7 Proven Ways to Build a Winning Culture with Chris Dyer

I'd like to ship you a free copy of my book, Habits of High Performers. If you come and join the 2026 goal setting workshop, I will ship you one of these today. The link is in the notes. Please come and join me to set up the very best 2026 you could imagine. If you've set up goals in the past or New Year's resolutions and they haven't substantiated, I'm here to help you across all the key pillars of your life, nail your goals. I'll see you there. Welcome to the Lead On Purpose podcast. I'm James Laughlin, former seven time world champion and now coach to entrepreneurs, CEOs, professional athletes all over the world. This show is for people who refuse to settle, people who are driven, people who want to grow, who know that there's so much more to learn and want to learn from the world's best. Each week I bring you insights from a special guest who's at the top of their game with whether they're in Formula one, whether they're a billionaire, whether they've started a company from scratch and take it to the top. I bring them to you so that you can rewire your mindset, take action and lead a life of purpose. Let's get started. Today's special guest is none other than Chris Dyer. People first Leadership is what he's all about. It's all about being rooted in meaning and values. I know you're going to enjoy today's episode. The Lead on Purpose podcast is sponsored by NZ Mortgages. Learn more at nzmortgages.co nz Chris, a huge welcome to the Lead On Purpose podcast.

Thanks for having me.

I'm so excited to talk about something that you and I clearly both geek out on. And I firmly believe that when we get this right as families, as teams, as organizations, then great things are possible. And that is culture. But before we look at what makes great culture, how can we screw it up? What's the best recipe for having a terrible culture?

Well, I mean, probably one of the best recipes is to have a really great product or service that sells really, really well and then people feel like that they can just do whatever they want to people, right? So this combination of like a toxic boss or like somebody who's, you know, knows how to, at a very high performing level to achieve something, but at this, at the same time, like their stuff sells pretty good. I mean, Steve Jobs actually wasn't very good at culture. There was a lot of people who were, he was kind of an a hole and, you know, he put that combination of, like, a highly driven person who's really smart, whose products and services do really, really well. Like, he wasn't that focused on culture. He was actually really focused on his leadership team and getting them right, which was probably the right decision. But if you would have, like, asked Steve Jobs to, like, go be in charge of culture, it would have been terrible, right? I mean, so it's sort of like the. At the high level, on the bottom level, it's like just not doing anything. Like, just assuming that everyone, well, I pay your paycheck and you have a job here, and you should be thankful and you should do what I say. And, like, there's this sort of, like, weird undertone of command and control, or, like, parent, kid relationship when we treat our employees where I gave you a job, and therefore you're going to do what I say and you're going to work hard all the time. And, like, that's just. It's silly and it doesn't work 100%.

And I love this concept that you have of WTF, where to focus. And it's looking at how do we focus on the really important components. So in terms of amazing culture, what are those pillars that we need to focus on?

Yeah, so there's seven. And we could probably spend the next five hours talking about them and without me taking a breath, but I promise I won't do that. So just to give everyone a little bit of context, when I was struggling with my company and decided that I needed to change my culture, I wanted to know, what exactly was it I was supposed to focus on? And there's a lot of stuff out there. There was a lot of books and a lot of stuff, but I felt like I could not find a book or I couldn't find a methodology that specifically gave me a very concrete blueprint of go do these three things, five things, seven things, whatever, and do them really, really well. And, like, you'll have a great culture. It was. There were pieces, right? So I'll give you an example. Listening is a great. Is one of my pillars. There's a lot of books written about listening, so I didn't invent listening. Listening is. We know that's a great thing you're supposed to do, but it's also something that your culture has to do really well. You need to listen to your employees. You better listen to your clients, you better listen to your vendors, you better listen to. You're. You're bored, like, whatever that is. And do those people feel heard? So we listening so we can make changes. Are we listening for so we can have innovation? Are we listening so they feel heard so that they don't stop telling us great things because they don't think we're actually listening to them. Right. There's, there's so many layers in there of what that really means to be a good listener.

And so it's not just, hey, middle manager, go be a good listener. Right? That, that's the message I hear most often. But it's also make your employees feel heard, make your clients feel her. Make sure you have mechanisms in place so that we are surveying and talking to all these different groups and then that we're actually doing something about it that would take me to my next pillar, which is measurement. Right. So great companies know how to measure what matters and they look at it and they actually do something with the data. So I made fun of, of, of Apple for a moment. But like Google measures so much. I mean they measure what they measure and that's what they're really, really good at is looking at big data sets, understanding, you know, what to do with what they're seeing and, and then going and doing experiments and testing and try to incrementally get better. Because they have that sort of almost hindsight, you know, is 2020 type of a thing going on because they have so much data and they can see so much. So those are two. I mean, I have five more. I don't know if you want to.

Let's look at those. Yeah, let's get into those. So a couple of things. So your company was awarded the fastest growing company by Inc. Magazine. So clearly you've embodied and embraced these principles. You've used them. They're not just in your head. They've been on the ground in a company and they work. So let's start with listening. You know, I believe that we all know we need to listen. I believe we all know how to listen. But what's the type of listening that really high performing cultures encourage?

Yeah, so I kind of alluded to it a little bit before, which was, you know, are we listening to our employees now? Let me, let me break it down to maybe a more tactical way to do this. We know that companies will do an annual survey. I think annual surveys are stupid. I think that they're dumb and you need to get rid of them right away. Like, why would you do that?

It's basically only asking people once a year how they feel. And we typically tend to do it at the end of the year or the Beginning of the year, which is like the worst time to survey people when they're stressed out on the holidays and they've spent all their money on presents for people they don't really care about. It's the worst time to be asking people. Also, the weather is generally terrible for most of the world that time, you know, it's just. It. I don't know, it's just. Well, I guess maybe not for you all. It's probably a good time in December. I forgot we're opposite seasons, but at least in the States or North America, it's a terrible time to be asking people when they're freezing cold and there's no sunlight. Like, how do you feel about your job? So what we did is we went back and started asking our employees one question every week. So one question, survey. So I got. And I didn't do it every week. I did it maybe 45, 46 weeks of the year. I got 46 questions asked of my employees. Okay? So I did what the annual survey does. But what is different is that I asked them one at a time. So I have very high response rates, like in the 90 percentiles, because I'm only asking them to answer one question. It's so simple, so easy. They can. They can do it. You ask any HR person, they're spending all of their time around that survey time chasing people down, trying to get them to complete the survey. I never had that problem because, again, simple. Number two, when we would look at the data, I could then go back to them and say, this is what I heard and this is what we're going to do about. It might have been good stuff, it might have been bad stuff. You know, if we said, what resources are you missing out on? And everyone tells me, if I only had a fifth monitor, I could do more. I could, you know, do more stuff. Okay, how do we make that happen? I might ask them, like, who's killing it for us? Like, who's. Who's doing amazing? And they tell us, I go back, hey, we heard these five people are like the rock stars right now. And here's what we're going to do about it. Like, you know, really powerful, right? And so every week, they kept hearing from me, this is what I heard, and this is what I'm going to do about it. And then, like, at the end of the month, we would bring up the last three or four that we had done and again, repeat what we did, what we heard, and what's been happening since then, since that initial thing.

So People feel heard, they feel listened to. They're a part of the process. They're not waiting till December to say, hey, I needed an extra computer screen. They're getting it sorted in February rather than December. So obviously for culture, it's going to make a big difference. What did you notice over doing that over a period of time in terms of revenue, in terms of staff turnover?

Hey, James here. I wanted to take a quick moment to let you know about something. Look, I get asked to deliver keynotes and workshops for teams and companies all over the world, from London to Antarctica, from America to Australasia, from armies to small businesses to large corporates to sports teams. But I go in and deliver keynotes around the mindset of high performers, around the habits of high performers, about how we navigate change. If you would like me to come and speak to your team or speak at your conference or deliver a bespoke workshop, please get in touch with my team. Carolinejlochlan.com will be able to help. I'll also make sure that we put that in the the show notes.

So when we started doing all of this, I will tell you, we had a pretty normal turnover rate. I would just have an average company. We weren't like, terrible, but we were pretty average. We also were never named a best place to work. We were also Never on the Inc 5000 list. And after implementing all seven of these pillars and actually doing it, that's when we were on the list five times. That's when we were our best place to work. 12 years in a row before I ended up selling. You know, when I sold my company, we had done 12 years in a row. Like, those things happen after we did the work on culture. So it wasn't our product and service. It wasn't that we hired particular people.

And that's a really interesting thing I want people to understand. We often think if I just get the right people in the door, that everything is going to be better. That somehow we're going to meet our goals or we're going to be happier or our culture is going to be better, or if we work all in the same place or if we work all remote like, no, it's the culture. The right people will be attracted to culture. The wrong people will get discouraged by not being able to flourish in good culture and they'll leave. Or you'll find. Or you'll figure out how to get rid of them. But like, 85% of the people you have now will end up getting better. They end up becoming higher performers and Doing better because it's so much clearer what they're supposed to do and what. What you expect of them. Right. And then, I mean, wouldn't you want to work for a company that's like, you're hearing me all the time. And so to really answer your question of, like, well, what happened tactically, what happened when we did that was that they started coming to us all the time. When they needed something, they raised their hand. When they had a good idea, they raised their hand. Nobody waited, like you said, until December. Because when you. When you do an annual survey, you ask people how they're feeling, what's going on. It takes you three, four, five, sometimes six months to, like, look through all that data. If you have. I mean, I had thousands of people. And then. And then by the time you figure out what the heck to do with that and actually implement something that's like, anywhere between three and nine months later.

That problem is long gone. They might be long gone.

Right? True.

And what does it matter? So that's why I think you got to get down in these tactical ways. What you get is a much better organization. You just need to be ready and willing to actually do something about it. When you get those responses.

Yeah, because I guess if you're asking for feedback and you're not doing anything, it's. People can sense that as well, that you're literally just ticking a box.

And sometimes we couldn't do anything. Sometimes they would bring up things that we could not change, control, or alter. But at least we could educate them and we could tell them, this is what we heard. We understand. Let me explain to you why we can't. Why this has to be the. There is a. Literally a law. There's a regulatory thing. Like, we have to do it this stupid way. We know it's stupid. That's the law. Right. And so then they went like, oh, it's not because the company. It's because of that. And so then they had understanding. Yeah, we all hate it, but, like, we all hate it together. Not that they hate it because they think it's something I made them do.

I love that. Chris, you're taking the time to explain why certain things are the way they are. And often, I think leaders and companies go, this is so much time to take all these questions, all this feedback, and then go back to people. But actually, when you look at the time wasted because people leave or because they're disengaged, it's probably way more costly to a company than sending out one question a week and taking action and responding to that.

Yeah. And what's awesome about the one question survey is that if you are a leader listening to this and you're not the CEO, you feel like you're not in a position to go and implement this throughout the company. You can still do it on your team. Now, if your team is only like three people, maybe that's kind of hard to do. You might just want to have a weekly chat with them. But like, if you got at least eight people or an up, then do that. Right. Because then you can. What I did is for like three months, I would tell them, listen, I'm never going to share anything that you wrote. I may share the sentiment if I need to go and talk to another department or another person or whatever, but, like, I'm never going to show anybody these answers. And they're totally anonymous.

That's cool.

And then like for three months, I would say everything you write down in here, you can leave it anonymous. But just so you know, whatever you write, I'm going to show it to everybody. Because sometimes I wanted the answers to be. I want. If I said, hey, who's killing it? Who's amazing? I wanted to share that with the whole team and be totally transparent. If, if I asked what client is like killing us that does cause us so much work. Like, we, we should really be concerned that we are losing money with this client because of what they charge, how they deal with us, all their complaints, all of the 5,000 tickets into customer service. Like, who's causing us a problem? Because, you know, a lot of times senior management doesn't know that, of course. And, and they would tell us, oh, you should go look at XYZ company. There's no way. And we would look and be like, they're right. This is. They're killing us. They're one in three tickets in our system is them.

Raise the price or you get rid of them. Right. And you don't Suddenly don't need 10 more people in customer service. Right. So, yeah, so it's really. You can do. No matter what size you are, you can do it and you can implement it. You don't need to be at the top or getting HR to agree to it. You can just start it right away.

Incredible. And let's proceed through the other pillars. So what's pillar number three?

Yeah, so these are in no particular order. I mentioned transparency a moment ago. That's a big one. So the thing I always ask people to imagine, okay, so imagine it's tomorrow and everyone on Your team knows your goals, and you know their goals.

In most organizations that I walk in the door to go help them with their culture. So first thing I ask them, does everyone here on this team, do you all know each other other's goals? And they. 99.999% of the time is like, one time it happened. But Elliott, at the times they all go, no. So it's just you and your boss. Who knows what you're supposed to do to be successful at the end of the year. That is lunacy. That is insanity to me. Why wouldn't we all know on the same team what each other's goals are? Because if it's September and you're only halfway through your goal, and I know that you and your spouse are going through a hard time or that your dad's got cancer or like, you just had a newborn baby, like, hey, can I, can I help you? Can I help you carry? I'm. I'm 90% to my goal, and it's September. I'm going to make it. I'm going to be fine. But, like, maybe you need some extra help this year. And I know what your goal is. I know what you're trying to achieve. So let me let the team come in and help you a little bit. Right?

Why do you think we struggle with that? What is it that is like, if, say, 99% of teams and people don't share and talk, what do you think is innately wrong with the way we set things up?

I think it's first off structural. It's just like, that's just how it's always been. That's just you and your goal. You and your boss talk. Maybe you, you might talk about your goals informally to other people, but, like, it's just not something that people think about doing. It's not. It's institutionalized. There could be a deeper, more nefarious reason that you're. It's a power thing with your boss and, like, you know, they want to be the one, and maybe they don't want. If they don't like you, maybe they don't want people to know you are actually killing it. If because they don't like you personally, that, that's probably less likely, but I think it's just structural, you know, just. That's just how my boss did it and how their boss did it and their boss before them. And you go all the way back to the Industrial revolution, right? Like, so I think it's just a matter of, like, people don't know a better way of doing it.

So that doesn't need to be complex, right? It can be pretty straightforward and simple to be able to do this at an organizational level, right?

And then you take that and you say, well, can we have every department share each other's department goals with each other? It's too complex to say, I'm on the customer service team. Tell me all the goals of all the salespeople. Like, that's just too. But just tell me, like, what is sales trying to do? Because if I'm on the customer service team and I'm like, our goals are 1, 2, 3, 4, and I look at their goals 1, 2, 3, 4th, and I go, wait a minute, their goal number three, if that happens, there's no way we can meet our goal number one. Those two things need to be rectified inside the organization so we don't have two different groups adamantly opposed to each other. That to your very early question, like, what creates a bad culture? Sometimes it's that it's misalignment, unintentionally, usually that we just don't know. So we want all of the goals to be shared amongst the different.

Groups, the different teams. And at the very large level, I don't mean like a small team. It's just like customer service, sales, marketing, like whatever those big operations, those big buckets are in your company. And then are we sharing our large sales goals, our revenue goals, our profit goals, and then are we actually sharing the data every month and every year about how we're actually doing?

Like, I used to share my full P and L, my summary P and L with every single employee every single month. And I learned that from, from Jack Stack. There's a book called the Great Game of Business. Learned it from him. And he talks about in the book that, like the janitor of these big, this big giant warehouse where he had all this stuff, like when he started getting the P and L and sort of understanding what they were spending money on, the janitor, who they had the least expectation of having any great ideas, right? Which is probably totally wrong. But like, he admitted, like, we had no expectation the janitor was going to come to us with a million dollar idea. And he did because he was watching, he was seeing everything. He's like, why do you know we spent all this money on cleaning supplies? And like, you know, it was some weird thing where like he, he could see it and he saved them all this money, right? So that's amazing, right? So giving people the information.

Is what is power? And that's sometimes why leaders don't want to give up the information because they're giving up power as well. But when we give them information, they now can come back to us with better ideas, innovation. They have clarity about why we're doing what we're doing. Right. We remove all the passive aggressive, not all, but a lot of the passive aggressive behaviors. Remove a lot of those bad ideas that come to our desk all the time as leaders because they don't know what we know. That was a hard lesson I had to learn. I realized it was all in my brain and people kept coming to my office. Oh, hey, Chris. I was thinking we'd do this thing and I was like, yeah, you and everyone else has had that same stupid idea. But I had never told anybody all of the details I had in order for them to elevate their thinking and come up with a better idea for me. And when I did that, then the line out the door with amazing ideas started happening, which was shocking to me.

I love that idea, transparency, because a lot of company owners and senior leaders don't want to release the details around profit and they feel like it could backfire on them. But actually, hey, if everyone can get clear on what the top line and bottom line look like, what their role is, they can think more laterally. Do you ever see these crossovers between sport and business in terms of good culture?

Sure, sure. I mean, understanding what the goals are, right? What? Being transparent. Be on the same, you know, being on the same team. Absolutely right. I mean, those things are there. We also know that.

I think every pillar that I'm going to talk about is we can see correlations in sport over and over and over again. Right. We talk about profit. If you, if you look at the collective bargaining agreements in most of the major sporting groups in, in North America that are based on now the owners being transparent about how much money they're making. And there are actual levers built in place onto what the collective bargaining agreements are going to be based on how much revenue they actually made. So that used to be no one knew how much the owners were making and the players were all making these crazy demands and no one really knew. And so they actually have created transparency around that. We know you made these billions of dollars and they've committed that X percent will go towards players. Right. And so all of that fighting and all of that sort of misapprehension has gone away because now they're being transparent about it.

It's interesting, I was chatting this morning with my brother back in Ireland. And he was talking about the tech industry and he said, hey, James, you see how many thousands of people have lost their jobs at Microsoft? And I says, no, I haven't kept up with the numbers. He says, yeah. And then they just released that the CEO got a 12 million or $13 million bonus. And I don't know all the facts behind those things that he had shared. But if that is true, how can that impact culture for those that are left behind at Microsoft, that are still there, knowing that they've lost a lot of colleagues and a very senior leader gets a massive bonus? How do you think that? Is that good for business, bad for business, great for culture?

So you're kind of dipping into a really complex area because I believe based on everything that I have read, everything that I have been able to pick up on when I'm going in and working with some of these companies is that they have a real problem. I don't particularly enjoy Elon Musk, but I will say he has been right about one thing in particular, and that is, is that we. There is this desire with tech companies to retain the best talent. And there's also a desire by the younger generations to move up quickly, to get promoted quickly. And so the tech companies have gotten this really bad habit of promoting, promoting, promoting, promoting, and they out promote faster than they can actually. Like, there's jobs for people to do, okay? So you keep, you know, you're a senior analyst one, and next year you're senior analyst two, and you get a book because they're trying to keep you and the next year seniors. And at some point you run out of places to go because you really haven't gotten that much better. You're still kind of the same person doing the same job or what. You've learned a little more, but like they're trying to keep you from going somewhere else. And what we end up doing, especially in the States and, and, and I see this in Europe as well, is like they'll just basically. Well, especially in the States where we, you know, there isn't laws about.

Severance. There isn't like minimum severance packages and all this stuff, right? Unless I've negotiated that in, like in Canada, it's like you get some crazy amount, they lay you off, you get like a huge guaranteed thing. So you don't see this in Canada, but you see it in the States a lot. They'll just lay them off. And it's not, they're not laying them off because they're doing a bad job. They're not laying them off because they are not doing well. So that the $12 million bonus isn't actually, it's not like, oh, we're doing bad, let's get rid of people, but we're still going to give our CEO bonus. What they're really doing is saying we're, we run out of places for these people to go. We're going to cut out a thousand here and then we're going to bring in a new thousand up at the bottom so they can go through the same little game of being promoted every single year up to this level. And then we'll have to get shed them again because we've seen this over and over and over again from these companies. And the ones that don't do that or if they run out of time and they can't do that, what they've been doing is saying, well, now we have to have everyone back at the office. There's no more remote work. And that again is another way for them to shed numbers. Sometimes those are actually because they are struggling and because they do need to cut their numbers a little bit. Far better to look strong and say, we're not going to allow work from home anymore. We really care about our culture. Right. When really it's that they're bleeding money and they need to get rid of people and they don't want to lay them off.

That's knitting.

Right. And so especially in the states, like if you quit, if you quit your job, you're not eligible for unemployment benefits and things like that. If you get laid off or you get fired, you are eligible. But if you quit in most states, if you quit, you're on your own. So if they tell you, we told you, you can move five hours away or, you know, you can go work in Bali. We don't care. Oh, by the way, now you got to be in, you know, Palo Alto next week. What are you going to do? You're going to quit. And now they've shed that and you don't get any services or any, you know, support. It's a really weird dynamic with the way in which the structure is in the United States. So is it probably bad? Probably. I think those people are probably just generally happier that they have still have their job and they weren't one of the ones that got cut.

True. And I'd like to just before we look at the next pillar is just talk about this idea of working from home. Obviously, 2020 changed the landscape we globally on that front. Do you have any thoughts or data around how working from home impacts organizational culture.

So the hardest one to do is hybrid. So if you're doing a little bit of both, you're actually doing the hardest one. I think I was laughing. People say, oh, it's too hard to get culture right when it's remote work. And it's actually, you have to do it differently. But it's just as hard or easy as being in the office. It's the hybrid that's the hardest because you're dealing with so many complexities you can't count on, are they here, are they there, where you know, and all of that. So for remote work, you need to just remember a few things. One, well, first, if you want a full playbook, I have a whole book on it and you can go pick that up and it'll tell you everything. But in the show notes, definitely, I'll.

Pop it in there.

So, yeah, it's called remote work. But the big things you need to do is, one, when we do culture, it's different for remote work. So if you're trying to do the same things you did in the office, that's going to be already messed up to begin with. Two, we know because we had a big university called Walden University come in and study us and many other fully remote organizations. And this was prior to the pandemic, all my people were fully remote. Starting in, like 2009.

A typical employee values personal connection the most. That is their number one baseline of, like five things. That is the most important thing about work, which makes sense because you go to work, you have work friends, you need to, like, navigate all the politics and people to, like, get the things done and, you know, beg, borrow and steal to get your resources and all that. But personal connection is number one.

And up at the very top, like, it's important, right? But like, of the five, work life balance is the least important. Still important. It's on the five of the most important things. But it's the least important because you drive into work, you start work, you leave work, you're done with work. For most employees, there's an on and off switch, naturally. Take the train, you drive in, whatever you do, like, there's a coming in and a going, and you can kind of turn your brain on and off for work a little bit. There are people, of course, there's exceptions and all of that, but like, for most people, work life balance is not an issue. For remote work employees, it is the complete opposite. Work life balance is the most important thing for them to be able to. They Struggle with how to turn on and turn off. They struggle, right with that stuff. And yet they highly value the autonomy to do the work when and where they want. So they love this part and they also struggle with this part. And so they need leadership. They need their team to help them remember to stay healthy. Remember to turn off your computer when you're supposed to be done. Don't reply to emails at 10pm if that's not normally when you work. Like, they need us to help them create that structure around work life balance so they're not, you know, burnt out. And as you might have guessed, personal connection is the least important thing to them of the five. Still important. The least important. So if you are like, hey, we're gonna have great culture while we're remote and I'm gonna make everyone show up to these stupid Zoom meetings where we're gonna like, I don't know, play trivia or have a cocktail, and they're like, no, they're done. Like, I don't care about that anymore. I want to get my work done. Professional satisfaction is like number four for work life. For remote work people, it's like number, it's, Sorry, it's number two. I'm sorry, I'm messing up. It's number two most important thing for remote. And it's number four for the people in the office. So actually people, remote work people care more about getting a good job done.

Right. And having a professionally advancing and worrying about their career as a professional. Not do I have a work friend and do people like me? So I always find that really fascinating. Right. So it actually should be easier to have a remote work culture. But we have to do it differently. We have to think about how we interact differently. Our meetings have to be different. Again, I could talk for five hours about what that should be and how you should set those up. But if you're trying to do it the same way as you did, when you're all back in the office, you're. You're in for a rude awakening.

Yeah, I agree. And this idea of hybrid. If you had one thing to suggest for others to succeed with a hybrid model, what's the most important factor?

Sure, keep. Make sure everyone is doing the thing the same way. So what do I mean by that? If you are all going to be on a meeting and you have three people in the office and you have two who are remote that day, everyone should be on their computers, on Zoom or on teams or whatever you use, you should not have the three people in the conference room and the two people out because the three people in the conference room are having a conversation before and they're having a conversation after that. Those two people didn't get who are remote. So it's a little tricky if like everyone's always coming in and out. Like if everyone is truly hybrid versus like you have some people who are always, always in the office or mostly in the office, and you have some people who are mostly remote or always remote. That does change a little bit. But what I have found, we have tested this like thousands of times. When they all do the thing the same way, then it's equal playing field. And we don't see there being problems. They talk about, oh, well, you might be missed out on a promotion. You're not being thought about if you're remote work. Like all that stuff goes away when we're all showing up to the meeting the same way. It doesn't matter if we're in the office or if we're at home.

That's a simple, simple little tactic. But actually I can see how impactful that would be. I love it. Now let's go back to your pillars. What are the next couple of pillars?

Yeah, next one is positivity. So we know this. This has been proven by psychologists back in the 70s. We see correlating work in neuroscience to back this up. More recently and to your point, we see this in sports as well. So positive. So any creating a positive environment where we focus on what's working first, we celebrate what's working first. We want to know why is this salesperson doing great and getting curious about that first, not why is this salesperson terrible and being just totally focused on that. We spend so much time problem solving and worrying about all the stuff that isn't going well should be spending. The best organizations spend most of their time getting really, really curious and hyper focused on what is working and why is it working and doing more of that and kind of brushing away and getting rid of and kind of scaling back stuff that isn't working, that isn't going well and not focusing on that.

There's a really great example in sport where we know that.

People who go back, maybe they watch game tape so they watch the. Maybe it's practice film, maybe it's game time film. And the athletes in the teams who watch film of them doing it wrong with a coach is showing them, here's how you did it wrong this time. On this play, you should have gone left. You went right on this play. You didn't block this guy correctly or you didn't kick it. This. Whatever the thing is, right? They did significantly worse than the teams where the coaches showed them tape and said, this is. You did it right here. Here's. Here's an example of us all doing it correctly, doing it the right way, running the play the right way, kicking the ball to the right place, hitting the ball, whatever the term is, showing them in, reinforcing. This is what good looks like. This is what the right way looks like. Those were the championship teams.

That makes sense to me, right? That makes sense.

It makes sense. And yet think about most of your bosses and most of your coaches telling you, focusing on what you did wrong over and over and over again. Right.

The highest performers I've ever met focus on their strengths and double down on those strengths. And the greatest coaches I've ever worked with are going, hey, you know, wherever your focus goes, your energy flows. So, like, let's focus on. Focus on what we do want as opposed to what we don't want. And I guess even our psychology of language is generally more negative based around what we're avoiding, what we believe is wrong for us or bad for us. So what I'm hearing from you is, like, the best organizations that have great culture operate above the line. What is possible, what is positive.

Yeah. And we know that people cannot create innovation. They cannot come to us with great ideas. They cannot just psychologically, they're not in a safe place in order for them to think that way and to actually feel brave enough to raise their hand and say, hey, I have an idea, unless it is a positive environment. So if you are fearful for your job, if you think you could get fired, if you think you're going to get yelled at, if you think you're going to get reprimanded, if you think someone's going to steal your idea, you're going to keep it to yourself. Right? So if you're asking yourself why my employees are not coming up with great ideas, why we are not being innovative, transparency is number one. They got to know what you know, got to get that out there. They got to know the direction we're going and what we want to do, and then you got to be positive. They got to feel like it's a safe place for them to come and talk about those things. And the next pillar I would say, you know, we talked about was measurement. Right. We got to make sure we're measuring all of that. We're backing it up with data that we're listening to them that they feel heard. I mean, these are all kind of starting to overlap on each other. Right?

There's like, layers.

Yeah, yeah. There's big layers there. And then we get into the next pillar, which is uniqueness. What do you mean by that? Uniqueness is a lot of things. Sort of like how listening had lots of different ways to look at it. Right. Or transparency did. Uniqueness is first. It's the de and I component. Like, how do we actually make diversity, equity, inclusion work? And for a very long time, we've been talking about this and training on this and doing stuff on this, and it hasn't gotten a lot better. And the reason for that is that we ultimately need to celebrate and focus on what makes us different. So the positivity is like, focus on what's working. Uniquenesses is like, I. I need to really understand what makes you tick and what makes you special and what makes you unique so that we can leverage that every single day in the business. Not what makes us the same. Right. We end up hiring people because, oh, I see that you're a fan of the All Blacks. Well, then welcome to the team. Like, you and I both like that team that you're on. And that's a terrible way to hire somebody. And that happens all the time. You went to the university I went to. Oh, I see you like the sports team. I like, we went to the same fraternity or sorority. Like, that is focusing on what makes us the same. And we end up getting the same people with the same ideas and the same way of looking at the world. We want people who think differently. And so we need to say, I want to know what makes this person tick in a different way. Because maybe that would be really an advantage for my company. Maybe I need that analytical thinker. Maybe I need that free spirit. Maybe I need that super creative person. Like, whatever it is, what makes them special. But also uniqueness is how do we convey what makes our product or service special? It's also. It's that marketing, right? How do we ultimately tell people what makes us special? Because I have worked with so many organizations that come in. They're like, because ultimately, when we fix the culture we know we end up growing rapidly. Profit starts happening rapidly, and people will ask me to come in and help them with this. And I'll ask them, like, well, tell me about your product or service. And they're like, we have the best product. We have the best customer service. It's the same crap everyone else says, right? And they're not really talking about the unique things about them. Like, where it's made and how it's made and why it's made. And you can get into some really granular things that tie your product or service to the consumer in a really special way. So it runs the gamut from marketing to employees.

I'm really making sure that we celebrate what makes us unique.

Yeah, I think it's so important. I see that time and time again, whether it's small companies right up to corporates, when we do celebrate uniqueness and we have diversity of thought and leadership, better outcomes all around, including economic outcomes. I love that. Now, how many more pillars have we got? We've done five.

I think we have two we can get. Run them in real quick. They're easy. The first one is recognition. You need to have a great recognition program, meaning a simple and easy way that we say thank you. There's really two ways to do this. The way in which I've seen most companies be successful, it was the way I was successful. My company was. We had a Slack channel and it was called the water Cooler. And that's where people could post pictures of their kids and their dogs and whatever, like work appropriate stuff was cool. But it was also where we went to say, green flag. Great job. Thank you. Way to go. To cheer people on. And if you were online, that was your cue to go in and say, yeah. If you had come in and said, chris, great job on this thing. Anyone else is online would pop it. Wow, that was great. Way to go. I know you've been working hard on that. Like just give everyone that. Give that person that pat on the back. We never tracked it. No one ever got bonuses on it. We never said, oh, well, this year you got 26 green flags and last year you got 25. None of that. Right. This was nothing other than just thank you. There are programs that do work. I did a big case study in my book for On Caesars Entertainment, the big casino and hotel air company. Their program works very differently where they actually have prizes. They spend millions of dollars on a storefront where their employees can buy things. But the reason it works for them is that their customers, the people who come to the hotels, are the ones who fill out a form and say, well, the valet on Wednesday morning really helped me. Thank you. And when that happens, their entire team, everyone who was on shift that day gets points. So it's not one person, because it takes everyone on that team that day working hard and working well together in order to create that great experience for that client. Because you might not have been the person who could have, you know, pulled up their car. Maybe you were doing something else that helped out, you know, so it's a team effort. It's really hard to game that when it's the customer who's going to that casino and going to, you know, staying in that hotel to get them to say something special about your group at that one particular moment. Right. Cause all those other programs, people end up gaming them, of course, get all their friends to say, and they, oh, hey, this month we're all gonna put your name in and you're gonna get the prize or whatever. You're gonna get the $25 Starbucks gift card that no one. That's not really recognition. So there is a way to do it at mass scale for really, really big company that uses prizes and money and things like that. And we. And that was why I included in the book, because I needed it to show there was another way to do it. But most great companies do it the way in which I'm describing, which is just, how do you. How do we say thank you? Do you have a big giant board? Whatever it is. Right.

I love it. And I think when you look at the habit loop, you know, in terms of, you know, we have a. We have a trigger. We do the thing, our piece of work, whatever it might be, at the end of doing that and achieving something, we have a dopamine release or a reward, and that encourages us to keep doing the thing. Well, I see that no differently at a company level. Like, when we reward people and recognize them, then that encourages them to focus on good behavior, on good work, on team spirit. I really like that you included that.

Yeah, yeah. It really was like kind of the first thing we started doing, and we saw such a shift in people, and that's what kind of got everybody really, really kind of like on board and fascinated with doing more with culture. Because it was like, well, that's kind of cool. Like, everyone's kind of getting in this habit. I mean, everyone's feeling good and people getting recognized. And it helped create visibility, transparency about who was doing a good job and who was doing great things. So maybe we didn't count those and we didn't use them directly, but, like, if you keep seeing the same person's name over and over and over again, like, you're going to remember that when it comes time for promotions and things like that. Right? I mean, you remember 100%.

Yeah.

Now, the last pillar is mistakes. So great organizations know how to leverage mistakes. Now, mistakes and errors are two different things. So errors are, I'm overworked, I'm not taking care of myself, I'm not properly trained. I, I'm apathetic, I don't care. I, you know, like, that's when errors happen. Maybe I'm just incompetent. Like, there could be, there's all kinds of reasons errors happen, and those should not be tolerated. And those people either get retrained, fixed, or replaced. I mean, that's no good. My mistakes are, I'm trying to do something good. I, you know, I, I, I knew everything, the client told me everything. I've been trained, I've been here 10 years. And I, and I thought, you know what? Maybe I'm going to try this, this new way, this could be a better way to handle this, and I'm going to try it. And it didn't work. And I'm brave enough to go back to my team and say, hey, this is what happened. And this, I thought this would be a great idea. And I tried it out and it didn't work. And I wanted everyone else to know so you don't make the same mistake. But then you go, oh, you know what, Chris? That was actually a really good idea. Maybe if you just tinker this one little part, that, and you went, oh, I didn't think of that. Oh, now we have a brand new idea. Now we have a great way to do it right. But mistakes have to have the light of day in order for us to build on them, in order for us to learn from them, in order for us to create great innovation. And that starts with leaders. So if you want this in your company, leaders have to be the first ones to show up over and over and over again and raise their hand and say, would you like to know what stupid thing I did today? Would you like to know what mistake I made today? Let me tell you about it so we can learn from it. And let's talk about it. Let's have a retrospective after we do a project. Let's talk about what went well, positivity. And then let's talk about what we could have done better and where we felt like we fell on our face so next time we can do better. And that will lead you to this sort of holy grail. In my book of if you're doing the other things and you're actually.

Dealing with mistakes in a healthy way, and that people aren't getting yelled and screamed at for trying good things, for making a good decision to try something great, that's when really, really cool stuff starts happening.

And that's what we want. We want that cool stuff and I love that you've got a framework for that and the power of company culture. Your book is phenomenal. So I'm gonna put a link in the show, notes for the listener. If they wanna go and get it, please do. I'm also gonna put a link into.

Channel so if people want to come and follow along. But I want to ask you a couple of questions just before we wrap up. And I'm just inspired by your view and your perspective on culture. And I'd love to know when you think of a culture like an organization that has an incredible culture, what's the organization that first comes to mind?

It's really tough because, you know, it's, it's, it's really been changing.

You know, we've seen organizations that were typically at the, always at the top have had some real change. You know, Apple's still at the top when you want to look at innovation. Google's still at the top when you want to look at data and measurement and things like that. Transparency. I mean they, they literally publish and tell you like the stuff that they're doing, what they've learned.

So there are some really, really good. I think there's some that have kind of like, you know, dipped down and come back up. You mentioned Microsoft. I mean they had been on my list. I think actually in the last couple of years they've been pretty good.

So it's really, really interesting. I might put throw in a couple other ones that maybe people haven't heard. I think Johnson and Johnson has a pretty, pretty good culture. It's going to be interesting to see what happens with Activision and Blizzard that have a fantastic culture and they've now been purchased by Microsoft and they're being sort of, I don't know what the right word is, but homogenized into the Microsoft. Yeah, Microsoft. And so what will happen? But like I've worked, had the pleasure of working with both of them and they have such a highly innovative culture. You know, will they impact Microsoft in a really positive way or Microsoft come in and, and there are very positive things at Microsoft that could really help their, their, their business units grow and even more, you know, and, and be better. But as standalone companies, which they sort of still are, I think they're, they're up at the top, they're pretty, pretty cool companies.

That's epic. I'll put a link into those companies below so if people want to go and check them out, they can. And Chris, I just want to be mindful of your time, I'd like to ask you to join me for a second and fast forward many years into the future. You're highly aware that it's your last day here on earth and someone very young that you love dearly comes into the room, says Chris. How do I go about leading my life on purpose? What would you say to them?

Yeah.

I'm a big believer that it really starts every morning with what you do and how you act. And if you want to have a purpose driven life, then you better get up and get in some exercise and you better sit and be really intentional and journal about the things that you want to do. And you better give yourself 20 minutes to meditate on that and let your brain have that time to catch up. Like just doing that, just sort of like having that little bit of time that spending that first hour of the day really getting yourself prepared, so physically prepared, mentally prepared, and almost like setting that tone, right. Of setting your future activities in alignment. That alone will have such a radical impact on your life versus waking up and staring at your phone and looking at emails. Right. And working or whatever it is. So I'm a big proponent of getting up at 5 o' clock in the morning and doing that before anybody else wakes up, before the kids and the dogs and the rest of the world need you.

But I think if you want to have that purpose, it's really easy to tell you to go have a purpose and to go and to figure that out. But really what you need is that mechanism of every single day revisiting that and making sure you're on the right path and that path hasn't shifted or changed or your priorities haven't changed. And that we're right being thankful for what we have in our lives and ensuring that we're remembering that, celebrating that and staying on that path that we want to be on.

You have Nelson Mandela back there behind you. I mean, the guy spent 20 something years thinking about what that was going to be and what it would look like if he ever got out. And when he did, it was very clear about what he did and what he was going to do. And most of us just wake up and let like a ping pong ball in a video game bounce around between whatever life throws at us instead of being really, really intentional.

Such powerful advice. It really is. And it's like Chris Dyer's Power Hour. I love it. And it reminds me of Robin Sharma, a good friend who wrote a book called 5:00am Club. And just a simple focused start to the day with get up, be grateful, journal, move your body, meditate. I love that. And I don't always get to do that. Sometimes mornings can be a bit chaotic. But six days out of seven I think you and I live a very similar morning and the days that I do it, I have a much different day that I really appreciate.

I was adamantly opposed to reading his book the 5am Club, because it was called the 5am Club.

I run a book club and half the members were like we're not reading that book. There's no way. Because they didn't want same thing. Everyone was worried about it. But but the 2020 rule of that what I described is very powerful and I do not like waking up at 5 and yet here I am doing it and it's been really, really helpful in my life and.

I highly suggest it so long.

May it continue. I am the same as you. I just want to say a huge thanks for actually the work that you do and how you share it and how open you are with it. So I deeply appreciate it. I will be sharing in the in the show notes a link to your books and to your social so people can connect. And I don't think this will be the last time that you and I connect. So a huge thanks Chris.

Awesome. I appreciate you having me on your show today. James.

Cheers. Thank you. The Lead on Purpose podcast is sponsored by NZ Mortgages. Learn more at nzmortgages.co nz. Thanks for tuning in to Lead on Purpose. If you find this episode valuable, please share it with one person that you think might benefit from it. And if you if you're serious about levelling up, please make sure you're subscribed to the show and continue to lead your life on purpose.