Hi, everyone. Kumar Dattatreyan here with Agile Meridian and the Meridian Point. And today we're joined by Chris Dyer, a recognized expert in company culture and leadership, who's been ranked number one, the number one leadership speaker on culture by Inc. Magazine. As a former CEO managing thousands of people, Chris's companies were consistently named best places to work and made Inc. Magazine's fastest growing companies five times. He's the author of three bestselling books, including The Power of Company Culture and Remote Work, and has developed a renowned seven pillar strategy that has helped countless organizations unlock productivity, performance, and profits. He brings unique insights into how meeting culture shapes organizational success and how companies can create environments that foster innovation while maintaining strategic focus. So without further ado, let me bring Chris to the stage. And actually, this is our second go around. Our first attempt at recording this kind of ended with a snafu on my part. So let's start over.
Fantastic. Yeah. So tell me, what is meeting culture? And what is your definition of that?
Yeah. So culture is essentially how we get things done. It's the norms. It's the things that are allowed or not allowed inside of a meeting. So, you know, I'm sure you've been in a meeting where no one talks and just the boss talks and they all leave and other ones where there's total chaos and everyone's talking over each other or something in between. And so that's really what that meeting culture is, is what are the norms, what's allowed in there?
Yeah, I like that definition. And certainly I have been in lots of meetings that are just utterly dysfunctional, where there's a very low level of engagement by the people in it. In a conversation we had before, you mentioned that you can tell a lot about a company's culture just by sitting in on a meeting for thirty minutes. Can you sort of recall that conversation, share with our audience here?
Sure. I mean, we can definitely look at whether or not employees are generally happy by what's happening in meetings. If you're starting late, if they're running the meeting over the time you allotted, if you have no agenda, if you've added five things to the agenda mid-meeting, that's generally going to rub your employees the wrong way because they can't be effective. They can't do their best. If we're essentially saying your time doesn't matter, we're just going to use up what we have you in front of us right now, and we're just going to use you in any way we want. That's certainly one area.
We also will notice if good managers aren't being good caretakers of the meeting's participants, right? For allowing the extroverts to do all the talking, we never hear from the introverts, right? Interrupting each other, we're not doing some level of making sure people are being heard that we're bringing all voices up to the surface. Again, we would expect there to be pretty low engagement, pretty low innovation.
And then probably the last thing is, if decisions can only be made in these very routine meetings, like only once a week or once a month as my team get together, that's the only time we can make decisions. That's a pretty ineffective way to run your business.
Sure. Right. And I've seen that where there's sort of this rigidity, rigidity into when do we make decisions and somebody's like literally waiting. I mean, I would go and talk to the employee later and I'm like, so how long have you had this problem? Like I've had this problem for three weeks. I've not been able to get in front of my boss to get a decision. So you've literally been stuck. You can't do what you need to do. You're frustrated. The customer is frustrated. Everyone's frustrated because you just needed five seconds with your boss to make a decision.
Right. So meetings can perpetuate some of those big problems.
Yeah. Well, that brings up another issue, isn't it? Like the whole decision making protocol, like why does everything have to be decided in a meeting? And I'm sure you can uncover that as you sort of dig into the meeting culture and meeting norms and things like that, where decisions, I mean, there's certainly, there are some meetings where decisions need to be made, but not every meeting requires a decision. Wouldn't you agree?
That's right. That's right. And we can make decisions on Slack and on email and, you know, and maybe we can also, the deeper part of this is that we notice that if that's the culture of having to make decisions that way, how do we become more transparent? How do we help teach our people to make more decisions correctly on their own? That we don't need so many heads sitting in front of a screen or in a room to make a decision that we probably could have guessed what was going to be the decision. And I think there's a difference between keeping everyone informed and trying to get consensus all the time.
Yeah, so in your work right, I mean I'm sure you work with a lot of companies, different types of companies. You ran companies, right? So meeting cultures vary with, you know, I'm sure from what you described where it could be dysfunctional; there's lots of people talking over each other or it's very hierarchical where one person talks and so on and so forth. What are some things that you do to help them see that? And how long does it sort of take to adopt a new meeting culture, if you will?
Well, I generally try to challenge them to do a few things. And, you know, it's always based on how much the leadership really buys in. Because they're ultimately going to be in charge of a lot of this. They're going to be swinging that sword to make some of this change happen. Because I notice the employees are jumping at it. They'll make the change. They'll do it. But they need the leaders to really be a part of that reinforcement.
So one is to really talk about, in our company, what does a good meeting look like? Mm-hmm. And then we get agreement, whether that's at a company level or a department level or a team level. For us, what is a good meeting? And I remember working with a pretty big golf company years ago. And we came up with like the eighteen holes of great meetings. It was like the great team, you know, eighteen rules of a great meeting. And they kind of use this golf theme. Right. And so and they had these rules and they were rules you would think about. But it was really easy for people to be like, hey. One of our rules was this, and we're not doing that right now. And it gave people permission to help understand what are the rules and what are we going to do.
Secondly, we have to have many different types of meetings that are different lengths, different focuses, have different rules and permissions around them so people can navigate meetings differently. If you're having the same meeting, every meeting is structured the same way, you're going to have the same meeting all the time. And we don't want the same meeting all the time.
That's right. Sometimes I just need to get on the phone with you for seven minutes so we can get something figured out and I can get freed from this problem and move on. And sometimes we need to get together for a half day and like strategy. I mean, those are very different things.
So what I did, what worked in my company and has worked really, really well in a lot of companies that I have consulted with and worked with is we come up with names. We name the meetings something clever and funny that people will remember. Yeah, and my most famous one is the cockroach meeting. So imagine there's a cockroach in your bathroom. It's a small problem. You may not want to be the one to clean it up, but it's a small thing. And so cockroach meetings were fifteen minutes or less, always start on time, never go over fifteen minutes, try to end early. Anybody can call the meeting. So, and you can invite anybody you want. Even if I'm day two brand new to the company and I want to invite the CEO, I can. Now anybody who gets invited, it's optional for them to attend. So you get invited to a cockroach meeting. You're the full authority, no matter who called it, to say no, because we're just asking for a quick favor. Yeah. Right. One problem, one issue.
And what I found is that meeting just by itself, radically freed up people because they were constantly spending hours looking for solutions online, spending hours bugging their teammates one at a time, bouncing around the organization, or getting stuck and having to wait until they actually could get the right person on the phone.
Yeah, yeah. That's a really radical idea. I just wonder how effective it would be in, you know, different types of organizations. Like the one client I'm thinking about right now that I'm working on, that I'm supporting right now, the culture, I wouldn't allow for that, right? For anybody to call a fifteen minute meeting and invite whoever they want and get a resolution to a problem. Because they're very, it's sort of a very traditional hierarchical structure and I wouldn't allow, I mean, people would be like, no way would I do that. I'm just a peon. I'm not gonna invite the CEO. People would laugh me out the door in the environment that we're in. Right.
I mean, and so the rules are you can. Now, whether or not you should, you need to figure that out based on the norms of the company. But, you know, if you've been trying for three days to get this thing fixed on your computer and IT hasn't fixed the problem and you're like, I'm stuck. I'm going to invite you. I'm going to invite this person, that person. Maybe I want to invite the head of IT, but I have this big permissions problem and I need help. We give them that freedom to do that.
But again, the caveat is that you are totally not obligated to attend a cockroach meeting. It is optional for you to show up. So just because we allow anybody to call it, we also allow everybody to say no if it's not the right meeting for them, if it's not the right time, they're busy, whatever. But we're bringing in visibility into the company that someone's having an issue.
Now, I've never seen people just start calling crazy meetings and inviting the CEO, you know, just never. But what I have seen is that people, you know, we suddenly realize that there are a lot of challenges going on that certain managers and people didn't know that they were having all these challenges and problems. Right. And we see massive shifts in productivity and performance when we allow people the authority, autonomy and democratization of being able to get their problems solved.
Yeah, no, I totally agree with you. And I think that there are certain foundational aspects that need to be in place for a culture that allows for that, right? Not only for the person to initiate a cockroach meeting, but then wherever they are in the organization, but also for people that are invited to it to feel empowered to say, no, I don't need to attend that because I don't have the information to really share.
So I think those foundational elements, if they exist, it's a wonderful place to be where meetings are actually productive and you can get things done in fifteen minutes or less. That would be something.
I've also seen some companies in that same structure, like you mentioned, where maybe we don't invite them on a calendar invite, but maybe what we do is create the meeting and you go into Slack, into the general room and you say, I have this problem. I need help at two o'clock. I've created this meeting. Anyone who can help me, I would appreciate you coming to this meeting to help me.
Yes. So we're not sending out calendar invites, but we are making the company at large aware I have this problem here, who can help me. And then anybody can choose if they want to show up. And we've seen big success with that, too, because not only do people show up to help, but people show up because they're curious about the answer.
Right. Yeah, I'm totally with you. Since the pandemic, of course, company culture has moved towards remote work quite a bit, right? I mean, even though you see in the headlines today that people are calling employees back into the office and hybrid work schedules and so on. And for me, I do remember back in the day before the pandemic where we had to go into an office all the time. In fact, I didn't think I could do my job unless I was face-to-face with people as a coach, as a transformation coach, actually seeing them and being there and all the things that happen in the hallways and the break rooms and the water cooler, the water fountain conversations that happen that are sort of spontaneous that are gone because now, well maybe not fully gone, but certainly for companies that are fully remote they don't exist. And so I know you've done a lot of work and you've written a book about remote work, right? So what are some things that you advise companies to adopt when remote or hybrid that would recreate some of those opportunities for collaboration?
Sure. You know, when we try to take exactly what we were doing in person and then try to like make it work in remote and hybrid, we are going to fail. I mean, there's an example before, but when the car was invented, we didn't take a saddle off the horse and put it in there as your seat. We came up with a new way to see. We came up with a new way to travel. We had to come up with new ways to now that we had a car, it was a better way.
And I think that remote and hybrid is the faster, better way. Whether you agree with me or not, that's fine. But if you're going to have that role, one of the big things you have to do is figure out how do we extract the information about that person, about how they're doing, about what is their mood, what is their sort of I don't know, blueprint in the world right now based on what's happening in their life holistically as that whole human being.
Because if you and I were only working in an office together and I see you every day walk in and all of a sudden this week, you've been late every single day. And I noticed that you keep leaving to go take a phone call out in the hall. And I noticed that you look upset. And every time I ask you a question, you're short with me. Like, I'm going to pick up on like, hey man, you want to have lunch? Like, so what's going on? You know, like I'm going to pick up on something.
But if all I do is show up on a Zoom screen or a Teams screen with you, and you put on your brave face and you do your thing, and then the moment you go off, you're back to whatever's going on in your life, as your teammate or your manager or whatever, I have no idea that you might really be struggling. But I am getting the negative feedback from you because you're not a very happy person right now. And I'm thinking it's got something to do with me. Or I'm thinking you're just disgruntled or I'm thinking that you're just a jerk or like whatever I want to fill in my head.
So what I have been training companies to do for years is this exercise called bonding. And so I highly suggest that if you can do it once a day with your team, awesome. If you can only get it in three times a week, that's good enough. But like ideally no more than once a day. And you only do this with your team, with the people you work with all the time. You would never do this with Bob in accounting who you only see at the holiday party. Like you wouldn't, you know, any people we have high psychological safety with.
And what we do is you go around the room when you first show up in that meeting and you say, How are you showing up? And you go around the room and everyone answers the question. How are you showing up? And if you're the leader, you shut up and you don't talk. You let them go first. Super important. Don't say, hey, I heard this guy, Chris, on a podcast. Let's do this thing. I'll go first. Because if you show up as the boss and say, I'm doing amazing. All these great things are happening. And then Sally on your team is really struggling. She's not going to tell you. Right. So you got to shut up. You let them talk and it's going to take time. It's going to take practice. This is not all going to magically happen the first time you do it or the second time, but you're eventually going to start getting things like, you know, I'm exhausted. I just got a new puppy. I've been trying to crate train and this dog will not shut up. I have not slept well on three nights. Like I'm struggling.
And then everyone on the team is like, Oh, okay. That's why you've been a little grumpy. That's why you've been a little, ah, Okay. So what can we do to help you? Like, you know, I'll jump in and help you with this account. I'll jump in and help you with this report. Like go take a nap or like, you know, go get caught up. Like I, as your teammate can help you or at least just empathize with you.
Sure. Right. You might also get, and I literally had this happen on a meeting. Well, I just found out my mom died and you're like, why are you here? Please go take the day off. Like, what you do not need to be at work. Like, let's figure out what you need to handle for you as a team. Like, please go be with your family. And like, they would say like, I just didn't know what to do. Like, I just kept working, you know, and you know, some other people handle grief differently, but like some people were like, I'm going to keep working. Like, I didn't know what to do. And we were like, no, you know? And so now we're jumping in and helping that person in a time of need.
And every, and so, employees remember that. Employees see that how you act as the leader and how you show up for them when I tell them you need to go home, you need to be with your family. Please go take the rest of the week off, we will not count it as PTO. Like go and don't... We will handle everything and there's an absolute emergency we'll let you know, but like do not work. Yeah, right. That has so much more stickiness to keeping an employer going up for them.
Right. Yeah, totally. Now you do this exercise and if they all are okay and they're all doing well, now you as the leader can actually... This is where I say it's okay to be vulnerable at this point. If your team is doing good and they're all told you they're good and you're not good as a leader, then I think it's a good time to share what's going on with you. But if they're not good, then you gotta shut up and you don't get to talk and you gotta take your thing uphill if you have a problem.
At the end of the meeting, we then ask, how are you leaving the meeting? The last part, same rules, they go first. And this tends to be more about the meeting and them as the employee. And I swear this happened all the time. I would be like, we solved the problem. I'm the best CEO ever. We did it. Okay, I know you're all going to tell me this was the best meeting ever, but how are you all leaving? And I got, I don't know if this is going to work, Chris. I don't know if the client's going to like this. I'm a little nervous to go tell IT that's the decision we made. And I'm like, oh. Okay.
And what I'm eliminating is that disappointment in two days when I'm like, how come no one's implemented? How come we haven't done the thing? Are you guys passive aggressive? Like, what's the problem? And no one's telling me that they just didn't really like the idea and they were too afraid to tell me. But when I give them that permission about how are they leaving, suddenly you've got all this information back. You as a leader and you can go, ah, okay, let's have another meeting tomorrow. Clearly we need to go a little deeper.
Yeah. I love it. The two things that are coming up for me from this conversation. One is how it reminds me of the core protocols. I don't know if you're familiar with those. No. For teams. Core protocols are a set of protocols that teams can use adopt. And there's several of them. It's sort of these behaviors, these patterns. And one of them is the check in, the check in protocol. And there's a specific phrase that you would use kind of like what you do, like, how are you showing up? Or how are you leaving? Right? So that's a specific phrase you're using in the team setting that the team understands what that means. And, and so the core protocols are set of these that provide a framework for how the team can bond and deal with conflict and deal with different ways to collaborate with each other, ways to ask for help if they need help without feeling that, oh, my God, is there something wrong with me that I'm asking for help from my teammate? You know, stuff like that. It sounds like that's what comes up for me.
The other thing that you mentioned was dealing with grief in the workplace. And I don't think many companies do that all that well. And one of the things that came up for me was when I lost my father many, many years ago, the company I worked for at the time, they were kind of like what you did, what they did with me, what you did with your employees. They said, Kumar, just take off, go deal with this. We've got you, we've got your back, right? And I mean this is almost twenty years ago, I still remember that. I remember the people, I remember that experience, and it goes such a long way because I still remember it. I remember those people fondly and that experience fondly. And I think I don't think all companies do that all that well. And I think this has nothing, maybe it has something to do with company culture and certainly meeting culture, but more to do with how companies treat their employees and how engaged employees feel in the work that they do and engaged they are with the people they work with. So that's the two things coming up for me from that conversation.
Yeah, and if people are listening to this and they're saying, well, I don't really know like what I'm supposed to do when, it's, I'll tell you, when it's the little things be flexible. And when it's the big things be rigid and you need to show up for the big things. Somebody has a big thing happen in their life. Show up big as their leader, show up big as their teammate, show up big as their friend. And if it's a small thing, then it's a small thing and be flexible and like, whatever. I mean, you know, you got to leave early to go pick up your kid, cool, whatever. I don't care. You know, like have fun by, you know, but you have a funeral and you need to go travel to different country and your family's in mourning, okay, well let's... How do we show up big for you? And that means a million times more than here's another dollar per hour or fifty cents an hour for your salary or you know, this gift card because you did a good job this month. I mean, that's just, you know.
Yeah. I totally agree. The other thing actually was three things that showed up for me or came up for me was the comment you made about the leader as you're going around the room and saying what's showing up for you and if it is negative and if it is heavy, then the leader takes a pause and doesn't necessarily share with that group because they're there to support them, to nurture them to a certain extent, and they may withhold whatever it is that is showing up for them as a leader at that point. And a really important point you call that. I appreciate that.
All right. Tell me about the seven pillar framework. And this is something that came up in our prior conversation, right? So this framework addresses both the basics of not sucking at culture. This is quoted, right? And the ability for companies to achieve greatness. I'd love to hear more about that.
So if you want to be good at culture, you got to have, you know, like vision statements and, you know, your values on the wall somewhere. And like, you know, you got to have thought about it for ten minutes and have some direction of where you're going. That's probably going to help you be good. And you might screw it up, but like that you're on the right track.
If you want to be great. The greatest cultures, the companies that consistently have great cultures, that do amazing things, that we look at it, we dreamed want to be one day. What's amazing is in all my research and all my work and all the podcasts, I did a podcast myself for ten years and all my research and writing books and working with clients over and over and over again, one hundred percent of the time, they were really good at these seven things. Never an example where like, you know, they were the top of the world and they were the best culture, but like, you know, they only had six out of seven, never. It was always these seven things they did really, really well.
And I've also, you know, in continuing to do this research have never discovered an eighth, you know, never like another thing that popped in later on. It's always in these, these buckets. And so these buckets are transparency, positive leadership or positivity, measurement, uniqueness, recognition, listening, and how they deal with mistakes. So those are the seven things you have to be really, really good at if and if you are your culture will significantly upgrade and you will be at your maximum capacity for high performance, high productivity and high profits.
All right. I love it. I'm just curious about the uniqueness part. Everything else I get, I mean, I'm sure there's nuances to it and you can... We could probably have a podcast on each one, right? But we'll start with the uniqueness part. Can you go into that a little bit?
Sure. So uniqueness covers a whole gamut of things. Let's start on the very hard business side, which is you had better be able to describe what you do and what the unique parts of your business are from a marketing perspective. What makes me unique? I use this silly example in my book. If I was selling those yellow number two pencils that you used in school, how would I be unique? I have a yellow pencil. It's the same length. I have the same eraser. How is what I'm selling unique? How could I even begin to talk about that?
Maybe I use recycled products. Maybe I make it in a particular city or town. Maybe, you know, we donate to charity every time you buy a pencil. We're giving some to like, you know, it could be something you do to stand out in the marketplace. You have to be thinking about that to be a business.
But then that begins to transfer into you need to start thinking about your employees, about what makes them unique, celebrating what makes them special, what are their strengths, thinking about that. And what I find a lot of businesses do is they want to find people who are just like all the other people in their company. And what they celebrate is what makes them all the same and what connects them. And so like, oh, we're all Dodgers fans, right? We all live in LA and I hire people. We're all Dodgers fans. That's not a great reason to hire someone because they're a Dodgers fan. Right.
We want to find people. We understand what makes them tick, what makes them unique, what makes them special so we can leverage their talents in a really great way. And I would spend a lot of time really trying to understand what each of my people, what their strengths were, what their talents were, because we would realize they were doing a great job in one place and suddenly we had a big need somewhere else. And it was way better for me to shift that person who really understood the business into that new brand new need. And then maybe up-level somebody or hire from outside into that other position than it was to try to go find someone brand new and hope they had those skills. Now, I already know who has those skills in the company.
This is also, and certainly in today's climate, maybe not as a popular topic, but this is also where we talk about diversity, equity, and inclusion.
It's just going to go there. Yeah. This is that point. And so I make a big point, actually. I think this works very... Despite me using the word diversity, I think this approach works extremely well, even in today's potentially different marketplace. I'm asking people to find diversity of thought. Mm-hmm. And we did a lot of work to really make sure that we were focusing on what made people unique, what their strengths were, and how do we find people who think differently. And when we did that, and I can give you examples of how we did that, but when we did that, who started showing up to final interviews with me was remarkably different. Remarkably different.
Yeah, I imagine that would be true, right? Because you're really looking for people that bring a different perspective. And so that's only going to improve how you show up for work and how you work with your colleagues and how transparent you are about the work that you do and the ideas that people bring that come from different, that have different experiences, bring different perspectives are gonna only improve your product or services that you provide. So yeah, that struck me as interesting just because I was wondering if that's what it was. And it certainly proved it proved to be what I was thinking, which I call it a market dominating position for a company. Like, what is it that makes them different, even though they may sell the same widgets as five other companies? What is it about that company that makes them unique in the way they market it, the way they make it, the way they sell it, and certainly the employees that work there that represent the company, how well do they understand it and all of that stuff. So that's really interesting.
Is there another one of the pillars that you'd like to mention? I think they're all probably equally important. Maybe just one more that you'd like to talk about.
You know, I probably haven't talked about this one in a while on a podcast, so maybe I'll just go with one that doesn't always get as much attention. I think the listening pillar is really, really important. And great companies have mechanisms and processes in place to ensure that they are listening to their customers, to their vendors, to their employees, right. To their managers. They have these different levers and mechanisms and they are not only listening, but they're ensuring that the other party feels heard. Yeah.
And it was one thing to give your employees a survey. It's another thing to actually do something with that information to actually demonstrate that you understood what they asked for, that you, here are the things that we did to make changes. This is how we addressed your concerns. Um, you know, and if we did that with employees, like we do with clients, well, it would be a lot better place. I mean, clients come with complaints and we're like jumping up and down, trying to figure out how we can make things better. With employees, we're like, yeah, get back in the line. We go complain later. But we need to figure out how to do that.
I think the listening pillar has never been more important because we have so many distractions. I mean, how many times you've been in a meeting with someone, let's just say in person, and they're looking at their phone all the time, they're looking at their watch, right? And you know that their attention is being constantly pulled. And yet some of our best friends, our best mentors, our best clients, our best vendors are people who put their phone away, put their laptop away, and they are completely having an in-depth conversation with you. And that's a skill. That's the listening skill. And we need our people to understand that because they can transfer that into those calls with everyone inside that ecosystem of the company.
Totally agree with that. You know, it's interesting, because the workshop I was running right before this was helping a team go through the yearly employee survey, right, and pull some meaning out of it. And, of course, with the leaders, and so on, and come up with some ways that the team as a whole, but certainly the leaders, what would they do differently to change the outcome of that survey? So it was an interesting choice that you made to bring that up.
And I guess my question is, what is an example of what companies should do in terms of listening to their employees? Say it's a survey or whatever it might be, because you're right. A lot of companies spend a lot of time listening to their customers as they should. Right. But maybe not enough time listening to the employees.
I think that companies should get rid of the annual survey. They should dump it right now, put it in the fire and just let it go. I replaced it in my companies and a lot of the ones that I worked with. And we've changed it to a one question survey.
Now, depends on the size of your company. If you're a huge giant company, thousands of employees, you might do this by department, by division, by something else smaller. If you've got less than five hundred people in your company, you might just do this yourself. That's fine. But what I did is every week I asked a question. So on Wednesday, I ask a question and I send it out and I tell you whether or not this is anonymous or whether or not I'm going to share these answers with everybody else. Those are my two choices. Either I'm the only person or that department manager or whatever will be the only person to see the answers. They might share the sentiment with other people, but they're never going to give certain answers to certain people. We're going to protect that, right? Or the opposite, which is whatever you answer, all hundred percent of the answers will be shared with everyone in the company.
We did that sometimes because it was important. If we asked a question like who in the company should we be recognizing that's not been getting the attention they deserve? Right. That's a pretty cool question to have to share with everybody the answers to.
Of course. Right. Right. And remove that possibility that the leader only showed certain answers or only wanted certain people to be highlighted because they liked them or whatever it is. But the key here is that I asked that question on Wednesday. I asked them to tell me by Friday. I had about a ninety five percent response rate. Because by Tuesday, I told them, this is what I heard, and this is what I'm going to do about it. So there was a follow-up. It was an immediate follow-up.
And then on the monthly company-wide call each department would say, this is the question we asked. This is what we heard. This is what, and they would bring up the four or five questions, whatever it was that we had done in that month and say, these were the questions we asked. This is what we have done about it. I mean, there may be more things we did about it. And, you know, this is basically giving an update and we're continuing to make those changes.
So employees felt like you asked me a question. You actually want the answer. You're actually going to do something about it. Now, sometimes the answer was, listen, I can't do anything about it. The law is very clear and it was a great education moment for the employees to understand why we don't do it that way. Um, you know, other times it was, Hey, I heard that customer service is drowning and you need people. Yeah. I'm hearing you. Our scores have dropped. We need resources. We need people. Here's our plan. Here's what we're doing. Here's how we're addressing it. Like sales might be saying, I'm losing clients because customer service is overwhelming. Hey, here's what we're going to do about.
Right. And, you know, there are more times we would tell them, like, listen, we do not have the money or the budget to go hire three more people. But we have decided that every leader in the company is going to do an hour of customer service calls until we can get there. We're going to jump in. We're all going to help a little bit until we can get the people in there. Right. We're going to address the problem. Right. So that is a much better way than asking them fifty questions in January.
Yeah. And reviewing in October, whenever it was.
Yeah, exactly. Right. No, I love that because there's sort of this feedback loop. You're asking these very purposeful, intentional questions, getting feedback, and the employees, they are seeing the results of them because you're taking action as a leadership team. You're taking action and you're rolling up your sleeves if you have to and working the service call, the customer service phones to help out because there's a need there, whatever it might be. So I can see where that would be a very virtuous cycle of improvement and engagement and so on. So I love that. Thank you. Thank you for sharing that.
All right. We're getting a little long here. So I want to end with, well, first, is there anything that I didn't ask you that you'd like to share before I go to some fun questions?
I would just say if anyone is interested in getting like a starter pack of twenty five of those questions to ask if they want to try that out, I'm happy to send it to you. If you want to text three three seven seven seven and just put my name, Chris, is the message. I'll immediately send you back a PDF and you can get twenty five of those questions.
I'm going to do that right after this call. All right. That's awesome. OK. Three three seven seven seven. Chris. So remember that, get those questions. I love that. There's an app that I use for sort of these icebreaker questions. It's called, I forget what it's called, but I'll share that with you later. I'll put it in the show notes. And it's a randomized set of icebreaker questions for meetings. And it's great because you can sort of cycle through until you get a question you want or just randomly just put it up there at the beginning of the meeting. And I wouldn't use it for all meetings. To your point, you want to do it where there's some shared collective experience amongst the people in the meeting, right? So that it makes sense. You don't want to do it in a big meeting with a hundred people, obviously. What is your thought of those types of tools?
I mean, if it can help you do a better meeting, great. I do think that employees start to get a little bit tired of being constantly asked to share personal things and to be constantly vulnerable and sharing all this. Sometimes they just want to get their stuff done and they want help. I realized that my job as a CEO was really to get out my virtual machete every single day and find ways to cut crap, cut meetings, cut things that was wasting people's time, energy, and focus. And try to give them more time back every day to be able to actually do their job.
I'm with you. Right. And so sometimes I feel like these little things can be a distraction. Sometimes, you know, if you're a brand new leader, it's a new team. I mean, you've got to do and you need that help. Then great. But, you know, if I was doing that forever, we're on like year two of that. I'm going to strangle you.
Yeah. No, no, no. These are these are sort of like a once in a while thing is to break the monotony of the meetings. But but yeah, totally, totally with you. Want to sort of consolidate meetings and eliminate as much as possible and use other means to communicate.
All right, so for some fun questions. So when you're in a meeting, do you have your camera on or off?
Always on.
And how do you encourage that in the companies that you advise?
So what we always have done that's worked pretty well is told everyone, we need your cameras on if it's a thirty minute meeting or less. If it's a longer meeting, Totally cool if you want to turn it off during the middle of the meeting, like have it on for the first five, ten minutes. Once we get going and it's a larger discussion or maybe it's one of those like it's not really a meeting. It's me telling fifty people what's happening. I'm explaining a strategic thing like I'm cool. You wouldn't have your camera off. You don't need to be constantly. That's cool. And then camera back on at the end when we kind of do the wrap up and all of that. So we did that.
But the way that we were able to sort of dictate that we wanted their cameras on in those thirty minute meetings or less consistently was to also give them the opportunity to say no when they needed to. And so we created this little term called the I'm having a no mascara day now. This was originally invented by a woman in my company who said to me one day, she goes, I just cannot be on camera. I'm having an Omascara day. I can't do it. And I said, you know what? That is a brilliant term. We're using that from now on. Regardless if you're a woman or not, you used it for that. I love it.
You just don't feel good. You're sick. You didn't want to shave today. You have a sick kid sitting next to you. You're not in your normal space. Like you're just having a bad day and you just cannot be on camera today. Cool. You just let everybody know today I'm having, as long as you're not abusing it, as long as not all the time, then that's what, cause that's what people really want. It was like, sometimes I just don't want to be on camera. And if you tell me I always have to be on camera no matter what, then they don't like that. But if I'm giving them an out and every once in a while it's okay, then that's fine. Then I've never had anybody have a problem with it.
Yeah, that's great. That's really good advice. And I suppose that having cameras on or off and so on is also tied quite a bit with psychological safety, right? In the culture, if you will, of the organization, the more safe you feel, the more likely you are to turn your camera on when you speak or turn your camera on at all, right? And I think those are the things to work on.
Leaders need to remember that if people have their cameras on all day, if they're in meeting after meeting after meeting and they're on all day, that causes exhaustion. Because the part of our brain that would be scanning the forest, looking for a bear at night coming to get us is the same part of our brain that's scanning all of these different people on the screen. And we're constantly looking at ourselves to make sure that we look okay and that we're not doing something stupid. We don't have that when we're sitting in a conference room.
That's right. So if you are making people be on all day, all the time, they're going to be exhausted, which means they're going to give you less of their cognitive abilities for other things. Yeah. That's why we told them to shut it off for an hour meeting, you know, just be on the beginning at the end and then off was fine.
That's a really good point. All right, maybe one or two last questions. So best piece of leadership advice you've ever received?
What you focus on grows.
I like that. Yeah, without focus, it's going to wither and die, right? You focus on problems and you focus on what's not working and you focus on the employees you don't like and that kind of stuff. That's just going to get worse. You focus on what is working. You focus on the employees that are excelling. You focus on the department or the product that is doing really well and you put more time and energy there. Things get better.
Yeah. Interesting. Okay. So it's almost like a strengths-based approach to growing anything, right? So focus on the things that you do well and they're going to get better.
And if I put us in the context of meetings for what we were discussing today, if I spent time every time I was in the meeting and I said to two people, hey, thank you for making sure everyone got heard today. Thank you for ensuring that everybody got a chance to speak. And let's say you and Bob kept interrupting everybody and kept railroading everybody. You think you're going to get the message about what I as your boss actually appreciate? I didn't say to you, why are you interrupting everybody? Why are you doing this? You talking too much? I didn't spend any time on that. I spent time telling people who did the right thing. Thank you. And I appreciate you. And guess what? That's going to grow.
Yeah, I love it. That's a great share. All right, one last thing. If you could instantly change one aspect of a culture, you go into a company, what is one thing that is the easiest thing to change that has a big impact?
Transparency.
Ah, okay. I love that you came up with a really quick answer. And tell me more, tell me more about transparency.
It's ensuring that people have all the information that they can possibly have that's reasonable for them to have. There are sometimes things that people can't know or shouldn't know, but most information they should be able to get and they should be able to know and they should know what the company's financials are. And like, you know, how are we doing and why do we spend money the way we spend it? And how do we think about clients?
And, you know, we leave people in the dark. And then they make the wrong decision and we're mad at them. We leave people in the dark and they don't come up with these amazing ideas and we call them dumb and stupid and they're not great employees. But they don't know what you know. They can't possibly have come up with that new great idea if they don't know what we're trying to do and what we have in our – you know, in our brains or in our resources as a company.
So usually if leaders just spend five extra minutes explaining why we made a decision and how we made a decision and what the actual thought process was, you get happier people. You spend five extra minutes on a company wide call telling people how we spend the money and how we're doing and what our goals are and what are people start going, huh? I know how we can get more sales or I know how we can save money because they now they're in, they're invested because they have been given the information that they need to actually think about it.
Yeah. You're touching on a passion of mine, sort of the open book management style of running a company.
Yeah. I don't know if you've heard of that, the great game of business, open book management.
Of course. And yeah, the great game of business was Jack Stack, right? I mean, that's where a lot of this idea of giving those financials and stuff came from. That was my first introduction to it was that book. And when I did that within a year, we were thirty three percent more profitable. And I did not once tell my employees, go, go save money, go find ways to cut costs, go. I had nothing. I just said, I'm going to start sharing this with everybody because I think it's a good idea. And they just started on their own going, why do we have two vendors for this? Why are we spending this much money on health care? Why are we? And they had ideas and they went and found better solutions and we save a ton of money.
Yeah. It's amazing what you can do when you provide that transparency to people, right? What potential you unlock in people because they now understand where the company is and where it potentially could be, right? So it can really unlock creativity to an extent that really not much else can. You can sort of talk about strategy all day long, but it doesn't matter if they don't have full transparency as to where the company is.
Yeah. Well, Chris, it's been a real pleasure having you on the show. I'm not at all worried about the fact that we're in our fiftieth minute here. I'm sure people will stick around and watch the whole thing right up to up till the end of this show, because it's for me anyway. It's been it's been a real pleasure and a learning experience, and I'm sure it will be for our listeners. So thank you so much for being here and sharing your wisdom, your experience and your insights. And maybe if you're open to it, we'll have you back on maybe talk about some of the other pillars.
Sounds great to me.
All right. Thank you so much. And thanks for watching everyone. Until next time. See you later.
