The Truth About Company Culture, Trust & AI at Work

There's a real chance that none of us are going to trust emails, phone calls, video, anything that an AI could make or do for us. Because I mean, just think about this podcast. You want to know if I really understand what we were going to talk about, what I'm going to be there. Can imagine if I had an AI answering all that stuff, and I didn't ever really read it. I didn't really know. And then I show up and I'm like, oh, I didn't, I read a summary of what the AI told me, but I didn't really get it. We have a bad interaction. And so it could push us the completely opposite way of where we've been going, which is like, I don't trust anything unless I'm sitting in front of you. I'm looking for diversity of thought. I want different people who think differently. I'm not necessarily looking for like, I need more of this person or that person or this color or this gender. Like I'm, I'm interested in, we've got our people. Who are we missing in the conversation to help us be better? Drunker said, culture each strategy for breakfast. We're with the man on strategy, Chris Dyer. And that was when I kind of had this realization that what I am focusing on, what I allow to happen will continue to happen. What I focus on grows. We have to kind of lean back into what makes us human. Seven pillars of building an amazing culture and the radical transparency. Here's Chris Dyer. All right, Chris, how, how do you define success? You know, that's a kind of a tough question to answer. I guess it's, you know, every person has their own individual answer. So I look at it from the, are you doing the things that you want to do? Are you reaching your goals? You know, are you ultimately, because we could say success is you need to have X amount of dollars in the bank, or you need to do this or do that. That's not necessarily true for everybody. So are you intentional about what you want? And then are you doing those things to make it happen? And I think that's right. Ultimately. Now, did, did your definition of success change over your life? Do you think, or did you always see it the same way? Or how's that been for you? For sure. I mean, it's easy as you're growing up to look at certain people and be like, well, I want to be like them and I want to have that car or have that money and think that that's success. When you start having kids, you look at other families than the people who've raised kids and you go, well, you want your kids to turn out well. So is that success? Yeah. So for sure, some of that has definitely changed. But you know, that definition is still the same. Yeah. And when you go into business for yourself, it's obviously, you know, then you look at how does business, how do I want to define success in business? I mean, and when you start off, it's like, can I afford that can of tuna next week? I mean, that's Yeah. Yeah. So obviously a part of your definition of success in business was being a great place for people to work. Tell me more about how that became your thing and how you sort of focused in on that. Well, it became a thing because I was completely screwing it up. So we were growing, we were doing well. I had thousands of employees. I had Fortune 1000 clients and I'm miserable and my employees are miserable and, you know, and I'm mad at them. They're probably mad at me. And then, you know, one day I'm walking down the hall and I look at the mirror thinking I'm going to give myself a pep talk and the light bulb went on. And it was like, oh, wait a minute, you're the problem, Chris. Like you have created this culture, you've created this place to work. It's functioning the way in which you allowed it to be, to be created. And that was when I kind of had this realization that what I am focusing on or what I allow to happen, right, will continue to happen. What I focus on grows. And so these different kind of realizations that came in or what I'm allowing to continue is going to continue to happen. You know what I mean? So you have these different realizations as a leader that I'm allowing this, right? I've let this stuff go on. I'm allowing. It's my fault. It's not anybody else's. And so that was the moment that I got really curious about, okay, I'm going to fix it. You know, I mean, we want to take it to like sports. I mean, like pick a sport. You're doing the thing. You're swinging the bat. You're kicking the ball. You're running on the field, whatever. And you're like, how come I'm not as good as everybody else? Okay, what am I supposed to do? What's the technique? What's the thing? How do I go do it? And that's what I got really interested in. And as I started to discover these things, we started implementing them. I got happier. My people got happier. I stopped firefighting and the companies exploded in sales. We started keeping our people. And you know, that was the metrics were all there. Like it was working. Yeah. Yeah. I think, you know, at some point, we have to realize that business is to serve us, not us serve the business type thing. And how did you start to define what you wanted to change? What was sort of the first three or four things that you said, I got to change this and this and this first? Yeah. For me, it was starting with transparency. I was essentially upset that people were not coming up with great ideas, that they were not being innovative, that they were leaving it to me, like they weren't doing these things, right? The problem is, I had not given them the information that they needed to ultimately be successful. I had not shared with them the things that I knew that were in my head, in order for them to be able to do those things. And so I had to change what we were doing. Because again, what you are not changing, you are choosing. And what I wasn't changing, I was choosing to happen. And so I wasn't changing anything there. So I changed, Hey, here's our P and L summary. Here's how we make decisions. Here's why we made the decision. Here's why we actually got rid of this person. Let's actually, let's not pretend that Joe never existed after we fired him. Like let's be open and honest in front of everyone and say Joe was not cutting and he wasn't meeting our values or he was being inappropriate with people or whatever it was. And that's not cool. And we're not going to accept that. And that's why that's first. We're being radically transparent about everything we could. Now, not every employee wanted to know everything. That's cool. That's fine. But we at least provided the opportunity and provided them the space to share everything that we could. And that began to change that sort of the friction in the company. Now, we had to do lots more things to make it run better. But that removed the friction when people understood, OK, this is how we make money. This is how we spend the money. This is why they made that decision. Even if I don't like it, it's I understand why so I can navigate things better. Got it. So ultimately, you found this idea that culture makes and breaks companies, you know, it just does. I mean, Drucker said it. Everyone's at some point said culture is the thing. What are the fundamentals in your mind to creating great cultures and performance cultures and cultures where people enjoy working and can succeed? So what's cool is I have got these seven pillars and it doesn't really matter if you want to be a high performing culture or a family culture or you want to be a kumbaya or you want to whatever. We know there's lots of different ways. I mean, so one size fits one. I'm not asking you to go be Amazon. I'm not asking you to go be Google. I'm not asking you to go be General Motors, like whatever. They all have their own way of doing it. But what we found is that they're really good at these seven things in their own way that makes sense for them. So transparency we talked about. That's number one. Positive positivity or positive leadership. So focusing on what's working first. Being able to say yes. Being able to look at what's working. Not walking around the office, focusing on problems all the time. Measurement. Being really good at measuring what matters so we actually can figure out how to get better. Uniqueness. What makes us unique? And that's marketing. That's sales. That's our people. How do we get diversity of thought in the room? So really being interested and curious about uniqueness. Not about sameness. I don't want to be just like my competitors. I want to be different. Those kind of things. Listening. How do we listen to everyone in that ecosystem? Our clients, our customers, our employees, our vendors, everyone. Then we have recognition. So the best companies have a great recognition program. And I think I'm on the last one. Mistakes. So all those other ones are like positive things. And the mistakes one is kind of like how do you deal with mistakes? The best organizations leverage mistakes. They build on the mistakes. They celebrate mistakes. And terrible organizations punish, fire, yell and scream. You know, you can't ever do anything wrong or you're out of here. And that's that's when you're never going to have a better company. If that's how things exist. Yeah. I love your definition of transparency. I want to hit on the positivity one just a little bit. If someone struggles with that, what's some of your hints to help them move in that direction faster, more, etc. to focus on what's good? Yeah. So I'll give kind of like two easy examples. The first one is if you just spent all day today saying yes to everything, go give it a try. Now, a couple helpers don't tell everybody you're going to say yes to everything, right? Don't put yourself in a bad position. And then you can say yes and and yes, but so you could ask me any question right now. And I could find a way to say yes to it. You know, you might say, Hey, Chris, let's go build a meth lab in our basement and let's start selling illegal drugs to children. And I could say yes, but you're going to have to get the law changed because like, I don't really want to break the law. So like, you know, sure, I'm interested in talking to you about your business venture here, Brad, but you know, go get the law changed. So I can say, even though that's ridiculous, it's an absolute extreme. I had to learn this, Chris, I really had to learn this with my kids, having five kids, the arguments is like, Dad, can I have ice cream? Yep, you can have ice cream tomorrow after dinner. Yep, you can have ice cream. Now, do you have the money? You got, you don't have any money? Okay, when you get money, you can have ice cream. It all just, all of those sorts of things. Okay, saying yes, good, yes, and yes, but yes, if yeah, so that's the way to like internalize it personally. But if you want to look at it from a larger scale, how do you get interested? So what I did is I realized I was a problem solver. I was walking around the office solving problems all the time. So all you saw was problems. But focusing on negatives, focusing on what wasn't working. And so what am I doing? I'm putting light and attention and I'm getting people, people are getting their attention from me by doing the wrong thing. The people doing the right thing or what they're getting ignored. And so what I did is I said, you know what, I, this time I had like 20 salespeople and two or three of them were killing it for us. And what do we do? We were like, leave them alone. Don't bother them. Like don't screw things up. Like they're doing great. And then there was like, you know, 10, 15 in the middle of doing okay. And then you had like, you know, four or five people, whatever the number is left, that just sucked. Like you were about ready to fire them. They weren't doing well or they just started. And so what most managers go and they put those lower people on a PIP, they're on every phone call, copy me on every email, I want to look at every one of your proposals. They're just like all over those people who aren't doing well. What should you do? You should go get really curious as to why those three people are doing so well and find out their secrets, get them to teach everybody else, not you as the boss go tell those people, well, Jane and Tom are doing great. And this is how they do it. You need to do it their way too. But getting them to share, this is what's working here. Here we're being transparent. We know this these got three people that probably do it at three different ways. But here's some ideas on what we know is working. And you can go change your behaviors and do better or you or not. And then we won't feel bad about letting you go if you can't do it there, right? And to the three people doing amazing, how can else can I help you? Can I get you an assistant? Can I clear away, you know, clerical stuff? If like, you get $5 million in deals a year and all you're doing is playing golf, how do I get you to play more golf? I don't need you in sales force more. I need you on the golf course more. So like, how do I figure that out? And so when we started getting curious about that, then our sales just went crazy because we were unkind of unshackling our people. But I was reinforcing, I like these behaviors and these behaviors over here that I don't like, I'm not giving you any time and attention, you're getting ignored. So change your behaviors or leave. And that happened very quickly. Now, I love the positivity our Monday meetings with my executive team. The first thing we do is what was the greatest thing that happened in your week last week? And the last thing we do is give a shout out to someone who did something amazing. So we start and finish feeling great. It's definitely, I know measurement and I love measurement, but I want to skip to uniqueness and focusing in on why that's massive in your mind. It's massive in my mind because it's, I think it's a more palatable way to deal with this idea of how do we have diversity? How do we have inclusion? How do we have this stuff? And, and there's been a lot of talk and politicization about this, especially in the United States recently. And, and it's because, you know, what we've been trying for a long time to do something that maybe hasn't, we haven't reached the goal or we haven't gotten where we wanted to go. And I think my approach is I'm looking for diversity of thought. I want different people who think differently. I'm not necessarily looking for like I need more of this person or that person or this color or this gender. Like I'm, I'm interested in we've got our people, who are we missing in the conversation to help us be better? And I can give you some like really practical ways we impact that, but it was really important for us to find that was really important for us to talk about what made us unique in meetings, not what made us the same was really easy to be like, Oh, well, you're a Dodgers fan. I'm a Dodgers fan. You're great. You're great. Oh, you don't like the Dodgers. Well, through you, like, you know, like you want to connect with people and you end up like excluding people by doing it that way. And then of course, you have to get really good at giving your unique value proposition out in the marketplace too. Right. This is not just about cultures also about marketing is also about sales. Like you have to be able to articulate that and Apple is like a really great example. We've saw about this for years, right? They could really articulate what made them different, even though still selling a computer, they're still selling, you know, like the early iPods sucked. Like the Microsoft of the zoom was way better. And yet we ended up with the iPod, right? Or then the iPod, because their marketing and their unique proposition was so much better. Yeah, I think that from a business standpoint, defining your uniqueness, how do you help people with that Chris, when they're so stuck on the inside, you know, looking out, they can't even see what's unique about their business. How do you help them find that? Yeah. So sometimes I start with a simple exercise of asking them, imagine that you are selling those yellow number two pencils we had in school that we used, you know, to fill out stuff. Your company, all they do is sell those yellow pencils. Okay. How do you stand out? How do you be unique? And so when you remove them from their world and they go into a different world, it's a little easier to like raise them and they will come up with, well, are our materials recyclable? You know, are they made in our country? Maybe they're made in a particular city or state. Maybe they have a different color eraser, like they start come asking questions and coming with different things and realizing there's ways, you know, they can market it. You know, maybe we don't, maybe it isn't going to be yellow. Maybe we're going to make those same pencils red or we make them green or we get, you know, whatever the thing is, but how is such a boring product, a basic pencil, how could you possibly stand out? And they come up with all these ideas and we come up with that. And then we take that back into their world and say, now think about it the same way. Are we, I mean, let's just say your company is based all based in one place. Is that a part of your messaging? Does that make you unique? Definitely. Definitely. Maybe it doesn't, but you have to figure that out. You touched on mistakes, but I'm a firm believer in fail, fast, fail, forward, make the mistakes. If we're growing and scaling, we're going to make mistakes and you got to support those risk takers. What are some of the keys to really giving that support to the risk takers that are making the change? So clear distinction here. There are errors and there are mistakes. And so we don't want errors. Errors need to go away and if people want to keep making errors, then they're not going to be around very much longer. And so let's define real quick what is an error? Errors, you haven't been trained properly, you don't care, you're apathetic, you went out and had five beers at lunch and you came back to work and you don't know how to properly run your forklift or whatever. Those are things that are not cool to do. You haven't slept in three days because you were playing video games all night and you can't work. Those are all like the error stuff. Mistakes are I was trying to do the right thing or based on all the information I had in that moment, I made that decision believing it was the right decision. Now it turns out it wasn't the right decision. And what we need to do is say, well, thank you for trying to make the decision and celebrating that person going out on the limb, trying to make the right decision. We can retrain, we can talk about how they could make, deal with that differently or what we need to teach them so they can make a better decision next time. That's a very different response than treating them the same way we would treat somebody who is apathetic, who doesn't care about that decision. And when we do that, if we treat them all the same, then people just sit there and they go, well, I don't want to make a decision. They just keep coming to you. Hey, boss, here's another decision to make all day long because they don't want to get in trouble or they want to screw it up. I literally went for an entire year and every time someone came my office and said, here's the deal. What do you think? I would say, you decide, let me know what you come up with. Let me know how it goes. Now I put a little guardrails on it. It was a few times they were like, going to do something illegal or do something I know is going to cost us way too much money. And I would have to stop it. But even though I knew they were going to go screw it up, if it didn't, it wasn't really going to hurt us, I let them go screw it up and come back to me and tell me what they learned and what they figured out so they could get better and better. And eventually, I didn't have anybody coming to my office unless it was something really, really bad. They knew how to make decisions, which means I could spend more time doing what I was really good at and help the business grow. So I got to ask, remote work, virtual work, hybrid, how has that impacted culture these last few years? Well, I mean, it's a really tough thing to answer because it's not like we just did remote or just did hybrid. We also had a pandemic in there and we also had temporary. We had some people do it permanently and some people say permanent and then went back. I mean, there's a bit there's a crazy thing. It's like an experiment. It's like we've done this massive social business experiment. And it's like, okay, what did we learn? Yeah, under duress, by the way, not like it. We didn't even choose it. Now, my company was fully remote. And so when this happened, we were already rocking and rolling and it was fine. The pendulum has swung and it swung back some. The good news is we have more people still today. You kind of take the pandemic out more total people who have remote work, who have hybrid work, have some workplace flexibility, which is awesome, because that allows more people to contribute and to be active in the workforce and actually contributes to more productivity for the company. Because if I don't have to take a whole day off because my kids sick or because I have a doctor's appointment and I can go and do that thing and come back and work, like that's huge. On the flip side, how do we do culture? How do we connect? And the problem that companies have really struggled with is that they are trying to do the same techniques and the same management style to a remote or hybrid team. It doesn't work. I can imagine when Henry Ford had the first couple cars roll off the line, if he would have said, well, we're going to take a saddle from a horse and put that in the seat, because that's just what you are used to. It doesn't make any sense. So we have to have new techniques and new things in place in order to deal with the new experience that our people have. And happy to give you one of my best suggestions for leaders if they want on how they can connect better with their people when they're not all in one place. For sure. Yeah. Yeah. So there's an exercise called bonding. And I love to do this with my team every single day. If you could get it in three times a week, you're doing great, so don't stress. But you only do this with the people you work with on a regular basis. We have high psychological trust. If you only see Bob into counting at the holiday party once a year, we're not doing it with him. And what we do is in a meeting that's at least 30 minutes long, we're going to show up and we're all going to go around and answer this question. How are you showing up? The words are extremely important. Do not change them. How are you showing up? Go around the room. I'm doing great. I'm okay. I'm a little tired. You know what? I have a new puppy and I've been trying to create training that little, you know what? And I'm exhausted. Like I haven't slept in three. Ah, that's a cue to everyone else in the group. Okay, well, Jason's a little, uh, little grumpy for a reason. It's not that he hates me. It's not that he doesn't. It's that he's has this puppy thing. Okay. Can we help him? Can we step in? Can we do something? Can we just, I don't know, whatever. But the group can better understand those dynamics. Okay. Now really key, if you're the leader, you got to go last. Do not show up and say, I heard Chris on this podcast. People are going to do this exercise. I'll go first because you are the leader. If you say you're doing terrible, you're doing great. Nobody's going to share honestly. So let them share. And if they are all doing okay, then that's a great moment for you as their leader to actually be vulnerable and tell them how you're showing them. If they're not doing well, shut up. Don't say anything about your stuff, good or bad. You can go talk to your boss about your problems and just be there for your people and support them. Okay. Now I'll give you examples. I've had people literally say, I just found out my mom passed away. And I'm like, what are you doing here? Why are you at work? And they're like, I just didn't know what to do. Like I'm kind of in shock. Like I didn't know. And we're like, okay, you need to go and we would immediately, the team would get in triage. How do we cover your work this week? You need to go be with your family. We'll cover this. I can't forward all your emails to this person. We would get them out of the meeting out to go be with their family. And that kind of empathy and that kind of action as a leader, right, really lands and creates this sort of like bubble around your people that makes them unpoachable from other companies. And you're actually showing up that way. Now at the end of the meeting, we asked them all, how are they leaving the meeting? A little different question, a little different answer. That tends to be more about the meeting we just had not so much like me as the human being. And I swear this happened to me all the time. I would be like, we had a great meeting. We just solved all these problems. They're all going to say they're leaving and they're happy. And they would be like, I'm a little nervous about this. I don't know, Chris, this, I think the client's gonna not like this solution me. And I'm like, where was that for the last 30 minutes? We just been talking, what do you mean? So this eliminates the passive aggressive, that friction between us and our people where we think we've made a decision and we think they agree and we think they're going to go do what we asked them to do. But then they drag their feet because they don't really like the decision, but they didn't want to tell us that. Right. And again, they got to go first. And if they're all good, then you can say how you're leaving as well. And if not, then you got to deal. I've had times I'm like, okay, let's put a pause. Clearly I didn't get this. We'll have another meeting in an hour or tomorrow. And let's go a little deeper to make sure we're all on the same page. Right. That extra little bit of delay actually would speed us up in the long run because I didn't have people dragging their feet all the time. Well, hey there and thanks for listening. I've noticed that 78% of you are brand new, which means you haven't hit the subscribe button yet. By subscribing, you help us bring on even better guests, better quality content, and serve you better with even more podcast. So please hit that subscribe button. It only takes a second. It makes a huge difference. If you support us, we're going to support your success and help you achieve big success together. Yeah, I feel like the ability for a leader to actually be, I guess, open or vulnerable enough or compassionate enough to actually ask that question is probably going to be scary in the beginning. It's a little scary in the beginning, but the good news is, is your people aren't going to really open up that much in the very beginning. It's going to take them a little bit of time to get comfortable and for other people to share and then to see that when somebody is struggling, you actually did something about it. And so this is a good place to talk about this stuff. You're not going to do it more than once a day. And so it will take time to build up, which is nice. It's not like you show up on day one and then your people go, oh, I'm so unhappy. You're the worst boss ever. And you're like, that's not going to happen. That's the way it is. So how is AI impacting all of this stuff now? I mean, it's obviously impacting the whole world, but culture, remote work, doing all this, keeping the team together. How's AI impacting that? Or what are you seeing? Well, in the short term, what we're seeing is it's just more stimulus. It's more stuff for people. Now, if you've been smart, people have been able to use tools to help them be more efficient, to get some other time back. But we're also in that experiment mode where chat GPT is great. So let me try Gemini. Let me try Claw. Let me try this. Let me try that. And so we still have this like, it's a little too much for people. Now, long term, if I were to make a prediction, I do have some concerns around how this is going to shape business, how it's going to change relationships. Because there's a real chance that none of us are going to trust emails, phone calls, video, anything that an AI could make or do for us. Because, I mean, just think about this podcast, you want to know if I really understand what we were going to talk about, what I'm going to be there, can imagine I've had an AI answering all that stuff, and I didn't ever really read it. I didn't really know. And then I show up and I'm like, oh, I didn't, I read a summary of what the AI told me, but I didn't really get it. We have a bad interaction. And so it could push us the completely opposite way of where we've been going, which is like, I don't trust anything unless I'm sitting in front of you. Yeah. Yeah, it's like, is Brad even actually on this podcast, or is this an AI version of Brad asking the questions type thing? Right. Right. Like, it could get that scary, that sophisticated. And so then it's like, well, do I have, you and I have to fly on an airplane, go sit in the studio in order to really do a podcast? Or do I have to go fly and see my customer? So we got this reprieve, Zoom gave us like, we don't have to necessarily go and sit in front of a person. We can do a Zoom that's more acceptable or teams or whatever. Is it going to flip back the other way? You know, because I can't trust that you are really reading my emails. It was a Columbia University came out with a study that showed that one hour of face-to-face time is worth five hours of Zoom or Teams time. And so I'm seeing it in sales now. I'm literally, in all of our companies, back on our salespeople, dude, go back to Tommy Hopkins. You got to get face-to-face, belly-to-belly with people. You got to go have lunch. You got to go do the things that, you know, just because you can do it on Zoom doesn't mean it's better. It doesn't mean it's actually going to get you the level of results. So yeah, that's going to be a real interesting one. The trust. I mean, I called something the other day and I know it was an AI version, but dang, it sounded like a real person. So, hmm. And what do you see then is going to be some of the antidotes to that? Is it getting face-to-face more? What should we be doing? Yeah, I mean, we have to kind of lean back into what makes us human. How do we connect with people? How do we make things make sense for our clients, for our employees? Like, how do we be declutterers of all of this stuff going on? Can we help them in that moment we're having a conversation with them? Be the sense maker. Right? Because it's going to be just more stimulus, more change happening. Yeah, look, when, I mean, the information age, it was all about getting the information. Now in the intelligence age, it's all about there's too much information. How do I get to the bottom of too much, not too little? So it's going to be a real interesting way forward. Chris, I always end up by asking people, you know, what was the best advice you ever got or even the best quote you ever read on the subject of success? Because I think it's important to just go back and see, where did someone help you on that journey or what pointed you on the journey? You know, it's something that I learned by asking a lot of really smart people, a lot of questions for years. And so no one said this to me directly. It was what I sort of figured out by having these conversations. And that for years, I would ask these really smart people, should I be worried about or should I focus on or should I try to get better at my weaknesses? And inevitably, every single time they would tell me yes. And my follow-up question to them was always, but do you do that? And this little light bulb would go out of their head and then would be like, oh, no, I don't. I have people for that. They suddenly would realize that they were giving me that what society's answer was to this question, that they were the highly successful people or high focusers, focusers on what they do really well. And they would find other people to do all the things that they don't do well, or they would just not do them. Right? It would just completely eliminate them from that. And so that kind of like learning that, that I need to be hyper focused at what I'm good at. And I need to delegate, eliminate, remove those things that I'm not good at as much as I can. That's been a really big help in my life. Now, if you're an entrepreneur wearing 18 hats, it's going to be hard to do that. But as soon as you can, as soon as you make enough money and you level your business up enough, take the hat off of you that is the thing you do the worst that causes you the most grief in your day and get that to somebody else. Because that you will notice will really change your, your outlook and your, your success. For me, it was accounting. Like I was doing the accounting because I didn't want to pay for a CFO and I ate accounting. Now, luckily I am an accountant, but I still hate accounting and I still have a CFO. Hey, thank Chris. Hey, Dan, you're on the Big Success Podcast. Chris Dyer hit the show notes, follow, learn, study, read, do all the things and we'll be back next week with more of your success. You've been listening to the Big Success Podcast with the number one business coach in the world, Brad Sugars. To learn more about how to achieve business and personal success, as well as how to level up or listen to past episodes, visit www.bradsugars.com.