About this episode
What's actually draining your bottom line? In this host episode, Cristina and Alex take a hard look at what happens when businesses forget the humans behind the numbers. From layoffs that quietly destroy institutional knowledge, to spreadsheets designed to tell whatever story someone needs them to tell, to AI-generated data points that are simply made up — the episode makes a compelling case that the leaks most organizations ignore are the ones costing them the most.
The conversation moves from diagnosis to direction: what does it actually look like to lead with the human experience at the center? Cristina and Alex explore how qualitative measures like cross-team collaboration, trust, and psychological safety show up on the bottom line in ways a P&L statement will never capture — and why investing in humans isn't a soft choice, but the highest-ROI decision a leader can make.
Transcript
Why Businesses Forget Humans
SPEAKER_01
The most businesses exist to create something, whether a service or a product, to help humans, right? I mean, we want humans to buy it, even if they're hiding behind a corporation. We want humans to use it, even if they're hiding behind titles.
SPEAKER_02
Welcome back to another episode of Uncover the Human. It's a host episode today, so hello, Christina.
SPEAKER_01
Hello. I don't know what day it is. It's someday.
SPEAKER_02
I don't know. It's somewhere between I think Monday and the Times.
SPEAKER_01
That's even better. Monday and the end of times. Yes.
unknown
Yes.
SPEAKER_02
Yes, that's why we talk about the impact of partying.
SPEAKER_01
And I know I was not out partying until 1.30 a.m. I actually spent a lot of that time in a parking lot trying to get out of the parking lot after a show.
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, I mean it would have been bad if you were partying, but if it's a parking lot, then that's fine. This actually weirdly duck dovetails into what we wanted to talk about today, which is we wanted to talk about the impact of non-human leadership. So what happens when you start to forget the humans? And we mean that from a very business sense in this case. What what impacts the business? There's a lot of times where businesses feel like they have to tighten their belts, especially in economies like now where everything's a little bit shifty, everything's a little bit uncertain, everybody's trying to make sure they are buckled down and ready to ready to face the future. But the exercises we tend to go through to do that always tend to miss the humans. I mean, what about you know a human who's out until 1.30 in the morning? That has an impact on the on the next day. What happens like if we don't take these things and allow them to be or or figure out how to work with them instead of just like trying to force something that never is actually true? What is the actual impact? So that's what we decided we'd discuss today.
SPEAKER_01
It does seem like that's the theme of our entire podcast in every single episode. So we're gonna try to narrow it down. Well, narrow is probably the wrong word. We're gonna try to focus on the business impact, on the bottom line that everybody so venerates. I swear to God, there's gotta be a billion pieces in cemeteries, little headstone that says, like, I increase the bottom line. Because given how much focus it's given on the bottom line of organizations, if that's not the goal and the meaning of life, I don't know what it's.
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, that's what I look for when I walk through cemeteries and like who's had the greatest value returned to shareholders.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I know, I know. And also on the tighten the belts because the economy, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. There's so much money in the world right now that it's not an econom it's not an economy problem. It's the hoarding problem.
SPEAKER_02
Oh, 100%. Yes. That's a good way of putting it. It is forced scarcity. It's not there isn't actual resource out there, it's that it is not flowing, which is a totally different problem. And it's also kind of a self-defining problem. The second people start to get wind of that, everybody starts to act like it's not flowing.
SPEAKER_01
Yes. Yes.
SPEAKER_02
Which then ends up in a vicious cycle of less and less flowing around. So it's really good.
SPEAKER_01
It's really good for everybody.
SPEAKER_02
And I'm glad we set this up.
SPEAKER_01
So back to the bottom line, which I just on my tombstone. Because apparently that is the measure of success and the meaning of life is increasing the bottom line.
SPEAKER_02
Yeah. Mine's just going to be an outline of a bottom. Um, that's gonna be my bottom line. The one good reason to talk about this right now is that you can get a lot of leverage out of working at focusing on humans that affects your bottom line. And you will lose a lot if you don't. And we bring this up because the bottom line is usually defined in some kind of PL statements. And it's it's hey, here's where we are. When you look at the profit and loss statements, you end up with a bunch of line items that are things like here's how much we spent on salaries, here's and they can split that up by department or whatever, and here's how much we spent on tools, and here's how much we spent in infrastructure for like laptops or whatever that we're sending to people, here's how much office rent is. And it's those are real costs. These are those are all different line items. But when we look at a budget that way, it doesn't really tell much of a picture. It's just saying where money is going. There's no like you could be underpaying somebody who's performing incredibly well, you could be overpaying somebody who's performing incredibly poorly. It's just you you don't have any idea what's going on. And so we people tend to look at DOD's spreadsheets and pie charts. And there are many companies which get a little bit too into the, oh wow, look how much we're spending on people. Let's cut some people. Not only that, all kinds of things, it's just not usually where the actual leaks are. It's not where the actual misspent money is going.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, and we're not advocating for cutting both the the low performers that you're getting paid high and the high performer that's not getting paid enough. Cutting and replacing with AI, not the solution.
SPEAKER_02
Yes, as Salesforce will tell you in their in their most ashamed way.
SPEAKER_01
Yes. And many other companies that are not admitting it
Layoffs And The Cost Of Lost Knowledge
SPEAKER_01
out loud.
SPEAKER_02
We can start with layoffs. We were in a in a company that promised things like uh a faster turnaround time to get onto the platform, and which was a differentiator for them, except it didn't end up really ever delivering that way because it was too short a timeline for humans to adjust to what is essentially a large system change. So we would have customers that would try to try to do this, and then they the actual implementation would go much longer than the thing, which means your budget for we can do this many projects a year is totally off because you still have people working on projects beyond when they were supposed to be working on them. But then the flip side was that we'd occasionally go through rounds of layoffs, at which point the institutional knowledge, the relationships in the middle of these projects would just vanish. And this was a platform that would take some time to like work up on, to understand. So the understanding of the platform, the understanding of the clients, the understanding of the project would all just disappear overnight, literally overnight. There would be times where you just go in and try and slack somebody, and suddenly you're like, why does it say their account is archived? Oh, they're not here anymore. This was never announced, it was just a disappearance. And this was this was not even just like externally they were managing expectations, but internally we didn't know. No, on both sides, there was like lack of that. That's uh a direct example of hey, you didn't think about the human impact for the people internally, because also everybody gets nervous when anybody gets laid off or fired, even if it's for cause. Didn't think about the external impact. And now we you're losing customers, you're losing trust, and you're extending timelines. I mean, the amount of leakage of real dollars throughout that process is insane. And I'm not saying that's the most important part, but it's just an indicator that damn, this really makes a huge difference if you don't focus on it.
SPEAKER_01
And the funny thing is that as you said, if anybody were to look at just a spreadsheet without understanding the human experience, the human to human experience, that individual humans, human to humans internally, and human to human with customers, you would never know. Because on the spreadsheet, you know, we promise short implementations, we deliver short implementations, and we have these many implementations in a month, in a year. See, we're succeeding. And I'm like, are you succeeding? Because we're still working on the implementations from two years ago and re-implementing every single module because they were done badly. Because what was missing was the human component of this. The knowledge that you just said walked out the door, humans not collaborating, trust being broken, not understanding, not taking the time to understand the customers' needs, implementing whatever, you know, off the shelf, something, something, something that did not work, customers being angry. So then referrals were down because our customers would not act as referrals for new customers. So where's that on the spreadsheet?
SPEAKER_02
It's amazing. It wasn't unique just to that company. We've seen it happen. Like there's this tendency, and this is gonna be a bit of a rough comparison, but I think it it holds. There's a tendency in companies to do what essentially the US government has repeatedly done with the mid wars in the Middle East. Like, we'll we'll get into it and then we're like, we did it. And we're like, what did we do? Did we mission accomplished? What do we have to do? Killed a bunch of civilians, killed kids. And then it's always like, What did we do? We accomplished what we were going for. And you're like, okay, first of all, no, I don't even know what it would, nobody knows what we what you started. And obviously the conflicts continue for years after these declarations of success. And we've seen this in companies too. You just have the if you just try and force it to the metrics that you can count, then you do things like that where you count projects as they're implemented because we all said it went live, but it's not really implemented because we're all redoing all the work and don't we actually like the actual fulfilled implementation and the actual finished change isn't going to be done for several months. And so you can try and declare all the success, but that's just optics that sound good for a brief amount of time while the bottom line is really not reflecting that at all. You're leaking money totally differently. You're overstretching people who now have to work two projects. I mean, how what are the chances then of making a mistake? At which point you have more chances of losing trust, more chances of tax notices.
SPEAKER_01
That's how the mistakes came back to the bottom line. Oh god, hundreds of thousands of dollars in tax notices because of a bad implementation. So you want to talk about bottom line because of the human component not being there? There it is.
SPEAKER_02
Yes, that's an example of like uh the personnel and and implementation and having unrealistic deadlines and then trying to announce that those are okay and ignoring where that's actually going. Because then you can say, well, we budgeted that much for this project. And then if you just shadow the other hours and say, like, well, those are just well, we'll call those overhead, even though they're actually for this project, then you don't actually know that the budget for that other project was way overblown. And this is how budget spreadsheets can be designed to lie to you about what's happening.
SPEAKER_01
Every spreadsheet can be designed to lie to you. Yes. Have you ever tried filing taxes and needing to and needing to find some other expense so that you pay less taxes? Come on. Every spreadsheet can be manipulated to show the story you want to show.
SPEAKER_02
I donated clothes and one of those shirts was worth $7,000.
SPEAKER_01
Exactly. I gave to charity. And my estimate is that I gave $50,000 of worth of stuff to charity. How did you appraise it? With the wind. I looked at work. I looked at the spreadsheet and needed to figure out how much tax liability I needed to decrease. That's how I figured out the appraisal. Where's that line in TurboTax?
SPEAKER_02
How much would you like to guess? You would need this much. Well, then I guess that much. That's the feature into it. Where are you going? Why don't you have that? Exactly we've talked about this before, but the consistent des impulse is to look at the things that are easy to measure. And the things that are easy to measure are just not the high impact ones. And there's a couple things that might somewhat relate to it. And you do have to look at like your PL from a general standpoint of like, are we losing money or are we gaining money? But actually knowing what it means and what's underneath it, there are some things that are easy enough, like, wow, we don't use that tool anymore. That's pretty expensive. Let's cut that. Sure. That's probably also not the thing that is entirely sunk your budget, unless it's a wildly expensive tool. But that's a human problem too, right? Somebody wasn't watching it or somebody couldn't raise their hands high enough to be like, hey, this tool is no longer
When Spreadsheets Hide Real Leaks
SPEAKER_02
necessary and it costs us $100,000 a year. Whatever it is. That's a human problem, a psychological safety problem. So if you don't have the safety for people to notice those things to speak up about them, or for them to feel like they would bother to have ownership over that, then you leak money a totally different way.
SPEAKER_01
There's so many ways to leak money, and it's it's not as straightforward as people are an expense, eliminate them so we can stop leaking money. Also, can we go back to the why the business exists? I assume, and I realize that right now it feels like a very wrong assumption, but I assume that most businesses are not. I know that most businesses exist to create something, whether a service or a product, to help humans, right? I mean, we want humans to buy it, even if they're hiding behind a corporation. We want humans to use it, even if they're hiding behind titles or whatever, you know, stu shareholder something, something, something. And ideally, and this is where I realize, you know, there's a lot of probably assumptions here, uh, most humans. This is to make it for most most human, as many humans as possible to make it better. And not just a few that are gonna end up living alone because nobody else can afford to live or get healthier. So everybody else is gonna die. So you're gonna end up alone with a shitload of money that you can't use because there's nothing to use it on. What's the point of then uh focusing so much on the numbers on a spreadsheet, which as we just said, you can manipulate the hell out of it and the way you want it if that's not the point of the organization? Are we helping humans internally and externally? That is the measure of success. And in order to understand that, you need human leadership. You need to actually understand the human experience and you need to measure the hard stuff. This the stuff that can't be measured in a quarter, the stuff that can't be measured in a month, the stuff that can't tell you, oh, we increased random number that I want to put on the spreadsheet to make myself look good by this percentage. Like if it's easy to measure, and I just heard a podcast with Simon Sinek that I really recommend everybody listen to. If it's easy to measure, you're not measuring the right thing. It's not actually telling you what's going on.
SPEAKER_02
And we've talked about this like a dozen times before, but the AI implementations where they're just like, we're measuring adoption. We're measuring usage. Uh, we're measuring that people are using it. And and everybody was like, cool, I'll log in, ask one question in a chat, but GPT, I've used it, I'm done. And then companies were like, wow, we have 90% usage and 0% ROI. So was what you're actually measuring and what you were hoping to do was find some efficiencies, find some whatever. So you're not measuring usage of AI. You're supposed to measure, I don't know, whether you've uh reduced time in a process, whether this person has extra time to do this, what are other innovations that have come out because people freed up some other time? Those are things that you'd have to look at. And you have to specify those up front. And these are the things we continually harp on. And this is why human leadership is the important portion, because it's like it's easy enough to have a spreadsheet, it's easy enough to lie with a spreadsheet. And in any either case, it's not particularly helpful. It's definitely not helpful if you're lying, but it's not particularly helpful even if you're not. Yeah, I know.
SPEAKER_01
It's uh usually helpful if you're lying.
SPEAKER_02
That's that's the tagline for this episode. It's it's not helpful if you're lying.
SPEAKER_01
Don't lie on your spreadsheet. Everybody knows when you're lying on your spreadsheet, and everybody knows you're lying on your spreadsheet.
SPEAKER_02
You made your spreadsheet now lie on it.
SPEAKER_01
Yes. I am pretty sure you can get AI to lie on your spreadsheet too. If you really want to.
SPEAKER_02
I I'm pretty sure that even if you tried to have it tell the truth, it might lie on it.
SPEAKER_01
Yes.
SPEAKER_02
There was a company recently that just came out and was like, oh, we've just realized that this report we asked AI to generate had just been making up data for the last nine months. Cool. Cool, good verification, guys.
SPEAKER_01
Yes, yes. Which mind you, like, I caught that we were using AI to help us create some like content marketing content. And this like statistics kept coming up of like, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, 30%.
AI Metrics That Miss The Point
SPEAKER_01
And I'm like, where the hell did you get that from? Because it's not for in any of our notes. It's not in any of our documents. So I actually went and asked Claude. I'm like, fine, tell me where you got this from. Because we didn't tell you that number. That number doesn't mean much for us. And also we didn't tell it to you. So why is it showing up as a quote or a measure of success in our marketing material? And Claude was like, Oh, yeah, I made it up. Mind you, this is one number in one piece of paper. How many of these things are happening?
SPEAKER_02
I like how low the bar is for AI models that I'm I'm a little bit impressed. I'm like, wow, I told the truth. It admitted to lie. That's amazing.
SPEAKER_01
Oh, I made it up. So if this actually happened, can you give me the source? And I'm like, it didn't happen. That's the source. You just said it, it didn't happen. I don't have a number that happened. It's like, well, you know, can you find a place to find it to find the source that maybe can verify it? I'm like, no, I can't. And these are the reasons why I can't. And these are the reasons why it doesn't make any sense to have that number. I'm like, okay, I'll remove it. I'm like, thank you. But again, this is one number on one piece of paper. And in that productivity bottom line report of using AI, I'm not just wasted an hour telling the AI to take away the makeup number and to stop using it in every other document. So I don't have to manually delete it.
SPEAKER_02
And you lose time trying to figure out if you can trust that piece of it. And then what what do you then you get even more time is going to be spent on discerning whatever comes out in the future. Like that's going to be a different drain, which is actually like, even though you're talking to a bot, that's a human leak. Like the leak is there's now a lack of trust, which ends up which is a huge one that happens between botch and humans, sure, but also between humans. You see that happen between departments. You see that happen between two leaders that don't get along, and then their employees are left to just fight a weird turf war that they can't win or really move. These are the little human problems that will also cause all kinds of leaks. If you have two leaders that aren't getting along, there's a good chance you have a an unnecessarily expensive workaround happening so that they're avoiding each other, or they're doing duplicative work and it's not being mentioned, or there's miscommunications and it's creating gaps in projects. And then you got project delays and angry customers and whatever else. These are the things that become your bottom line impacts, but they're not going to show up on just a PL of like, here's how much you spend on a salary.
SPEAKER_01
And again, eliminating both departments is not the answer.
SPEAKER_02
You could do that in the same way that like eliminating all of your code will eliminate the bugs in your softwares.
SPEAKER_01
That's a good analogy. That is a good analogy.
SPEAKER_02
This function doesn't work, so we just removed it. Like, okay. Well, the customers did want it though, right? And that was actually a big part of our value problem. Okay.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah. I was gonna go for something like you can eliminate, just like, you know, you don't want to waste time washing dishes, so you get rid of all the dishes in your kitchen.
SPEAKER_02
That's a good way of doing it. Yeah, these two dishes, I don't like washing them. And even though I need them to roast the turkey, they're gone. Anyway, now we're we're cooking a turkey in a toaster oven, it's just not working the same. And it does take 17 hours and it smells terrible.
SPEAKER_01
Yes. And we eliminated the dishwasher too, because you know, it uses if you look at the bottom line, it there's a cost for the dishwasher, and there's a cost for the energy of the dishwasher and the water of the dishwasher. So let's eliminate the dishwasher.
SPEAKER_02
Also, I just I love the I love the thought process that goes into this. Like, we oh man, people are always the biggest expense. Like, yes, because people are the thing powering your entire business. Like, yeah, if you have an electric car, the big battery is the big expense. You don't take out pieces of the battery because it's expensive. You're like, you know what? If we had half-size lithium battery, I think this would be better. Like, okay, but now the car can't drive so far.
SPEAKER_01
Like, what do you even better? I'm like, God, like changing these tires every year because they get consumed. It's really expensive.
SPEAKER_02
I got so excited for that. She unplugged her own microphone.
SPEAKER_01
I somehow use telekinetics to unplug the microphone without touching it.
SPEAKER_02
If I was to guess at the very end of that analogy, because it cut off halfway after wheels, you were talking about ruining the wheels of a car.
SPEAKER_01
I'm talking about getting rid of the wheels of the car because it's expensive to have wheels.
SPEAKER_02
Yes. This is like if you don't know where your actual tracks come from. And I'm not saying that like you don't have to replace the treads on those wheels. That's the kind of that's the same thing as like trying to improve teams. Yes, there's gonna be inefficiencies between teams, but that's why you need human leadership. So you fix those inefficiencies, not eliminate the humans, and then you just, you know, you don't have a business. So that's fun.
SPEAKER_01
Like exactly. You just don't have a business.
SPEAKER_02
Yeah. You've really cut those costs though. So congratulations on your Q1 report. But what are you gonna do for Q234? And then in Q3, they announced we're we're hiring, but still announces if like it's a big growth opportunity, but it's because six months ago we let half people go and it took us three months to realize we're flailing.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I just read actually uh somebody that's basically predicting, which again, it doesn't take a genius or an economist or you know, anybody doing a study for a year and a half, that you know, all these hundreds of thousands of people that are getting laid off now are gonna get all rehired back next year. And I'm like, so why are we causing suffering internally and externally and to the bottom line?
SPEAKER_02
Uh, because very briefly, for one earnings report, uh, it sounded good. And then that was that was the earnings report right before the CEO's bonus was approved.
SPEAKER_01
So Yes, because we needed the stocks to go up, and stocks go up when you eliminate people, and they go down when you actually hire people and invest in people and RD. And so somebody needed to make a lot of money, which again, I I'm still trying to figure out what the hell they're gonna do with all this money when they die, or even when they're alive, because there's so much money you can spend as a human, so that so you cause suffering for everybody involved, just 360 degree suffering so that you can have a bunch more money in or in your portfolio that you can't possibly use as a human.
SPEAKER_02
I just don't think a hundred billion is enough, you know.
SPEAKER_01
Oh, that's the other piece in the Simon Sinek podcast that he talks about is somebody that he's acquainted. I I'm gonna repeat it because he says that in a podcast that's public, so I'm not repeating his private story. Where he had a friend who was a billionaire who lost a lot of money. And when Simon asked, like, how much did you lose? He was like, Well, 80%. He's like, so whatever you have left is is still way above any human could possibly need to survive and live in a very, very, very good way. Like, so what the hell is the problem?
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, what's the problem here?
SPEAKER_01
You still have hundreds of millions of dollars, which you can't pause. Your lifestyle has not changed at all. What you can't do has not changed at all. So what's the problem?
SPEAKER_02
Yeah,
Empathy As A Business Advantage
SPEAKER_02
yeah. That's brings up the interesting like through line here that empathy is kind of the cornerstone of all these pieces, right? Because if you understand that what what the people are going through, you'll make a little bit better choices that would have helped in understanding the customer journey in the company we were talking about that we worked for. That would understand that would help in understanding whether you need to have more money personally, that would help in understanding what you're doing for or against people. And it's something that just is having empathy helps you reach across the gaps of departments and understand what has to be done. And then finding things that work arounds that can be closed. If you can have that kind of trust and you can build that kind of space, you can build a much more efficient business and you don't have to have it. Then you're gonna show that's gonna show up on the bottom. Bottom line, and it also isn't going to have its own budget line. All those efficiencies will show up in just a better PL. You can check in and make sure that it's making progress, and that's great. You still will have to do the hard work yourself of figuring out where the actual inefficiencies are. And you have to, and that means parsing who's telling you what and making sure you're you have both sides of whatever stories and making sure that whoever is tends to be good at politicking, what is the real story here? And make sure it's not just what their department just always happens to be operating at exactly the level it needs to be. Like that, is that suspicious? Is that like it's it maybe it is, but to verify these things, and that's the kind of thing where that's human leadership that gets into the details that actually matter, not the ones that are just easy to measure and point to. And I get the temptation, and we are in this weirdly unnecessarily rushed world where we we just have to have quickly, easily digestible information, but that makes it so much easier to lie with the information. People will talk about lying with statistics all the time. I mean, it's you can choose whatever stat you want, and you can frame it however you want. Like if if you have a rare disease that only one in a hundred thousand people has, and then the next year two in a hundred uh a hundred thousand people have it, you can say like it's the same, or you can say there was a hundred percent increase in this disease.
SPEAKER_01
Yes, exactly.
SPEAKER_02
How are you framing it? And and the only way to know the truth of this is to actually build trust. And the only way to do that is to be human. That was my long-winded way to get to that
Practical Ways To Measure Humans
SPEAKER_02
thesis.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, so if we could pivot from the the rent and the soapboxing to the, you know, we keep talking about being more human, having human leadership, focusing on on the things that are hard to measure, and thinking may be helpful if we actually explained how to do that.
unknown
Yeah.
SPEAKER_02
Yeah. So here's one notori that we have used before, but it's a it's prescience. So in the middle of large changes, organizations tend to look for like where are we in the stages of this linear change that we laid out. But as we know, change is not linear. It comes, it happens in all kinds of ways. People have moments of losing identity, gaining identity, feeling lost, uh, not sure what the future is, trying to figure their way through that, needing some encouragement to change. What we found was more useful than any linear graph was the comfort to growth chart. This was something that ended up being uh incredibly useful to help plot where we felt people were in like, are they more in their comfort zone and not changing at all? Are they in a fear zone and they're kind of resisting some of the change? Are they in the learning zone and they're, you know, they might be a little bit less productive right now while they pick up the new system or pick up the new process? Or are they in the growth zone where they're they might be advocates for the whole thing? And people would change, you know, from a couple weeks to next, but that ended up being an important way to measure this. And it was an easy, easily digestible graphic that was qualitative. It wasn't quantitative. It was just, hey, here's where we think we have the opportunity to do this, dot do this. And you just adjust that with as your assumptions change, as people go through different emotions. That was a huge one that we we've used often to help decode what is more human and what's going on behind the scenes. And that helped push large complex transformation through.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, that's a great example. And it's it's it's it's about the human. So it's focused on the humans, it is subjective, it is a point in time, but it gives you an opening of figuring out what can I expect here, depending on the person, and how can I help the people that maybe are stuck? Is it okay that they're stuck? And how long can they be stuck? What's causing them to decide how to be stuck? So it really gets into like what is their experiences and how can we get closer to their experiences? It's one of the things that you talked about earlier was when in the blame game, one department or one team gets constantly blamed. I'm like, we all know that's not possible. Pretty rare if it's always the same team or the same department that does so well, and this other department does so badly every single time. And so, and it's always this other department's fault, always. And so, you know, part of that, and we, you know, we saw this in in large scales, we saw this in smaller scales at a project level, and you know, somehow it's always the same culprit. Like every project, you know, like you've got 10 projects, eight are on red, and it's always this, you know, this specialist, this me's team or or this functions team. And I'm like, really? In every single one of them. And then the thing is that like when you actually start talking to people and understanding their experience, you realize, like, oh, that's not true at all. Like, yeah, there are some things here and there, but what they're struggling with depends on this other part of the team, which depends on this other part of the team, which depends on like an entire different department. But none of that can be discovered if you're just trying to shortcut and say, like, well, it's this one function that never works, or we're gonna lay them all off and hire new ones.
SPEAKER_02
Yeah. Yeah. There has to be a deeper investigation. It's not to say that there aren't people who might need to be cut for the for the benefit of the team. Maybe there are people who are a drag, or there is a team that is underperforming. And that's great, but you have to figure out why it's underperforming. Is it just that those people are there? Is there a different relationship? Is it the fact that they just became easy to blame? And then lots of people just got used to like, oh, I can just push the blame here and then I don't have to worry about it this quarter or for my performance review for whatever. Whatever it is, like it's it's easy enough to get into those habits. And and I I'm not even saying like I'm not trying to blame anybody. That just happens kind of more naturally if you're not paying attention, if you're not being aware, and if you're not being very careful and empathetic, you could just be like, well, it must be because uh I've heard that the this team doesn't do well, so maybe it was their fault. Uh maybe that's what happened. Maybe it's just uh it's a gap, it's over over there. And it's an understandable impulse, but it doesn't help you make anything better. It doesn't help you build trust, it doesn't help you understand what the actual problem is, and it doesn't help you resolve it.
SPEAKER_01
So when you think about, you know, so that what do I measure? And if it's if I can't measure the easy stuff, what's what's the hard stuff? And some of the things that we've seen make a difference to the bottom line and to the entire business health is are people talking to each other? Are people that you didn't talk to each other, are they now talking? Are you hearing less complaints about people not talking to each other? You have teams collaborating that didn't used to collaborate. And they are now collaborating because they did the human work, because as an organization, you did the human work with them to understand how to bring them together. That's a measure of success because if two teams that didn't used to talk to each other now do talk to each other and collaborate, yes, having less complaints is a measure of success because it means that projects are moving most likely quicker. There's less mistakes being hidden, things are actually moving as opposed to circling and spinning.
SPEAKER_02
And that's like that's where you start to see that on your bottom line. Like, oh, all the things that we said we were going to do, we're starting to do. We're getting closer to that. Oh, these projects are happening. Oh, I'm having less issues brought to me that I shouldn't have to deal with. They should have been dealt with at a lower level. Like, great. Measure how much of your day goes to that, or think about how much of your day goes to that. Measure that against how it's happening now. What used to happen and what's going on now. Where's the trend? And what has helped with that? And that's your job as a human leader is to go make sure the humans can function. Make sure all the things are more well oiled. Make sure you can diffuse tensions before they become a whole stop in the system. It's just just like doing car maintenance. It's making sure that the pieces are running smoothly and then listening for the times when they're not and figuring out what has to be done. Instead of saying, like, it seems to be a problem with the engine, let's get rid of the engine.
SPEAKER_01
Yes. I don't, you know, I don't want to keep washing dishes, so let me get rid of all the dishes.
SPEAKER_02
Yeah. I wouldn't have to wash dishes if I didn't have them. Exactly. So now I just leave the pot on the stove and just put my face right in it. I don't have a spoon, I don't have a knife, I have a straw and soup.
SPEAKER_01
I somehow open the frosted, hot water comes in, I put my mouth into it, I put some pasta in the mouth, and then I wait 15 minutes to swallow it.
SPEAKER_02
Does it take a while? Sure, but I don't have to do the dishes.
SPEAKER_01
Exactly.
SPEAKER_02
Dinners are 75 minutes long and I get six bites in.
SPEAKER_01
I know. My my electricity bill is is lower, my water bill is lower because I don't have a dishwasher to run anymore. Because I don't have dishes.
SPEAKER_02
Look at my PL sheet. I mean, I would I would be able to tell you that if I weren't
Closing Thoughts And How To Reach Us
SPEAKER_02
currently marinating some raw noodles in my mouth.
SPEAKER_01
So look at this financial success. Oh my god.
SPEAKER_00
I know my mouth hurts just from the hot water and having pasta just marinating under my tongue until it's cold.
SPEAKER_02
Yeah. I love the idea that like, I think how starchy. Anyway. You've heard it here from the very calloused mouths.
SPEAKER_01
Focusing on the humans is not measurable as easily as you would like it to be. And it does impact the bottom line in many, many, many, many unseen ways.
SPEAKER_02
Yes, just because it's not measurable does not mean it's not having an impact or not easily measurable. Sinkal Force and try and try and go a little deeper, dig a little deeper, and realize that where you're where you're losing money isn't where you think you're losing money.
SPEAKER_01
Exactly. It's not that simple. If it's simple, you're doing it wrong.
SPEAKER_02
And also an investment in that is it can have a huge ROI. You invest in resolving conflict, you invest in leaders that can foster this kind of environment. Now you've got wheels turning in a totally different direction. And the PL sheet looks a lot better. And it will also be for quote unquote unknown reasons because it's hard to measure the the um the it's hard to understand the exact impact of each piece of it. It's seeing it holistically and being like, oh, hey, we're moving in the right direction. The ROI of investing in humans is huge. The ROI of not investing in humans is huge the other direction.
SPEAKER_01
Yes, exactly. Yeah, it's a little bit like if you have an electric car and you have a charger in the garage for it. Investing in humans, the ROI is that now you have a bigger charger, a stronger charger, and your car is charged in 20 minutes instead of 24 hours. So now you can drive to more places, you can use it more frequently, you don't have to keep waiting for something. You can get to do what you need to do without having to now stop at a supercharger somewhere else because your home charger, which you didn't invest on, is not fast enough. That's the same. It's like sure. Plug plug your car in in a normal in a normal outlet if you want to, because you don't want to spend the extra money for a bigger charger. Well you can do is live.
SPEAKER_02
It feels like a big upfront cost, but then what if that's way more efficient? Both of you you gain time on the other end, you gain maybe it's a more efficient charger. Like, yes, it costs you know a thousand dollars or something, like uh to put to install the the outlet and put the new charger in. Maybe that's the upfront cost. And it does feel like sticker shock looking at that upfront cost because these savings are are hidden, because it's those hours that you save not finding a supercharger. It's the maybe it's a more efficient charger and you're actually saving more on your energy bill over time. Whatever it is, there's little pieces that if you invest in that, that's what you get. And it will be a greater ROI than what you than what you spent. But if you're unwilling to go through the sticker shock phase, you'll never get there.
SPEAKER_01
So invest in your invest in humans. Yes, invest in your people. Who are humans? The humans, people.
SPEAKER_02
People, most likely humans in your company.
unknown
Yes.
SPEAKER_01
And thanks for listening.
SPEAKER_02
Thank you. Thanks so much for listening to Uncover the Human. We are Ciamo. That is the company that sponsors and created this podcast. And if you would like to reach out to us further, reach out with any questions, or to be on the podcast, please reach out to podcast at weareciamo.com, or you can find us on Instagram. Our handle is we are Ciamo, S-I-A-M-O. Or you can go to weareciamo.com and check us out there. Or I suppose Christina, you and I have LinkedIn as well. People could find us next.
SPEAKER_01
Yes, we do have LinkedIn. Yes. Yeah. And we'd like to thank Ebbie Robison for producing our podcast and making sure that they actually reach all of you. And Rachel Sherwood for the wonderful score.
SPEAKER_02
Thank you guys so much for listening.
SPEAKER_01
Tune in next. Thank you.