Chris Dyer
speaker
104 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard Jan 2025
Chris Dyer’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
I'm a serial entrepreneur who had a big company that I sold at the end of 2021. Along the way, during my journey in managing thousands of people, I realized I was a crap boss and doing culture totally wrong. I had to figure out what we were actually supposed to do. I thought I was doing it great. Then one day you look in the mirror and you're like... It's like saying, oh, I'm really healthy.
And then you look in the mirror and you're fat. And it's like, huh, what I'm saying and what I'm doing are two different things. And so I realized I needed to change culture. And we did it. We did it really successfully. I worked with a lot of other big organizations to take it to them. And now I spend my time speaking and writing and helping companies make work not suck for people.
Yeah, I mean, one of their really big mistakes that they make is that, first of all, believing they have good culture just because they say so. That's not how it works. You can't manifest a great culture. You can manifest many things in our lives, but I think you have to be far more intentional about culture. That's the first one.
The second one is that they believe that if they just tell people... That is enough. We need people to be a part of this process. It's great for the CEO or the senior leaders to create the vision and to ultimately say, people like us do things like this and don't do things like that. What was it? Google's theme used to be, don't be evil. That was sort of like a baseline thing. Yeah.
But beyond that, we need like our people to be a part of that process. And so usually companies leave them out. Right. They completely ignore it. They just say, this is what our culture is and you are lucky to be here. And that doesn't work.
Well, first step is to ask them. Ask them what they care about. Ask them what they value. Ask them, you know, when you do that, you start to pick up on themes and things that obviously overlap and connect. You're not going to get 100% agreement on anything. But if you're saying, hey, we really need to do X, and you ask your employees, well, what do you think?
And they're generally saying X or mostly X. I mean, you'll find ways to connect the dots to make them see and understand that what you care about and what you want this company to be is ultimately aligned with what they're saying they want Or, you know, sometimes you don't just ask, what do you want? Like, what do you think a great company culture looks like? What is it in your mind?
You know, if we had the best culture in the world, what does that look like? What would we be doing? And they ultimately will start telling you things that maybe they're not doing yet. Again, we can go back to the exercise. What's healthy? Well, healthy is I would be working out every day. I'd be eating good food. And you're like, we know you're not doing that right now. Right.
But you're getting that alignment on we all agree what good looks like. And so we can start to work towards that. That's kind of a really good step one. Step two is There's this really interesting correlation between understanding and actually getting people to change. Yes.
And so usually what leaders do is they just try to convince, convince, convince, and they try to push and beg, borrow, steal, yell, scream, whatever it is to get them to comply and to change. And all of that is a complete waste of time.
All you need to do is to help people understand more and more and more about why it's important, why we're doing this, why it's good for them, why it's good for the company. Assuming it's a good idea.
More understanding will result in more change and people being willing to do more of that and eventually finding some people I call champions of change, people who are really love the idea and are really enthusiastic and will go carry, you know, will go out into the world with their virtual sword and shield and help you, right, do more of that. Um, that's super important.
And so we have to ask, and then we have to really help inform people, not just once, but constantly, right. Getting them to understanding.
Culture is how we get things done. It's the norms, it's the behaviors. And so if we think about what's the most efficient, what's the best way to get things done, I think most people would say, I want a collaborative company. I want people who speak up. I want people to give ideas. I mean, we talk about all these things we would want from people.
And yet, if your culture is one where it's shut up and don't talk... Uh, don't speak out of turn. The senior leaders get to talk and you have to sit here and be quiet. Um, you know, we don't, we don't really care about ideas or, you know, if you give a good idea, the senior leader is going to steal it for their own. I mean, like there is what the reality of culture is.
And then there's like what we think we want. And so culture is so important because we have, this has been studied. I could give people, I could send them a hundred studies right now if they wanted them that would, you know, We know that when you have a great culture, you have higher profits. We know when you have a great culture, you have higher performance.
And we know when you have a great culture, you have higher productivity. Give me the senior leader, give me the business owner who doesn't care about those three things. Right.
Well, their needs are everything. Everyone is always out to figure out what's in it for them. I mean, people are only working for you essentially because they want fulfillment. They want to feel like they're part of something great, but they also need the money. They need to feed their families and all of that.
So there's this basic contract in the beginning that I'm here because I need something from you, business owner. as the employee. Now, I'm here, and I would much rather enjoy my time here. I'd much rather feel fulfilled and to do something meaningful with this work, or else I could just go work at the local burger place and flip burgers and just not care, right? And so there is that shift there.
We need to think about, they're not just showing up altruistically. That may happen in a volunteer organization, but we're talking about work. right? That is huge. So what have we done? I used to send out a one question survey to all of my employees every single week. We ditched the annual survey, which I think is dumb and stupid.
Showing 1–20 of 104 · page 1 of 6
Next →