they had a 30 minute meeting every single day because they had really topical things happening, they big challenges coming in.
It's okay for there to be a difference between each of your different teams and maybe different regions and different groups that are in the company. But you should have a meeting that is for, we used to call them cockroach meetings. There's a cockroach in your bathroom, it's a small problem, you just gotta go get it, get rid of it, and you're done. You gotta have a meeting for quick little problem solves.
If people can't get their problems solved and they're spending three hours on ChatGPT or on Google or on YouTube trying to figure out their problem and they could have just gotten a couple people together for 15 minutes and solve their issue, right? That is killing your productivity, right? And then also gotta have the, people need to understand when you know what's hit the fan and we need to have a big meeting and we better show up prepared and we better show up ready to go. So you gotta figure out those moments and what that means and just experiment.
what works, what doesn't work, what's too much, what's too little. And you'll find that people love having different frameworks and having, knowing exactly what's expected of them in each of those different types of meetings.
Sam Penny (37:43)
So, these seven pillars of culture really must increase the ability for an organization to make better decisions, to group think. How, across all the companies that you've worked with, how has that change in culture translated into increased productivity and profitability?
Chris Dyer (38:06)
Yeah, so what we see is that, you know, pretty quickly people are able to be in less meetings. I mean, we've talked several times about how do we do less meetings, get rid of one-on-ones. We're giving them time back, number one, to actually get their jobs done. If we're helping them make decisions faster and find ways to get through these issues quicker, right, we now have more productivity. We can now onboard clients faster. We can get, you know, help salespeople close deals quicker.
Those things all directly translate into us reaching our goals for the year as an organization or as a team. I remember my customer service team, they were doing pretty good. We had an MPS score of 41, which in our industry was in the top two or three. Car dealerships would love a 41. Now there are other industries where it can be higher. And we said,
I just want you guys to go and meet every day and think about how we can get our customer service 1 % better. Just think about it. just what little tiny things can we do? And within six months, we were at 80 NPS score. And within a year, we were at 93. And I didn't tell them how to do it. But when you start retaining your customers, when you have that high of a customer satisfaction rating, you don't lose customers.
That had a massive impact on our productivity and our performance and them making referrals in and all of that. Like if they loved working with us, they were going to tell all of their friends about us. So all of that was all culture related.
Sam Penny (39:47)
So we're talking obviously about the current challenges that a lot of the businesses are facing and the work that you've been doing with your clients. I want to now change gears a little bit Chris and talk about the future of work and particularly the impact of AI because we're in certainly quite a state of fluxes. Many organizations and leaders try to understand how AI is going to affect them. And a lot of employees nervous about how AI is going to affect their role, their job.
Are they going to have a job in one year, three years time? So with tools, AI tools like chat GPT, for example, that are rapidly changing how we work. How do you foresee leadership and workplace culture evolving over the next, two, three years or even five years? And are you optimistic about AI's impact on how we're going to communicate and collaborate at work?
Chris Dyer (40:45)
Yeah, so really leaders jobs are going to, you if just think back a little bit, it was about going through a pandemic. And then it was about, you know, people not turning off, it was overwork and burnout and all of that. It's kind of in the mode right now. It's what it's changing to the next thing that we have to worry about is it's going to be our job as leaders to help people deal with all of the massive change that's occurred.
Sam Penny (41:11)
So empathizing with the employee and keeping humanity really at the center as we adopt more AI, how can leaders really balance leveraging AI? ⁓ Because it is fantastic for efficiency, ⁓ but how do you balance that with maintaining trust, empathy, human connection, all those kinds of things that are so essential in a team?
Chris Dyer (41:39)
We have to have one source of truth that we have to be very open, transparent, and keep the things that we are changing in one spot so people can understand that. Change is going to happen so much faster. People will need a, what is that source? So I know what we've changed, what's still the same, and all of that. We also need to think about people's jobs being on a lattice, not a ladder, right? So if you've ever seen in the garden those little lattices that, know, people can go up and they're going to be going sideways, they're going to go down, and they're going to go.
diagonal, and that's going to be the new thing that we need to think about doing with people in their careers. It is not climb up the ladder to the top because AI is going to come in and be disruptive. And we're going to say, well, geez, now we have all these new technologies. We don't need as many people over here, but now we can shift and do more of in this other area. And so we need people to be able to shift from, let's say, less customer service to maybe more customer onboarding, right? Maybe that's the new place where we really need that human element.
And so again, that's helping people change because they got to learn new jobs and have new functions and all of that. So that's really going to be the core exercise of leaders, right? Is to be really focusing on that change and being highly communicative and making sure people understand it.
Sam Penny (42:54)
All right, Chris, time to put on your futurist hat. What's your big vision, do you think, for the future of work and company culture?
Chris Dyer (43:03)
Well, I mean, there are a lot of places. So, you know, if you want to go dystopic, we could say that, you know, we could get to the point where there are no, there are almost no jobs to do. then how does society change? Like, what does that even mean? You know what mean? Like could, will it be utopia like in Star Trek where like, you know, these machines just replicate food and no one ever needs to work. like, but we all get along somehow, or is it dystopian where it's like,
everything's terrible and no one has a job and no one has anywhere to live. Who knows, right? I think more realistically, what we need to be thinking about is there are some experts that believe we could reach singularity in 2045. And what singularity means is that there are so much change happening so quickly that we don't even notice it. Right now, I just upgraded to the latest iOS 26 on my phone.
I noticed that change. I had to approve it. I had to put it on. It was totally different. I had to make a bunch of setting changes. I had to learn how to use the phone differently. I noticed the change. But by then it might just be you wake up and your phone has made a bunch of micro changes that you don't even know and you don't even realize that there's new functionality, don't realize you could use it differently. It just keeps happening. Imagine if your car just updated when you were asleep and made changes and suddenly the dashboard was different.
Like that could be a real reality, right? There's so much happening. What does that mean for work? What does that mean for engaging our people? Like we don't even know what the AI is doing in an attempt to help us, right? That is a real concern that could happen in our lifetimes that we're going to have to really face.
Sam Penny (44:52)
So, okay, let's go 10 years into the future, Chris. What do you hope, Chris Dyer, what do you hope is going to be different about the way that we work and, also the way that we lead?
Chris Dyer (45:05)
I do hope that we can ⁓ have a much better balance of work. A, I should be able, we should be able to say, listen, it's going to do more work for us. And so we should be able to pay everyone the same and they only work four days a week. I mean, that would be a nice alternative, right? And maybe we as a society say, maybe that extra day should be for something more noble like helping your community or volunteering or.
taking care of somebody, you're like, maybe we could use that extra day for something to make the world a better place. Maybe that's the trade off. ⁓ That's what I would love to see. And instead of it being, well, AI can do more work, we can cut 20 % of our workforce and screw those people, they're going to just go figure it out. I think it'd be nice if we could really guide this in the right way, in an intentional way that could be good for the world. And I think for leadership,
⁓ in 10 years, good leaders are going to have to be the ones that can just, again, I've said a couple of times, continue to be able to help their people deal with massive change. just don't, that is going to be the number one headache. That's going to be like what every book is going to be about for the next 10 years.
Sam Penny (46:20)
Now, before we wrap up, Chris, I want to make this really practical for listeners. So if a business owner or leader is listening to this and they want to improve their culture or even just their remote work setup, starting tomorrow, what would be three practical steps for them to implement?
Chris Dyer (46:41)
One, stop having as many, any one-on-one meeting you can get rid of, get rid of. Look at any other meetings you can get rid of, any other, have a real meeting audit and say to yourself, do we really need this meeting? know, could it be combined with something else? Like figure out how to get rid of meetings that you don't need and shift that into larger team meetings where you can have more collaboration and transparency. Number two, figure out how you're going to do a better job of listening. And one of the best ways you can do this, if you have a,
small company, you can do this if you're in a big company, but maybe have a team. Start asking them one question per week. Just one question. Like, who's doing a great job for us? Or what resource don't you have? Or how am I as your boss getting in your way? Like ask them a question, get the data back, and then go back to them within that week and say, this is what I heard and this is what I'm going to do about it and actually do something about it, right? That's how you listen and make changes and people will start to get in the habit.
of coming to you with really important things so that you can make important shifts to make the work better. And then I would say number three is to really be sure that you and your people understand what kind of rest you really need. We make the ⁓ mistake of assuming that if we are tired, we need physical rest, that we need a nap or we need to go to bed early. And often if we feel exhausted,
especially from all of this change. We might need emotional rest or mental rest or spiritual rest or creative rest or sensory rest. It may not be that we just need a nap. And that's usually what people go and try to do and it doesn't work. And we see our people getting burnt out and frustrated. They might just need a different kind of rest and it's going to be your job as the leader to help them figure out what that is.
Sam Penny (48:34)
So then what does the next 10 years look like for you?
Chris Dyer (48:38)
Well, I hope it's filled with working with cool clients and talking on stages and being able to deliver this message. I'm just kind of taking it on my shoulders that I want to make sure that people understand you can create an environment where people do the best work of their lives at your company. That is possible. And if I can help a few more companies, a hundred companies, thousand companies figure that out, that's what I hope the next 10 years is all about.
Sam Penny (49:05)
What is the ideal client for you?
Chris Dyer (49:09)
⁓ Well, let's see, they have employees. They care about that outcome, that culture. And I think that they really want an organization that is human-centered. There's human-centered leadership, human-centered approaches. That it's not that we're just going to somehow forget all that stuff and just have the best piece of software or the best widget. It's that, we're going to be the best company. ⁓ And I think we certainly see that.
Sam Penny (49:12)
hehe
Chris Dyer (49:39)
There's great examples, Apple, Google, and we see that when they, they really wanted to be the best company, make a big change. It wasn't just about the things that they sold. That mattered and that's where the culture came in.
Sam Penny (49:49)
Chris Dyer, thank you so much for sharing what I reckon is such a powerful insight. What I love about your message is that it makes culture Something any leader can work on starting today. Now, Chris, for those listening, remember this, a strong culture isn't just about making your team happy, it's about driving performance, boosting valuation, and building a company that people want to buy.
and employees want to stay with before we wrap up. I'd love to hand it over to you. For listeners who want to go deeper into your frameworks, tune into your podcast or get hold of your books. What's the best way for them to connect with you and follow your work?
Chris Dyer (50:29)
Well, I know you have people all around the world. you know, you go to our website, chrisdyer.com. I do a lot on TikTok and Instagram. If you want to find me there, it's chrisdyer. for the culture guide, not the artist, the psychedelic artist. That's a different Chris Dyer. He's a nice guy, but we're not the same. I'm a little less dreads. And happy to connect on LinkedIn. I think it's chrispdyer7. That's my handle for a lot of the things.
⁓ but happy to connect with anyone. If you're in the US market, can also, I think it only works there, it might work other places, but you can also text 33777, put my name Chris in there and I'll send you free PDF on some resources. that doesn't work, you can also send me a note to my website, I'm happy to send it to you.
Sam Penny (51:13)
Fantastic. And I'll make sure I put all of those into the show notes. And if you enjoyed this episode, make sure you hit subscribe and share it with someone who's building their own business. It means a lot to me. And it helps us bring more conversations like this your way. This has been Built To Sell, Built To Buy. I'm Sam Penny. Thanks for listening and I'll see you next time.
