A short transcript excerpt from the YouTube video "How I Fixed MY Toxic Culture ⚠️" where two speakers discuss accusations that a leader discriminated when hiring (they cite the hiring of "Gio", identified as African American). The leader explains personal preferences (e.g., tattoos, hair) versus discrimination, describes instituting anonymous peer reviews when the business faced financial stress, and recounts emotionally reviewing negative feedback with an operations person. The speaker concludes that organizational humility must start at the top and that a clear purpose statement should not require people to "look a certain way."
They think he discriminates.
Yeah, 1000%.
Example. Give me an example.
Straight up example.
When I hired Gio.
Gio is African American. There was a huge spiel by guys that if this was. If this was in Luke's control, he would have never hired him. That it was based off his color. Even the guys, when I got here, like, day two or three, they were like, luke put you in a position of power with those tattoos. And I was like, I mean, see.
To me, that's proving to them that it's like I have a preference about tattoos, you know, just like I have a preference that you don't let your hair, you know, look all bed hair every time. You know, I have a preference, but I'm not gonna micromanage that. So I did this originally. My business was like 1.4, 1.6 at the time. We were still going up, and we weren't making money. And so I had anonymous peer reviews. They all did peer reviews on each other, and I was included on it.
Who said to do that?
We took all the reviews. I had a whole page of all the negative stuff, and I spent three hours with my operations person going through every single one. And that was painful. I was crying. It was emotional. I knew that there was a lot of things in my past that I was allowing to surface up from family, religion, et cetera. And ultimately, if that purpose statement doesn't require someone to look a certain way, act a certain way, be a certain way, I don't care. It will take a level of humility that is currently not in the organization, and that starts at the top.
