S1E10 What Am I Reading?

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 with host Dia Zafer-Joyce. 

In this episode, Dia shares a brand new segment where she highlights books that have influenced her approach to leadership. Today's collection includes pavement pounding, Mt. Everest summiting, and workforce multiplying gems.

Thanks for listening! Follow us on Instagram and Facebook and get engaged in the people conversation.

Transcript

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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. 

Hi again, I'm Dia, and welcome back to Everything is a People Problem.  Today's episode will be a brief departure from our typical business topics. If you don't already follow @everythingisapeopleproblem on Instagram, I highly encourage you to do so now. Not only do I post quotes for live episodes, but I also post a lot of books. Why do I post books?  It's not like they're all leadership books; there's a wide array of literary categories that I like to share with folks that are following along. But books are a great way for us to be able to explore not only what inspires us, but do some introspective thinking as well.  

Now, I appreciate that not everyone is bookish like me, so one thing I'd love to do is experiment on this podcast with new segments and so today is one of those moments. This is what I call, “What am I reading?” The way this segment will work is that I'm going to use this time to share some titles, authors, and summaries for you of books I've either read or I'm looking forward to reading so that that way either you can share in something I've experienced already or you can take part in something I'm about to dive into. Before we jump in, friendly reminder: I now have an opportunity to take your questions so that for the last episode of the season, episode 16, I can do a Q& A.  Hop on over to diazaferjoyce.com/podcast and then click the link that will allow you to ask a question. It's just embedded in the text right at the top of the fold. An email will populate and it will have an option for you to include your name, don't feel like you have to, and then a space for your question. And if you'd like to be played on the air, please attach a voice recording of your question. 

All right, let's talk about books.  Our first book is called, “Multipliers, How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter” by Liz Wiseman. This book deserves my very first call out, even though I've already talked about it on the podcast. I recommend it to any and every manager, especially since it was so critical for my own growth in leadership.  I found this book at a time when I was trying to understand who I wanted to become as a leader. It was when I went to the Grace Hopper celebration in 2019 and I realized reading this book that there were other leaders who cared about people. And you've seen those leaders here and there throughout your career, but here was an actual book that was telling me how I could strategically  support and elevate my team without compromising the needs of the business. 

So what does this book do? This book tells you how to leverage your people and your workforce at a hundred plus percent. That doesn't mean working them a hundred plus percent. It means recognizing where their talents lie and being able to attune activities and tasks and assignments to those strengths. When we have work that has to be done, we often are in a position where we've got people and we've got work, and we recognize we need X number of people for X amount of work.  Liz really takes this concept and identifies how you focus on the people first and the skills they have to offer, and then you match that to the work. So it's a reverse order from maybe what you're used to, but I appreciate it because it puts, again, the focus on the people, their skill set, and enabling them to do great work that complements how they work today.  If you pick up this book and you only do one thing with it, facilitate a native genius assessment with your team. This can be as surface level or as deep as you'd like, but there is nothing more powerful than bringing your group together and going one by one through each person and asking everyone to identify what they are naturally and undeniably good at. Not only does it help you as a leader identify where they have strengths, it also helps them see how they are perceived by the rest of their team. Multipliers, Liz Wiseman, incredible book for optimizing your workforce from a people first perspective.  

Next up, “Eat and Run: My Unlikely Journey to Ultramarathon Greatness” by Scott Jurek.  You might be thinking, “Weird choice, Dia,” but let me tell you a little bit more about Scott Jurek. He is an ultramarathoner, and there was a period of time when I was regularly running and running marathons, as you've heard also in the podcast, and I am incredibly inspired by this athlete. Scott doesn't only run. He uses his running to advocate for different organizations and  less than privileged groups. One of them, Every Mother Counts, is a group I feel very passionate about. They provide wellness and resources to mothers in countries that don't have the same medical care as an affluent area like the United States. He partnered very closely with that philanthropy in order to run and benefit that group.  

So why Eat & Run? Number one, Scott's not only an athlete, he's a vegan athlete. And everyone told him throughout the course of his career that he couldn't be a vegan and an ultramarathoner. So already he's beating the odds because he does his research and tries to identify what his body needs in order to perform at the level he needs it to perform at. Athletes have a lot of similarities to folks within business because we have goals. We need to visualize where we're going, create a strategy. We need to risk manage. If you're in the middle of a situation that you need to improve upon, but you have limited options and limited time to make choices, athletes and corporate employees can be one in the same minus the amount of miles you're actually running. It's more like the amount of miles you're burning in the work that you're doing. But we can gain a lot of wisdom from athletes who are driven, dedicated, and really at the top of their game.  An ultramarathon is insane. It is more than 26. 2 miles and you have to have a team behind you. So the reason I love this book is that it talks about Scott's journey in becoming an ultramarathoner and especially one that eats a certain way and that's unlike any other runner out there. What he does is he talks about his failures, he talks about those moments where he didn't make it or didn't think he would make it and shows how he persevered beyond the momentary in order to live out the full vision that he had set out for himself. This book takes you out of your own known environment of a workplace scenario and puts you into his. But the learns and the takeaways are incredibly relevant and can be applied to the work you do and the way you lead your teams. Eat and Run, Scott Jurek, incredible story about perseverance amidst very challenging, difficult odds. 

Next up, “The Stonewall Reader” with a foreword by Edmund White.  The Stonewall Reader is a compilation of many different publications that talk about right before, during, and after the Stonewall Riots on June 28th, 1969.  These riots were the beginning of celebrating pride and diversity in the  LGBTQIA plus community in the United States. There is no one piece of documentation that articulates exactly what happened, so this reader was created so that that way we can shape the events from many different perspectives. It is a true piece of history that  was the beginning of a movement and hopefully one that continues to advocate for freedom, for change, and for acceptance in many diverse communities.

Why the Stonewall Reader? Well, number one, It's really important for diversity, especially as a leader, we need to understand that we are not going to manage the same people that are carbon copies. Everyone is different. And number two, this is a great piece of community collaboration. There are many different voices represented in this piece and it helps build a story. As a leader, we need to identify that our perspective, our opinion, is not the only opinion. The way we see a situation isn't the only way a situation is perceived.  Often, the perception of those around us is what builds our reality as managers. So it's incredibly important for us to be open to other ideas and thoughts, and this is an excellent way to be able to prime yourself to do that. This book certainly isn't for the faint of heart, but again, it is history, and it's something that's critical for especially leaders within the United States to read, absorb, and understand. Our role as managers is to unblock barriers, so when you read The Stonewall Reader, You definitely see barriers that people themselves had to unblock. So if we can do anything to support our communities and our employees that are part of our LGBTQIA plus community, then  we have a responsibility to do that. The Stonewall Reader, forward by Edmund White, edited by the New York Public Library, a true piece of history that shows how collaborative storytelling shows all perspectives of a situation. 

“Into Thin Air” by John Krakauer.  I just posted about this one, but it covers the 1996 Mount Everest disaster. Now I selfishly love Mount Everest disaster stories, and this was one of the first books I remember deeply falling in love with, but we just talked about failure in the last podcast episode, and this is an epic fail. Of course, similar to Eat & Run, there's an element of nature in this that goes beyond just what we can control. But it definitely deals with risk mitigation and judgment calls that you need to record and read about so we can prevent those disasters from happening in the future.  I appreciate John Krakauer, the journalist for Outside Magazine at the time who wrote this book, because he went along on this journey and really viewed it from an outside perspective. So, of course he was on the expedition that encountered this disastrous storm that produced many fatalities, but he also was able to pull himself out to look at each situation, do some research and be able to share what went right and what went wrong.  

Honestly, this also gives you some perspective. Sometimes we can feel like the work we do is life or death, and this is life or death, so it really makes us feel like we can take a beat when it comes to our tasks and elements at work that  dying for our attention. Into Thin Air, John Krakauer, a survival story that takes us out of the office and into a true real life, life or death, risk mitigation situation. 

The last two books I'm calling out is a twofer on the author for you. One of a book that I've read and one of a book I'm looking forward to reading.  The book that I've read is called, “Cultish, the Language of Fanaticism” by Amanda Montel.  Amanda was inspired to write this book because her own father was in a cult and got out of it. But his stories, when she was younger, really spurred her research into identifying cults, cult behavior, and how we playfully use that term for things that aren't formal cults but are cultish, like SoulCycle or maybe following certain influencers on Instagram. She is incredibly well researched and dives into how language is a key driver of cult following, cult behavior. Language can help us determine whether or not we belong or not belong, whether we fit in or don't fit in, and invites us to the table in places where we feel far. The curious thing to think about as a leader is do we create our own cultish followings with the kind of language or vernacular we use? Are there ways that we can say things that will help encourage work to be done? Is it manipulative if we say things a certain way to try to elicit certain behaviors from our team? It's a really fascinating study on language and devotion and how we can motivate the people around us. 

Now I said this was a twofer because Amanda has a book coming out today, April 9th, called, “The Age of Magical Overthinking, Notes on Modern Irrationality.” I cannot wait to read it. And guess what? I'm going to bring it with me on vacation. I'm going to be taking next week off from the podcast because I'm going to be traveling with some friends and bringing lots of books. So if you liked book talk now, you're going to love book talk in the future because I'm just going to be sitting on a beach with my books. 

It's always hard to find time to read and to educate ourselves, but as leaders, this is really important. We can't just lean on our own knowledge and background to drive our decisions and the quality of our leadership. So even if this has piqued your interest and you're going to dive into one of these books, or you have a book yourself that you're enjoying and learning from, take some time, a little bit every day, a little bit each week to learn some new things and bring some new perspectives into the work you do.

You've just finished the latest installment of everything is A People Problem. You can find episode transcripts with work cited on diazaferjoyce.com/podcast. Find me on Instagram @EverythingIsAPeopleProblem, and tell me what you thought of the episode.  If you like what you heard, please subscribe so that you're notified when new weekly episodes become available. Once again, I'm your host, Dia Zafer-Joyce.

Today’s episode was written and produced by Dia Zafer-Joyce. It featured Royalty-free music provided by Sarah, the Instrumentalist from Epidemic Sound.