How can CEO's navigate times of crisis more effectively? What are the main pillars of successful company culture you need to adopt in order to survive and thrive? All these and more questions answered in the conversation with Chris Dyer, the author of the best-selling book, The Power of Company Culture.
How can CEO's navigate times of crisis more effectively? What are the main pillars of successful company culture you need to adopt in order to survive and thrive? All these and more questions answered in the conversation with Chris Dyer, the author of the best-selling book, The Power of Company Culture.
Chris Dyer is passionate about helping leaders reach their full potential. As an expert at driving workplace performance through company culture, Chris has been featured by leading media outlets such as the BBC, NBC, and Forbes. He is also a frequent speaker at conferences all over the globe and was recently named to Inc.’s list of "10 Leadership Speakers That Can Help Transform Your Company Culture".
To find out more about Chris and the work that he's doing, check him out online: https://chrispdyer.com.
- Welcome to "Leading Through Crisis". A conversation series exploring the idea of leadership in challenging times. Hi, welcome to "Leading Through Crisis". I'm Celine Williams, and I'm here with my friend, Chris Dyer. Chris is the author of the best selling book, "The Power of Company Culture". He's also the founder and CEO of PeopleG2, a background check provider that has appeared on the Inc 5000 list of the fastest growing companies four times. Welcome, Chris.
- Hey, thanks for having me.
- Yeah, it's a pleasure. I really want to talk to you because you have the dual honor of not only being a CEO leading a company right now, but also being an expert on company culture. So I thought, for every time about leading through crisis, you know who would be a great person to talk to?
- Well, thanks for having me.
- Yeah, for sure. So I'm gonna to start by asking, about put your CEO hat on for a second. Have you found any challenges or opportunities, or how have you found leading a company in the past few weeks? 'Cause it seems like everything has shifted dramatically and you're in a very particular role of leadership.
- So I think I've been a little bit spoiled here because we are already 100% remote and because we're doing all these things that we should be doing, like I didn't have to do a lot for my people. They're already working from home, right? So I didn't have to help them prepare for that. We sort of have things set up. But what we have been doing is trying to make sure that we are doing the things that we say we do, that we continue to, I've had probably 50 phone conversations from people in my network reaching out to me, freaking out, asking questions, and I'm like, well make sure you do this, this, this and this and then I realized we gotta make sure that we're still doing that, that we're not forgetting or that we're kind of ramping some of that up. So we have had a lot more all company meetings. Typically we only do an all company meeting once a month, we have had three of those. So two of them were like really structured, mandatory, show up. We had a schedule and then like this morning, I decided we needed to have one because information had radically changed. And what I did was I just did a Zoom call, hey, it's 9:30, Zoom call, if you can't make it, if you're not on it, that's okay, I'll record it and I will send you the call. Which it was only like five people that couldn't be on. And because information changed and as I mentioned to you before the call I was in this mode in my head because I was in crisis because things were like really intense. I thought I needed the information to be perfect. And over the weekend and reflecting on that I realized that's wrong. The information just needs to get out there, so transparency is one of the big pillars that I talk about in the book that the more information we can give people, the better decisions they can make, and the better they can help assist the company. When we give them no information, all they can do is fill it in with their own conclusions, make assumptions. We had someone that assumed they might be fired because they didn't have any work today, right? Because I hadn't given them the information. So we got on that call today and said, here's the information. And actually, even though it was full of holes, I handed them the Swiss cheese of solutions today. They were actually happier. I got tonnes and tonnes of notes. People thanking me, they appreciate the information, then they were 10 minutes before when I didn't tell them anything because I wanted it to be perfect. And I think as leaders we have to remember we're not perfect. We just need to keep telling them what we know, keep advising them and providing what we can, when we can and where we can. And it's okay if things change. It's okay if it's not the same today as it was yesterday. Because people just need to know what we know.
- It's really interesting what you say, because there's two things that I hear inside of that, and I wanna touch on both of them. One of them is the idea that you really can't over communicate right now. Right? You're not gonna be meeting with your people too often, you're not gonna be holding too many meetings, you're not gonna be sending too many emails, giving information, because it's a time where any information is valuable, so you can't over communicate. That's the first thing that I hear. And the second thing is that I think what you experienced is really common with leaders in general, which is the idea that you have to have all the answers and solutions, full stop. You're not out there saying, excuse me, historically, you're not out there saying like, I don't know, I'm not, I don't know all the answers yet. I don't know what's gonna happen. I'm just gonna share with you as things come up. That can be really uncomfortable for leaders, 'cause that's not how you see your role. So for anyone who is listening to this, what was your experience in going through that transition or making that realization? Or what made it, you know, is there anything that you would offer for leaders that are like, no, no, no, you have to have the answers. That's what people are looking to you for.
- So I went through this big change in our company back in 2009, when the big recession hit. We had the economic crisis last time. And I learned some lessons back then. And one of those lessons was, to be transparent is to give information as much as I could. I learned I didn't need to be perfect. I didn't need to have, and I had to remind myself of that just recently, 'cause I was like, well, if we just wait two more days, I'm gonna have so much better information. But that's two days of people having nothing, having no information. And we learned that that didn't work. The other thing that I learned from me personally and this may not apply to all leaders out there, but I'm a pretty like level person, I don't get super excited. And I don't get super down, like I'm just very level. And that's sometimes I wish I could like get super excited. But people kind of freaked out a little bit that I was so calm during a crisis. And so when that last crisis they took my calmness as I didn't take this seriously, that I wasn't worried enough about what was happening and I was totally worried, I was totally freaking out. But I was putting off this very, here's what we're gonna do. And I thought I was being really reassuring. And so I had to find opportunities, I don't wanna say the manufacture but to at least really show them that I was taking this seriously, in my own way I didn't need to be, not true to myself, but I had to find ways to get excited or to show them that I was really concerned about things. And so that they knew what I was thinking. And I could only do that by telling them things. Or if I was mad if I was upset, it was okay to let that out. It's fine to do that maybe when things are, when they're normal, and it's okay for me to be level but things aren't normal, I can't keep acting like I do when I'm normal. A little bit of getting excited a little more, celebrating what's working, focusing and having extra meetings on where we're scared or where we're upset or what we're gonna do. All of those things really are opportunities for me on an emotional level, connect with everyone and to be a leader, even if I don't have the answers that we all want.
- That's really valuable and I think even acknowledging, so you might not be someone who's super expressive, you're not gonna cheers and yell when things when you're really excited. And you're not gonna weep or yell when you're angry. Like they're the, but sometimes it's even valuable to say, here's what I'm feeling. And acknowledging what that is without it having to be shown in the way that other people expect it to be shown. And it sounds like having some of those meetings about, what people are scared of in general not just you has helped to cement that for your team.
- Right.
- Sorry, go ahead.
- No, go ahead.
- I was gonna say you mentioned transparency as one of the pillars in your book and I want to go back to that for a second because, when you have a company that has really strong cultures like yours does, what are the other, I know there are nine I believe pillars in your book if memory serves.
- Seven.
- So close. I was gonna say transparency is obviously, extra important for leaders in a time like this in order to maintain and grow the culture, right? 'Cause culture is tested in these times, let's be honest. Are there any others that really stand out that you would highlight now more than ever for leaders as they're in this space?
- Sure. So one of the other pillars that's really important is positivity. And that goes back to this entire sort of, almost called a philosophy, but it's more psychology based, but it's called appreciative inquiry. And that is how we look at things. So if we walk around right now calling everything that's not working a problem, right? We focus on all the things that are not working or sales are down and then lost this client, all the negative, negative, negative. Those are the things that we have to deal with. Those are opportunities for us. And there are things that we do but I'm not saying we don't talk about those things. But if everything is inherently negative it is a problem. Things really, really get intense in these types of situations. And I think in general, we shouldn't view the world that way, but especially right now. So what do we do? Well, we have to focus on what's working, we have to celebrate what went well. We have to remember to look at each of these things as an opportunity for us to get better, to improve, to refine, to assist, whatever it may be. And when we have a client that, looks like they're going out off business, and we're providing we're providing them whatever help and assistance we can, even though they may not ever spend another dollar with us, because we've had a relationship. That may not pan out to anything right now, we may just be doing that completely altruistically, or those people may end up in jobs down the line and they'll remember that they'll come back and wanna do business with us. So we think about how we can work, there's some really great stories around this sort of process, but when people are thinking about things in that positive way to that appreciative inquiry, we're taking the time to dream about how we might get something done with designing it well. We're doing all these things that we're talking about what's working, people really start to change, and it will remove some anxiety and the fear. Probably the simplest thing that I can give people that to help them understand there's probably two examples. First is to eliminate the crap sandwich. And what I mean by that is stop giving good news and putting a bunch of bad news in the middle and then leave on good news, right? Because nobody believes that first bit of good news, and they actually don't even believe the end too because they're waiting for the bad news. They're like hey, guys, so this thing happened. Yay! And oh, by the way, we're gonna do lay... And then you start hitting him with all this horrible stuff. If you condition people that you're gonna keep giving them the crap sandwich, they don't value the positive things on each end of that. Instead, start with the tough things. Every meeting, every interaction, let's talk about the hardest stuff first. And then let's make sure we remember all the stuff that's working well, what's going great. what did happen well, because there's a real psychological kind of a cognitive bias happening here. So there's some really famous research where they tested things like having people put their hand in ice water for five minutes, and rate how painful it was. And then they had people put their hand in ice water for eight minutes. But the last minute they got warm water in that bucket, so the last minute was actually more pleasurable. Even though their hand was in the cold water longer, they rated that experience less painful than the people who only had the five minutes of ice water. So if we do the hard stuff first, and we end with the good stuff, people will remember that experience better because our brains don't wanna remember all the bad stuff in our lives. They remember those tough meetings, those experiences, whatever, they remember them better. So it's a sort of a design issue. But if you do the crap sandwich version, people are constantly skeptical. And they pretty much only remember the negative.
- That's really cool. I do an exercise with teams when I work with them sometimes called elephant in the room, which is I've adapted for the way that I do it. But basically, you have everyone submit ahead of time to the facilitator the bad stuff that doesn't get talked about, but they think everyone is aware of. Not everyone's always aware of the same things by the way, but you submitted it ahead of time, neutral person parses it out, clip groups together, and it facilitates a discussion, but we never end with that as the like, inside of the discussion, we often get really interesting places, but I never end it on there. So it's really interesting you say that for the reason that then everyone's like, oh my God, look at all the problems we have. And no one wins when you're walking out of a situation like that. So I think that positivity is valuable. And I also have a question around that, because there's a lot of articles, there are a lot of articles. There's lots of stuff on social media, in the news, possibly less generally speaking right now. But what's almost like a false sense of positivity, where it's almost trying to force people into being like, listen, whether you agree or not, that this is going to be an opportunity in six months is irrelevant. It's almost overlooking the fact that there are people who are suffering right now and there are issues at hand and it's just focusing on the positive. So, in a situation like this, and I don't know if appreciative inquiry addresses this at all, but how would you advise leaders to not get stuck in that place where it looks like they're just being, chipper and positive for the sake of being chipper and positive? Everything's gonna be great guys, it's gonna be fine. Let's just focus on the future 'cause we also don't want that in a leader.
- Right. And so you have to be willing, and this is maybe we could tip our hat to Bernie Brown here, like, how do you be vulnerable? How do you like, say, what's the real stuff? And, to your exercise, how do we talk about what elephant in the room? And so that's really, really important that we are, being authentic, that we are not being false. We're not just putting on, when I say be positive and to focus on what's working, I mean, like real things, I don't mean, show up and pretend that everything's okay and pretend that you know there's not any problems. That's not treating your people with respect and being a good leader. You need to walk up and say, yeah, here are the things that we need to focus on. We have a problem here, sales or, whatever those things are, but here's what's working as well, right? And on the meeting I had with my staff we talked about, here in the US how that stimulus package is gonna work. And that we may be having people working, the sort of hours they have to work their normal hours, basically, for me to be able to take advantage of this program. If I don't, then I actually end up owing the government money, but if I keep them working at their normal levels, it'll be a grant. So it's really confusing. But it was like, everyone's like, wow, that means we can go do these projects we've never done. We don't have any work, but you have to still pay me for my normal hours. They were already thinking about, there's this project I've always wanted to do. We could look into the software, we could redesign this process. We even talked about like, they might just get paid to read some cool books and we can talk about it. They were already thinking about those things because that's already a part of our process. No one said like, oh I'm just gonna have to sit around and do nothing all day. Which they could have easily done, right? But we're sort of trying to focus on that, but it takes practice. This is the thing about appreciative inquiry or being positive. It takes practice just like, usually if people are against this, if they don't understand this concept, I will challenge them like at a conference or something for the rest of the day, say yes to everything that's asked of you. Just start there. And they go, no way I could never do that. And I go, just say yes and or yes but. That gives you all the space you need to not get yourself into a bad situation, right? So if someone comes up to you and says, can I have a raise? Yes, but you need to have done dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, whatever those things are that you would be happy to give someone a raise, you can give them those things. But whatever someone asked you, if you just say yes, you find yourself finding better ways to communicate, better ways, better solutions, and you are conditioning that other person that you are willing to find solutions with them. You are positive, you're not a no person, you're not negative, you're not just gonna close them off, and send them out the door which connects to the next pillar which is listening. Which I think is actually where you're headed, in that there's so much fear and people are freaking out right now. And they're just saying a bunch of like mumbo, here's this warm blanket of false BS. Just go over to the corner and wait for this all to be over. What we really need to be doing is being better listeners to our people. And hearing what they're really having to say, making sure they feel heard, because right now when they're in fear mode, and they don't know what's happening, you have to be a good communicator and be transparent. But then you gotta stop and listen to your people. And that's hard. It's hard to do, right? And it's hard just because like, how do you have that many conversations with all your direct reports? And how do you do that? Because often right now, you can't do this in the group thing. You can, you can try. But some people just need that one on one thing, too. So like, that's kind of the challenge I think that leaders are having right now.
- Do you have any tips for leaders when it comes to listening because I have a lot of conversations with leaders that are like I'm a great listener. I listen all the time. I hear every word they say. I am wonderful at listening. And they're listening to respond. They are listening to get their point across. They're not really listening. For a leader who is like, oh, I maybe need some improvement there, do you have anything, even where they could start inside this or what they can challenge themselves with?
- So if they are listening to this and when you said they think they're good listeners, if you thought in your head, you're a good listener, you're not, that is number one. I work on being good listener all the time because I'm terrible at it. There's is sort of like, if you start learning guitar and you think you're good, you can play three chords and you think you're good at music and you just learn a little bit more than that you realize, there is so much to know. The vastness of music is so intense, I know if I practice every day for the rest of my life, I will never be a good guitar player. I can trick people. But, what I don't know would fill libraries and libraries. So it's the same thing with listening and good leadership. If you are totally for sure that you're great at it, you are not. You just don't know you don't know. You don't realize how much is going on. So, good point was that active listening. So we don't wanna listen to respond, we wanna listen to understand. And so if you hear a fact if someone starts talking to you, and I was in this example like, start talking about camping, I had a friend who was talking about camping at a party recently and he wasn't talking about camping. But everyone started talking about sleeping bags and Yosemite and all this stuff. Eventually I coaxed it out of him, because I didn't respond. I didn't hear camping and immediately start going down on this camping. What he really was trying to tell us, was he was freaking out that he was gonna spend 10 days with his family, in Yosemite with no social media. And was he going to kill his children and his wife because he had never done that. They had never been 10 days unplugged, no devices, no games, no video games, nothing. And that was what he was really saying. And no one got in it. And he didn't even get it. Like it took me 30 minutes of asking questions to really understand. So then you say, well, how do you ask questions? Well, I use a method called three plus. And that is if you hear something, ask them if that's what they're saying. Three times they have to say yes, three times in order to move on. So I said so you're really worried about going camping. Well, no, not like going camping. Oh, so what is it? Well, I'm this is oh, so what you're concerned about is that the kids don't have their devices? Well, yeah, but I'm also and so I kept just asking these questions and then validating and then he hadn't even fully understood himself what all this anxiety was about. He just knew he was worried about going camping with his family but hadn't quite figured out. You have to keep asking those questions. And if you can get someone to agree with you three times, that that's what they're saying, then you have finally reached your Nirvana of listening. They really have because it's not only about again, listening, but making sure the other person felt heard. If you don't have that two way street, that reciprocal thing happening, you may have heard everything and you think you're a great listener, and the other party might think that you didn't get it. And if they didn't get it, then it doesn't matter. One of the most confusing things that I ever learned about listening, so if I say something to you, who was responsible for the meaning of what I just said? Do you know?
- I was like, am I actually answering?
- Yeah.
- Well, it's my interpretation of what you're saying. So I'm responsible for the interpretation of it.
- You're right. And that is the most confusing thing I ever learned about listening, that me as the speaker is not in charge of the meaning of what I said, because you being the intelligent person that you are know this, but most people don't, that they think, if they said it nice, or they said it mean or they said it sternly, that that's what the meaning is. And that's not true. It is the person who hears it. They are the ones responsible for meaning. So if you hear something and you think someone is being mean, or being excited or being nice or being positive, you have to in of you think that's important to make sure you're getting it right, you have to ask and clarify. In that listening situation as the one listening to someone because often you might say, well geez, why are you so upset? And they go I'm not upset. You're not? 'Cause you look upset, you seem upset. Oh no, I'm not upset, I'm just really excited about this, or I'm just, or whatever. And so you start to get these changes. And that's the next level of listening. So if you haven't even considered the fact that you as the listener have to make sure you understand what the intention is of that, then you're not, you're not able to really start to weave into this sort of jungle of complexity when it comes to conversations.
- And I think that's really, to your point that's really stepping into the next level, because we talk about in the work that I do, emotional intelligence, we talk about, we judge ourselves based on our intent, and other people judge us on our impact, right? And we get in that world of emotional intelligence, we have to be as clear with in communicating our intent as possible. But you can't get stuck there, which a lot of people do. Then they're like, well, I was clear. I said what I meant to say. Sure, and there was another party that is you need to work together to get to the middle. And that the other, the listener side of it is just as active as the person who is trying to communicate their impact or their intent.
- And it's a good reminder because there's a great cognitive bias that people forget about. And that is we tend to, you started to kind of say it, and I wanna give a little bit more detail there 'cause I think it might help people. When someone does something, let's say someone disappoints us, we often assign internal things to that, like they're a bad person. They are irresponsible, they must not have been raised right and whatever, it's about them. And when we do something that disappoints someone else we say, it's because my spouse was mad at me, my boss is a jerk. There was traffic. We have all these external reasons to describe our behavior and yet we don't give that benefit of the doubt to the other person unless we are actively thinking about it. And remembering to ask questions, so that we can understand, are they a bad person? Or are they a rude person? Or was there some other factor? And when you're in a real listening situation, when it's difficult to be a good listener, we tend to apply these right away. You're just a jerk. You're just a hothead, you're not smart enough to understand what's really happening here. And all these things about the other person that 99% of the time are not true.
- Right. Now, that's a really great reminder. It's a great point because we, I have found in the discussions I've had with leaders over the years that I'll quite often when I talk about listening to understand, they hear listening to agree. And it's not the same thing, right? I can ask you, we can disagree about something. I can ask you questions for the next 30 minutes. And at the end of that, I don't have to agree with you to understand your position, where you're coming from, what your point is. But I have spent the time to understand it. So now we can be in a proper discussion as opposed to me thinking that, if I think that if I hear you out, it just means I'm gonna agree with you or that you're gonna win an argument or whatever, all that bias that those ideas that we have built in are, then we never get to the understanding. Because you don't wanna go deep enough.
- No. And it's hard work. It's much easier just to assume we're right and just move on and nod at someone yeah, and then go but in the long term, especially with those people in your life you have a relationship with, the people you manage, the people in your family, your friends, you just can't do that and be successful.
- I agree. Years ago, when I started doing training to be a coach, basically, I had to do a full class that was called listening. That was it, listening eight classes, eight hours of time plus whatever outside of classes. And I was like, I see that I'm like, oh come on. Like, I'm a good listener and this has been, what am I gonna do for eight hours? There's like a massive chapter in a book on listening, all these exercises like whatever. It was the most humbling experience to be in that class. Because it was that to what you're saying is that you're constantly learning and every person you encounter, when it comes to, listening is a lesson is a new lesson in listening. So there's no end point where you're like, I'm a perfect listener.
- Right. There's the problem with learning, the more we learn, the more we realize we don't know anything. But it gets harder to do that. But the more we learn, the better we get, and the better we can connect. And I think for the purpose of this call today, the better leaders that we can be, especially in a time of crisis.
- Yeah, absolutely. I want to be respectful of time. But ask this question before we wrap up. And that is, based on the experience that you have as a CEO, based on the book that you've read, and all the people you get to be around and consult with and work with, is there anything additional that you would want to let people know or talk about or get into before we end our time?
- You know, I would say the biggest thing that I've been telling people right now, is because they're going remote, they may be remote, they may have worked remote sometimes, but most people are being sent home to work right now remotely and they've never done it. And so the biggest challenge that leaders have is they have to redesign their time. And what I mean by that is you used to be able to have quick little conversations and walk down the hall and do these things that you were used to doing that don't work anymore. Both information is now not traveling the way it used to travel, all those pathways have essentially disappeared because everyone's at home. And so my advice to leaders right now in this sort of really unique time in our lives, is to stop having one on one meetings. Unless it's like, you really need to connect with someone or it's a review thing or a privacy thing. Fine, I mean those happen. But the more you can have team meetings and group meetings and get people together, the faster information moves, the more effective you can be as a leader, because if you can meet with five people and you guys can all talk about it. You don't have to have five one on one conversations now. So basically the more one on ones you have, the slower your organization is gonna go, especially when people are remote. And the more group meetings you have, the faster you're gonna go because everyone understands, everyone's on the same page. Questions got answered and you now can move very quickly and be very effective and take advantage of what the rest of us have already known, which is that remote work is actually faster and is actually better, and you get a hell of a lot more done than you ever did before. Because you eliminate driving to work, driving home from work, needless meetings, and you get real deep time to sit and think and to get work done uninterrupted. Which might be a little of a challenge if you've got kids and the spouse or people at your house, you have to figure that part out that's a little bit unique. Because usually when I work from home, I could work from home, I'm by myself all day. But if you can just remember to have as many group meetings as you can, five to seven people maximum. It's not a group meeting if there's more than that. It's now a webinar. And do that right now, it'll really, really help you be more effective. That's the biggest thing that I've been talking to leaders about. And I've been hearing back from them it's really working well for them is to be in these small group meetings instead of one on ones.
- That's a great, I think that's a great point. I have two questions inside of that. The first one is, I just wanna confirm that I've understood something. If a leader has 10 direct reports, I mean let's hope they're not 10 direct reports ideally, but let's say a leader has 10 direct reports and they normally have one on one sessions with them each week because some of it is involving coaching, right? Like coaching organizations. You're not saying eliminate those, you're saying that other meetings that come up outside of that, turn those into team meetings rather than okay. I want to confirm that I was understanding that.
- Yeah, if you're coaching, If it's a regular cadence for you to meet with them once a week, that's fine. And that's normal. But I would try to make sure that you reserve that to things that are just about them. That is that coaching you're giving them, and those things. I personally do not do any other conversations around things that we're working on, that other people would wanna be involved in, during that conversation. because now, either we're gonna repeat ourselves and so I've wasted both of our time, right? Or we're gonna talk about it and then because our brains be like oh, we talked about it, we're done. We're gonna forget to communicate with everyone else about it. Which is actually the biggest problem that I have. I talked about it once with someone and I moved on, and then I realized the four people who needed to know did never find out. So we just really are tight about that conversation being just about that coaching manager's thing. I don't know about you, I have a 30 minute limit on that. In fact, we try to be at 15 minutes if we can. I have a really, because if they need more time, we'll book more time. If there's something else happening, going on great. But I find if I book an hour, we spend 15, 20 minutes shooting the stuff, and not not talking about anything that was really that important. And as a leader, if you've 10 direct reports, that's 10 hours. That's 10. If you did an hour, that's 10 hours of your life, how do you get anything done? So that's yeah...
- It's a great point. It's really interesting, because the CEOs that I that I work with or I coach, we will book an hour of time, and we will most of the time, unless there's projects that we're working on we'll be done at 30 to 40 minutes. So we have about a five minute catch up. And then we go through whatever's on their agenda to deal with and we're usually done 15 to 20 minutes early, and they get gifted that time at the end because it's not about filling time. It's about having it in case there's stuff that comes up, but we are almost always done early. And when we're not, there's a reason for it. So I think it's a really good point that either to be aware that it's okay to have time at the end if you're gonna leave that or to do it in 30 minutes. And if you need extra time, I think that's a really, really valuable point.
- So at my company there is a goal of ours to always end meetings early. And we do that because there is we've talked, we should just rename the show cognitive bias talk. But there is a cognitive biases call called Parkinson's law that says if you schedule an amount of time to do something, it tends to take you that amount of time to do it. The best example I can give people is if you say, I'm gonna go clean the garage this weekend and I have two hours to do that. You tend to move your body about the right speed and get into things and you take about two hours to get it done. If you said I'm gonna do it in 30 minutes, the same amount of work in 30 minutes, you would move faster, you'd prioritize, you'd ask for help, you'd get other people from your family to come help. It changes how you operate if you change the time. And if you say, in every goal and everything I set to do, I'm gonna end early, and you're being cognizant of it, you can really save yourself a lot of time. But people don't think about this. And they block 30 minutes for a 15 minute meeting, and they spend 15 minutes talking about nothing. And you do that several times a day and now your day is shot, and now you're wondering, well, how do I possibly manage all these people? How do I ever get my job done? You just gotta condense everything. And if that's a goal and everyone knows, the goal is to end early and to have the gift of time. And no one's offended that you didn't ask about their eight year old soccer game this weekend. When you were talking about this project, you know what I mean? This is not the time, it's quick meeting. Let's get on and let's get off and go back and work.
- Yeah, I completely agree. The other thing I wanted to touch on before we wrap this that in the idea of leaders now leading remote teams, and this is a new paradigm for them. Some of the concern that I've been hearing and I don't know if you've been hearing this with people reaching out to you, but it's that shift from I know by the way, this isn't real. I'm gonna acknowledge this up front. But it's the idea that if we're in the office together, I know how you're spending your time. I know that you're working 'cause your butt is in a seat. If you're at home, I don't know what you're doing. I don't know how you're spending your time. And for a lot of companies and organizations and leaders, they're still that the amount of time you're at your desk is the amount of productivity that you are giving us, right? We both know this isn't real. But for people who are now experiencing that shift with their team being remote and then being remote working from home whenever you wanna call it, do you have anything to offer them that would help them make that transition?
- So you just set me up for the next pillar in the book, which is measurement. When we went remote, we found that we were not measuring very well. We didn't really know what did a good job look like, or what did success look like for people? And we were managing the way you said, oh, I can see you're at your desk and you're here for the eight hours and you must be getting things done and that is a complete fallacy. If you are managing people that way and you think seeing them running around and staplers clicking and papers swooshing and that's productivity to you, you are missing out on an incredible opportunity to really understand what is happening in your organization. And if you understand it at a much deeper level, it doesn't matter where they're working. Yes, you have to be at a vineyard to grow wine and you have to be at a factory to build a car. I mean there are jobs where you clearly cannot send people home and have them work but for most jobs, setting clear KPIs. understanding exactly this is what I asked you to do, and here's how we gauge whether or not you did it. That's what you need to look at as the end result. I asked you to do A and did you get it done? And that means you did and I expected you to get it done in a certain amount of time or these five things. But that means you have to talk about that in advance. This is an area that we see that teams and managers do a really bad job at which is defining what success looks like. So you wanted someone to go do a project, if you don't talk about, this is what a successful project looks like. Hey, you five people you're gonna go find us a new CRM. Has to be in this price range, has to do these five things. The sales team needs to be okay with it. What does the success look like? What are these things? I need it done in a week, evaluations in weeks, what's the time facings, creating all that round up. That's like a pain in the butt. We just wanna send people off to go do it and we don't give them any, what does success look like? And if we can do that more often, you will find that you can manage people so much better and have such a better feeling about what they're doing. I have not worried about what someone is doing at my company in years. Because we create these clear KPIs, is clear, what does success look like with them? That when someone is cheating, and someone's not doing what they're supposed to do, it is so glaringly obvious that I mean within a couple days, managers are together going we got a problem. This person is not, we can tell, what they're putting in for their time and what their output I mean, we go back and coach them make sure they understand but like it's really obvious when someone's not fitting into that.
- That's great, for anyone who's listening or watching. If you haven't guessed you all should go and get Chris's book, "The Power of Company Culture". It's a fantastic book. And I really appreciate you. We'll have a link to it and your website under this as well in the visual notes. But I wanna thank you for taking the time to chat with me about this topic, leading through crisis and sharing your insights and your wisdom. It's super valuable. And I really appreciate you taking the time out of your day.
- Thank you for having me.
- Yeah, my pleasure. Thanks for listening to us talk around leadership in challenging times. If you would like to learn more about us or any of our guests, you can find us online at www.leadingthroughcrisis.ca. If you like the show, please subscribe and leave us a review wherever you get your podcasts from.