Everything Is A People Problem
An approachable leadership podcast hosted by seasoned people manager and creative problem solver Dia Zafer-Joyce. Listen along as Dia explores the connections between business, culture, and community, testing her theory that every business problem has a people-centric solution.
Everything Is A People Problem
S1E1 It's Not Business, It's Personal
Welcome to the inaugural episode of Everything Is A People Problem; a podcast that explores the connections between business, culture, and community, uncovering how every business problem has a people-centric solution with host Dia Zafer-Joyce.
In this episode, Dia introduces the podcast and makes the case that there is a direct relationship between employee engagement and business results. Listen along as Dia shares her experience, insights, and research supporting that the key to sustainable growth and success is prioritizing people first.
Click here for a transcript of this episode.
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Hi there, welcome to Everything Is A People Problem, a podcast that explores the connections between business, culture, and community uncovering how every business problem has a people-centric solution. I'm your host Dia Zafer-Joyce. Let's talk about people.
Thank you so much for tuning into this podcast. I'm Dia and I am so excited that you're here. You know how when you finish a very exciting but time consuming life event, you think, “Okay, two years down of my life. Now I'm gonna do all the things that I didn't get a chance to do.” And then two more years goes by and you think, “Oh no! I didn't do any of the things that I wanted to do,” because I spent this time recovering. That is me. I finished my MBA a couple of years ago and I found that through all of my research and reading and application of my program into my daily life and job as a people manager in Silicon Valley that I am obsessed with people and I really want other people managers to be as obsessed with people as I am.
Now before I go into a manager perspective as to why we should be obsessed with people, I just want to call out, you do not have to be a people manager to get something out of this podcast and out of these topics. People are people and we should be investing in relationships with our peers, our co workers, and our direct reports because at the end of the day, that's how we advance progress and success in business. That being said, this podcast is designed for managers at all levels. You may find some content more or less applicable to your specific role and job, but no matter what, this should be easily digestible knowledge and insights that will improve your management behaviors and corresponding results.
Okay, so as a manager, you are responsible for the bottom line. You are contributing to the financial success of a company and so what do people have to do with it? Right? Well, there is a direct relationship between employees, employee engagement, and and business results. You cannot sustain a profitable business without prioritizing your people. Forbes did this excellent study in 2023 where they were trying to identify employee growth retention strategies and they found that disengaged employees decreased a company's profitability by 15 percent. 15 percent is a big deal. Let's say as an example, you earn $10, 000 a week in profit. If you have disengaged employees, you will lose automatically $1, 500 per week. How do you explain that to a shareholder? You might say it's seasonality or it's fluctuations in demand, but when there's a consistency there that you can't fully explain or bullshit your way through, then obviously there's something under the surface that you really need to explore.
This is why everything is a people problem. It's a super simple example, but it's a business problem, profitability or lack thereof, and a business problem doesn't just have a solution in the numbers alone. You have to think about how you're treating your people, how you're prioritizing your people, how you're leading your people. And when you do that, you're able to identify how to treat people in a way that improves your business results, how to prioritize people in a way that drives productivity, how to lead people in a way that creates sustainable growth. A company's growth really comes from management. It's upper leadership being able to clearly communicate vision, priorities, and purpose, and lower management being able to execute on that vision. The catch is that the managers who are in charge of getting this work done need to have the skills in order to be successful. In 2023, a global leadership forecast surveyed companies across the world to identify the top skills crucial to leadership success. They found that managers today need to lead change, think strategically, develop their talent, and make decisions through both influence and authority in order to be effective in their roles. So the bummer is that only 29 percent of the companies that participated in this survey train their management in these skills. And of those sampled leaders, only 12 percent believe that they can exercise those skills. Yikes.
There are two things happening here. One, there's a lack of investment in people from companies and upper leadership. And number two, there's a lack of self confidence from these leaders because they lack the skills or the knowledge of those skills in order to do their jobs to the expectation of their leadership. Now, let's say you are that leadership and you're listening to this podcast. You're a senior director, a VP, and you think, “Yeah, okay Dia, I could probably invest a little bit more in my people. But at what point does personal ownership and responsibility come in for development?” Earlier, I mentioned getting my MBA. That was me making an effort to mitigate the risks that I didn't even know existed. But as a small aside, higher education in the United States is a privilege, not a right. And firmly requiring accreditation, such as MBAs, particularly for women and people of color, causes whitewashed senior corporate leadership that lacks diverse perspectives when making inclusive decisions. Especially those that impact an entire organization. So before we put independent and individual ownership on personal development, let's recognize that there is not equal access to this knowledge. This is why it's so important for companies to invest in and train their people directly.
On the topic of education, access, and upper leadership, I got curious about the top 50 Fortune 500 companies and their CEOs. I wondered how many of them actually got their degrees and was that critical to them becoming the leaders that they are today?
Quick related side story. In 2019, I attended an all women CEO panel discussion at the Grace Hopper Celebration, and someone asked, “Do you need your MBA in order to be a CEO?” They said one of two things. Either one, yes, educate yourself, or two, no, but find somebody that you trust who does have that knowledge. Of the top 50 Fortune 500 CEOs in place today, so this is current 2023 statistics, more than three quarters of them have a graduate degree or higher. And the only people on that list who have reached their position without a master's, or in some cases even without a bachelor's, are white men. So CEOs like Michael Dell and Mark Zuckerberg, who are college dropouts, are truly winners of a rigged lottery and they are the exception, not the rule. Reinforcing that the quickest way to this magnitude of leadership is money, access to education, or social privilege. And speaking of social privilege, the white male demographic makes up three quarters of those 50 CEOs, and then 12 percent are white women, with the remaining 14 percent being non white men and women combined.
Lack of leadership diversity at that level reinforces confirmation bias. And confirmation bias tells us that everything is working fine the way it is, and it's not. It's not working fine, because homogenous leadership is bad for business. There is a clear financial cost to not looking at every problem as if it's a people problem.
I love learning and drawing inspiration from incredibly smart and innovative people. And author Leah Thomas of The Intersectional Environmentalist, How to Dismantle Systems of Oppression to Protect People and Planet, is one of those folks. She wrote this incredible book that talks about the intrinsic connection between oppression and the malnourishment of our planet. Basically, you can't resolve environmental injustices without also addressing social inequity, because those two ecosystems, our people and our planet, impact one another. This means that you can't create one solution for one of those ecosystems in isolation from the other. No one is going to find an affluent neighborhood next to a dump. That means somebody's going to live close to a dump, and that's likely going to be low income housing. So while you've solved one environmental issue, you have created a social health and safety issue for an entire population of people.
You should see where this is going, because this relationship that Leah Thomas calls out is strikingly similar to employees and business results. Employees are one ecosystem, and business results are another. And similarly, you cannot sustain a profitable and successful business without prioritizing your people. You cannot solve one in isolation of the other.
In this inaugural episode, I've talked a lot about connections between people and business. It's kind of my thing, but I'm hoping that you're going to draw some inspiration yourself from some of these topics and maybe even start to engage with me on social media so that we can start to have some conversations. But I'd like to bring it home with The Godfather.
There's a very famous quote, “It's not personal, Sonny, it's business.” I don't know if you are aware, but it was coined by a real world mob accountant, Otto “Abbadabba” Berman, and that was back in the 1930s. But Michael Corleone was the one who said it to his brother, Sonny. Even though Michael and Sonny have a relationship with the two characters, Captain McCluskey and Virgil “The Turk” Sollozzo, who Michael is going to have to kill, he's explaining that it's not personal. He's killing them because he's treating them the way that they treated his family. So by killing those men, it doesn't mean that he hates them. He's just treating them the way that they treated his own people. It's a transaction. It's business.
I hope we can learn something from Michael because his approach to business is bad. He tanked his business just because he looked only at the numbers. He didn't look at fostering a relationship. He didn't look at how that could be more fruitful in the future and flourish his business and his profits. He just approached it as tit for tat, incoming, outgoing, just by the book and the numbers. Pop culture gives us a great way to talk about these issues. While, yes, it's a bit fantastical how Michael has a business first approach, it does highlight the small crumb of truth that there's an opportunity to change how we lead people. And being a people manager is about people first and the business second.
I've even seen firsthand through my own experience that solving business problems by means of people centric solutions builds a cultural foundation of trust and honesty. It's the long con, but it leads to success and profits, so it's okay. My own experience comes from spending 13 years at Apple as both an individual contributor and a manager, building operational teams from the ground up. I'm also fortunate enough to have been recognized by my peers across multiple companies for my leadership skills and collaborative work ethic. One undeniable element of collaboration is both learning and change. And I can promise you that throughout the life of this podcast, I will change my mind on some topics. And genuinely, I hope you will too.
A podcast is a pretty one directional communication channel. And my own thoughts, opinions, and my research may not yield that inspirational kumbaya, campfire singing moment that I would love to see of people leaders across the world. But my goal is to make you curious and maybe even fire you up a little bit. This is about exposing you to the cost of this myopic bottom line leadership and hopefully piquing your interest to have you subscribe and see how we can positively impact our results in any industry by starting with a people first approach. Can we put people first and still make a profit? Absolutely. Is everyone going to start doing this today thanks to my tantalizing little podcast? No, but fortunately, we have so many other inspirational managers, authors, and thought leaders in the world who also believe that people come first. So I'm really looking forward to sharing that evidence and diverse perspectives with you in episodes to come.
You just finished the very first installment of Everything Is A People Problem. You can find episode transcripts with work cited on EverythingIsAPeopleProblem.buzzsprout.com and I'd love to know what you think of this content, so come interact with me on Instagram @EverythingIsAPeopleProblem. This is just the beginning, so please subscribe so that you're notified when new weekly episodes become available. And once again, I'm your host, Dia Zafer-Joyce. Thanks for joining me and see you next week.
Today's episode was written and produced by Dia Zafer-Joyce. It featured insights and statistics from Forbes, the Niagara Institute, DDI World, Qualtrics, and MovieWeb. com. Royalty free music provided by Sarah, the Instrumentalist from Epidemic Sound.
I'd like to extend a special thanks to the Humble Creative Collective for providing feedback on this episode that shaped it into what it is today.
