From Overwhelm to Outcomes: Chris Dyer on Team Charters & Change

Rob – Intrigue Media (00:31)
All right, everybody, welcome back to another episode of the I am landscape growth podcast. I would say we have a really special speaker and guest on the show today, ⁓ Chris Dyer. I’m pumped to have you on sharing kind of what you’ve been up to with what appears to be a lifelong pursuit to make people’s lives better, specifically at work, but obviously not just at work. So thank you for doing this.

Chris Dyer (00:52)
Thanks for having me, Rob. I appreciate it.

Rob – Intrigue Media (00:55)
So you founded PeopleG2, whatever, over 20 years ago, and you’ve literally had your entire pursuit in your career around optimizing the experience for humans. And obviously that’s a very deep subject, but if you could just give the audience like a quick Coles Notes summary of like your passion and what you’ve been up to, and then we can just dive into it.

Chris Dyer (01:17)
I mean, I’m an entrepreneur at heart, so I’ve had lots of businesses and have businesses now. I think humans are our greatest asset. And I like to work with people that I like, but also that want to be a part of the organization and want to do a great job and want to have a great life. life’s just too short to hate your job or hate your boss or hate what you’re doing. And so many times, I’ve just walked into

into companies, into teams, into moments, and I’m like, why is this so broken? Like, this is not, does not need to be broken. This is, you know, what is going on here? And to be able to come in and fix that or to be able to help people, guide them to figure out how to fix it for themselves has kind of like turned into the thing. And I jokingly say like, I’m an accidental author, I’m an accidental speaker, I’m an accidental.

and like these are not things I wrote down in a paper one day and was like, I’m going to go do this. I was just wanting to run my businesses and I just figured out along the way the better the human stuff was, the better the business was.

Rob – Intrigue Media (02:29)
What a crazy idea. And so what I find really fascinating with this and like, know, running businesses for, you know, not quite as long, but pretty close, like not quite 20 years. The human experience and helping people want to come to work with a bit of excitement in their step on Monday morning, you know, does have ⁓ a massive impact, not only on the business, but on the energy of all the humans when they go home to their families and it just cascades through communities, whatever it might be. And so

Chris Dyer (02:30)
Yeah.

Rob – Intrigue Media (02:55)
I find that in the experience of working with hundreds, not thousands of entrepreneurs in my own career, it really starts with the leader in terms of how we cascade culture through an organization of any size. So I’m really interested to get your take on that. But as the nature of the show is, we start off this whole thing with what’s the primary constraint holding entrepreneurs back in the green industry. And so I’m just curious from your perspective.

you know, working on this type of stuff, what do you see as the primary constraint holding entrepreneurs back?

Chris Dyer (03:24)
Well, there’s this convergence right now between the customer experience, you know, there’s been for years, Apple and other sort of big, you know, tech providers that have given us a much easier experience to get what we want out of something, right? So the iPhone radically changed like our experience with any electronics.

refrigerator is not easy to use, our, you know, like guitar pedal is not easy to use, like whatever the thing is, we as essentially we’re blaming them for Apple’s superiority. Like we had this super great easy experience of like, can do what I want to do. And it’s easy to find and all of that. And so you have entrepreneurs have been dealing with that pressure of how do I provide an experience that is easy and fluid and and you know,

mindlessly wonderful to navigate for my customer. With now, people have an inundation of a, so the second sort of thing that’s kind of come in here is with AI, is that now people can do more things, they’re inundated with more information, and they’re actually having a harder time making decisions. And so here your client is asking for a better.

Process and a better experience and also we are new clients that you’re trying to bring it on board are like I’m just so overwhelmed maybe I’ll just stay with my crappy thing I have over here because I’m Having a hard time being able to get the bandwidth in my brain to be able to make another decision today and that’s a really interesting point for us to be at for anyone is being out there running a business of like current clients want it better new clients aren’t moving because

They’re stuck in minutia, they’re stuck in overwhelm, they’re stuck in doom scrolling on TikTok all day or whatever that thing is, right? And it’s real. I mean, give you some examples of like how Apple’s been dealing with this, but it’s really impacting the business landscape in a really significant way. And Chattie P.T.’s only been around like, you know, less than two years. Can you imagine what it’s gonna be like when it’s a five-year-old?

Rob – Intrigue Media (05:33)
Mm.

Mm.

Chris Dyer (05:36)
Right?

I mean, it’s gonna, it’s really gonna be impacting everyone as it saturates down the level from, you know, your people may not be, you know, there’s like tech companies, it’s impacting in one way. And then like, how do you have like regular mom and pop shops? Like, how is it gonna impact them? That’s starting to saturate down to them now.

Rob – Intrigue Media (05:54)
So you’re thinking, you’re saying that the, ⁓ a huge constraint right now in the face of many entrepreneurs is a convergence of information overwhelm and a pressure to make things better. And so it’s actually tough to fund the improvement because we’re not onboarding and building a company that can grow. And so then if I, you look at the entrepreneur then, and, and bring it back to the idea of like culture and people, what do we need to start looking at as leaders to navigate?

through this convergence.

Chris Dyer (06:21)
Well, in any realm, whether it’s you as the leader, you as the salesperson, as the, whatever your role is, I think if you can do two things really well, you’re gonna have a job for long time. One is be the sense maker. Can you simplify things, make them easier, make them clearer for everyone involved? So if you’re the salesperson, can you make it as simple and clear as possible for that potential buyer to buy from you?

and eliminate as many obstacles and variables and extra things they have to think about in order for them just to say yes. So it sort of like turns the upsell into a really big part later on. But like if someone came to you and like, hey, I need you to my lawn, cool, let’s get you signed up, we’ll start mowing your lawn. And then we need to worry about, well, do you need all these other services that we have?

what we were typically doing is say, he wants to mow your lawn, but we also do all these other things and we were trying to sell them on all this stuff in the front. And what we’re seeing now is that people just, they’re not saying yes to anything when we’re giving them too much. that’s like a, that’s being a sense maker, right, is really, really important. And the second thing is if you’re as a leader, you’re gonna have to really help people be able to navigate change. Like that is your new job.

is to be helping people with change. Because their job is gonna change, everything’s gonna change, everything is already changing. If you’re saying, it’s not changing for me right now, it’s coming. Like if it just hasn’t come to your level yet or to your industry or your job, it’s coming. And so those are two really big areas I think we can really help.

Rob – Intrigue Media (08:02)
Yeah. I think that, I mean, those are kind of timeless principles as the world has been evolving and becoming more complex over time. Maybe it’s just rapidly doing so more so right now than it has in a while. but the idea of being a sense maker and now helping navigate change, those do seem like they’re stacked on top of each other. and I think that’s one of the biggest things that we’ve seen in terms of companies that actually figure out how to scale is they simplify the complexity.

And so then make it clear for people and understand what they should be focused on. So they’re not doing a whole bunch of random things while they’re out, you know, at work. and, know, they’re trying to do their best, but they end up putting their attention maybe in the wrong direction. So if you come back to the, you know, the leader in this instance, that needs to help simplify what’s going on and navigate change, like help people navigate change. What are some like tactical approaches that people should consider when they’re looking at this thing right now?

Chris Dyer (08:54)
So what I’ve been really advising people to do is to think about it in this concept that I like to call shrink the loop. So in anything that we are doing, I think it’s a loop, right? So, hey, I wanna start a business, how do I actually start it? And now I’m actually running the business, right? That’s a loop. Hey, we wanna go find five new clients that we start that process and we find the fifth client and onboard them and now we’ve closed that loop.

We need to go and change how we invoice people. Whatever the thing is that we’re trying to do, how do we go from starting point to we are now finished in doing the thing as quickly as possible? And with all of the meetings and all of the emails and all of the things that are happening in the world to impact this, what we’re seeing is these loops just get bigger and bigger and bigger.

or that leaders don’t make decisions, or we don’t empower people to make the decisions to get the things done they need to get done. And so that really impacts our ability to actually create progress. And so if we aren’t shrinking the loop, right, then we are stagnant and we’re tricking ourselves into believing that we’re productive or that things are going well because we are running around.

doing things, but we’re not necessarily creating progress, if that makes sense.

Rob – Intrigue Media (10:18)
Yeah, for sure. mean, the idea of accelerating the rate of decision making is kind of like the, I mean, the rate of decision making in an organization is almost the pace of the company.

Chris Dyer (10:26)
Right, right. And so sometimes that’s empowerment. Sometimes that’s figuring out what success really looks like. What are our obstacles? What would happen if we did fail? know, kind of starting reverse engineering. What if we fail? What does that look like? And coming up with that. But what I’m seeing mostly is that people are in way too many meetings, sending way too many emails, and waiting on their boss to finally make a decision. And if we could just get rid of that. Right.

Rob – Intrigue Media (10:50)
Yeah, that sounds like sounds like a great environment.

All right. So let’s break it down then. Cause I mean, that is definitely rampant. I don’t care what industry you’re in. and, and, and I’ve, I’ve never heard anybody say, we don’t have enough meetings in our business. So then how do we start navigating something like that so that we can, you know, kind of make it more efficient and streamline stuff, empower people, get out of all these crazy meetings. We talk about nothing.

Chris Dyer (11:14)
Well, the first thing we can do is create a team charter. And so a team charter will tell us what is it that we do on our team or on our company. If you’re a small company, you might have one charter. If you have a big company, you might have a charter per team. But hold on one second. I have a little visitor in my office. Give me one second.

Rob – Intrigue Media (11:30)
You do your thing, man. We can pause and come back.

Yeah, you’re right. You’re good, Chris. Don’t worry about

Chris Dyer (11:35)
So sorry. It’s 7.20 here this morning and my grandson is asking me for scissors. so, anyway.

Rob – Intrigue Media (11:42)
Yeah, you know what? Cherish the moments, man. That’s

just magic. Where are you?

Chris Dyer (11:47)
I’m in Orange County, California, so.

Rob – Intrigue Media (11:49)
Yeah, it’s a beautiful place and to have a grand kid coming in looking for scissors a beautiful thing.

Chris Dyer (11:53)
Yeah, it is. All right, so let’s go back here. I’ll add.

Rob – Intrigue Media (11:57)
I was saying,

we were just getting back into like, how do we get rid of this craziness in terms of meetings and let these people actually have some fun and kind of believe in themselves so they can go make some change.

Chris Dyer (12:06)
Yeah,

so if we create a team charter, which allows us to determine what are the rules for our team? And that could be like, hey, from nine to five, that’s when we work. And then at five, like we don’t bother anybody. We don’t send texts, we don’t send messages. Like we don’t expect anyone to reply if we do need to send that message. Like there’s a really hard start and stop to our work. Or maybe it’s.

different maybe our work doesn’t allow for that our work could be very asynchronous and maybe like some people are working while other people are off and there needs to be this like general like we have to figure out what the rules are right so we are respecting people’s time and energy and they understand hey if the boss sends me an email at nine o’clock at night because that’s the boss’s schedule the boss doesn’t expect me to write back though at nine o’clock at night so i’m not sitting there feeling anxiety because i’m i have an email from my boss that i gotta go

Rob – Intrigue Media (12:42)
Mm.

Chris Dyer (12:59)
I don’t get to do books with my kids, I gotta go respond to an email. The team charter is like, listen, when you’re off, you’re off. When you come back in, then that’s the cool time to respond. So we create some of those boundaries, right? Of like, when is it? And honestly, my sales team, they were insane. They were like, our team charter is we answer all the time. Like we wanna be totally, they were like never off. Like that’s what worked for them. Like they wanna jump in and help and it was totally cool.

Rob – Intrigue Media (13:03)
Right.

Chris Dyer (13:27)
All right, but like my customer service team, they were like, listen, at five o’clock when I shut my laptop, like unless the house is on fire, like you don’t, do not contact me. Like I am off. Like I need time to decompress from listening to people complain all day. Right? Cool. But like the charters were different. And then, you know, inside those charters, it’s like coming up with what are the rules of engagement and meetings? How are we going to act? How are the meetings set up?

Do we use different types of meetings? What are our roles in those meetings? You know, how long are they? And then, then you move into a, I like to do a quarterly audit on meetings. So every quarter, what meetings need to die? What meetings need to die and go away? I mean, seriously, like we are, so many people are in repeating meetings that just didn’t ever die because like, well, we were doing a meeting about the Salazar account and then.

You know, like we just kept going because it was a good time to like talk about everyone else’s clients. And so like we just kept going with this meeting. was like at this unofficial Thursday meeting at three o’clock that we just keep having. No, that needs to die. What meetings can be shortened? What meetings can be adjusted? What meeting? Are there meetings that certain people don’t need to be in anymore? Like it doesn’t make sense for them to be in those meetings. They can just get a report. Like they know what’s going on, but they don’t need to be in this meeting. There’s like

Rob – Intrigue Media (14:45)
Yeah, yeah.

Chris Dyer (14:46)
three people who are actively talking and there’s five more of them just sitting and listening, just in case there’s something they need to add. Bullcrap, get those five people out. Like, you know what I Those three people can keep meeting and let them free, right? And so like, it’s just, it’s that kind of maintenance that we’ve got to do because people are reporting that their number one and number two activities at work are meetings and email.

Rob – Intrigue Media (14:57)
Set them free.

Yeah. Which is, it’s by definition not doing the work. Yeah.

Chris Dyer (15:13)
It’s disgusting.

It’s not doing the work. Now,

of course we need to meet and collaborate sometimes. Of course we need to send meetings, sometimes. But the other thing too is then to create a single source of communication, a single source of truth. So where does that exist? And I think email is a terrible place to do that. ⁓ We did it in Slack, right? So that was good for it. You could do it in Teams, you could do it in Slack. But if you have a place where there is a room,

Rob – Intrigue Media (15:34)
Hmm. For lots of reasons.

Chris Dyer (15:45)
and then people are in these rooms and you can go and like ask something, report something, update on something. Well then everyone can see it when they come back to work, when they’re ready to look at and digest. They’re not sitting there looking at a thousand emails and then trying to organize those thoughts and whatever. Like I go to Slack right now and I type in a couple words and it tells me, find every message about that, every document about that. And it’s like very easy for me to go back and jump into something if I’m, you know. So.

There are ways to make it better for people. And again, back to that team charter, then I can tell my Slack at five o’clock to stop sending me notifications. And I can go inactive, and then when I come back in the next morning, I can get caught up with whatever I’ve missed. But I’m not feeling the anxiety or the FOMO or whatever. And that grates on people over time.

Rob – Intrigue Media (16:35)
Yeah, it’s really interesting you bring this up because there was, you know, a couple of years now, I would say communication has popped up as like an issue here at our organization. And then, you know, just like when you buy a new car, you see it everywhere. When I hear people bring up something on a consistent basis and talk to people about it and start to see it everywhere. And it’s like, for a lot of founders, entrepreneurs and owners that say run say five to $10 million businesses, like, communication is fine. I don’t know what you’re talking about. What are you complaining about?

But it’s because they’re getting fed everything anytime they ask for it, anytime they need it, there’s a bunch of people that are going to drop stuff and do it. It’s not system, it’s not systematic or institutionalized, but I think it’s like this really interesting intangible that’s so important because of communication streamline, everybody can run a lot faster. And so then when it comes to like these team charters and these quarterly audits and meetings and the single source of truth, it really seems like you’re shaping communication throughout the organization as like a priority.

And so like, what kind of led you to see this as like, you know, we got to get this stuff figured out first, and then we can start working on other things. Why is it so important from your point of view?

Chris Dyer (17:31)
Mm-hmm.

Well, back in 2009 when I realized that my culture and way I had things set up wasn’t working for us. And so we, I went on this, you know, long journey, uh, with, with, without Ayahuasca to go figure out, um, you know, I’ve read every book and had talked to every person on an eyebrow and podcasts for 10 years and like, you know, tried to digest as much content as I could about what made organizations great or teams great and all of that. But.

Rob – Intrigue Media (17:55)
you

Chris Dyer (18:11)
Every time I would learn things, we went back and did experiments inside of our own organization to figure out what would work. And my ultimate goal was, as the CEO, I’ve kind of dropped the idea that was my role to essentially be the manager of managers. That’s chief executive officer. I’m the chief of the executive. I mean, it’s not much in the title.

It’s much, you actually look at other people’s titles, like the chief revenue officer, and it’s very clear and a much broader thing, right? You’re in charge of all of revenue. I’m in charge of the executives. That’s what my title says. I’m in charge of the other executives. And so I said, ⁓ screw that. I think my job is actually to be the chief experimenting orchestrator. Right? And so it’s my job to orchestrate all of these experiments. And some of these experiments were specifically around how do we help people?

Rob – Intrigue Media (18:55)
Nice.

Chris Dyer (19:04)
do their job better? How do we remove friction? How do we remove the stuff they don’t like? The stuff that bothers them? The things they go home and complain about to their spouse or partner or friends or whatever? How do we change that? And what we found was that, again, customer service was complaining about, why am I getting text messages from all my coworkers at 7 p.m. when I’m trying to get my kids in the bath?

and I’m getting text messages about the Johnson account. that’s, for that team, like that’s just not cool. Like that bothers me. Excuse me. And so we can fix that, right? How do we fix that? Well, let’s come up with the rules of the game and okay, we’ll come up with the rules of the game and that works for them. Then like, cool, look, does that work for the other departments? And again, those experiments started working. We did other stuff that like we tried and everyone looked at me like, And then like, you know, it just didn’t work. And so we tossed that out. Okay.

And then people got, were good about doing experiments with us because they saw if it worked, we really made it work. And if it wasn’t working, we would toss it out quickly and not, you know, make them painfully keep trying to experiment on something that didn’t ⁓ so that was really the intent of trying to find these things. And I think the biggest thing we discovered was that meetings was hands down the most complained about thing. That was the biggest issue, whether it was.

Rob – Intrigue Media (20:13)
Mm.

Chris Dyer (20:29)
The communication wasn’t right in the meeting. Maybe it was that we were in too many meetings. Maybe it was they couldn’t get their work done. Maybe it was that no one ever actually made a freaking decision. Right? And so why am in this meeting if I don’t make, or I don’t know how I’m supposed to act. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do. You’re telling me you want me to step up and be a leader or do these things. I show up to this meeting and Rob won’t shut up. Rob gets in the call and he talks for an entire hour and then leaves and you’re telling me you want me be a leader? Like I.

You know what mean? These sort of examples. And so we actually created lots of different meeting types. So we created meetings with different names, with different rules that set the tone so people knew exactly how to act and how to show up and how to be successful in that meeting. Instead of, hey, show up to this generic 30 minute meeting I just called. And with…

Rob – Intrigue Media (21:19)
Love it.

With

no agenda.

Chris Dyer (21:26)
with no agenda or some crappy agenda we all know is like, you know, whatever. Yeah, agenda, talk about the thing. okay, well, that’s, right. So, and then expect them to know how to navigate that. They don’t.

Rob – Intrigue Media (21:39)
Well, I think

this goes back to being the sense maker and helping people navigate this change as a leader. Like it’s, really is tied to this idea and to take the time, like I bet there’s some people listening to this being like, so what I’m going to go create a nomenclature and for different meeting types, I’m going to then build a whole bunch of rules for what you do and how you act and how you be successful in each meeting type. Then I’m going to get the team to build different charters. How do I got time to do that? And so I just want

If you just take a second to help people maybe reframe their thinking around why it’s so important, especially as a CEO or an owner or a founder, to take the time to simplify this stuff and make it more clear.

Chris Dyer (22:19)
So let me fast forward to the end, right? When, I don’t know, using the romantic comedies thing, when the guy gets the girl, like whatever, like let me tell you like what’s actually gonna happen. When I did all this stuff, that’s when we started winning Best Places to Work. When I did all this stuff, that’s when we were growing rapidly and we were a fastest growing company five times with the Ink Magazine, right? Like.

The things that happened as a result of me taking the time to do this were fundamentally and overwhelmingly positive to my business. We were never a best place to work prior to that. We were never growing rapidly prior to that. We did okay, but never the kind of like, the thing that you would, I just, I wish my business would double. Can you imagine if my business was double what it was today? Yes, I can actually give that to you now, right? Go fix your freaking meetings.

Rob – Intrigue Media (23:03)
Mm.

Chris Dyer (23:16)
You don’t need the million dollar client to walk in the door. You need to go fix your crappy environment, right? And your people are actually gonna help you get there. So it’s really a matter of realizing that you, yes, it’s gonna take a little bit of extra time right now, but that little extra time now creates so much more time and space later on.

Rob – Intrigue Media (23:42)
Mmm.

Chris Dyer (23:44)
You know, it’s like, if I told you you could either walk to work or you could wash your car and then drive the car, like, it’s a pain in the butt to have to wash the car, but like, you’re still gonna get there faster by driving in the car than you are walking 10 miles. Do you know what mean?

Rob – Intrigue Media (24:01)
Well, yeah,

totally. There’s this, you the one thing is a really cool concept. What’s the one thing I need to do today so that, you know, any year from now, like what’s way I need to get done so that everything else becomes easier and or unnecessary. And it just seems like this focus is like a primary idea around this. How do I take friction out? How do I make it so that the whole organization can run faster? And so then you got these charters, you got the audits, you’ve got meeting types with different,

rules and then you’ve got single source of truth. I’m assuming there’s just like you’ve ran all these experiments. And then the other thing, yeah, here, I’ll leave that one. What else is there that you want to share? Cause I’m to come back to this experiment idea.

Chris Dyer (24:40)
Yeah, I’m telling you what else, you Oh, the other big thing that we did is we needed to collect a lot of data and figure out where the problems really were. So when we first started this, it was easy because there was like, I don’t know, if I’m gonna use a medical example, right? If I’m gonna like, someone walks in the door and like they.

they’re sick. I mean, it’s pretty obvious what’s happening. But once you fix that initial thing and you realize there’s like 15 other things wrong with the patient, that takes a little bit more work, right? So the first thing is easy. The first one or two things are easy to fix and figure out. But how do you get down to the deeper things that we don’t know about? And so I created this idea of a one question survey. We ditched the annual survey.

and we started asking our employees one question every week. And once we got going and we started showing them what we were doing with this, I mean, I was getting 95 % response rates from employees every single week. It was very rare for someone to not super engaged, right? So, and I would ask them tough questions and I would ask them fun questions and I would ask them silly questions sometimes just to keep it light, but like…

Rob – Intrigue Media (25:43)
Epic. Yes, super engaged.

Chris Dyer (25:57)
I ask them about 48 questions a year.

Rob – Intrigue Media (26:00)
Okay, so it’s not the same question every week, it’s you’re changing it up.

Chris Dyer (26:03)
Changing it up. And I would go two or three months and say, listen, I’m the only person that’s ever gonna see these answers. I’m gonna repeat what I heard in general as a summary, but no one’s ever gonna see your specific answer. And then I would go two or three months and say, every answer that you put on into this survey, I’m sharing with the entire company. Right? Like we’re going full transparency here. So there’s, know.

If I’m gonna ask a tough question, I might ask a tough question, I might ask a fun question. Like, hey, who in the company is like killing it for us? Like who should we be recognizing? Who’s the big star that we don’t, we haven’t realized? And if everyone’s writing Rob in there and then I send it back out and you see your name in there, I mean, that’s just like, that’s just, that’s huge, right? And if you don’t see your name in there and you’re asking that question of like, well, why doesn’t anyone see me as someone who’s valuable? Why doesn’t anybody see me as someone who’s showing up for them?

Let’s have that conversation. Like, how are you showing up? Like, what’s going on here? So, but the key to this was that we would ask the question on Wednesday. They had until Friday to answer. And by Tuesday, I would tell them a summary. This is what I heard and this is what I’m gonna do about it.

Rob – Intrigue Media (27:16)
So you got a five business day loop.

Chris Dyer (27:18)
Yep. And then on Wednesday, new question, right? And then on the monthly, we did a monthly standup for 30 minutes with the entire company with thousands of people, you know, logging in from all around the country. And I would again repeat, here were the questions we asked since the last meeting. It might have been three, might be four, might be five, whatever the cadence was. And again, this is a new update on what we’ve done since then. So I’m constantly telling you, and sometimes it’s, this is what you told me.

Rob – Intrigue Media (27:21)
Yeah, yeah.

Chris Dyer (27:47)
Yeah, it sucks and I can’t do anything about it.

Rob – Intrigue Media (27:51)
Yeah, sometimes shit stays effed.

Chris Dyer (27:53)
Yeah, and here’s why, let me explain to you, and this is what the law says, and this is what, know, our hands are tied for this reason, or whatever, right? Or we’re working on a new solution, but it’s two years out, or whatever. mean, but at least I’m communicating that. And I’m listening, they’re hearing me, I’m shrinking that loop for them, they feel heard. And so they also feel empowered that if they actually put their neck out and say something, someone’s actually gonna listen.

Rob – Intrigue Media (28:22)
Yeah, that’s cool.

Chris Dyer (28:22)
And so we started creating all these micro improvements after that. Then we started finding out these really small things that were really interesting that we would have never seen.

Rob – Intrigue Media (28:31)
And so the questions that you’re asking were based on issues you’re experiencing, things you’re curious about, like how did you go about deciding what you wanted to get feedback on?

Chris Dyer (28:41)
Sometimes it was based on what we were seeing in the responses. We might want to keep poking at things. We might want to revisit things after a month or two to see if we get an improvement in what we’re seeing.

Rob – Intrigue Media (28:52)
I see. Yeah. Okay. Come back to it. So what was the, what was the first one? Do you remember?

Chris Dyer (28:54)
Right, but like…

Around the very, think the first one I might’ve done something really positive just to kind of kick it off, but like pretty early on I asked this question and I continue to ask it every quarter. And I always thought that I was gonna get to the point where there were no responses, know, there no criticisms there. And I never, it never happened. And the question was, is how am I as your CEO getting in your way?

Rob – Intrigue Media (29:19)
Yeah.

Chris Dyer (29:24)
I mean, anyone who’s like listening to this podcast, do you have the guts to go ask your people that question right now? How am I as your boss or as your leader or as your team leader, whatever that is, getting in your way? Because they come back and tell you like, I need, you’re not making decisions fast enough. I need you to hire more people. Like I don’t have the, right. We’re this client, this subset of clients is always pissed off. We got to figure that out. Like whatever the thing is, like I, need you to help. We need you to do more over here.

Rob – Intrigue Media (29:42)
You’re not listening to this thing.

Chris Dyer (29:54)
You know, and so it was like this gut check every three months of like, okay, this is the time. They’re gonna say, no, Chris, you’re amazing. You know, there’s never gonna be a problem. Nope. Nope.

Rob – Intrigue Media (29:54)
Love that.

You’re like, this is

the magic one. You know, it’s awesome. We’ve done anonymous CEO feedback here for a while, but I gotta tell you, it can sting. But it’s also probably the most valuable piece of, the most valuable thing that’s helped me grow as a human, let alone a CEO. Yeah, that’s awesome. So I will.

First of all, the question piece and that whole idea of shrinking the loop and getting feedback and communicating back. that’s another thing a lot of, a lot of people, think, you know, get halfway there, where they do get feedback, but then they kind of go work behind the scenes and then don’t communicate back with like what they heard and what they’re working on, which is, think, super critical. But one of the things you brought up is this idea of experiment. And I think it’s kind of magical because a lot of people in my experience anyway, when we say something like, Hey, we’re going to test something. They’re like, okay, we’ll let’s, test it.

But if we’re like, we’re to change this thing, you’re like, I don’t know about change in this. Uh, that means I might not be able to do what I do well, or it might impact me. But this idea of test versus change seems to have been grabbed a lot easier. And then you’re using experiment seemingly on a similar principle, but what, what kind of drew you to the idea of like running experiments, um, in like these, you know, whatever shorter loops.

Chris Dyer (31:22)
I mean, was mostly because we didn’t really know what the answer was. You know, we knew what the problem was, but we didn’t really know what the answer was. Certainly there are a lot better books now, but back when I was doing this in 2009, like there was a lot of times when I would go and I couldn’t find a book that would address the thing I was trying to figure out. Now there’s millions of books, so maybe I just couldn’t find it, you know, Track GPT might’ve been really helpful for me back then.

Rob – Intrigue Media (31:49)
Sure.

Chris Dyer (31:50)
you know, but I was like, hey, this is the problem. And I’m talking to my CEO friends and I’m reading books and I’m like, I can’t figure it out. Well, let’s just go run some experiments. Like, let’s go, let’s come up with some ideas on what we could do differently. Let’s ask our people and have them be a part of the idea process. But they have ideas. They’ve done it differently in other jobs and other things. So like, let’s figure that out. And to your point, when we presented it to like, hey, let’s try something. Let’s measure it.

And then let’s come back and talk about like, how did it work versus what we’re doing now? Like people were always pretty receptive. ⁓ and the people that were resistant to experiments didn’t last very long. They went and found new jobs, like people who just want everything to stay exactly the same and never ever, ever change. And that’s not really the kind of people I wanted anyways in my organization. there are some value in people who want things to want to create steadiness and, and, and keep tradition and all of that. There is a place for that.

Rob – Intrigue Media (32:24)
Mmm

Mm-hmm.

Chris Dyer (32:48)
in our organizations, but I can’t have them be resistant to any change. And so the people that were so far to that extreme, they just didn’t last because they were just like, you guys are running another experiment this week? you know, I’m…

Rob – Intrigue Media (33:01)
Yeah, well, and

it’s stressful for some folks that aren’t wired that way, right? They’re just like, my God, man, this is insanity over here. You’re always changing everything. And that’s OK.

Chris Dyer (33:09)
And we weren’t necessarily

always changing things. know, and I think this is the thing is we were making it better for people. These experiments were to help their lives be easier, to make their job better, to make their… And we checked it. So it wasn’t like, you know, I’m saying, hey, what’s the best color of, you know, whatever. It wasn’t like we were just coming up with like crazy design things that they were just like…

Rob – Intrigue Media (33:20)
And if it didn’t work, you chucked it.

Chris Dyer (33:33)
this change doesn’t matter to me. These were all changes that were in the what’s in it for me university realm, right? This is like directly makes their life better or worse. And so it was pretty rare to have someone that just didn’t want to do it.

Rob – Intrigue Media (33:39)
Mm.

Yeah, well, it’s interesting too, because like, you you, you, take this focus on how do you enhance the human experience? ⁓ and you know, whatever meetings as an example, and then all of a sudden there’s less of them and people are, you know, like, that was a good change. And then all of sudden the company’s moving faster. And then all of a sudden you’re growing more, but you didn’t put any focus on product development or sales or, know, so it’s, it’s just, it’s an interesting perspective on how you focus on reducing friction in the organizational environment. ⁓

And so like, as we kind of come to like a wrap up on this whole idea, you know, when someone starting out as, again, a founder, say they’re three, five million, six million, whatever, and they actually still have like a functional role in making the needle move inside the organization, but they want to start switching more to working completely on the organization like you’re describing. How do we help them see how to do that?

Chris Dyer (34:44)
How do we help employees see how to do that? ⁓

Rob – Intrigue Media (34:46)
No, like the owners and founders, like a lot of people listening

to this are running say, you know, 2 million, 6 million, 12 million, 15 million, 50 million dollar companies. And they still have like a functional role in terms of like sales and operations. And, maybe it’s like finance and legal, depending on the type of organization they’re in. And they’re like, you know, I really, really want to do that, but I still have this functional role that I need to take care of. And so they’re in the, they’re in the shift. Their mindset is shifting from like, really, I’m working less in the business, but I’m still there.

And, and, then you’re moving into a point where it’s like, no, it’s, this is all I do is make the organization better. And, but that is a transition and they might want to do it and, and they might like, they have the will, but they’re just can’t see it yet in terms of like how, and I’m just curious if there was one tip that you could share with people about making, you know, that commitment towards improving the whole organization, completely working on the business, what would you say to them?

Chris Dyer (35:43)
Yeah, I mean, if there are parts of the business that they’re working in where they are uniquely talented and they are uniquely driving the positive outcomes for the business, then can they go do more of that? I mean, that’s great too. I for years kept doing the finance. just, because it was easier for me just to do that, had a bookkeeper, but I was sort of acting as the quasi CFO. I hate that role. I hate it.

Rob – Intrigue Media (36:06)
Mm-hmm.

you

Chris Dyer (36:10)
Right? But it was like, I don’t know why I’m gonna afford bringing in a CFO and blah, blah. You know, and so finally I just gave up and it was like, no, I need to bring in a person who can really do this and take it off. I hate doing this. It is a part of my job. This will free me up to go. And I was still like, but this is expensive and am I gonna regret doing this? it too hard? But the moment I freed myself from those activities that A, I’m not that good at, B, I just don’t bring me joy. you know.

That person did amazing things I’d never thought about that really helped us. And then I had the energy and the passion to go do more of the things that I love doing. So I think the one maybe like really simple way to put this for the people that you articulated to me is that what you focus on grows. So if you want to focus on

being in all the crap and all the problems and all the stuff like that stuff just going to get worse. mean, that’s just how the universe works. Like you want to go. Right. And so if you want your people to be happier, we’ll go focus on that. You want to, you want more sales, go focus on that. You know, like.

Rob – Intrigue Media (37:10)
Yeah, where the focus goes, energy flows, right?

Well, and

it’s really interesting too, because I think what you’re saying has a lot of merit in a lot of ways. Because I know I speak to people all the time. And they’re like, we got to grow, we got to grow, we got to grow. But they have all these issues, they have all these headaches. And so it’s like, they’re really just going to grow issues and headaches. I mean, there might be some top line that comes with it, and maybe a bit more profit that comes with it. But at the end of the day, if your stuff isn’t running quickly and with less friction, then you’re just growing yourself into more issues and potentially like blood pressure.

Chris Dyer (37:36)
Mm-hmm.

Rob – Intrigue Media (37:49)
Um, and, and so that it’s like, um, this, this idea of trying to simplify all things coming back to the first kind of part of our conversation, um, as a, as a, as an owner, CEO, founder, leader, it doesn’t matter what capacity and what do you say to somebody who has got it in their head? have to grow, but there’s so many issues.

that are around them all the time. And they’re in this like duality of growth versus fix. Growth versus fix.

Chris Dyer (38:26)
Well, a lot of time, for me, it was once I fixed the things that weren’t working for my people, that were getting in their way to doing their jobs, or maybe fixing the things that was causing my clients to be, to have friction and to not be happy. Like when I went back and thought about how do I improve, run these experiments and find ways to improve the business, growth took care of itself, right? But I also wasn’t the rainmaker.

Now I know founders, they are the rainmakers. They walk into a room and they come back out with 15 people who’ve just signed up for the business. like, if that’s who you are, you need to, maybe you need to go do more of that. You need somebody else that you hire in the business to go run these experiments and try to make things better. Maybe you need somebody else to do that, right? Again, it’s going back to what are your strengths and what’s your real, what’s your number one value to the organization. know other founders, they’re really good at the invention part.

Rob – Intrigue Media (39:13)
Yeah.

Chris Dyer (39:24)
They’re really good at programming or inventing or like the product and like, and so they need somebody else running the ops and somebody else running the revenue part of it. So you got to be doing a majority of your day around what you’re generally really good at. And if that’s not the case, then you, you, you’re just misaligned, right?

Rob – Intrigue Media (39:43)
Yeah, well, and I think you bring up a really good point too, because like the idea of being a chief experiment officer obviously suits a superpower that Chris has. And so you just leaned into it and had an opportunity to speak and write about it. So on that note, if somebody wanted to dive into this topic more, where would they get resources from you to be able to go do that?

Chris Dyer (39:50)
Mm-hmm.

Well, if you’re interested in those meetings that we talked about, the different meeting types, or if you want a starter list of 25 questions, if you want to start doing that one question survey, you can text 33777 and just put my name, Chris, as the message, and you’ll get back a PDF with all that information on there for you. If you want to hang out on any of the social media channels, I’m on all of them, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, especially…

⁓ I do a ton of content there or you can go to chrisdyer.com and I have a few books, Power Company Culture and also Remote Work. Even if your people aren’t, we say remote, like if your people are out in doing jobs out of an office, that’s also remote. It’s like the oldest remote job of all time, right? I always think it’s funny, we’re like, I don’t know about this remote work, this new thing. It’s like.

Rob – Intrigue Media (40:47)
Yeah, a hundred percent. That’s like their entire workforce is doing that.

Chris Dyer (40:57)
The doctors coming to your home was like remote work, back, know, little house in the prairie. Yeah, exactly. So I have two books that I think would be really helpful in trying to figure out how to leverage that human side of it. And we talked about all of the different tools, all the different things we did, and really specific tactical ideas that they can use.

Rob – Intrigue Media (41:00)
Yeah, all field services remote work.

Cool, and then because people were listening and probably didn’t understand that they can actually just text a simple number, Chris, and get a bunch of resources. What was the number again?

Chris Dyer (41:27)
It was 33777. That’s the phone number you put in the text message. And then for the actual message, you just type in Chris.

Rob – Intrigue Media (41:32)
Yeah.

Yeah, that’s awesome. So 33777 typing Chris, and then you get the meeting types and that was a 2425 starting questions for the weekly question. Epic and then any events you got coming up where someone might be able to check you out and when you’re speaking.

Chris Dyer (41:45)
Yeah, 25, yep.

Uh, I’ve got a bunch of speaking gigs, but I don’t think any of them are public. They’re all like in association events or I’m working with, like I’m doing a lot of SKO events, sales kickoffs for Q1 is like big SKO season. So yeah, working with a lot of Yeah. Help their sales teams, you know, go in, uh, be the sense making sales person.

Rob – Intrigue Media (42:07)
Sure, yeah, that makes sense. Rally the troops.

Epic. So chrisdyer.com, all resources available and links out to all socials. One last one. What speaker author, you know, somebody that kind of hit inspired you that you think people might want to check out.

Chris Dyer (42:29)
Boy, there’s a lot of directions to go there. I’ll tell you some of the books that had the biggest impact on me early on in kind of formulating some of this. There’s a book called The Art of Gathering that’s really great. the author Priya, I always forget her last name. She really talks about how to create.

Rob – Intrigue Media (42:40)
Mm.

Chris Dyer (42:49)
really intentional great moments for people when they come together. Like so in meetings, client events, whatever. mean, like she, she like got, you know, like Middle East peace, you know, meetings together for like leaders to come in and actually decide on things. And so, but she really pushed on some of my preconceived ideas about what a good meeting looks like and what a good party looks like. And, you know, it was really helpful again to think about how do you get people to come together in a way that’s really positive.

Rob – Intrigue Media (43:19)
Well, and you don’t really hear people talk about that idea ever. The art of gathering. Love it.

Chris Dyer (43:25)
Art of Gathering,

great, great book. And probably, mean, anything Adam Grant, you’re gonna be pretty sad. think Give and Take is the best one to read. ⁓ And then if you feel like you are in an existential crisis, if you’re trying to figure out like really kind of what direction you wanna go, this is kind of bleeds into personal and business and all of that.

Rob – Intrigue Media (43:34)
No doubt.

Chris Dyer (43:51)
I think it’s a great book. It’s essentially Buddhism repackaged for millennials. And I say that lovingly because I enjoy the book. I’m not being a jerk, but it’s the subtle art of not giving a f… You know what I’m going to say, okay? All right. Subtle Art of Not Giving a F**k is the name of the book. And it’s great because it’s old Eastern wisdom just sort of like repackaged in a way that’s for today. ⁓

Rob – Intrigue Media (44:02)
Yeah, you can say it. You’re safe place, buddy.

Yeah, that’s great.

Chris Dyer (44:16)
And it’s a great book. And I think that can really help you figure out like me as a leader, as a CEO, a founder, whoever, like, what is my purpose? What am I trying to do here? What is my direction? Because if you don’t got that figured out, it’s really hard to be leading people and telling them to row the ship when you keep changing the direction of the ship all the time, because you don’t know what the heck your your deal is.

Rob – Intrigue Media (44:33)
No doubt.

You’re the best. Thank you so much for doing this and sharing and everybody for listening to another episode of the I Am Landscape Growth Podcast.

Chris Dyer (44:42)
Thanks, Rob.