How Leaders Can Help Create High Performing Cultures
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In this episode of Relationships at Work, Russel chats with keynote speaker and author Chris Dyer on the steps leaders need to take to foster high-performing cultures.
A few reasons why he is awesome — he is a keynote speaker on company culture, ranked #1 by Inc Magazine. He is the author of The Power of Company Culture: How Any Business Can Build a Culture that Improves Productivity, Performance and Profits and co-author of Remote Work: Redesign Processes, Practices and Strategies to Engage a Remote Workforce. He’s on tons of top this and top that lists focusing on leadership and change management. Including as a Top 101 Global Employee Engagement & Experience Influencers by Inspiring Workplaces and Work Buzz.
Connect with, and learn more about Chris on his…
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“We think about [culture] as a science. So how do we poke at things and think about how to make this better? And when I say make it better, I mean, make it better for everyone, not just better for the company, not just better for senior leaders, but better for everybody.”
Chris Dyer
Russel Lolacher: And on the show today, we have Chris Dyer and here is why he is awesome. He’s a keynote speaker on company culture ranked number one for that very thing by Inc Magazine. He’s the author of the Power of Company Culture, How Any Business Can Build a Culture That Improves Productivity, Performance, and Profits.
And he’s the coauthor of Remote Work, Redesign Processes, Practices, and Strategies to Engage a Remote Workforce. The man likes his Ps. He’s on tons of top this and top that lists, focusing on leadership and change management. Including as a top 101 Global Employee Engagement and Experience Influencer by Inspiring Workplaces and Workbuzz.
Hello, Chris.
Chris Dyer: Hello, thanks for having me.
Russel Lolacher: Thanks for being here, sir. As we’re both enjoying whatever we need to at this early in the morning. I appreciate you connecting with me today.
Chris Dyer: There’s coffee in here. I promise. I promise.
Russel Lolacher: Ditto. Whatever you’re drinking. I’m right there with you, sir. Before we get into our very interesting topic of high performing cultures, I have the question I have to ask all of my guests, being thrown your way, Chris. Which is, what is your best or worst employee experience?
Chris Dyer: So I’ll give you a story that kind of dives into a little bit of both. We many years ago had a big project and we had to hire a whole bunch of people. And the client was like, we’re going to give you all this business. We promise. It was all this stuff. Now they turned out to totally screw it up and they didn’t end up giving us this the million dollar contract like they things didn’t work out and so we had hired all these people on for this special project and then we ultimately had to, you know, let them all go. It didn’t, it didn’t last. And that was a really, that was the only time I’ve ever had to bring people on and then let them go. We’ve always been really safe and good trajectory. And we, we let people know there was this chance. We were very upfront that this is a big, weird contract deal.
So it wasn’t a huge surprise, but it was still weird, but we had identified two people who were, I thought did really, really great. And then we could maybe keep them around in, in, into the core business. And one of those people was a nice woman. And what I noticed was that about a week in, my people came to me and said, I can’t stand her, we, we, we have to get rid of her.
And I’m like, what’s going on? Cause she was very high performing, all these great stats. And they’re like, she asked so many questions. And I was like, tell me more. And they were like every, she wants to understand every little thing. And she asked a million questions and it’s just driving us all crazy. And I’m like, listen, give it two weeks and she’s going to be your best employee. Give it six months and she’s going to be redoing the whole department. And and they were like, you’re, you’re, you’re crazy. You’re nuts. I got this like huge pushback from the leaders, but they ever grudgingly kept going and it was exactly as we had thought.
She was asking questions because she wanted to deeply understand. She wanted to know, and then she started making improvements and iterations and coming up with things we had never thought about, but you know, was so unencumbered by, I’m not supposed to ask you 392 questions today. And so it was a bad experience for most of my employees for a couple of weeks, and then all of a sudden she became their favorite person and their favorite employee and the person they always go to, to get things figured out because she could… had that kind of brain. But she would just walk in and imagine someone walking in your house and went why do you do it this way? Why do you do it that way? And it gets, it gets annoying, but then like suddenly handing you a list of 55 suggestions on how you could improve your household.
I mean, you’d be like, okay, cool. So I was, I was thinking of her, cause it was like this huge discrepancy between how we thought about her in the beginning and then how she ended up being thought about later on.
Russel Lolacher: It’s so interesting too, because in any leadership conversation, we always talk about curiosity being such a, a part of the DNA ever. And then we’re like, but it needs to show up in the way that’s comfortable for me rather than what it might look like for another person. Now to your leadership who may have had a challenge and we’re wondering, cause they’re thinking short term thinking. They’re thinking, all the questions are slowing down our velocity of productivity. Cause we’re so busy having to answer all these questions. They’re not long term thinking going, no, this person is foundationally building something that will be amazing. You saw it, but the organization didn’t. Did they learn anything from that interaction?
Chris Dyer: Certainly in the people that went through that learned and they got far more receptive to answering those questions and understood. It was a good epiphany moment for them too. And I think it’s hard for us to sometimes do the things that are good for us. Sometimes the things that we should do, because they’re hard.
And to your point, they slow us, maybe they slow us down in the short term. And they cause us pain in the short term or loss in the short term, but in the long term, they’re really good for us. And that’s where good leadership steps in and says, we’re okay bleeding a little bit right now. We’re okay slowing down a little bit right now.
We understand maybe we’re not going to hit our goal this month or this quarter, but that means we’re going to blow through this year’s goal because we have figured this out and the average employee needs leadership to help them do that, to give them that permission.
Russel Lolacher: They really need to connect those dots. Cause everybody’s in their own silo. They’re in their own world. They’re in there. How it impacts me. Unfortunately, leaders can’t be like that, but we have so many that are. But what we’re talking about already is I think works really well into what our topic is today, which is of course, high performing cultures.
Before we get anywhere. One of the cornerstones of the show is definitions. I hate talking about things without defining what the hell they are. Innovation, diversity, leadership. We use words a lot, but we don’t actually define a lot of them. So let’s define, especially your definition of what a high performing culture even is. Define me, Chris!
Chris Dyer: So maybe I’ll back up and say culture itself is the norms of how we get things done. How is it that when we go to work, how do we get things done? Am I like free to go and figure it out? Am I supposed to do everything in triplicate and get 19 different bosses to approve my request?
What does it look like to work? What are the norms? Do I get high fived and do I get patted on the back if I screw something up? Or do I get yelled and screamed at? We all feel it. We could be on the fourth floor of a company and feel one way and go to the fifth floor and feel another way just the moment you walk out of the elevator door. That’s culture. But it’s those norms, it’s the rules, it’s the things that typically happen to us. So we take that and say how do we make the norms? How do we make the, those experiences become high performing? That means that we’ve been intentional and that we’re treating culture like a science. And not an art. And when I talk to leaders they think of culture as an art, as some creative process, something that they do or don’t do or it’s how they put their little touch or spin on it. And that is totally wrong. It is, Hey, we’re struggling. Why are we struggling? There’s probably some piece of our culture that is not performing well.
We’re not being transparent enough. We’re not having good, positive leadership. We’re not embracing mistakes and, and, and figuring out how to leverage them and talk about them. And, and help people learn the first time so everyone’s not walking around making the same mistake over and over and over again, right?
So there’s, there’s those things. And then, so we think about it as a science. So how do we poke at things and think about how to make this better? And when I say make it better, I mean, make it better for everyone, not just better for the company, not just better for senior leaders, but better for everybody.
And that means that we are not creating an environment where high performing culture means burnout culture. Means go work a million hours and work on the weekends and your boss is going to call you at 10 PM at night because they’re insane and work stupid hours and they don’t think that you have a family or whatever, on a consistent basis. We’ve all had to call somebody when we shouldn’t have because of an emergency at work, but like on a consistent basis, are you like define those boundaries? So can we think about performance? I mean, Olympic athletes do not train 24/7.
They do not go, go, go, go, go, go. And then their bodies would just fall apart and mentally they would not be able to sustain that. They, they practice. They have diet. They have sleep. They have all these things that go into that, maybe watching film and, and changing their technique and like having a good coach and a good man.
And they get to high performing and Olympians get to the top of the top. And, and they don’t do it by burning themselves out. Those people never make it. And so we have to kind of think about that analogy a little bit as it relates to the high performing part.
Russel Lolacher: And that’s what I’m curious about is the high performing part, especially because it, to take the, to take the term at face value, it sounds really great for the bosses because it’s affecting their bottom line, but it doesn’t in, in face value benefit the employee, but how can it, because high performing generally means great.
We’re going to do more of the service. We’re going to create more of the widgets, which is great for the bottom line. But as an employee, you may be coming into an organization where it’s not necessarily all about that. It is also an experience. It is also the employee journey. So how do you tie those two in that one little set, one little term.
Chris Dyer: Most employees, I would say almost a hundred percent want to be high performing. They want to come in and do their job effectively and efficiently. Nobody wants to sit on 19 extra meetings that don’t mean anything. Nobody wants to sit around and they were told to hurry up and go do this project.
They did it. And now they’re sitting around waiting three months because somebody else can’t get it approved or we don’t have the money or they didn’t hire the person. So high performance isn’t necessarily go make more widgets. It’s if we’re going to go do this action, can we do all the other things that relate to that to be successful?
If we’re going to go Hey, go hire this person. But then we don’t have the money to like, get them what they need. And we can’t… all of a sudden the budget’s not there and we can’t send them on the airplanes or to conferences. And you’re like why the heck did we hire this person? And now they’re sitting there frustrated and upset and then they leave.
And now they’re talking bad about the company and they… like there’s, there’s the stuff that comes out of this. I don’t know. It’s just crap. I just, there’s some companies that are just so bad. It’s they’re literally spending most of their day juggling balls that don’t matter, that don’t impact the business or just creating busy work for themselves.
And I’m sure you’ve all run into these people. Or I mean, I know people that like take, they’ll take everything from vendors and then put it into their own report. Like they’ll make their own thing. And like, when I see that, I’m like, Oh, okay. You don’t have a lot to do. All right. Like you’re not, the people will make more work out of something than it has to be. And you have other people that like they’re just creating and generating and doing all this stuff, but it doesn’t actually do anything because the organization isn’t prepared. So, if you’re going to have your people do stuff, does that mean something? Will that actually turn into something? And can the organization ride that momentum?
And continue to build on that? And we see great cultures do this all the time. And we see those who don’t have great cultures, just stay in the middle of just, okay. They’re never the market leader. They’re just okay.
Russel Lolacher: You sort of alluded to it in your description of how organizations run when it comes to cultures. And it’s something I talk about a lot on the show, which is there is no such thing as one culture. There’s 11, 000 cultures in most organizations going to a different floor, completely different culture.
So if we’re as leaders trying to define and implement and build a high performing culture, is it about alignment? Do we focus on what’s in front of us first as a team? Are we trying to influence the whole organization? Like, how are we trying to crack that nut?
Chris Dyer: Yeah, it depends on who you are. Are you running a team? Are you running a department? Are you running a company? Are you just one member of a team? It really depends on who you are. But ultimately, the high performing part is you, as that person, have a machete in your hand and it is your job to go and just create that path and get obstacles out of the way for whoever you can help.
Maybe that’s just a few team members. Maybe that’s the whole team you manage. Maybe that’s the department you manage. Maybe it’s the company you run. Back in 2008, 2009, when I decided we needed to have a great culture and I needed to fix my company. I literally, that was my only job. I stopped helping in sales. I stopped helping in accounting. I stopped helping in a marketing. I stopped doing all the things that I was doing as CEO. And I just said, What’s, where are we slow? Where are we having problems? Where are we getting stuck? Where are we, where do you, where does anybody feel a frustration point in the organization?
Please come tell me, and I have my magic machete here and I’m going to fix this. We’re going to get this done. And we just kept working through problem after problem after problem. And then we come up with solutions or we would test things. Does this work better than this? We’d have one team do one way, one team do another.
And so we ultimately started discovering all of these things that would really help us, to your point, they were good for our company. They may not have been the right thing for another company, but the fundamental things that are correct about what makes, what makes a great culture are true from culture to culture, to culture. How they do it is different. Much like I’m sure how your parents parented you was felt a lot different than when you went to your friend’s house. And you saw how their parents parented. And yet if you think about the very base what is, what is the baseline things that are true? We know that the parents love their kids. They made sure they were safe. There was certain things that always happened. And then the, then there was their own personality on top of that and how they made those things happen.
Cause I mean, I saw kids who parents let them do whatever they wanted, totally different interaction than I did. And those kids went off to big schools and big careers and did great things. And I know other kids who like total opposite of that. And they went on and did great things, whatever.
So there isn’t necessarily like one way to parent. You could kind of use that example as well. So it’s just a matter of what can you do in whatever position you’re in to make it easier to get the work done for those around you.
Russel Lolacher: So let’s bake a cake, or I guess with the respect of the morning that we’re having parfait, I guess that’s a morning or thing. What are the ingredients to creating, you’ve mentioned sort of almost like it’s a Maslow’s need hierarchy to start like safety and security to start. And then you can build on, am I wrong in imagining that?
Or what are, what are the ingredients you’d like to see in a high performing culture to make it successful?
Chris Dyer: Yeah. So you’re the psychological safety part and all of that happens. So I’m, I’m, I’m addressing it by saying here are the things you specifically need to do that will then result in your people feeling psychologically safe and all of that. As opposed to saying, ‘psychological safety, everybody.’
Go, go, go do it. Bye. Shut the door. And I’m like, what, how the, how the heck do I do that? So transparency, positive leadership. So focusing on what is working, what’s good first. Listening, so being great listeners, hearing what people are saying, hearing what our employees are saying, what our clients are saying.
Do we have a process? Do we have a regular thing? Do we listen? Do we make people feel heard? We celebrate what makes us unique, not what makes us the same. Then we have mistakes, which I talked about earlier. So we celebrating mistakes? Are we leveraging mistakes? Are we talking about them and using them as examples in a positive way?
And we used to give out a Boo Boo of the Month Award. So whoever made the biggest mistake and admitted it to everybody, I would give them like a gift card. I hate gift cards for anything except for this. It worked for this. And people loved it. Like they would literally, we had a room in Slack called Oops, My Bad.
And people would go in there and say, this is the stupid thing I just did. Just letting everybody know. So you don’t make this mistake. Like I didn’t realize that this form or whatever wouldn’t work in this state. And I told the client that, and I had to go back and fix it. They’ve come in and admit it because we had that safety.
Then measurement is the next one. So we have to measure what matters. I mean, just a very simple example. If you want a culture that is respectful of each other. Then are you measuring how respectful we are to each other and then how we interact with each other? We, is that, is that a goal for everybody? Is that something we actually talk about? Like you can’t just say it and then don’t do anything with it. We might measure our P and L. We might measure our, our sales and things like that. Those are important factors, but there’s some trait you want the company to exhibit. Are you measuring it?
So you take all of those. Hopefully I said all seven. I don’t know if I said six or seven, but like you take those things. And you start to work on them. You start to realize whenever I talk about these at a conference, if I’m delivering a keynote, somebody always goes you can see it. Like the light bulb goes off in their head.
They’re like, yeah, transparency. Okay. Positivity. No measurement. Boy, are we bad at that? Like you could see their eyes go, Oh, okay. If we just went and fix that, maybe we’d be okay. Maybe things would be a lot better. It’s usually transparency, by the way. That’s usually the one where they go, Oh my gosh, we don’t tell anybody anything.
Nobody, nobody knows what’s in the CEO’s brain. No one knows why senior leadership made that decision. Nobody knows what each other’s goals are. Nobody knows. Like what the, actual objectives are this year. I saw on my friend of mine’s post, Dr. David Burgess, he reminded everyone, I can’t remember if it was Inc or Forbes, but they like surveyed senior leaders and said what percentage of your employees know what your objectives are this year?
They would say at least 90 percent and then they went back and then for the employees, it was like 2 percent actually knew.
Russel Lolacher: The gap between what executives think and what employees know continues to grow. So you brought a really good example of when you were a CEO and you made it a priority to focus on culture, on bottlenecks, on where things can get fixed. What leadership style are we talking about here? Because I, so leadership style is, as it’s a Swiss army knife.
Nobody should have one leadership style or then they’re can’t talk about innovation and adaptability in the next sentence because it’s all about showing up as you need to show up and you showed a great example there of, okay, I need to focus on this. I need to stop the working leader thing. I need to really focus on the culture of the organization.
A lot of leaders are like, that sounds great, Chris. I have 17 meetings today I have to get to when on earth am I going to have time? So what is the leadership style that works best for creating a high performing culture?
Chris Dyer: We have to decide what is the most important thing. What is it we’re trying to accomplish? What is it I want to happen and what’s important there? Because I’ll bet you 18 or 17 of those 19 meetings you have today are total crap and you don’t need to have, and if you didn’t have them and if you were in the hospital or you got COVID or whatever, and you didn’t go to them, the world is not going to end.
And, and we’re probably doing a lot of those meetings just to feel good, to feel productive, to feel, I don’t know, to hear ourselves talk. I mean, there’s a lot of ego that goes into all of this, stuff we do that doesn’t really matter and I, I realized that when I like just stopped doing all these activities and it was like, sales actually didn’t, they didn’t disappear.
They didn’t get worse because I wasn’t involved at the time. Marketing was just fine. Operations was just fine. They came to me if they needed me, if there really was something that I needed to help them with. But I didn’t need to be on all these meetings all the time. I wasn’t, I was creating busy work, essentially.
And so when I went back and said, I want more sales. Hey, sales team, what’s your biggest, what’s the biggest thing keeping you from getting more sales? And they might say we need more leads and we might need more of this, but like number three and number four would be like, we need to stop being on so many meetings.
We need to like your, your, our sales there is asking us to put so much stuff into our CRM that, we, we spend, 40 percent of our day on data input and not selling. And I remember going Oh my gosh, wait, what? You’re spending 40 percent of your day typing crap into a CRM? Okay. Stop. Instead of let’s go hire another salesperson to meet our sales goal. I hired a sales admin whose job it was to sit and put all that stuff in for them. And they got massively more productive. They started selling way more. Why? Because they weren’t sending 40 percent of their time… If you ever met a salesperson, they do not type a hundred words a minute. Salespeople do not like go learn how to type really, really fast.
That’s not what their skillset is. Most of them. In fact, a lot of good salespeople I know do this.
Russel Lolacher: Search and destroy.
Chris Dyer: Right. And so it was like, what’s the obstacle that I can get out of their way? I cut their meetings down, right? We worked with their leader and we got cut down how much they had to put into the CRM and got them help with that.
And then sales went up. So that’s the kind of things I’m talking about. How can we go back and have common sense solutions and think about what the real problems are that our people are having that’s causing them not to be high productive. And again, the answer is not you need to work more hours. The answer is not, you need to work harder on the weekends or come in earlier, stay late. That’s not the answer. The answer is not that you need to like, I don’t know, focus more or be less distracted or… But, I would say that the other part if you’re a leader, if that, if that itself, you might be like, okay, yeah, fine I’m doing that. Or I don’t know how much I can do of that. The second thing I would say is anytime you take on a task or anytime anybody else in the company that you’re managing is taking on a task. What task are they giving up? Because usually they don’t, usually we just keep adding onto people’s plates and they never let go of anything.
And then suddenly they have so much to do. They’re in 19 meetings a day ’cause they’re in all these things and their productivity goes down or they burn out because they actually can, they actually keep it up. They keep that level up, but they just work more hours and then you lose them. Because the only way for them to escape is to leave the company and start over again. When they have like too many tasks, too many things that they’re responsible for. So there’s lots of different ways to think about it. But it’s virtual machete.
Russel Lolacher: How do you maintain this? Because people come and go. If there is a leader and you’re championing this and you’re getting all the buy in and everybody’s moving along and suddenly that leader leaves. Suddenly that team changes its dynamic. How do you keep it consistent and resilient regardless of who’s in the roles?
Chris Dyer: That is, I mean, the role of the CEO plays a big part here to prioritize that. And it continue to tell your senior leaders that this is a priority and it continue, and then again, to measure it. I mean, as a CEO, I would, I went out and I did the work, but then I went back and when I, my senior leaders saw that it was impactful and good, and they were doing it on their own and they were jumping in and they were realizing, they saw the value. They saw the importance I was putting on it. And then I started making that a regular part of our cadence. Once a month, we talk about how are we helping the culture? How are we helping the people? This was a, this is a bullet point in a discussion that we had every single month. And then I would measure, okay, what have we done?
And when, when someone would take on a task, it would say, okay John in this department said he could start doing this thing. I would say, okay, but what thing did we remove off of John’s plate? That’s a really big ask. It’s a big thing he just took on. What are we removing? So you have to keep those questions. Keep having those conversations. Keep doing that over and over again to really make sure it’s happening.
Russel Lolacher: I think raising the awareness of leaders and executive to understand work because to them, they’re just thinking, I need a thing done. They don’t care about your workload. They don’t care about… it’s your time management skills. Not that’s not a me problem. I remember hearing a story. I cannot remember the man’s name ahead of one of the heads of Pixar.
Not Jobs. Not Jobs. Anyway, he was writing a book called Creativity Inc. And he was talking about how when…
Chris Dyer: Great book. Yeah. I’m blanking on the name too, but yeah.
Russel Lolacher: When executive would come into his office and they’d ask him to do more work, he had popsicle sticks on his, on his wall that illustrated man hours, woman hours, diversity hours… to trying to be inclusive. To illustrate the work that was already being assigned.
And then if somebody jumped in and brought the office, I want this, this, this, the other. Okay, great. Love to. What am I moving? What am I not doing? What am I bringing down that you want to replace? As soon as they saw the board, they’re like, Oh, nevermind. And then they’d walk out of the office.
Chris Dyer: Right.
Russel Lolacher: Because they’re in their own bubble and they have no concept. So communication seems to be a huge part of this as well.
Chris Dyer: Yeah. It’s well, communication. It’s the dedication and what you just show that example is transparency. To show them in some way, this is what we’re dealing with. Let me, let me show you, explain to you. And then let’s talk about how to… also positive leadership. That person said, yes, sure. Love to do the new stupid thing you just brought into my office.
Let’s do it. How do, would you like to make this happen? I said, yes. Let’s figure it out. Here’s transparency. Here’s how we’re measuring man hour, worker hours. And so we’d like to three pillars right there. We just hit and then to your point then all of a sudden it. Ah, OK. Maybe we can’t do that. Maybe this isn’t a priority. Maybe we shouldn’t do that. Or maybe they said this one little thing we don’t need to do and we can do this instead. I mean, this is where like Scrum and Agile has some parallels with backlogs and you have a Product Owner, you have somebody who’s in charge of monitoring all the things that need to be done and you have someone who’s actually in charge of helping the teams get it done and there’s a really important reason why those two people are not the same person, why they’re two different people. Because one person’s looking at it strategically and saying, we have this many hours and this many tasks, and we have this deadline and we can’t, can’t allow someone to come in and say, Oh, here’s my new little pet project. Can you make sure that this gets done this week? Without sacrificing something else.
Russel Lolacher: It’s almost like you’re a member of an improv group. It’s never a no, it’s a yes and.
Chris Dyer: Yeah.
Russel Lolacher: Absolutely. But there are consequences to your decisions, and we don’t talk about accountability. We talk about responsibility a lot. We don’t talk about accountability enough. And I think if you want to do this, then we have to be accountable for the work we’re not doing.
Totally fair. Where does diversity fall into this? Because I hear what you’re talking about, but I’m also thinking of different generations having different approaches to how they work, how they want to work. Is it, a homogenized process? I mean, everything you’re talking about, none of it’s no, everybody wants that.
It’s one of my biggest pet peeves is talking about the future of work is trust. I’m like, no, that has been something we’ve wanted for decades and just don’t have yet. So how do you approach it from a, okay, you may want to work differently, but this is what we want to do.
Chris Dyer: The diversity part comes under the uniqueness. So we want to celebrate what makes us unique and then ultimately be clear about what we want our people to accomplish and set those expectations and work collaboratively with them to set those goals, but then it’s we need to give them the autonomy to get their job done.
So if they want to do it one way versus another way, and there isn’t a safety reason. There isn’t like a really good reason why they shouldn’t do it that way. Let them do it how they want to do it. Here’s the bar. Here’s the goal. Go do it. They’re not being successful. Let’s go back and talk about how you’re doing, how you’re working.
Ah just so you know, your nine other people who had the same job as you, this is how they do it. And they’re much more successful. You might want to try it that way or do it your own way. Wow. You’re way more successful than the other nine. Can you show them how you did it? But we have to give them that freedom in the beginning to figure that out.
It’s I always say I’m here as a support to you, to help you. If you feel like you’re not able to achieve the goals and things that we’ve talked about, but if you’re there, I don’t, I don’t need to know how the sausage is made. I don’t need to know how your computer is set up and your desk. And I don’t care if like you got 19 cats in your room while you’re doing it. You get it done. I mean, I remember one time I had a salesman who did not last very long. And he was like, did you know our sales, our number one sales person’s on the golf course all the time. Like he should be back making phone calls.
And I said, did you just hear the stupid thing that you just said? Our number one sales person’s on, where do you think he’s making these deals? How do you think he’s it was like, it was like, let’s take the activity our number one salesperson is doing tell them they can’t do it anymore. And they should go do it like the other people do it who aren’t being successful.
Russel Lolacher: How does this inform hiring ,Chris? Because we’re talking about the culture that we have, but we have to bring people into this culture. So how does it inform that way?
Chris Dyer: Yeah. I mean, we just need to be very clear about how we work and how, how people do well in our company. And at some point, if you make the changes and you you’re seeing it’s working, then to certain types of people are really into it and do really well. And so can we go find more of those people with those kinds of attributes?
I mean, to be careful that we’re not. Just hiring the same person over and over and over again, but we can have great diversity and we can have very different people come in who maybe have some similarities that share a passion for something, or maybe they’re super organized, or maybe they’re super passionate, or maybe they’re super diligent or whatever this like term is, but then the person themselves may be completely different than the other one.
They just share a commonality and being responsible or being, I don’t know, if you use Strength Finders, they have Woo, like they walk into a room and everyone’s in our new best friend. That’s a great trait for a salesperson. So we just have to think about what is that commonality, not 900 traits that should be the same.
Cause then we get the same person again and again.
Russel Lolacher: We’ve mentioned how important communication and transparency is, but you’ve not mentioned terms like vision, mission, values, which where’s the alignment there is that basically that’s how you’re illustrating this high performing culture?
Chris Dyer: I mean, so like that stuff’s the bare minimum.
Russel Lolacher: Oh, okay.
Chris Dyer: Like you got to have written your vision statement. You should have figured that out before you’re going to go start working on the high performing stuff. So yeah, write it down, talk about it, put it on the wall somewhere. I really feel like that’s more of an exercise for the senior leaders to go, to just get a line on what was important and then go start helping people do it and that that’s more important and then it sort of comes out through osmosis, right?
Of I’m going to demonstrate it, you’re going to pick it up. That’s going to be more likely to happen than not. Hey, everyone. Make sure when you walk down the hall, you read the seven things that we care about, right? That’s not really going to happen.
Russel Lolacher: You, you do sound and I’m not knocking it, the bit of a dismissiveness about vision and mission and values, because is it because you don’t find them that impactful because you want to operationalize it, you want the rubber to hit the road for a horrible metaphor in what do we do day to day? I don’t care about what’s on your website. I don’t care what’s on your poster. What does the day to day look like? Is that what I’m picking up?
Chris Dyer: Yeah. You need, it’s important. It needs to happen because it’s the thought process that the leadership should go through, but but inot that that important to the average employee. What you actually do and what actually happens is what matters to them. And that can be guided by your vision statement, but them knowing your vision statement doesn’t mean squat if you don’t actually act that way.
Russel Lolacher: Especially when how many visions and missions and values are horrible and not actually inspiring, short… They’re just the, an ego sentence for whoever runs the place. So where do we start, Chris? I want to kind of bring us back and wrap it up with, if I’m a leader going, I want a high performing team too, Chris. Like I want to, I want to create a culture that’s like this, where are they starting say tomorrow or the next day going, okay, what’s the first step I need to do on this path?
Chris Dyer: Step one is go back and start getting curious and start asking questions. How can I help you be better? What’s your biggest frustration? What resources don’t you have? If you had a magic wand, what would you change here? Start getting really curious about what your average employee is going to tell you.
And if they’re not going to tell you to your face, then do ask them anonymously, get, but get that data and then start fixing it. I started asking one question a week of my employees and I would take that answers. I would tell them what I heard, what I was going to do about it before I asked them the next question the next week. And then after a month, I would go back and say this month, I asked you these three or four questions. This is what we’ve done about it. This is what we heard. This is what we’re going to keep doing about it. And we kept rinsing, repeat, rinse and repeat. We made the changes incrementally. James clear calls of the aggregation of marginal gains. How do we get 1 percent better all the time? And we’re not trying to go from zero to a hundred, we’re trying to get, can I go from 49 miles an hour to 50 miles an hour? And can I get to 51 miles an hour? And can we just change a little bit and get a little bit faster? And that works for people not, Hey, I’m going to come in and change your whole world and your whole department’s going to be thrown upside down.
That’s scary. That’s not psychological safety.
Russel Lolacher: What I’m hearing is, is just sort of to wrap this up is your teams want to be high performing cultures. It’s your job as a leader, to let them.
Chris Dyer: Yes, absolutely.
Russel Lolacher: Thank you so much for this, Chris. Last question, which I ask all my guests as well, sort of as a bookend. What is one simple action people can do right now to improve their relationships at work?
Chris Dyer: Say yes. Just say yes. Yes, and. Yes, but. But say yes. You will be shocked at how, how everything changes at work and in your life for that matter. Just keep saying yes to things. Then you got to maybe show them why what’s going to happen or what that means. But like when when you’re the NO person, nobody wants to come with you with an idea and people don’t want to be around that energy. They want to be around people who say yes.
Russel Lolacher: That is Chris Dyer. He’s a keynote speaker on company culture and the author of a book I would recommend a lot to The Power of Company Culture, How Any Business Can Build a Culture That Improves Productivity, Performance and Profits. Love all those P’s. Thank you so much, Chris, for being here.
Chris Dyer: Thank you.
