I’m Glenn Gow, The Scaling Executive Coach and host of The Scaling Executive Podcast. I talked with Dan Turner, President and CEO of Xperigo, about the trust philosophy he says is the core of the company’s culture.
When a CEO extends trust to a team member by default instead of waiting for that trust to be earned, Dan Turner holds that the person feels like they belong immediately and works harder not to let the organization down, the approach behind Xperigo earning recognition as a three-time winner of Canada’s Most Admired Corporate Culture under Turner’s leadership.
Turner has spent more than 12 years at Xperigo, rising from Vice President of Business Development to COO and ultimately to CEO. Under his leadership, the company has earned the Shell Mobility Partner of the Year award, ranks among the Top 50 Great Places to Work in Canada, including specific honors for its environment for women, and now leads a team of more than 200 professionals.
This episode is for CEOs and new leaders deciding whether to make people earn trust over time or extend it by default from day one.
Key Takeaways
- CEOs who extend trust to new team members by default, rather than making them earn it over time, create a sense of belonging that motivates people to perform, the approach Dan Turner credits with building Xperigo into a three-time winner of Canada’s Most Admired Corporate Culture.
- Culture and revenue growth aren’t a tradeoff to balance: trust-driven culture motivates people not to let leadership down, while operational success and growth in turn reinforce pride in that same culture, a dynamic Turner says shows up in Xperigo’s annual engagement survey, where roughly 89 percent of team members agree the culture drives their personal performance higher.
- The hardest leadership shift from COO to CEO is letting go of being the “doer” who owns everything personally and instead trusting people and process to deliver operational results, freeing the CEO to focus on strategy, vision, and people.
- Xperigo treats AI as a tool to support frontline agents during high-stress customer calls, feeding real-time information and suggested empathetic language during live conversations, rather than replacing the human agent who provides reassurance to customers in unsafe or inconvenient situations.
How CEOs Should Build Trust with a New Team
Turner’s rule is simple to state and hard for many leaders to practice: “I will trust everybody until they give me a reason not to.” He contrasts this with the more common approach of waiting for someone to prove themselves before extending trust, which he says leaves new team members feeling like they don’t quite belong yet, even when no one intends to send that signal.
The approach isn’t a substitute for rigorous hiring. Xperigo still puts candidates through a thorough assessment before bringing them on. But Turner draws a hard line at what happens after someone is hired: “If you trusted them enough to bring them into the organization, then you should trust them to do the job that you’ve hired them to do.” For leaders who find that difficult, he suggests a middle path, occasionally checking in to confirm things are on track, without slipping into oversight that undermines the trust being extended.
The payoff, in Turner’s experience, runs in the opposite direction of what a worried CEO might expect. Trusting someone immediately tends to make them want to deliver for the person who trusted them. Micromanaging the same person tends to make them feel like they have something to prove. Turner sees this as the foundation everything else at Xperigo is built on.
How CEOs Should Stop Balancing Culture Against Revenue Growth
Turner rejects the premise that culture and operational performance are two things a CEO has to balance against each other. “I don’t think there’s a balance that you need to manage,” he said. Instead, he describes the relationship as a flywheel: a trust-driven culture motivates people not to let Turner or the leadership team down, and when operational results follow, the growth and profitability create pride that reinforces the same culture that produced them.
Xperigo measures this directly. On the company’s annual engagement survey, Turner says roughly 89 percent of team members, down to the frontline agents answering customer calls every day, agree that the culture at Xperigo drives their personal performance higher. He’s careful to flag that figure as approximate rather than precise, but treats the underlying pattern as consistent: when the two reinforce each other, “it’s a powerful force.”
How CEOs Shift from Doing the Work to Trusting the Team
Turner’s own hardest leadership transition came when he moved from COO to CEO after 12 years at Xperigo. As VP of Business Development and then COO, he was used to owning tasks personally and getting things done through his own effort. Stepping into the CEO role meant he could no longer operate that way and remain effective.
His advice to anyone moving into a CEO role for the first time is direct: “You’ve got bigger fish to fry, you’ve got other things to put your focus on, primarily around people.” In Turner’s view, the CEO’s job is strategy, vision, and people, and operational delivery has to be trusted to the team that was hired to handle it. Letting go of day-to-day ownership, he says, was the single hardest change he made in the transition.
How CEOs Should Use AI to Support Frontline Teams Without Losing the Human Touch
Xperigo’s customers are often calling in during one of the most stressful moments of their day: broken down, inconvenient, sometimes unsafe. Turner treats the human voice on the other end of that call as a deliberate point of differentiation, even as he acknowledges that many competitors are using AI primarily as an efficiency tool to gain an edge.
Rather than rejecting AI, Xperigo is bringing it in to support the agents handling those calls, not to replace them. One use case Turner described: feeding real-time information to an agent during a live call, since agents can’t retain every detail of training and searching a knowledge base takes time a stressed customer doesn’t have. Another is surfacing empathetic language in the moment, useful for an agent deep into an eight-hour shift who may be struggling to sound as reassuring on call fifty as they did on call one.
Turner describes the rollout as deliberately slow: testing, piloting, and learning from other organizations rather than moving fast. “Our goal right now isn’t about replacing people. It’s about supporting people in a better way,” he said.
How to Scale a Company: The Framework
| Principle | What it means | Named evidence from this interview |
| Default to trust, don’t make people earn it | Extend trust to new team members immediately rather than waiting for them to prove themselves, so they feel like they belong from day one | Xperigo has been recognized as a three-time winner of Canada’s Most Admired Corporate Culture and a Top 50 Great Place to Work in Canada under Turner’s trust-first approach |
| Treat culture and performance as a flywheel, not a tradeoff | A trust-driven culture motivates people to deliver operationally, and operational success in turn reinforces pride in the culture, so the two reinforce each other rather than competing for attention | On Xperigo’s annual engagement survey, roughly 89 percent of team members agree the company’s culture drives their personal performance higher |
| Stop being the doer, start trusting the team and the process | The hardest shift from COO to CEO is giving up personal ownership of operational tasks and trusting people and process to deliver results, freeing the CEO to focus on strategy, vision, and people | Turner says letting go after 12 years rising from VP of Business Development to COO to CEO was the hardest change he made, and is now the advice he gives every new CEO |
| Use AI to support the human in high-stress moments, not replace them | Apply AI to feed agents real-time information and language during live, high-stress customer interactions rather than removing the human point of contact entirely | Xperigo uses AI to help its frontline team of over 200 professionals respond faster and with more empathy to customers calling in during roadside emergencies, while keeping a human on every call |
Quotes from This Episode
- “I will trust everybody until they give me a reason not to.” (Dan Turner, President and CEO, Xperigo)
- “If you trusted them enough to bring them into the organization, then you should trust them to do the job that you’ve hired them to do.” (Dan Turner, President and CEO, Xperigo)
- “I don’t think there’s a balance that you need to manage.” (Dan Turner, President and CEO, Xperigo)
- “You’ve got bigger fish to fry, you’ve got other things to put your focus on, primarily around people.” (Dan Turner, President and CEO, Xperigo)
- “Our goal right now isn’t about replacing people. It’s about supporting people in a better way.” (Dan Turner, President and CEO, Xperigo)
Frequently Asked Questions
Should a CEO make people earn trust or extend it by default?
Dan Turner, President and CEO of Xperigo, extends trust to every team member by default and withdraws it only if they give him a reason not to, rather than making new hires earn trust over time. Turner says this approach makes people feel like they belong immediately, which motivates them to perform, and credits it as central to Xperigo earning recognition as a three-time winner of Canada’s Most Admired Corporate Culture.
How should a CEO balance culture and revenue growth?
Dan Turner, CEO of Xperigo, says culture and revenue growth aren’t something a CEO should try to balance against each other. Instead, he treats them as a flywheel: a trust-driven culture motivates people not to let leadership down, and operational success and growth in turn build pride that reinforces the culture. Turner points to Xperigo’s annual engagement survey, where roughly 89 percent of team members agree the company’s culture drives their personal performance higher, as evidence the dynamic is working.
How should a company use AI without losing the human touch with customers?
Dan Turner, CEO of Xperigo, uses AI to support frontline agents rather than replace them, especially since many customer calls come from people in stressful, unsafe, or inconvenient roadside situations who need a human voice for reassurance. Turner’s team is piloting AI that feeds real-time information to agents during live calls and suggests empathetic language, so agents can respond faster and more consistently without removing the human point of contact.
CEOs Work with Glenn Gow to Scale Their Companies and Themselves
Glenn Gow is The Scaling Executive Coach. He coaches ambitious executives into the CEO seat and CEOs into successful exits, drawing on 25 years as a CEO and five years in venture capital. If this conversation was useful, you can apply for executive coaching with Glenn Gow or apply to be a guest on The Scaling Executive Podcast.
