When Dale Tolley took the stage wearing a mop-top wig and bantering in a fake British accent, he was already sidestepping the rules.
The Procter & Gamble charity sing-off at headquarters in Cincinnati had clear guidelines: four employees per act and no instruments. Dale and his colleague Chris Farnsworth entered as a two-man band dubbed the “P&Gtles” (after the Beatles). At the time, Dale was fresh out of BYU Marriott’s MBA program and in his first year in human resources at P&G. “Wouldn’t it be funny,” Dale joked with Chris when they hatched their plan, “if the HR guys competed in the sing-off and broke the rules?”
During the performance, Dale strummed a guitar and belted songs laced with company references and jokes. The audience roared as the act blew past the time limit—breaking another rule.
“They had the crowd eating out of their hands,” recalls colleague and mentor Scott Creer, a fellow BYU alum who had recruited Dale to P&G. “The songs were hilarious.”
The duo’s antics paid off—they won the competition, advanced to a Cincinnati-wide sing-off, and scored rides on a company jet to take their act on tour. This response sparked a realization for Dale: “We struck something there. This company wants to laugh and not take itself so seriously.”
Dale, now director of talent acquisition in North America and in his 10th year at P&G, has always been about defying expectations.
“HR has a lot of negative stereotypes and tropes—everyone thinks about Toby from The Office,” Dale says. “People are always surprised when they work with me as an HR leader. I’m on the silly, bubbly, creative side of things.” Always the entertainer, Dale taps that creativity when he introduces HR policy via music videos or when he onboards interns with an original board game called “Procters and Gambles.”
For Dale, success is part strategy, part
performance—and doing what it takes to keep the game interesting.
Setting the Board
Dale was born in a small town in Alberta, Canada, to parents who grew up in farming families. Although he moved to Kansas City, Kansas, during his childhood, he has always felt a strong connection to Canada and still celebrates Canadian holidays with his wife, Alana, and their four kids. “We get two Thanksgivings,” Dale says. “It’s a fun way to celebrate my ancestors and my heritage.”
Dale describes himself as “well-parented,” growing up with opportunities such as music lessons (which paved the way to the P&Gtles). His two older sisters delighted in choosing costumes for him while they played dress-up, sparing his younger brother from the same experience.
Dale’s father, Warren, worked in human resources in both pharmaceuticals and higher education, planting the seeds for his son’s career aspirations. “I always had visibility into what he was doing,” Dale says. When Dale followed Warren’s footsteps to BYU and studied HR, he looked to his dad as a mentor. “My dad would answer my questions and help me network,” Dale recalls. “I’d go to conferences with him. He helped me fall in love with HR and realize this is where my skill set lies.”
Dale’s church mission, which took him to Slovakia, solidified his love for HR. After witnessing President Dieter F. Uchtdorf dedicate the country for preaching the gospel, Dale worked alongside missionaries sent in from neighboring Czechia to pursue the seemingly impossible goal of collecting 20,000 signatures from Slovakian citizens in one week to legalize The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in their country.
Hitting the target was a miracle, Dale says. And the work that followed was grueling. “It required grit to get out there and be rejected month after month as we tried to plow the field for future generations.”
Serving in mission leadership roles helped Dale uncover natural talents he would later draw on. “I discovered an ability to motivate with public speaking, to organize and communicate, to set goals, to measure performance, to help administer business, and to get things done,” he says.
After his mission, Dale attended BYU, studying management with an emphasis in organizational behavior and HR. Learning from professors such as Troy Nielson confirmed Dale’s career path. The path to building his family, however, took shape a few years later, when he sat down to a game of Apples to Apples.
Game Theory
It makes sense that Dale first met his wife over a board game. Since childhood, Dale has seen games as a safe space for social connection. “Playing games provides a forum to do something in common, even with strangers, where socializing might otherwise be hard,” he says. “And it scratches my itch for strategic thinking.”
Alana, then a senior at BYU studying social work, remembers coming home after a long day at her hospital internship. A roommate hollered across the courtyard: “We’re going to play games at some guy’s apartment.” Alana decided to join. It was Dale’s apartment, and he had a “gaggle of young women around him,” Alana recalls. Alana caught his attention when she started winning a round of Apples to Apples.
She noticed him too. “He was fun and charismatic, and he had a lot of energy,” Alana says. Their connection deepened, and soon they started dating. Seven months later they were married in the San Diego Temple. They started their life together by putting each other through grad school. Alana was first, studying social work at the University of Utah, while Dale searched for a job during the Great Recession and eventually took a gig at a tech startup.
The position was not his dream job. He relied on two things to get through it.
The first was faith: “Learning to rely on God at BYU helped me to know it was going to be okay, even though I couldn’t see clearly,” Dale says. “Who’s my provider, ultimately? I have my abilities, skills, and opportunities because God is blessing me. He knows how to give me good gifts.”
The second thing Dale relied on? Games. “He kept from being really frustrated while underemployed by designing board games,” recalls Alana. “He would often come home with all kinds of ideas to play-test in the evening.” One of his experimental games, Cheesonomics, impressed a panel of judges at a board game convention in Salt Lake City. Dale developed it into a commercial game, and he hopes to design more commercial games in the future.
“He’s excellent at teaching someone how to play a new game,” Alana says. “He always loses on purpose so they’ll want to play again.” Dale’s enthusiasm and design talent have also been put to good use at Handful of Hope, a nonprofit supporting foster families. He developed a game to teach children the Handful of Hope curriculum, which is based on resilience and the power of positive emotions.
A cardboard cutout of Dale in the basement of the Tolleys’ home guards Dale’s personal game collection, reminding young kids to ask for help with getting the games out to play. “Dale has been buying games since our first son was born with the hope that they’ll play together,” Alana says. That son was born just before Dale began his MBA at BYU, where he again focused on human resources.
“I felt a desire to accelerate into a leadership position,” Dale remembers. “The MBA is a great vehicle for that.” Dale brought valuable prior work experience, and Nielson noticed how that benefited others at BYU Marriott: “He was a good resource for his peers—willing to lead and good with building relationships.”
Alana decided to stay home with the kids while Dale was busy in the MBA program and working campus jobs. The Tolleys had intended to find a tech job in California to be close to Alana’s family, but Dale’s internship at P&G in Ohio pointed them in a new direction. “P&G stole my heart,” Dale says.
One Move Ahead
Big decisions in the Tolley family are always made together—the choice to move to the Midwest for a permanent job at P&G was no exception. Dale poured himself into researching the companies that recruited him, hoping to find a place that would offer stability. Alana hoped for an environment that wouldn’t burn Dale out. “I wanted his work to invest in him more than just financially,” she says. Dale found that at P&G.
“It was clear early on that he was a good fit,” says Creer. “And his success here has not been at all surprising.”
The family moved to Ohio, and Alana worked on establishing friendships and social connections as Dale settled into his first role as an HR business partner supporting family care brands such as Bounty®, Charmin®, and Puffs®. One unexpected perk was free toilet paper, which came in handy during the COVID-19 pandemic a few years later.
As Dale began injecting his trademark creativity into his work, his reputation as the “singing HR guy” of P&Gtles fame was born. “He has found a way to take some of his personal interests and marry them with the P&G job,” Creer says. “He’s an entertainer at heart.” Dale designed P&G-themed board games, and he created an in-house production company called LaughTracks. Through music videos, live performances, and games, “we offer lyrical business acumen and cultural comic relief,” says Dale. “When things are tense or hard, we make people laugh.”
After two years, Dale was ready to see more of the company. “To be a well-rounded leader you can’t be in a silo; you have to know the business,” he says. After asking for an HR leadership role at a P&G manufacturing site, Dale was sent to a shampoo and conditioner plant in Iowa City, Iowa, that was slated for downsizing. His task: maintaining productivity and morale while preparing to separate or reassign 400 people at a union site with deep community roots.
The job required thick skin, patience, and compassion. “When you’re a manager coming from ‘big, bad corporate,’ it can be adversarial,” Dale points out. “I wanted to become one of them and help them through something hard.”
In his signature way of defying expectations, Dale shook off the managerial mantle. He wore hairnets, took overnight shifts, polished equipment, packed shampoo bottles—and wrote a parody song that drew on the language, slang, and acronyms he learned on the floor. “I wanted to show them that we could have some fun despite what was going on,” Dale says.
The workers gave him a standing ovation after his performance. “As HR management during a time when the site was shrinking, I made the irritable VP of the union laugh,” Dale recalls. He counts it as one of the “proudest moments of my career” and proof that “if you can lead carefully and without pretense, you can reach people’s hearts.”
The efforts of Dale and his team to advocate for the site and encourage employees were a game changer for the plant. By the time Dale left, corporate had selected the factory to manufacture a different product. Very few employees had been laid off; in fact, the plant was hiring. Dale visited a few years later in a different role and was proud to find the factory refurbished and humming with new life.
Leveling Up
During the pandemic—with face masks, social distancing, at-home church, and remote work in full swing—the Tolley family moved back to Ohio as Dale took a new role supporting the skincare business. He onboarded with no in-person contact, and the family settled into a new neighborhood without meeting anyone for weeks.
“We were praying desperately that we would belong and that this place would be safe and great for our kids,” Dale recalls. He felt this prayer answered as the pandemic slowly lifted and the family emerged into a vibrant social life in the Cincinnati suburb of Montgomery, where they connected with neighbors and joined in local events.
“I am so happy to live in Ohio,” Alana says. “It is a forest, it is beautiful, and the winter is short. We live in a neighborhood where my kids can go and knock on doors and ask if a friend can come out and play.” Although Dale’s job may take them elsewhere in the future, for now, the family is settled.
Returning to headquarters at that time had its own challenges. P&G’s primary skincare brand, Olay, had done well during the pandemic—“people need to have their face be moisturized to appear well on camera,” Dale says. But soon after he arrived, sales started to decline. To learn how to boost morale, he immersed himself into the culture and the work at all levels, including by using products himself: micro-sculpting cream for daytime, retinol max at night, and Super Serum® both times.
“To be an HR leader who others trust and ask to work with, you have to be a sponge,” Dale explains. “You can’t be satisfied with just talking HR. You have to learn your business inside and out and then apply your craft.”
A year after his return to Ohio, Dale was promoted to HR director for skincare in North America. Last year, he was named P&G’s HR director of talent acquisition for North America, supporting not just one arm of the business but all of them. “That’s daunting,” Dale says. “Early on, I felt out of my depth.” That vulnerable feeling, he realized, was part of the process of growth that sold him on P&G in the first place.
“I’m always on the edge of my comfort zone,” Dale says. “Once I know how to do something well and the company sees that, they invest in me. I’ve grown a lot this year, and I’m still not totally comfortable. Growing means being uncomfortable.”
Dale’s mentors aren’t surprised to see his growth.
“He’s been promoted so quickly because he communicates well and drives the right decisions,” says Nielson. “He’s become more confident in expressing his conviction about what should be done in a given situation, which comes with experience and success.”
“It’s not a common thing,” adds Creer, “that you can pluck someone from one setting who will continue to swim and do well. Dale can morph to a new situation and thrive. He’s smart, he’s pragmatic, and he doesn’t take himself too seriously.”
Playing It Forward
Since his P&Gtle days, Dale has appeared at company events as Freddie Mercury from Queen, Steven Tyler from Aerosmith
(Hair-care-osmith in P&G lingo), Brandon Flowers from The Killers (in a pink suit honoring P&G product Pepto Bismol®) and Dale Lipa (his version of Dua Lipa). Next up is Dale Bieber.
On the stage and in his day-to-day work in talent acquisition, extroverting is a big part of Dale’s day job. But Alana sees him as an introvert at heart. Or rather, “an introvert masquerading as an extrovert,” she says. Dale accepts that assessment.
“Donning characters or being silly is a way to project confidence where otherwise there might be self-doubt,” he says. “I do it in spurts, and then, yes, Alana sees my recharge periods when I’m at home.” He’s grateful for the support she offers as he crawls back into himself at the end of the day.
Dale’s also grateful for his alma mater and gives back to BYU Marriott students by recruiting for P&G and connecting interns and new hires to other BYU alumni at the company. “I feel a strong sense of duty to give back, not just monetarily,” Dale says. “My favorite part of my job at P&G is coming back to BYU and inspiring the next generation to have hope they will succeed. I want to inspire them on what HR can be and just inspire them to be themselves.”
Nielson appreciates the effort Dale puts into his role as an alumni champion at P&G. “Dale just has a flair for it,” Nielson says. “He’s very good with communicating with students once they apply for positions and accept offers, keeping them feeling love from Procter & Gamble.”
And while Dale stands positioned for more growth in his own career, he’s firm about what’s most important: stability for his family, enjoying his kids, and having time to date his wife.
“It seems outmoded or even daunting to stay at the same company my whole life, but I’m currently still growing at P&G,” he says. “I get calls occasionally, but nobody has been able to dislodge me yet.”
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About the Author
Sara Smith Atwood lives with her family in Orem, Utah, and is an associate editor at Y Magazine.
Photography by Bradley Slade
