S1E11 Artificially intelligent

Season 1 | Episode 11

Episode Description

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 uncovers how AI will foster the future of human-centric leadership, calling all leaders to switch from an either/or mentality to the both/and method.

Episode Transcript

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.

Hello, friend. I'm Dia, and welcome back to Everything is a People Problem. I am so excited for today's episode, which is about AI and the role it will play in supporting leadership in the future, but first I want to talk about gratitude.

Gratitude is something that makes you a better leader. There's a lot of interesting research out there about gratitude and its benefits. It has physical ones like allowing you to lower your blood pressure and exercise more. Psychological ones; when you're thankful, you're more alert. You're alive and awake, maybe more joyful. And social ones; you're more forgiving and you feel less lonely and isolated because of this gratitude. Similar to how we talk about putting the oxygen mask in the airplane on yourself before helping others put theirs on, leaders need to practice gratitude first so that they can enjoy that positive physical, social, and psychological impact. That impact inevitably influences how they lead and how they treat other people. Nicole Lipkin, who does a lot of research on the connection between leadership and gratitude, identified that gratitude breeds employee engagement and fosters more positive interactions. That gratitude helps us acknowledge our accomplishments and gives us a level of thankfulness that encourages us to focus on successes over failures.

What's interesting is that we often suffer from an apology-reflex over a gratitude-reflex, where instead of being thankful, we tend to be sorry. One of the easiest ways to challenge someone to improve their self confidence is to ask them to replace, “I'm sorry,” with, “Thank you.” So instead of, “I'm sorry I was late,” you change that with, “Thank you for waiting for me.” A connection between two people is deepened when you replace apologizing with expressing gratitude. I'm sharing all this so you know there's a lot of knowledge, history, and research behind why gratitude is important because I have an apology-reflex, because all I want to do is say, “I'm sorry for taking a few weeks to get a podcast episode out.” “I'm sorry for being a little radio silent on social media.” I want to apologize for my own shortcomings, which actually doesn't do any favors to anyone. Mostly myself. So instead, I'd like to deepen the connection between you and me and say, “Thank you for being patient while I researched and prepared my next episode.” “Thank you for listening to this podcast and providing your comments and thoughts so that I can continue to create something that we all can derive value from.”

And in addition to your comments, I would love your questions. So friendly reminder, if you hop to diazaferjoyce.com/podcast, you'll see near the top of the page, “Do you have a question for the pod?'“ and a link for you to click and submit yours. I'd love a voice recording where you can include your name, if you'd like, and your question, or if you don't want to be on the air, please feel free to write down your question and email it to me.

Let's dive into today's topic, which is AI and leadership. AI is the hotness. It is everywhere and being embedded into everything. It's actually been a part of our lives for longer than we realize when we think about the kind of ads that get marketed to us through various websites and social media that we use, but Forbes was talking about recently how the rise of machines creates an even greater demand for a rise in creativity. CF Su, Vice President of Machine Learning at Hyperscience, says, “Regardless of the industry or how the tech is adopted, workers will increasingly need to adjust and learn to embrace soft skills to excel in tomorrow's workplace.” Ultimately, CF is saying that we need to bring the people skills. Artificial intelligence is going to bring the automation and the amount of information that can be processed, more so than humans can do, but we have to bring the human element to the AI.

There is a new type of leader that is needed today, and that is the AI-Augmented Leader. That's someone who integrates the use of AI into their leadership in ways that enhance and expand positive human impact. Nhlamu Dlomu, the Global Head of People at KPMG, says that leaders in this age of AI have a rare opportunity to rethink and redefine how we work and how we lead. We can focus on ourselves and our people while simultaneously improving financial results by leveraging the benefits of AI-Augmented Leadership.

But AI is scary, so what does this really mean? Because we don't really associate AI with humanity today, so this is a very new thought. Well, AI can strengthen our cognitive, emotional, and social powers. Intellectually, it can process vast amounts of information and help us make quick decisions as leaders. Emotionally, it can deepen our understanding of an employee and help us choose the best path forward in a challenging situation. And socially, it can help us understand team dynamics and foster diverse thinking. The key here is that AI helps. It is a tool. It cannot alone make us better leaders. You don't just work with artificial intelligence and then bam, you're amazing. It's not going to happen that way.

There's this part of leadership now that embraces AI augmentation. So augmentation, this is defined as the process of enhancing or improving something by adding to it. AI augmentation happens when we use AI to augment our perception our discernment, or our actions.

When we use AI to augment our perception, let's say, that's leveraging AI to help us understand team dynamics and to foster diverse perspectives. When we're asking AI to augment our discernment, that's where we leverage AI's ability to process those vast amounts of information so that we have more evidence at our fingertips before we make a decision. I recognize that this relationship between leadership and AI sounds idealized, but this adoption of augmentation is centered around an existing principle called a both/and mindset.

A both/and mindset is the opposite of an either/or mindset. Good leaders today are consistent in their decision making. They stick to commitments and they stay on message, but the problem is as much as we say we value consistency in our leadership, we don't actually reward it. The goal of leadership is to maintain balance in an organization. Either/or choices are creating paradoxes that leaders need to solve with that both/and mindset.

The innovation paradox comes from the question, “Are we managing for today or for tomorrow?” There's a tension between existing offerings and new ones and a balance that needs to be struck between stability and change. The globalization paradox asks if we are adhering to boundaries or crossing them. There's a tension between global interconnection and local needs. Going wide with breadth versus going tall and deep with depth; we need to find a balance between collaboration and competition. There's also the obligation paradox, which asks if we're focusing on creating value for our shareholders and investors, or for a broader set of stakeholders. Who, in the end, are we obligated to serve?

The both/and leader has to put these two ends of the spectrum together. It's not, “Are we managing for today or tomorrow?” It's, “How do we manage for today and tomorrow?” It's not, “Which do we adhere to boundaries or do we cross them constantly?” It's, “How do we both respect boundaries as well as push them outside their comfort zone?” The both/and leader is exactly that, both, and. And the AI augmented leader is also a both/and leader, but they're bringing the best of both human and machine into their leadership practice.

Phew, chonky topic today, but what do we do with all this information? How do we become an AI augmented leader? Well, from a neurological perspective, almost all scientific cognitive models have three qualities. They perceive, they discern, and they respond. And those can be classified into three categories. It's awareness, wisdom, and compassion.

Awareness is the perceptual capacity of the mind to observe internal and external experiences. The AI Augmented Leader We'll skillfully provide context to AI generated content. When we're talking about this AI augmented leader, there is an interactivity happening here between the leader and the AI because the AI won't make a good leader and the leader brings humanity to the AI. So again, with awareness, the AI is bringing the information and the exposure at a level that a human can't match. But the leader is providing context to that AI so that they understand what the parameters are for the information that they need.

Wisdom is the capacity of the mind to discern and form sound judgment, and that's by understanding reality as it is today. AI will provide answers based on enormous amounts of data, but the AI Augmented Leader uses wisdom to ask thoughtful questions so that they can discern the answers that are provided by AI. AI provides Information, the leader uses their skill to discern and identify which information is pertinent to their situation.

And finally, compassion, which is the ability to provide genuine care with the intention of being to the benefit of everyone around and contributing ultimately to the greater good. AI contributes by providing algorithmic knowledge and insights, but the AI augmented leader leverages that power to analyze employee data and provide authentic, heartfelt, and human experiences.

So how do we become AI augmented leaders? We use AI. Technological advancements are taking off, and us as leaders have to stay on top of things. We cannot fall behind, because if we do, then we become outdated and useless. And that's not the kind of leader I know that I want to be, and I don't think it's the kind of leader that you want to be either. There's an incredible book I just picked up. It's called, “You Look Like a Thing and I Love You, How Artificial Intelligence Works and Why It's Making the World a Weirder Place,” by Janelle Shane. She is brilliant. She has a PhD in engineering and an MS in physics, and she had a blog called AI Weirdness, where she was trying to test AI algorithms and teach it so that she could really learn about AI and its limitations. In her book, the first thing she says is that AI learns by example, and many AIs learn by copying humans. The question that they're answering is not, “What is the best solution?” but instead, “What would the humans have done?”

I want to leave you with two quotes. One is from Sultan Saidov, who's the co founder and president of the talent management company Beamery. And when they were interviewed by Forbes, Sultan said, “Professionals and managers should view AI as an opportunity versus something that should be feared.” At the beginning of the show, I talked about an apology-reflex. AI augmented leadership is happening now, and let's not have a fear-reflex for something that could revolutionize human-centric leadership and human-centric leadership is focused on humanity. And I can't imagine a better way to illustrate this than Barbie's quote in Greta Gerwig's “Barbie” when she says, “I want to be a part of the people that make meaning, not the thing that is made.” AI is the thing that is made, and we are the people that make the meaning. So let's do it. Let's be that new generation of AI augmented leaders and make meaning together.

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 insights and statistics from Entrepreneur.com, Forbes, Hartstein Psychological Services, Harvard Business Review, IMDB, and LinkedIn, , and Royalty-free music provided by Sarah, the Instrumentalist from Epidemic Sound.

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References

Hougaard, Rasmus, and Jacqueline Carter. “How AI Can Make Us Better Leaders.” Harvard Business Review, 6 June 2024, hbr.org/2024/06/how-ai-can-make-make-us-better-leaders?ab=HP-latest-text-1.

Jamgochian, Jennifer. “When to Say ‘I’m Sorry’ and When to Say ‘Thank You.’” Hartstein Psychological Services, 16 June 2021, hartsteinpsychological.com/when-to-say-sorry-or-thank-you.

McKendrick, Joe. “As Ai Rises, so Do Calls for More Creativity.” Forbes, Forbes Magazine, 7 Jan. 2024, www.forbes.com/sites/joemckendrick/2024/01/07/as-ai-rises-so-do-calls-for-more-creativity/.

Paviour, Maria. “Shifting from the Apology-Reflex to a Gratitude-Reflex.” LinkedIn, 8 Mar. 2018, www.linkedin.com/pulse/shifting-from-apology-reflex-gratitude-reflex-maria-paviour/.

Rampton, John. “Why Gratitude Makes Leaders More Effective.” Entrepreneur, 23 Nov. 2023, www.entrepreneur.com/leadership/why-gratitude-makes-leaders-more-effective/339430#:~:text=Nicole%20Lipkin%20writes%20that%20leaders,to%20focus%20on%20your%20successes.

Smith, Wendy K, et al. “‘both/and’ Leadership.” Harvard Business Review, May 2016, hbr.org/2016/05/both-and-leadership.

S1E10 What Am I Reading?

Season 1 | Episode 10

Episode Description

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.

Episode Transcript

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.

S1E9 The Other F-Word

Season 1 | Episode 9

Episode Description

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 discusses how failing is a natural byproduct of growth and the difference between preventable, complexity-related, and intelligent failures.

Episode Transcript

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 there! I'm Dia, and welcome back to Everything is a People Problem. Before we dive into today's topic of failure, I want to remind you that I am now open for questions. The last episode of the season is going to be a Q and A and so if you go to diazaferjoyce.com/podcast, you'll find a new little link that says, “Do you have a question for the pod?” and you can just click here and submit yours. You'll have an email form open that will ask for your name, which is optional, and your question, and give you the opportunity to attach a voice memo if you want to be played on the air.

Let's talk about the F word, that thing most people try to avoid, but everybody needs. Failure can be a trite topic because it means something different to everyone. A lot of old timey sayings have been exhausted over our lifetime, like, “If at first you don't succeed, try, try again,” presuming that you didn't succeed because you failed. There are acrostics to help you feel better about the word failure, like FAIL standing for First Attempt in Learning. Some people see failure as a weight on their shoulders every time incrementally they do not succeed. Others see it as steps moving upward so that every time you fail you take a step forward and make progress. No matter how you think about it, if you are someone who enjoys potato chips, post-it notes, pacemakers, penicillin, or silly putty, then you better also like failing because all of those things were failures from their intended first attempt at least.

Failure and risk are synonymous and even though I haven't accidentally made potato chips while trying to attempt another task, I have certainly learned from my own unintended outcomes when I've taken risks and they haven't gone the way I would have expected. I want to share my experience with you in opening an enamel pin business. If you're wondering, “Well, Dia, I don't see a link to your shop on your website to this pin business,” that's because it doesn't exist anymore.

I love enamel pins. Ever since my very first one that I found at a garage sale back in the suburbs of Chicago, that was this unicorn, it is a hard enamel pin, it's very old, and I still have it today, all the way to pins that I find on Etsy and purchase from artists because they put their art in wearable, adorable little formats and allow for deep, thoughtful self expression without even having to say a word. Enamel pins are awesome. One day I thought I should create my own pin business. I love making art. I love pins. Obviously I should get into the enamel pin industry. I named it Pinup because I love a good pun. And I had branding, a color scheme, an identity. I wanted people to know when my pin arrived in the mail because they would see this small little yellow package with my sticker on the back. And they would know that their moment has arrived and their precious pin was now in their possession.

The thing is, when you're selling material goods, there's a lot of overhead. You need to buy the envelopes and the stickers ahead of time, so that you have them to send to your customers when they purchase your pins. You also design, contract, and produce your goods, so, that means you have bins of pins lying around waiting to be bought. And then not to mention taxes and international shipping and all the other things that creep in when you least expect it. And by least expect it, I mean you didn't do enough research before you decided starting a pin business was a good idea. After about a year and a half of running Pinup, I decided to close it. What I learned from that moment in time was that I loved controlling the experience for the customer. I loved instilling a sense of excitement that everything was meant to be there, from the wrapping, to the tissue, to the note thanking them for their purchase and support. What I didn't like was the volatility of the pin industry's market. Closing Pinup was a bummer for me. Beyond just the sunk cost, I just really cared about my little enterprise and thought that it could be something that would thrive and at least I'm not alone; 50 percent of small businesses fail in their first 12 months of being open so at least I went beyond the one year mark, but on the flip side 42 percent of those failures are because of lack of demand in the market for their product and that was me.

Now we've talked about the benefits of failure and of taking risks for both individual development and for business innovation, but business failure is actually good for the economy. Hart Posen of the University of Michigan's Ross School of Business and Anne Marie Knott of Washington University in St. Louis, did a study on the economic impact of failed firms. They focused on the commercial banking industry in all 50 US states and the District of Columbia. They found that the more firms that enter a market, the greater the likelihood that established companies who perform poorly will disappear, and this suggests that failure is just a byproduct that yields the best companies. Posen and Knott are talking about this cyclical effect that happens with excess entry, so a large flood of new companies that come into an industry, they saw that with this influx or an introduction of new companies, there is a greater service provided, which then decreases the cost that customers are willing to pay, mostly because prices get competitive. When that happens, good companies innovate, and when they innovate, they might find a way to be able to provide a comparable or even better service for the same or lower price. They may find ways to persevere, whereas those companies who weren't performing well to begin with, now that there's this competition that is surpassing what they can offer, they naturally die out.

I'm using the example of small businesses and businesses in general to showcase how important it is to normalize failure. And failure itself is a very strong word, but we're going to use it because people use it and associate different feelings with it that are completely unnecessary. Failure is a learning experience, and there's a great book called “Little Bets; How Breakthrough Ideas Emerge from Small Discoveries” by Peter Sims. It's an excellent read on those little experiments that we should conduct; everything from a small business owner within your business to an individual contributor and a manager, it's taking advantage of small risks that can yield wins so that that way you learn from those little bets that you make. They're little because they're low stakes. That's how you get used to failure is you don't just make a big commitment without doing the proper research like me, don't be me and decide to just start a goods-based small business just so that you can learn from it. When one small bet follows another, follows another, follows another, what ends up happening is that you learn so much that before you know it, you look back and you've actually taken a big risk. You have done a lot of little things that have led to a large change, large decision. So, If you did fail along the way, it's a lot easier to understand what part those failures have played as you continue to move forward.

Back when I attended the Grace Hopper Celebration in 2019 for women in tech, I was completely floored by these young women who were presenting with these brilliant ideas, and I thought, “Oh my gosh, I'm not doing anything with my life,” and it's not that they woke up one day and said, “Ah, I'm going to make this change in the world! I'm going to solve this giant problem.” Every single one of them in their conversations said they started with something small. There was just one thing they wanted to change, one thing they wanted to improve, and that one thing led to another and led to another, and then, before you know it, they're not even graduated from college and they're presenting at GHC because they have followed their failures and their successes to create something that would be beneficial not just for themselves, but for their community and for the world.

Something funny happens to our brain when we fail. It expands. Believe it or not, your brain begins compiling information about an experience and throughout the learning scenario of that experience, it gets bigger. Now normally, the brain will return to close to its original size after the learning experience concludes unless you fail, and if you fail, it matures the brain. It results in more efficient synapses and fundamentally altered neurons, so failure can actually make you smarter.

Not all failure is created equal. Often in order to have a culture where you are allowed to or encouraged to fail, it also coincides with high performance expectations as well. Mostly because if you're going to learn from the failure, You need to articulate what you've learned and apply it into the next attempt. But failure has three broad categories: preventable, complexity related, and intelligent.

Preventable failures are the ones that shouldn't happen. When they do, it's usually a result of deviance or inattention or, lack of ability. The good news is that preventable failures are the easiest to fix because maybe you need to introduce training or a checklist. There are very task oriented solutions that can be implemented in order to prevent those failures in the future. Complexity related are unavoidable failures within complex systems, usually due to the uncertainty of work do these failures occur. It might be a new combination of needs and people and problems, and if they've never occurred before, then the output is going to be incredibly unpredictable. Failures in complex systems pave the way to innovation. They are generally around safety and risk management, but they need to happen in order for small failures to help prevent big failures. And finally, intelligent failures; these are ones that provide valuable knowledge that helps organizations move ahead quickly and surpass their competition, which helps ensure that they'll grow in the future. This is a format that encourages small experimentation that produces failures quickly because then you have information to learn from right in the moment. Trial and error may fall into this category as well, although error assumes that there was a wrong way to do something, so more like trial and discovery.

No matter what failure you either experience or observe, there's one thing you should do and you should start doing it today. Write them down. Record them. Recording a failure is not with the purpose of assigning blame. There's a difference between failure and fault. It was definitely my fault that Pinup failed, but through the failure, I learned some valuable lessons about the kind of business that I want to run. When you're managing a project, one of the most important steps that gets left off the most is evaluation. Recording our failures is authoring the evaluation of an experiment, and you don't need to be a project manager in order to do that. When you don't record the failure, you lose the knowledge. Retaining the knowledge and leveraging it into the next experiment is how you're going to turn your failures into intelligent ones, so don't ignore those important, meaningful failures. Embrace and elevate them so that everyone can learn from them.

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, 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, Harvard Business Review, the University of Michigan, and The Zebra, and Royalty-free music provided by Sarah, the Instrumentalist from Epidemic Sound.

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References

“Business Failures Are Good for the Economy.” University of Michigan News, 6 Sept. 2006, news.umich.edu/business-failures-are-good-for-the-economy/.

Casuto, Simon. “Council Post: Why Failure Is the Key to Workplace Culture Success.” Forbes, Forbes Magazine, 27 July 2016, www.forbes.com/sites/theyec/2016/07/27/why-failure-is-the-key-to-workplace-culture-success/?sh=74d89fb548f4.

Edmondson, Amy C. “Strategies for Learning from Failure.” Harvard Business Review, Apr. 2011, hbr.org/2011/04/strategies-for-learning-from-failure#:~:text=Failures%20in%20this%20category%20can%20rightly%20be%20considered%20“good%2C”,Sitkin%20calls%20them%20intelligent%20failures.

“Small Business Statistics in 2021: Reports and Facts | the Zebra.” The Zebra, 14 Mar. 2024, www.thezebra.com/resources/research/small-business-statistics/.

S1E8 Employees Just Want To Have Fun

Season 1 | Episode 8

Episode Description

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 applies Emotional Intelligence to neurodivergent and introverted individuals, elevating the importance of leadership diversity for both problem solving and visibility.

Episode Transcript

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.

Why hello. I'm Dia, and welcome back to Everything is a People Problem. Having fun at work is a non negotiable for me. I need to dedicate intentional time with my team to be joyful because if we just focus on the tasks and the roadmaps and the strategies, work is really dull. Once a quarter, I try to organize either a team wide or org wide event that has some element of fun. Maybe employees are learning from each other or we bring someone in externally that can lead us in an activity.

But one time I organized a game of Mafia and since we're in a hybrid space that means that it was pretty friendly to do this virtually. If you've never played Mafia before, there's the narrator, who's the organizer, and they assign roles ahead of time before you play, and those roles are Mafia, so you're trying to kill people, civilians, who are innocent, the doctor, who tries to save people, and the investigator, who tries to identify Mafia members. A leader is primed for this narrator role because you can draw people out. You can start to pit people against each other. Maybe plant seeds that there's some form of deception happening. Try to see who becomes allies and builds bonds together; usually it's the mafia that does that. But it is so fun to get a team in a room where they're also leveraging their strategy and negotiation skills, but in a way that's completely different than how we use them in a work environment.

It's not easy to find time for these events. You have to, as a manager, be intentional about booking these activities and setting aside the time with a priority of fun. And I'm talking about this because guess what? There's significant research that shows fun in the workplace has a positive impact on engagement, creativity, and purpose. In fact, when we find tasks more enjoyable, we're more likely and more eager to dig into them and complete them.

Mario Tamayo, author of the book, “Work Made Fun Gets Done,” conducted a voluntary study where employees and companies could participate in a 60 statement survey and it had a five point scale that described what a great employee experience looks like or assessed what it could look like. And they measured that experience in terms of high levels of trust, respect, credibility, fairness, pride, and camaraderie. His book focused on the subset of companies that employees tagged as “great,” so 81 percent of those employees described their work environment as fun. So, a fun work environment gave them a great company to work for.

Now, if you've listened to a few episodes of this podcast, you would probably put together that a great company is creating engaged employees and the higher the engagement, the more successful the business. Having fun at work has a lot of benefits, but three of my favorites are that it increases risk taking, it reduces stress levels, and it improves teamwork.

Regina Mayer, the global head of energy for KPGM, conducted a women's leadership study and she found that 45 percent of women surveyed in this study said risk taking allowed them to gain a whole new set of skills that they otherwise would have never developed. I think her story is really interesting because she was in the army and had attended airborne school, or jump school, which trains you how to parachute into an operation from an aircraft. And she was only one of 15 women in a class of 500 who had signed up to jump. And she said that when they went up into their aircrafts for their very first jumps, they were each in different teams, but each woman was in a team comprised entirely of men. And in her group, she jumped first. Later, she learned that most of the other women had also jumped first. The reward in this for her, besides all those women being badasses, and her included, is that she earned incredible respect among her peers, and that was an example of her leading from the front. And sure, maybe she would have gained respect from her peers in a different activity or exercise, but this was the one where she took a risk, and that risk really paid off. She took this risk because she felt safe, and that's where we come back to having fun in the workplace, because one of the ways to build safety and a culture safety is to have fun.

You know you're in a great work environment when you can laugh and laughter is a stress reliever. A hearty laugh relieves your physical tension and you stay relaxed for up to 45 minutes after the laugh has occurred. The Mayo Clinic found, along with many other institutions, but I'm going to focus on the Mayo Clinic's research, that laughter improves your immune system. Negative thoughts manifest into these chemical reactions that bring more stress into your system and ultimately decrease your immunity. But in contrast, positive thoughts and laughter, which generates positivity, releases neuropeptides that help fight stress and potentially more serious illnesses. Bright HR worked with the Robertson Cooper Consultants on their It Pays to Play study, which focused on 2, 000 employees from all over the UK identifying correlations between workplace fun and business results. They found that 62 percent of employees who had no sick days in the last 3 months experienced some form of fun in the workplace.

Friendly reminder, this is just a study, and a study of a finite number of people, so, I fully believe if someone is sick, you are sick, you should take your time off to be sick. It doesn't mean you're not having enough fun in the workplace, but their survey did also identify that employees who feel stressed are more likely to have sickness absences. There's no denying that if you're laughing and having fun at work, it becomes an environment you choose to be in. And even though you don't get to necessarily choose your coworkers, if you're having fun with them, then working as a team gets way easier.

I know I'm throwing a lot of statistics at you during this episode, so also prepare your heart for some more, but I'm doing that because not only am I passionate about having fun at work and it's foundational to my own leadership, I really want you to understand how having fun is not a waste of time. Here are the statistics because we're talking about teamwork and Stanford University conducted a study that showed teams that work well together are 50 percent more productive. It shows that effective teamwork is directly linked to increased productivity, and when team members collaborate, they can accomplish more tasks and projects in less time.

Listen, if you're not going to have fun for the reasons that I think it's important to have fun, then at the very least, you should prioritize an engaging environment to attract and retain talent. In that same Bright HR study I talked about earlier, they found that 79 percent of graduates believe that a fun work environment is essential to their employment. So if you're asked in an interview, how do you have fun at work and you don't have a good answer, there's a pretty high likelihood that that incredible talent you've just talked to is not going to choose to work at your company. And you know who suffers at that point? Your bottom line.

Real talk. What if you're not a fun person? I am sad for you if that's true, but it can be difficult to know how to incorporate fun into the workplace. And fun is a spectrum because of course we need to be thoughtful and intentional about what does fun mean. How do we define it, and how do we make it inclusive. There are a lot of resources online for ways to have fun, both in person and in hybrid environments, and so I'm going to encourage you to do some research for ideas. You already had mine through virtual mafia. Another time, instead of eating lunch at the cafeteria, an employee and I walked 10 minutes down the streetto go get a bite and visit a plant shop. And then we came back with plants, one of which she let brilliantly die on her desk over the course of a weekend. And so we had a good laugh about that the next week. But the one thing I am going to ask you to do is talk to your team. I talk a lot about vulnerability and honesty and how that is also foundational to a healthy culture, so if you want to have fun with your team, tell them you want to have fun with them be honest and say, “Hey I'm not sure what everybody thinks is fun, so can I get some ideas?” or take a poll ask them through an anonymous survey so that you can get ideas from them, but not necessarily put them on the spot. But your best resource is going to be your team. And if you're an employee and your manager hasn't set aside intentional time for fun, number one, share this podcast episode. Number two, ask for it. It's great if managers have access to an employee morale budget, but you also don't need money to have a good time. So this is not only something you want as an employee, this is something you need. And it is your responsibility as an employee to tell your manager what you need in order to be successful.

I want to leave you with this article that I found when I was researching fun in the workplace. It's from March of 2022, and let me read you the title. “The highest French court ruled that a Paris based consultant was wrongfully fired after he refused to stick to the ‘fun values’ of the company.” In 2015, Mr.T, as he's referred to in the court documents to protect his identity, was fired from Cubik Partners for “professional deficiency.” So basically he didn't stick to the, “fun and professional” values of the company, which involved both seminars, that's the professional part, and after work drinks, the fun part. The court ruled in Mr. T's favor, saying that he was exercising his freedom of opinion and expression, especially since this investigation brought out the excessive alcohol consumption and promotion of promiscuity, bullying, and misconduct from the company itself.

There's a couple things to take away from here. Number one, Mr. T absolutely did the right thing. He should not have put himself in a situation where he felt unsafe. So when we talk about fun in the workplace, the number one goal is safety. In fact, the fun is trying to cultivate an environment where people feel safe to experiment, to be their best selves. So, if you're inviting people into an unsafe environment with the guise of it being fun, that's the wrong move. The other thing is with the reintroduction of in-person work and attendance, it has reintroduced social engagements that are also in person. There is a natural push and pull between professional duty and personal autonomy. You need to find the right balance for you between building the relationships that are critical to your career and your growth, as well as exercising what you need for yourself.

When you are a people first manager, you'll probably check in with your team first and ask for those who are comfortable to participate, while also making it guilt-free for those who simply can't. I know what you're thinking. You're watching the clock click down on this podcast episode and you're thinking, “But Dia, don't go! I've got so many more questions for you!” Thankfully, I have a solution for you. If you navigate to diazaferjoyce.com/podcast, you have an ability to submit a question. It says, “Do you have a question for the pod?” And then the link that says click here will automatically open an email with a quick form, which is your name, which is optional, and your question, and you have the ability to attach a voice recording so that that way I can play you on the air. We're on episode eight right now and for season one I committed to 16 episodes and I've dedicated the 16th entirely to Q& A. So I'm starting to collect those now. If you've got a question, if you want advice, please feel free to submit it through the website and I can't wait to be able to address it together.

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, 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 Bright HR, Euronews, Harvard Business Review, HelpGuide.org, KPMG, the Mayo Clinic, Teambuilding.com, vantage Circle, and Zight, and Royalty-free music provided by Sarah, the Instrumentalist from Epidemic Sound.

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References

“40 Workplace Collaboration Statistics: The Power of Teamwork.” Zight, 5 Mar. 2024, zight.com/blog/collaboration-statistics/.

“BrightHR – It Pays to Play.” Bright HR, 2023, pages.brighthr.com/rs/217-MIC-854/images/itpaystoplay.pdf.

Duboust, Oceane. “A French Man Has Won the Right Not to Be ‘fun’ at Work.” Euronews, 30 Nov. 2022, www.euronews.com/next/2022/11/30/a-french-man-has-won-the-right-not-to-be-fun-at-work-in-a-landmark-court-battle.

He, Grace. “10 Benefits of Having Fun at Work.” Teambuilding.Com, 12 Mar. 2024, teambuilding.com/blog/benefits-of-fun-at-work.

Mayor, Regina. “Making the Jump: How Taking Risks Helped Elevate My Career.” KPMG, 2023, info.kpmg.us/news-perspectives/people-culture/making-the-jump-elevated-my-career.html.

Medhi, Barasha. “Fun at Work: 6 Useful Tips for Managers.” Nurture an Engaged and Satisfied Workforce | Vantage Circle HR Blog, Nurture an Engaged and Satisfied Workforce | Vantage Circle HR Blog, 27 Apr. 2023, blog.vantagecircle.com/fun-at-work/.

Nelson, Bob. “Why Work Should Be Fun.” Harvard Business Review, 2 May 2022, hbr.org/2022/05/why-work-should-be-fun.

Robinson, Lawrence, et al. “Laughter Is the Best Medicine.” HelpGuide.Org, 5 Feb. 2024, www.helpguide.org/articles/mental-health/laughter-is-the-best-medicine.htm.

“Stress Relief from Laughter? It’s No Joke.” Mayo Clinic, Mayo Foundation for Medical Education and Research, 22 Sept. 2023, www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/stress-management/in-depth/stress-relief/art-20044456.