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.
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Appearances
Well, Toms, let's just say Toms, whatever his demographics are, but he's from this particular school and he's from this particular part of the country. You end up hiring five versions of Tom. That doesn't mean you're going to be successful. I mean, my top five salespeople could not have looked, acted, spoke differently, worked completely different, approached sales completely differently.
And that was a huge value to us because one did all their sales in the golf course. And the other one was like way into partnerships. And the other one like made 500 phone calls a day. And we just burnt, you know, knew everybody like, Having that skill set in many different people was very, very valuable. So I kind of find that people get this like a little mixed up sometimes.
In the book, I could tell you a quick story if you want an example of how to do this. We had everyone in the company take the StrengthsFinders, the Gallup StrengthsFinders test. You get your top five strengths. I think that's all you need. You don't need the other. Sorry, Gallup. I don't think you need to pay the extra money for the other 34 or 37 or whatever it is. You need the top five. Yeah.
And we asked everyone to take it. We took their top five and I put them out on just because I was curious. And we put them all the strengths up top and we put all their names down this side on an Excel sheet. And then we just filled in the box wherever they had strengths. And what was fascinating was we had so many people with overlapping strengths.
I mean, my entire operation and research team all had responsibility in their top five, which makes a lot of sense because they have to be responsible. They were doing work that was really, really important. And if they were irresponsible people, like sex offenders get jobs at daycares and stuff. I mean, it was like they had to be that kind of type of person.
But what was also interesting to me was we had all of these gaps. We had... I think something like 12 or 14 strengths that we had nobody talking thousands of people. I have nobody that's terrifying with these strengths. And I was like, that's a problem for us. right? And we had been trying to reach some particular goals with diversity to, you know, to create more diversity in the organization.
And we had hit a ceiling, we kind of hit, hadn't really gotten any better, we didn't really know what to do, we were certainly committed to it. But like, You know, we didn't know what to do. So I just said this at the top, you know, pull this out of my butt.
I was like, hey, guys, the next time you're going to hire somebody, I'm not going to take a final interview and I will not hire them unless one of their top five strengths includes one that we don't have right now. Yes. That's it.
Race or gender or sexual preference.
yeah give me people who don't who are different than the people we have now like just by one strength they can have the other four that are the same so they're going to connect still with the organization and the people i started getting at the interviews and i gave no other instructions the people were acted different they spoke different they had different backgrounds they looked different right they talked different everything was different about them in a wonderfully positive way
And the organization just – and it was like a snowball. As soon as we suddenly had this new injection of fresh ideas and different perspectives, we never had to, like, think about diversity again because we were now already – it was just going. It was like the momentum was there, right? And we weren't trying to, like, solve all of society's ills by – inside of our organization.
We were just trying to get people there that could think differently and have different perspectives so that we could argue more in a very collaborative and constructive way about how to solve real life issues.
The book, my most recent book is called The Power of Company Culture. That's the second edition. And it's filled with... It's really a three-part book. Part one is like, what do you got to do not to suck? What's the bare minimum you got to do to have a... company culture. And then the middle is, how do you be great? And that gives you a breakdown of those seven pillars.
And I've got case studies with NASA, Neiman Marcus, Gary Vaynerchuk's company, lots of different organizations in there to be able to help give good examples. Not just my companies, not just my experiences, but what are they doing with those particular pillars? It's really interesting. And then the third part is, and this is, I think, really interesting for anybody on any topic, culture aside.
Third part is like, how do you actually do change? So it's my little mini guidebook of, you know, change management. So if you have a big change management issue and right now your culture is fine, you could literally buy the book and just open up the last third. And that's going to give you the framework on how to get people to change change.
and not drag their feet and make it harder on you to really create that momentum you need to create.
I was going to do a case study on Uber because they really screwed up diversity.
They had a lot of problems for a while. Now, they ended up riding that ship, and they brought in some really key people to help them deal with this. But, I mean, they had a young boys club, essentially, right? They had sort of this tech bro thing going on for a period of time, and they had some real problems, and they had some lawsuits, and they had some real...
legitimate concerns for people that didn't fit that. This was years ago. And I remember people wouldn't drive with Uber. They would only drive with Lyft because they had heard about some of these real problems. I had kind of wanted to do a case study on them on what was going on with that. Shockingly, I couldn't get them to want to really talk about it.
I wanted to kind of show what their growth had been and show what they had done to try to right that ship. Um, they weren't interested in, um, I guess, bring some of that because they had kind of gotten over that PR hump, I think. So I think that would have been really, really interesting to have learned and see what they learned and what they had actually ended up doing.
Showing 61–80 of 104 · page 4 of 6
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