Why The Customer Doesn't Come First at the Arizona Diamondbacks

Derrick Hall runs the Arizona Diamondbacks 🐍, a 2,000-person operation with a roster that turns over constantly and a front office that almost never does.

Roughly 70% of his staff have stayed 10 to 15 years!

In an industry built on trades and releases, that kind of retention is its own scoreboard. The reason traces back to a belief most leaders are too nervous to say out loud, and Hall builds his entire operation on it.

Skip this one and you miss the clearest case yet that employee-first is a winning retention strategy, not a soft cost.

👀 Here's what you get in today's edition of the Culture Creators:

Check out the episode wherever you get podcasts.

— Nate Bagley, Producer of Culture Creators

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Derrick Hall has spent 35 years in baseball, more than two decades of it running the Arizona Diamondbacks. He’s managed to produce incredible results in one of the most competitive industries on earth — and the most important ones aren’t on the field:

So when he says something that breaks what some would view as a basic rule of business, it's worth slowing down to take a listen.

"The customer doesn't come first. The employee does."

👉 Here's how that belief became the Diamondbacks’ operating system, and how you can sell each piece of it to a skeptical CEO.

Most service businesses train their people to put the customer first.

Hall flips it deliberately.

Not because customers don't matter, but because the employee experience is the delivery mechanism for the customer experience.

You cannot give fans a more memorable experience than any team in sports if the people creating that experience aren’t committed to that mission.

The proof is in the small signals. Hall doesn't call his front office "staff." He calls them "team players," the same status language used for the athletes.

The receptionist isn't a receptionist. The title on his card reads "First Impression Specialist," and Tony has held it since 2012.

When Hall arrived at the Diamondbacks, (like most sports teams) every photo on the office walls was of a player on the field memorializing impactful moments in the team’s history. He swapped in photos of Team Players (employees) laughing, working, and serving the community, “Because 400 people walk those halls every day and the players don't.”

None of those moves cost real money.

That's the point.

They are signals that tell an employee what their status is in the company. And status shapes behavior.

When people are treated as the story rather than the support crew, they take ownership of the outcome instead of just clocking the hours.

The strategic value compounds. Recognition is one of the cheapest, highest-leverage tools a leader has: 83.6% of employees say it affects their motivation to succeed.

The Diamondbacks aren't spending more to retain people. They're spending attention, which is free and almost never deployed on purpose.

Most company values are what Hall calls "pocket values." Printed on a card, read once, forgotten. They don’t fail because they’re bad or wrong, but because nobody can recall them in the moment a decision actually gets made.

Hall and his SVP of People and Culture, Joe Walsh, rebuilt theirs into a five-letter code: BUILD. Belonging, Unified, Integrity, Longevity, Development.

The genius isn't the acronym itself. It's that the words describe what the organization literally does every day, so the work and the values reinforce each other.

The Diamondbacks are always building, a team, a culture, leaders, a fan base, so the values never feel separate from the job.

Notice who was in the room when these values were developed. Not a committee. Not an outside agency. The CEO and the head of People, the two people actually accountable for culture, sat down together and designed it. That co-authorship is why it has teeth.

And they optimized for memorability over completeness. Five words a parking-lot attendant can recite beats fifteen nobody remembers.

A value that can't be recalled can't guide a decision, which means it isn't a value, it's a platitude.

The strategic value is decision-making at scale. In a 2,000-person organization, leadership can't be in every room. Memorable values are how you distribute judgment, so a frontline employee makes the call you'd make without needing to ask.

Hall believes in promoting from within. That belief created a problem: people were being thrust into management roles they'd never been trained for, and you could see them struggle.

Believing in internal mobility without building the infrastructure to support it just sets your best people up to fail in public.

So… he built a year-long Leadership Academy.

Each cohort is 25 to 30 employees, hand-selected and nominated by their supervisors. One class a week for a year. Guest speakers, real projects, and DISC assessments so people learn how to communicate with each other and how to handle confrontation.

It's now in its eighth year.

The detail that matters: this isn't a one-day offsite. It's a year of structured development that treats leadership as a skill to be taught, instead of a trait you either have or don't.

That's why the internal promotions actually stick.

The strategic value shows up in the retention number. Roughly 70% of the front office has stayed 10 to 15 years, and most of them started as interns or entry-level and worked up to director, manager, and VP.

People don't leave organizations that visibly invest in their growth. The Academy is both a development engine and a retention moat.

Derrick believes culture is really created when it’s lived out by the team.

"Culture isn't created by me and Joe."

Leadership can set the conditions, but it can't manufacture culture by decree.

So… he operationalized it.

Every month, the Diamondbacks run what they call the President's Council, made up of the employees of the month plus a group of VPs.

They sit together in the boardroom, and at the end of every meeting they generate culture ideas for the whole organization. As Hall puts it: "We're not dictating. They are."

Leadership's job in that room is to listen, and occasionally to explain why something can't happen, but the ideas come from the floor.

This is the part most "bottom-up culture" talk skips. Bottom-up isn't a vibe or a value on a wall. It's a standing meeting, on the calendar, with a named group of people who have real input and a CEO who shows up to hear them.

The strategic value is ownership. People defend what they help build.

When employees author the culture, engagement stops being something HR has to manufacture and becomes something the organization sustains on its own.

It also surfaces problems early, because the people closest to the work have a real channel to leadership.

In 2020, with no playbook, the Diamondbacks furloughed employees. Hall is blunt about it: "We furloughed folks. Never should have done that." He names exactly why it was wrong…

You take some of your best people and tell them you don't need them, can't use them, won't pay them, and then you want them back when it's convenient. By then, many had moved on or returned stung.

What I learned most about this admission is seeing how Derrick holds responsibility for the tough choice he had to make.

He doesn't blame the moment or the advice he was given. He says it simply wasn't consistent with who they are, and then adds two words most leaders never say: "And we learn."

He handles it the same way he handled a recent LED ribbon board that blocked some fan views, responding to every letter personally and taking the blame publicly rather than pointing at the installer.

The strategic value is trust, and trust is the substrate everything else runs on.

When a leader models accountability, it gives everyone else permission to be honest about their own mistakes, which is how you build an organization that catches problems instead of hiding them.

Hall is explicit that he wants people to make mistakes, because that's how they learn, as long as they own them and don't repeat them.

Hall is the rare executive who runs his entire operation on the premise that culture is a business outcome, not a soft cost, and he has the awards, the retention, and the pennant to back it up.

For the HR leader who has spent years making that argument to a skeptical exec team, this episode is more than validation. It's a field-tested playbook, and a set of CEO-ready arguments for putting it to work on Monday.

Companies like the Arizona Diamondbacks use Nectar to incentivise and reinforce the behaviors and values they want to see more of.

Nectar helps culture leaders make those moments consistent with a culture platform that’s easy to adopt and actually gets used.

→ Recognition that doesn’t feel forced
→ Engagement + listening you can act on
→ Communication that reaches people where they are

Because when employees feel valued, informed, and heard, they stay longer, perform better, and pull in the same direction.

See how Nectar works:

Hall's father gave him this advice at 24, as Hall took on a leadership role at the Dodgers. He has carried it through every role since, into an organization with 450 names to remember.

The whole employee-first philosophy starts here, in a private conversation between a father and his son.

We started a new tradition in this episode where we ask our guests who their “Culture Crush” is. (A person or organization they really admire for the culture they create.)

Derrick’s answer was his Dad (listen to the full episode to hear that part of the interview), and Peter O’Malley, former President and Owner of the LA Dodgers.

Here’s an example of the impact O’Malley had on Derrick:

(I definitely cried while he shared this story.)