This is It's an Inside Job, and I'm your host, Jason Lim. This is the show where we explore the stories, strategies, and science behind growing resilience, nurturing well-being, and leading with intent. Because when it comes down to it, it's all an inside job. We often talk about company culture as the big ethereal concept, something reserved for HR handbooks and mission statements. But the truth is, your culture doesn't live in a handbook. It lives in the way you speak to each other, the way you solve problems under pressure, and most importantly, in the way you value each other's times. So if you want to see the DNA of your company, you don't look at your perks, you look at your meetings. So today's guest, Chris Dyer, learned this the hard way. During the 2008 recession, Chris realized his command and control leadership was actually a bottleneck for his company's survival. Today, he's a world-renowned expert on remote work and company culture, a best-selling author and a CEO who's transformed his own organization into a model of high performance and psychological, So in this episode, we're going to cover a number of topics, how to build and sustain a strong company culture in a changing world, the future of work, leadership strategies for remote and hybrid teams, mastering tough conversations to improve communication and accountability. And practical methods for increasing employee engagement and performance. And last of all, we're going to be talking about the seven pillar strategy for transforming culture and driving organizational success. And if you can join us to the very end of the conversation, I'll be sharing one specific transformative insight from Chris. It's a principle that changes how you view every so-called problem employee on your team. Well, let's now slip into the stream and meet Chris Dyer. I'd like to welcome everyone back to It's an Inside Job. Today, I'm joined by Chris Dyer. Chris, welcome to the show. Hey, thanks for having me, man. Could we kick off by you briefly introducing who you are and what you do? Sure. I'm Chris Dyer. I'm a CEO, entrepreneur, speaker, author. I'm just someone who likes to do a lot of things. And I really enjoy the process of learning and helping others learn and figure out how to get where they want to go, right? Achieve their goals and clear away as much of the crap as possible along the way on that journey. Yeah, I think we all need a map along that journey. Well, today, the reason I've asked you, Juan, is because I wanted to talk to you. You're an expert in the domain of company culture, but I'd also like to tag on something that you've talked about is about remote work. So if I may take the liberty, I'd like to talk to you, get a basic definition of how you would define if you were walked into an organization, how do you know they have a healthy, vibrant culture? What are some of the signposts or signals you pick up? Well, I mean, there's the big things we can look at, like engagement scores and retention rates, customer satisfaction rates, profitability, performance, productivity. I mean, there's big, you know, sort of signposts that we can look at to say, how are they doing? And, you know, is there a problem here or not? I can tell you on the micro level, I can go sit in on a couple of meetings on a couple of different teams and tell you pretty quickly whether or not the culture is any good. I mean, you can pick up on that as well. And a company can be profitable and be doing well because they have a sexy product or they have maybe a high-need product or they've got a pretty insulated barrier to entry into their marketplace and then get away with some bad behaviors, right? Like you said, it is kind of case by case, but if your engagement scores aren't where you want them to be, if your customer satisfaction scores aren't where you want them to be, if you're constantly losing people and having to spend a ton of money on hiring, those are all pretty easy signs to know you've got a problem that can be fixed. In your origin story, you mentioned that the strategy, your strategy, and I'd like to get into the seven pillars. You mentioned that your own company's culture wasn't right. Sort of what was the specific moment or failure that acted as a catalyst for the seven pillars? So, I mean, the catalyst was me. I mean, I had built the culture and never allowed it or never intentionally grew it as we grew. It sort of stayed the same. We were trying to run out like a little, you know, small company, a little startup, and that's not what it was anymore. What caused me to change was the 2008, you know, recession. So when we lost a bunch of clients and lost a bunch of money and we had a whole lot of extra time on our plates to think about what the heck are we going to do about this, that was when it dawned on me that I really needed to change the culture first. That that was really the biggest need beyond sales, beyond marketing, beyond anything else. The company wasn't really, wasn't worthy of being saved if I couldn't fix that first problem. How would you have described the the the culture before that i mean was it was it something you just let organically grew and then when the financial crisis of 2008 hit you decided you know what i need to cultivate the culture i i need to sort of curate it per se yeah it was one part you know stuff i learned from my coaches and teachers and parents and things like that which is, great if you're managing children it's not great for managing adults um and so i had this sort of like sports mentality it was a little bit of organic like you said but what ended up happening was is i was the idea guy and i was also the bottleneck. And that's what really was the problem in the organization. And so when the big problem happened and the big recession hit, and now the problems were so many and so big that I couldn't just solve them on my own anymore, I'm turning to my people and saying, what ideas do you have? How can you help me? How do you think we should get through this? And they did not have the practice and the experience and the psychological safety to do that. To come up with ideas, to want to go try things, to want to strategize, to think about risk in a healthy way. They were all stuck in a, just tell me what to do, boss. I'll go do whatever you tell me to do, and I'll work really hard, but you tell me what to do. That is not scalable and was not going to work long term if I'm just trying to be the only person with the idea and a whole bunch of executors. I needed a company full of idea people and risk takers and and and people who shared my um maybe enjoyment of trying to figure out a better way to do something i mean a lot of organizations i'm i'm in and out of organizations every week and i i always hear sort of sort of the textbook answer about psychological safety about building culture and they invest gobs amounts of money to try to do this. But to find a consistency, a sustainable practice within a corporation, you might find pockets of it where it holds. From what I understand of human behavior is that a lot of cultures, a lot of people in general, they go back to default. They tend to go back to what they knew. And I'm not saying that's intentional, but after a while, it's like participants go to a workshop. They learn something after 70. You know, it was a great workshop, a lot of information, things that they can apply. But as you've probably heard the standard reframe many times, within 72 hours, they go back to default. And many of us do that with habits we're trying to change. From your expertise, Chris, I know this is probably a very complex answer to a simple question, but how do we create this sustainability? How can organizations make sure it is ubiquitous? Yeah so what you're talking about is this idea that you know we're going to end up defaulting back to mediocrity and whatever it is we do and the only way to defend that is to have a much bigger larger goal and purpose for the organization something that a true north star that people understand and really align to to keep us and to defend against us going back to that mediocrity And so what I teach people on stage and consulting and where I'm working with clients is that North Star needs to be that you're trying to create the best organization, the best place that your people will ever work in their entire lives. I'm not talking about a good culture. I'm not talking about things being, you know, fine or whatever. Like, and that's the problem is we think, oh, we're just trying to make, we want this to be a good place to work. That's, no, that's not enough. Like, literally, if you worked for me, I want you to believe that this is the best job you're ever going to have. Or if you leave, if you decide to go take another job, you're going to regret it the rest of your life. And I don't mean that in a spiteful way, but just like you didn't realize that how good you had it. That this was that things worked well here you were listened to you could try things you had you were paid an appropriate amount like that was off the table but like your day-to-day operations your your work is was not a slog it was not a struggle you didn't go home and complain to your spouse and your kids about your crappy boss and your crappy work that you actually came home and talked about all the fun things you did the amazing things or the impact you made or how you solved a client problem but that takes and i can get into how you do it on the micro level but we need that north star or or we're gonna just slip back into well this is good enough this is fine right enough people are happy that this is we can we need to worry about this let's just go spend more time on clients more time on vendors more time on software um and i say this because there are four important things in your business right there's people there's process there's tools and there's technology and you have to start with people the people part has to be right. Or the rest of these things do not matter you can have the wrong people in there and if the best process in the world is not going to fix your problems or you can have the right people in the right process and you bring the wrong tools well then you know what does it matter If I bring in musicians to go and dig me a hole to build a mine, I'm going to have a pretty shallow mine, right? I mean, you had to have the right tools then to go along with the people in the process. So all these things stack on each other. And if we don't get the people part right, none of it matters. None of anything else about this whole podcast I would ever tell you is going to matter if you're not going to worry about your people first. To challenge you, I think it's so important. I think you made an astute point with the North Star. We need something that guides us, that pulls the organization and aligns it in a certain direction. Great. But then people are going, yeah, I've heard this many times. I've read it in Fast Company magazines and such. But what I'd like to explore with you is... What are the nuts and bolts? You know, if we focused on the people, you know, what are the nuts and bolts? What are the tangible, salient things that organizations, people who are responsible for cultivating that culture, what should they be focusing on? Well, I think the first thing is, here's what's really, really easy to do. You don't want to worry about the big blocks. Maybe you're listening to this and you're saying, listen, I'm not in charge of the culture to a point where I can really impact these larger things that I'll give to you as a second part of my answer. But let me just address anybody who's like, listen, I got a team. I got 20 people or 10 people I'm in charge of. What the heck can I do about this? So let me talk to those people first. Get your meetings right. Like create a go do a meeting audit every quarter and figure out what meetings need to go what meetings are going too long what meetings have the wrong people in them well you know how do you like you should be constantly trying to cut meetings and and and curate them and fix them and not allow them to take over your space and your time and your and your ability to get the job done. You need to be cutting as many one-on-one meetings as you can. As many meetings that can be collaborative as possible. I think it's stupid for managers to be meeting with their people one-on-one, to be doing goal setting and career trajectory and all that. It's just a waste of time. No good manager today does this. They put this into a group setting. Your team should be helping you with your goals, your team should be helping you with your challenges, your team should be brainstorming with you about whatever you're going through, not you and your boss at 10am every Monday and your boss is going to cancel half the time anyways. It's a stupid way, it's an outdated way of trying to help someone in their career or help someone in their job by you being the only person, Who's supposed to help them? You're creating a bottleneck for yourself as well. So move that into a team meeting. Curate as many meetings as possible. Create a meeting on it. And then go back and figure out what your team charter is. Meaning, how do we collaborate? Is it all in Slack? Is it all in Teams? Is it all in email? Where's that one place that we're all going to collaborate? How do we collaborate? What are the rules? Are we the kind of team where like, anything goes like it's nine o'clock at night i need an answer and i can send you a team's message or i can text you and that's totally cool are we on that kind of team are we on that kind of team where it's like at five o'clock i'm done and at 501 leave me alone until i come back in the next day at 9 a.m totally respect my boundaries i had teams on my in my last big company where, like customer service team was protect my boundaries now i'm i'm there from nine to five I'll do whatever you want. At 501, leave me alone. Unless it's the house is on fire, do not call me. Sales team, they're like, 11 o'clock at night, you need something for a proposal? Hit me up. I'm here, buddy. I'm here to help you all day long. There was no boundaries. They were just all over the road, and that was cool with them. But they created that. They decided that as a team. And so if you can just do those things, you will up what people believe about the culture and about your leadership overnight. Because you're taking care of the most annoying parts of their day by just dealing with that stuff. What are the rules? How do we meet? And how do I get crap done? And by pulling it into a team meeting instead of these little tiny one-on-ones all the time. So before I get to the larger macro stuff for the senior leadership, I'll pause and see if you have any questions about that. Yeah, so what I hear as a team chart is the rules of engagement. It's what is acceptable amongst us. Not everyone has to agree with it, but it has to be what the majority agrees, per se, as the rules of engagement, because you're not always going to get unanimous. I 100 percent agree with that. When it comes to one to ones, you know, from my experience, Chris, is that as high performing and as much as they collaborate and communicate, there's going to be some things that, Maybe too politically sensitive or personal that a person does not want to bring up, which affects their job in a group setting. And they want to have a one-to-one with their manager because they have psychological safety with that him or her manager. And they want to talk about their career path. They want to talk about sources and resources and help that they need. But as much as psychological safety in that group, they're thinking, I don't want to air this laundry out in front of everybody. What would you say to that? So I would say if it's the exception, not the rule, yes, there are always cases and times when, yeah, that one-on-one is going to be the right call. But if that person is consistently pulling you into that, I think that there's something going on there, right? They're trying to create their own political, playing their own little game by trying to get your time and attention away from the group. And often that's because they don't want to be accountable to the group. They want to live in darkness. They want you to not know all of the details. If they talk about this thing in front of everybody, then they have to be accountable to everybody for their thoughts and their feelings and their actual performance. So I find that it's my lower performers that want to live in that one-on-one setting. And by pulling them back into the light, there are exceptions to that. They may be having an issue with someone. Of course. So exception, not the rule. No problem at all. I'm just saying, get rid of that consistent. We always do this at 10 a.m. on Monday. I think that's a waste because it stops people from getting their answers. If it's Thursday and they're like, well, I'll just wait to talk to Jason on Monday. Well, then that's the several days of productivity is lost because you just stall because I'll wait to talk to you on Monday. We want to remove that friction and get decisions and flow going faster than that. I was really concerned about exactly what you're saying, right? But what I found was as we moved it in there, and then I said, well, if people don't feel safe in the team, how do I fix that? Because if they don't feel safe in the team talking about whatever it is they need to talk about to get their job done, what else aren't they talking about? What else isn't happening? What other conversations are not coming up and is stopping us, again, from reaching that North Star, this is the best place you're ever going to work. And those are natural salient questions that would come up if there is a consistency of, I just need private time with you all the time, each time. So you said, get meetings right, create a team charter, make sure there's a majority and there's an agreement. What would the second step be on the nuts and bolts level here for that team? On the nuts and bolts level, then I would start to change your meeting types. I would get really clear about, we named our meetings. We had cockroach meetings and ostrich meetings and tiger team meetings and tsunami planning meetings. And you could steal these names or come up with whatever names you want. It doesn't matter. What's important is that the meeting gives people the directions. It gives them the clarity about what kind of meeting is this? What is my role? What am I supposed to do in this meeting? Do I even have to show up to this meeting? Is it optional or is it mandatory? And what is the length what are all the little rules that go around this meeting because again, I told you I could go into a company and observe their meeting and the first thing is if it starts late and goes long, you don't respect people's time there's already a subtext of passive aggressive behavior. Just right there. Just do I started on, if our meeting's at 9, by 9.01, we are rolling, right? And in my company, if you showed up after 9.01, you had to sing a song, right? Like, we did something fun. And that would happen a few times a year to a couple people. And then we got around the company real quick. And it wasn't even fun if somebody was a fantastic singer and we didn't know it. But like the point was is like we weren't that's not cool here people like us show up on time. And also if the meeting is supposed to end at 9 30 our goal was to end early but at the absolute worst case at 9 30 if we're not done and we need okay guys well let's reschedule we'll get another meeting on the board but we're done 9 30 we're done because you all have other meetings you all have other work we're not going to bleed over even though i was the ceo i'm not going to be like well i'm going to pull rank and say i'm the ceo i'm going to keep you guys on the phone even though your clients are waiting for you vendors are waiting for you your kid might be waiting for you to take them to school like that's just i'm creating bad will all throughout the day for all those other people by doing that so getting those rules inside we found that by creating those names, it allowed people the permission to. To step up in the right way because otherwise they keep showing up in these generic 30-minute meetings and they don't know what they're supposed to do what is the agenda is this a me shut up and listen to you boss meeting is this a me show up and brainstorm is this a me show up and lead okay, right like i don't know what i'm supposed to do here and so you spend the first five ten minutes trying to figure that out and then the person around the meeting is like well how come no one's helping me how come no one's well because you're trying to figure out what kind of a meeting is this that's the psychological safety we're talking about we're creating that psychological safety by saying 15 minute meeting cockroach meeting i need help it's optional for you to attend you're busy you don't have to come you want to come you want to help us collaborate we are not talking about the weather we are not talking about how we're doing we are not doing anything other than getting on the call and saying client just called this is a problem how do i get this fixed oh okay call jason he's going to call tim and they're going to call jay and then good to do this is what you do okay cool thanks everyone bye click no i like the idea of moving from generic because one of the. Major time bandits for many of my clients is just they get sucked into meeting after meeting after meeting and they don't have a chance or their people don't have a chance to powwow with them to have a conversation about something because they're constantly dragged into the next meeting whether it's virtual or, you know, face to face. So a couple of things that come up. So you create bespoke meetings, depending on what it is. So people understand the role and responsibility. There's some sense of certainty of what they are supposed to do in that meeting. Two things that I usually see that come up is that there's some people who just like to talk a lot. I mean, they just dominate the room because of the personality. And the second is if the time is short and everyone has to debrief about something some people start with the details then get to the punchline instead of starting with a punchline and then asking the details. That would tell me that a manager would have to have the confidence to have hard, difficult conversations with these people. But a lot of the times, I also find that managers, which is natural, don't want to have that confrontation to hold people to those rules and think, okay, this will blow over. What would you say to those kind of things where people dominate the room or they just start with all the details before getting to the point? So I want everyone to remember that what you are not changing, you are choosing. What you are not changing, you are choosing. So you are not going to go and change that behavior of that person. If you're not going to go coach them, if you're not going to go help them to be better, again, for our North Star, because I guarantee there's a whole bunch of employees that don't like listening to Dave talk on and on and on and on in every single meeting. If we're not going to change that, then you're choosing to allow it to happen. By choosing that, you're choosing your team to be frustrated every single day. So we have got to address it. Now, how do you address it? We address it by using this concept called feed forward. Feed forward is, hey, Dave, in the next meeting, can you make sure everyone gets a chance to speak? Dave, in the next meeting, can you make sure that you don't speak again after everyone else has had a chance? Right? Hey, Dave, can you make sure that you're listening twice as much as you're talking? Like whatever however you want to deliver it but it's you're asking them to change their future behavior because when we go to people and say hey dave everyone tells me that you talk too much in meetings dave's gonna get pissed off he's gonna get defensive he can't change what's already happened it's done it's it's over but dave can commit to future change Future Dave is happy to be different. And it's not always going to work every single time and right away, but it's going to be that – you're going to have a much more constructive conversation. And I will tell you about 80% of the time, they say absolutely, and they do a pretty good job the next time. 10% of the time, they give you lip service, and you're going to have to keep working on that. And that may be somebody that doesn't last, that isn't going to stay in your organization if they can't make a change. And the other 10%, they actually say something to me like, well, there's a reason why. I talk so much. There's a reason why I was so dominant in that. Cool. Why was that? Let's talk about that. And there might be something else going on. Like maybe they feel like, he feels like if he doesn't talk, nobody stays on the agenda. That they'll just start going off and they're doing, okay, there's another problem here. Let's solve the agenda problem. Let's talk to the team about that. And then you can talk lag. So sometimes I find these little discovery. But that feed forward, I'm not kidding. I literally went to a guy one time and said, hey, in the next meeting, can you not be such a big jerk? And he kind of laughed and said, yeah, I can do that. I called him a jerk, and he still wasn't mad because I'm asking him to change future behavior. That he was like, yeah, I can do that. And he kind of recognized, yeah, I've been kind of a jerk lately. I've been a little too much in meetings, right? But if I would have gone to him and said, you're such a jerk in meetings, what the heck's going on, dude? He would have been, hey, don't call me a jerk. Like, what are you? Right, we'd be in a fight. And that's what we're trying to avoid as leaders when we're having those difficult conversations is we don't want the confrontation. This is a way to reframe it so there isn't a confrontation. Before we jump into the seven pillars, is there one more, there's probably a number of things, is there one more nut and bolt thing for the manager managing his or her team? Well, you talked about hybrid and remote work. And this little exercise that I will tell you about works for any company, any team, anytime. But it is especially important when we are working hybrid and remote, when we have a little bit less opportunities to observe people face-to-face, where they magically show up on Zoom and they look happy and then they turn off their Zoom and they're crying. We wouldn't see that in an office. We wouldn't see that on Zoom. And so how do we – this is what managers are struggling with right now. They go, I don't know if the culture is good. I don't know if my people are– how do I deal with that? They're trying to figure that out. What you need to do is do one meeting a day. If you can do it three times a week, that's good, too. But I try to do it every day, just with my team and the people I work with the most. And this has got to be at least a 30-minute meeting or more. It can't be a little quick meeting. So before you start the meeting, you say, hey, let's go around the room. How are you showing up today? And you go around the room, everyone answers that question. The more you do it, the better the answers get, the more psychological safety there is, the more they start to open up. And they're giving you. If you were to ask me that, Chris, how are you showing up? Would I would it be some like, you know, I'm a little overwhelmed today. I'm stressed. I don't really have much time. Is that what you're talking about? Yeah. Yeah. OK. I get that. I might get I'm exhausted. We got a brand new puppy and we're trying to create a train it. And I haven't slept correctly in three days. I'm like oh that's why jason's been grumpy today yeah okay okay he's not mad at me he's just tired, like you know and then then what happens is we have some sympathy or empathy for you and we might say hey why don't you like take off like an hour earlier today i'll i'll handle this thing for you and go go get a nap man like like how do we help you with whatever's going on with you. If you're saying you're really overwhelmed and you've got all these client emails to respond to, I might be like, hey, send a couple to me. I'll handle it. I've got a little extra time today. I can help you out. That's how the team can. Help each other and deal with that. And you might say you're doing great. You just won a big deal or the client's really happy and re-upped. It might be a celebration. That's cool too. But if the team is all good, then you as the leader can share how you're showing up. If the team is struggling, we need to focus on the team and get them help. They cannot handle your crap today so if you need support you got to go uphill um if someone really is struggling like i've been in those meetings and had someone say i just found out my grandmother passed away. And i'm like why are you here like take the day off like go go be with your family like go, you don't need to be here like we we'll cover your stuff we got this you know like And you showing up in that moment and giving them permission to go and be with their family and not have to work. They remember that. They remember that moment when some recruiter is trying to poach them out of your company. Indeed. Right? That you had to ask. That's part of this exercise is asking. And then the next part is doing something about it. Right. And if you have to stop the whole meeting, I mean, I, again, I had someone say, I just found out my wife's got cancer. Okay. Meeting's over. We're done. Like, let's, we're not going to talk about this thing. How can we, you know, Tom, how can we support you now that you just found this out? What do you need from us? Do you need to take a couple of days off? Do you need to like throw some projects at us? Like how, what can we do again? He's going to remember that for the rest of his life. Now, hopefully you don't ever have to have those moments, but they happen. we have enough people we're managing bad stuff's going to happen now at the end of the meeting if everything went well you got to share you had your meeting you leave a few minutes at the end and you ask how are you leaving the meeting and this is important because it tells you um if the meeting you just had is the same meeting they had what i mean by that is i would have the meeting and i'd be like I am the CEO of the year this was the best meeting ever everyone's happy I solved all their problems I got they all have permission they all gonna and then they would say I don't know I'm kind of nervous about what we just came up with I'm leaving a little nervous to go tell the client about this solution whoa wait. Oh, so if you've ever been a leader and had one of those moments where you guys had a meeting and had an agreement and then nobody went and did it, like the thing didn't happen that you all promised was going to happen, it's because they weren't really there. They weren't ready. You told them, but they weren't on board yet. And this is how you get that. By asking them how they're leaving, they're going to tell you. And again, this takes practice and takes time and it will get better over time. But when they start telling you, I don't know, they might also tell you, I'm so excited to go call the client because this is the best solution ever. I mean, hey, cool, we're on the right track. It could be good. It could be bad. But I needed that information because I kept making the mistake that I was having the same meeting they were having. And each person was having a different version of that meeting. And I needed to pull that out of them to figure out if we needed to meet again or if we were good and now we could stop meeting about this thing and remove it on our meeting audit and we're done and go about our day in our business and be successful. I think those are very brilliant questions to ask the beginning, how you've shown up and how are you leaving the meeting. I think they're really great questions, but that would suggest that manager or that leader has established some level of psychological safety where people feel open and they can be transparent. My question is, again, devil's advocate kind of question here, Chris, is that after a while, do people just sort of default to the answer? Yeah, that was great. Yeah, it landed well with me just to get out. That's what I'd worry about because I think they're great questions if you have established really good relationships, communication, collaboration, and deep psychological safety. But if you have a team that's kind of, eh, we're okay, they're like satisfactory, right? I mean, would you truly get, you know. Truthful answers from people or like, how would you, if that's one of our listeners listening right now and he or she is skeptical, but open to what you're saying, how do you address that? So I've never had it where people did not want to share at some level. Right. Again, we build that trust meeting by meeting, day by day, not doing it more than once a day. If your team doesn't meet every day, you could do it two, three times a week. Sure. But you start to build that trust. I don't expect them on day one as if we were magically a brand new team and a brand new leader to tell me about, you know, something really, really hard going on at home. But they will at least tell me I'm really busy. You know, they might tell me I have back to back to back to back to back meetings today. Like, I know I got a lot. OK, how can we help you with that? Like, how come is there a meeting we can cut from that? Like, is there a meeting we can remove? So the moment that they're sharing anything with me and I'm immediately jumping in, like a good Scrum Master would do in Agile and Scrum methodology, to say, how do I come in and help you? How do we solve the – we have little Scrum meetings every day, call them the daily stand-up. It's the Scrum Master's job to help remove friction and remove problems for the team. This is exactly what you're doing as a leader. We know this work is built into one of the most famous project management systems ever. Is just tell me a little thing and I'm going to jump in and try to help you. And then tomorrow you might tell me a little bit more and I'm going to jump and try to help you, right? And then when someone helped you and then when you find yourself in that space where you're doing well, then you want to go and help somebody else when they're not doing well. It's contagious, right? I have had people that were very private and didn't want people to know their business and didn't really want to share things going on at home. And that was really the exception It was very few people were like that But I knew who they were And so I didn't ever expect them to share deep, dark things going on at home But they would talk about what was going on at work. Even if they were that kind of person, they would get to the point where they were sharing pretty openly and honestly about work stuff. And even though they didn't want to talk about it, it would be known if something was going on at home. And we at least could acknowledge, we know you have a lot going on, you don't want to talk about it, that's fine. But we're here to support you if you need your help. You don't have to tell us all the details, but we can handle a project or help you with emails or whatever if you need it. Is there another tip you would suggest or recommend to help manage the culture of remote teams? So the meetings are probably the most important thing if you're fully remote. And how do you manage that? And how many time zones are there? Because three, maybe four time zones are manageable for we meet on Zoom or Teams or whatever. The moment you go outside of that, you need to do a different type of work. You need to be doing work where if people are 5, 6, 7 time zones away they're going to pop into a slack room like this is what I did when you guys were sleeping. You have to have a different type of handoff and communication and all that. So it has to be designed based on where your people are, how many time zones you're dealing with and all of that. But the meetings become really important. If your team really does have to get on a call every once in a while and you have all those different time zones the same people shouldn't have to suffer like it shouldn't always be the people in europe that have to be on the call at 3 a.m like if that's when you have to have your call then the americans have to be on the call at 3 a.m sometimes like you have to have that shared pain right uh that that's important so meetings are are really really the the big part of it, finding that way to extract what's really happening in their lives to get that bonding exercise i just told you about is great for that and then how and where do we create recognition and that's one of the pillars that i know we want to talk about today is where do we and how do we recognize people because it's kind of easy to do in the office to be like hey point over to sally sally did a great thing and people go yay or you have like a board or something where you put up people's names and what they did. In hybrid and remote, it gets harder to do that. And so we have to be far more intentional about where and how we do that recognition. Great. Let's segue over to the foundational blocks or the seven pillars of creating a cultivated or great culture. Can you walk us through it? Sure. So, back when I was trying to figure out how to change my company culture, I struggled with, well, what is the blueprint? What does an A-plus look like? And there was so many different answers. I mean, how Google does it, and how Amazon does it, and how Meta does it, how any big company that I might go study does culture. They all, if you look at them, they look like they all do it a lot different. I mean, you know, Bezos has a very particular way he wants to do it, right? And what I began to understand as I really studied those companies and I interviewed for 10 years on my own podcast, great leaders, I was hearing consistently the same things being brought up about what they do well. And they may use different words they were all synonyms of each other but they were saying the same seven things and so we took that we instituted it we then had walden university actually studied my organization and several others and were able to prove that that those seven were really foundationally important and then we've been able to replicate this hundreds of times with other clients um the good news is the same seven always pop up and the good news again is we've never had like you know the pluto thing where suddenly one of the pillars didn't was no longer a planet it wasn't like you know it suddenly went away as ai comes in as things change these seven are still just as important so no dwarf pillars there's no dwarf pillars exactly, um what is important is that you decide or you figure out which of these pillars you suck at, because i guarantee a few of them you're good at you wouldn't be a company if you didn't at least do some of them it's generally you have a few that you're really struggling with and that's where you need to go spend your time and effort so the seven are transparency recognition, positive leadership measurement how we deal with mistakes listening and uniqueness. There are applications to these pillars to your employees, to your clients, to your marketing, to your sales. They are holistically important in every which way. This is not just about employee engagement. This is about your company as a whole. I don't know if you want me to talk about each seven or you want to dive into a couple of those. I'll leave that to you. Maybe dive into maybe recognition first. You were talking about that. Just expand on that right now, Chris. Yeah, so recognition, we really found that a bottom-up process was best, meaning our people owned the program. This was not, hey, you put in stars and you get a gift card, and this was not something that was the manager's responsibility. This was not top-down. We would ask the managers to make sure it was happening. They were aware and they were cognizant of it. But we really wanted, if I noticed that you did something great and I was your boss and no one else had said anything yet, I might go call up your teammate, Bob, and say, Bob, hey, you should really go recognize Jason for that amazing thing. I really would start to encourage it by making it a peer-to-peer, bottom-up thing. And once you get that ball rolling, it just, you cannot stop it. People just loved saying thank you and high-fiving each other. We had a little slack room called the water cooler room. And it started to feed itself. And then it was okay for managers to also thank people. And it was okay for people to thank their manager. And it wasn't seen as brown-nosing. It was just, it started to really go. There are some good examples. I have one in my book. I did a case study on Caesars Entertainment on how to do it top-down. Big, giant. I mean, they spent millions and millions of dollars on that program. It's a very different way to do it. I think for the average company, you want to build something that is easy, that's replicatable, that's bottom-up, that doesn't cost you any money, is not gift cards. It's just saying thank you. That's it. It's that simple act of recognizing somebody. So, again, we created some structures, some rules. People like us say thank you, and we say thank you in this room. And if you see someone being thanked it's your job to go in and give them a virtual high five, say way to go add on context we actually had this little icon that we added to Slack, it's a green flag and we called it the green flag, So it was like waving this, like the beginning of a race, waving that green flag. Way to go. It was an awesome job. Way to kick this thing off. And people loved it, right? And we didn't track green flags. We didn't promote on green flags. We didn't give raises on green flags. But you did subjectively know what people were getting a lot of green flags and getting a lot of thanks and really helping the organization. I'd like to go into, this may be more a political sensitivity, considering sort of the current corporate environment is uniqueness. Encouraging diversity and individual perspectives to foster innovation and dynamic workplace. I agree with sort of the diet when it comes to diversity of experience, knowledge, and perspectives. I mean, could you walk us through that from your perspective? Sure. So uniqueness has several different ways in which it shows up. It shows up in marketing, right? How do we define ourselves uniquely in the marketplace? How do we think about ourselves as a unique company, service, product, whatever that is? So we have to be thinking that way for uniqueness. Then we should be thinking about our people as unique people. I don't want to create programs and create solutions and treat people as a one-size-fits-all. I need to be thinking about them as unique individuals who have unique capabilities, who have unique personalities and abilities to help my organization. So if I show up on a meeting and I'm like, hey... You're a Dodgers fan. I'm a Dodgers fan. You must be a good employee. That's not a great way to connect, right? We're trying to find what makes us the same or what makes us similar. I want to be curious and discover what makes you unique and special so that I can channel you to do your best work and do the things that you're going to be uniquely great at. Again, we're trying to make this the best place that people have ever worked. I'm not doing that if you're going to do a job that you're not very happy doing. But I'm constantly giving you tasks that are not your natural cadence, that you're naturally going to be good at. To your final part of that, of your question... That does mean that we want to be encouraging and trying to find diversity of thought. Okay. So for years, we tried to hire in a more diverse way. And we failed over and over and over again. I kept getting the same candidates, the same looking candidates, the same talking candidates, the same types of people. At my final interview over and over and over again, no matter what initiative, no matter what thing we tried, no matter what we said we cared about or promoted or put on our website, I still got the same people. Good people, but the same people. My problem with that is that they all talked and thought the same way. I wanted people who thought differently, not 100% of the time, but I wanted some people in the organization who might challenge everybody else and think differently. What we did is we took our strength finders data i had everyone in the company take the top get their strengths or top five strengths and we mapped them out on a giant excel sheet every all five five strengths you got a tally mark and all those places and we had a ton of people with responsibility and we had a ton of people with you know all these like certain things but we also had nobody in analytical. We had nobody in all of these different strengths and that was what i was that was what i was trying to solve for wasn't trying to solve for i don't have enough women or don't have enough of this race or this kind of person or that that's not i'm trying to find people who think differently. And when i started telling my people i'm not gonna hire somebody don't even send them to a final interview with me unless in their top five they have at least one strength that we are missing, For the next year, that's it. That's all my requirement is. You guys like them, you think they're great, come to me for final interview. We have no one in analytical, let's say. They better have an analytical in their top five. I will tell you that the people who I started meeting with looked different, talked different, thought different. It's amazing what happens because people have so many biases accidentally. They get on there, they look at their resume, and they go, oh, you like this, I like this. You went to that school, I went to that school. You worked in that job, I worked in that job. We start trying to find the things that are similar about somebody and then we suddenly think they're a great person to bring into this role. That's not really a great. That doesn't mean they're going to be great at their job. I'm not saying you should have to hire certain types of people. I'm not saying that DEI is good or bad or whatever. All I'm saying is you need to find a better way to get different voices into your company And that's what that uniqueness pillar is talking about, is how do we figure that out and get people in here that we can celebrate for thinking differently and high-fiving them for being the devil's advocate and for challenging our assumptions and saying, what if we didn't do it that way? What if we did it this way? I want people like that. Because if we just did it the same way all the time, I could just hire AI. I could just hire robots to keep repeating stuff over and over and over again. I need thinkers. Well, we've talked about two of them. What would, what's another pillar that kind of very important for you to communicate today to our audience that's for them to know? Yeah, I mean, I really want people to remember that what you focus on grows. So if you are focusing on what people are doing wrong, to your point about accountants looking for mistakes, if you're focused on the employees who are underperforming and not focused on the people who are doing really well. What do you want more of? Do you want more great employees? Go focus on your great employees and starve out the ones that aren't performing and aren't doing well and aren't trying. Put your effort into what you want more of. It is amazing how putting your time, energy, and attention on what you want to grow will make things so much better. And I find that most managers spend all their time in meetings trying to fix problems, trying to fix people who aren't doing what they're supposed to be doing. Instead of like, what are my best salespeople doing? Like, I want to understand what their process is. What are they doing? And how do we get more people to do what they're doing? Or get rid of the people who aren't performing and go find more people who are doing how they do it. Like, that's how we shift. And that was the first step I had to take on a very long journey, a long flight of stairs, to get to the how do we make this the best place you're ever going to work. And again, that's by focusing on what I want more of. And putting my time, energy into those things, into those people and not anything else and protecting my time away from anything else that's going to deter from that. It all seems to work out in the end that way. One last thing before we start running off, I wanted to go into listening. Yeah. So listening, again, it's multifunctional here, right? So how do we listen to our clients? Are we surveying them, talking to them? How do we get their stories, understand their concerns? Because that creates better products and service. That creates better responses. So we have to be listening to them. We have to be listening to our vendors. We have to be listening to our employees. Surveys um you know are we really understanding what they're going through and what's happening um we went back and talked to uh people during covid and found out that like we were having four totally different experiences for employees based on their home situations, right just by listening to employees you realize if you had a multi-generational, family happening at your house or you had a bunch of family in your home like you guys they were having different similar but like somewhat different if it was just you and one other person living in your house or your apartment you were having a very different experience and if you are living by yourself we had employees who lived by themselves in apartments and they're suddenly locked in and not allowed to leave they had a very different experience so when we showed up to listen and said what do you need from us the people with mostly generational family said i need more bandwidth like i got grandma watching tv i got the kids on netflix and doing homeschooling you know the virtual schooling my my spouse is home they're using the internet i'm using the internet we're all on zoom calls and like i get me more bandwidth. And, and number two, leave me alone. I don't need any more social time. I don't need any more stuff. Like I want to get my job done and, and probably then go have a bottle of wine. But like, I just want to be left alone. Actually drinking too much and was something we had to deal with later on. Like, as you know, we realized like people were just so bored. They were just getting plastered every night, which was a very COVID thing to do. Um and then like the other group the family they kind of need the same thing leave me alone bandwidth the i'm have one person in my house or my wherever i live or i have nobody, i need social connection can we have a a something can we like do something on fridays at five o'clock where we have like a cocktail party or we have a an event or we have social something or other. And so what we realized is we totally redesigned our teams temporarily. You were no longer on the customer service team. Your team was now based on your home situation. So all the people who had mixed groups, mixed generations, they were on teams because they were like, just quick meetings, leave me alone, help me solve some problems, and then like total boundaries. Put those other people, the single people or one person in your house in teams, and they were like having social hours every night. They were watching movies together, like co-watching movies. They were doing all this crazy fun stuff because they needed that. But can you imagine if I tried to solve that problem for my employees with one solution? It would never get to if I didn't listen to them, talk to them, get data, hear their stories, and then go back and really think about how do I fix this? What can I fix? What are my subgroups? What are my avatars here? And how do I come up with solutions for them? Thank you for that. Last important question. But if a company goes through the seven pillars and they identify two or three things that they're not very good at, what is your recommendation to tackle one at a time to see how it plays out or to tackle all three? Pick the one that's the biggest problem that's really hurting you the most and go and completely solve it, like really go big and solve it. Because if you solve a small problem that takes a whole bunch of work, everyone says, well, that was a whole lot of effort and a whole lot of rigmarole for just a little tiny bit of change. If you go and solve a really big problem and they go wow it is so much better now the next time you come to them for the next pillar they're like i'm on board what are we going to do because i saw what you just did over here that was amazing. Transparency is a great one like we to be really transparent like we gave people our pnl we shared team goals we shared personal goals we start we start telling people as much as we possibly could, right? Finding ways to deliver all of the information, why we made decisions, even if it was hard things for them to hear or hard things for us to have to deal with, we shared, shared, shared, overshared. And people went, oh my God, not everybody cared. Not everybody wanted to know, but people stopped filling in the gaps with bad information. They filled in the gaps with the right information. And so they were making decisions after that correctly and not removing fear and anxiety and all of that. It was amazing if I showed up on a meeting and said, listen, we've had three bad months. We've been not profitable for three months. We did not hit our sales goals. We have way too much staff. Here's what we're going to do about it. Here's what we've come up with. Here are the three things we're going to do to fix this. This is how long we think it's going to take to fix it. This is why we think it happened, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And all my employees exhale. Ah, okay. I get it. Chris understands the problem. The senior team understands the problem. They know what they're going to do about it. They're going to have to fix. And next month, I'm going to see if they're right. I think we're going to keep getting information and see. And when they see it's getting better, they go, ah, okay. I have trust in my team, my leaders. Because they tell it to me straight. They tell me what they're going to do about it, and then I see the changes that happen. So that was transparency for us, and that took time, and that was our first really big thing. And I hooked everybody in after that. It was like I had given them a little free taste of cocaine, and they were on it forever now because it worked, and it was great, and they loved it, and they wanted to do it. And so every change initiative after that, they were on board. Well, Chris, we are coming close to the top of the hour. Is there any last thoughts you would like to leave with our listeners today? Just if they would like any more help, they're more than welcome to text 33777 and put my name, Chris, as the message. I'll send you a free PDF on how to great questions to ask your employees, a breakdown of all those meeting types that I mentioned, like how they work and what their structure is, if you want to steal those from me. And then I'm happy to connect with anybody on any social media platform where you can find me. I'm happy to connect. And you are the author of the book, The Power of Company Culture and Remote Work. That is correct. As I understand it. That's right. And I have a new book coming out next month. Not next month. Next year. And probably in April, March, early April, called Moments That Matter. Moments That Matter. We'll have to have you back up on the show for that one, too. Fantastic. Chris Dyer, thank you very much for sharing your deep knowledge and experience today with us. Thanks for having me, Jason. I appreciate it. Well as we close out today's conversation i want to bring us back to that key insight i mentioned at the top chris shared a mantra that every leader should keep on their desks to keep in mind what you are not changing you are choosing so if you have a team member who dominates every call or a meeting that drains the energy out of the room and you don't address it, well, you're choosing that culture. Culture is the sum total of the behaviors we reward and the behaviors we tolerate. One of the techniques that Chris shared with us that really stood out to me was his feed for technique. And that is asking for a specific future behavior instead of criticizing the past. I think it's such a warm and human way to stop choosing mediocrity. It's also a great way to continue psychological safety but at the same time not allowing certain behaviors or attitudes to slip. But to address it, but to address it in a very diplomatic and direct way. This episode is packed with a lot of Chris's valuable techniques that are born from knowledge and long experience. And I just want to thank Chris Dyer for his incredible transparency and for showing us that leadership isn't about having all the answers. It's about building a team that is safe enough to find those answers together. And folks, if you're interested in reading Chris's books, which I highly recommend, or getting in touch with him, I will leave all his contact information in the show notes. And to you, dear listener, thank you for showing up for another episode. I hope you found this valuable. and if you did, share it with a colleague who might also benefit from it. And until next time, keep well, keep strong, and we'll speak soon.