Ignoring People Quietly Destroys The Bottom Line

“Cristina Amigoni: The most business exists to create something, whether a service or product, to help humans, right? I mean, we want humans to buy it, even if they're hiding behind the corporation. We want humans to use it, even if they're hiding behind titles.”

[EPISODE]

Alex Cullimore: Welcome back to another episode of Uncover the Human. It's a host episode today, so hello, Cristina.

Cristina Amigoni: Hello. I don't know what day it is. It's some day.

Alex Cullimore: I don't know. It’s somewhere between –

Cristina Amigoni: It’s a day.

Alex Cullimore: - I think Monday and the end times.

Cristina Amigoni: A Friday. That's even better. Monday and the end of times. Yes. Yes. 

Alex Cullimore: I think we're somewhere in between those two.

Cristina Amigoni: All I know is that I didn’t go to bed until 1.30 a.m., so this is going to be an interesting recording.

Alex Cullimore: Yes, that's why we talk about the impact of non-human leadership.

Cristina Amigoni: 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.

Alex Cullimore: Yeah. I mean, it would have been bad if you were partying. But if it's a parking lot, then it's fine. There's actually weirdly dovetails into what we wanted to talk about today, which is, we wanted to talk about the impact of non-human leadership. What happens when you start to forget the humans? We're not from a very business sense in this case. 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 is a little bit shifty, everything is a little bit uncertain. Everybody is trying to make sure they are buckled down and 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 a human who's out until 1.30 in the morning? That has an impact on the next day? What happens like, if we don't take these things and allow them to be, or figure out how to work with them, instead of just trying to force something that never is actually true, what is the actual impact? That's what we decided to discuss today.

Cristina Amigoni: It does seem like that's a theme of our entire podcast in every single episode. We're going to try to narrow it down. Well, narrow is probably the wrong word. We're going to try to focus on the business impact, on the bottom line that everybody so venerates. I swear to God, there's got to be a billion pieces in cemeteries, little headstone that says like, “I increased that 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 is.

Alex Cullimore: Yeah. That's what I look for when I walked through cemeteries, and I'm like, “Who's had the greatest value return to shareholders?”

Cristina Amigoni: Yeah. I know. I know. 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 economy problem, it's the hoarding problem.

Alex Cullimore: 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. It's also a self-defining problem. The second people start to get wind of that, everybody starts to act like it's not flowing.

Cristina Amigoni: Yes. Yes.

Alex Cullimore: Which then ends up in a vicious cycle of less and less flowing around. It's really good.

Cristina Amigoni: It's really good for everybody.

Alex Cullimore: Humans are great, and I'm glad we set this up.

Cristina Amigoni: Back to the bottom line, which I don’t like to have –

Alex Cullimore: Yeah. Let’s talk about –

Cristina Amigoni: - on my tombstone, because apparently, that is the measure of success and the meaning of life is increasing the bottom line.

Alex Cullimore: Yeah. Mine's just going to be an outline of a bottom, and that's going to 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. We bring this up, because the bottom line is usually defined in some kind of P&L statements. 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, and they can split that up by department, or whatever. Here's how much we spent on tools, and here's how much we spent in infrastructure for laptops, or whatever that we're sending to people. Here's how much office rent is.

It was a real cost. 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. You could be underpaying somebody who's performing incredibly well. You could be overpaying somebody who's performing incredibly poorly. It's just, you don't have any idea what's going on. People tend to look at these 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.

Cristina Amigoni: Yeah. We're not advocating for cutting both the low performers that’s getting paid high and the high performer that's not getting paid enough. Cutting and replacing with the eye, not the solution.

Alex Cullimore: Yes. As Salesforce will tell you in their most ashamed way.

Cristina Amigoni: Yes. And many other companies that are not admitting it out loud.

Alex Cullimore: We could start with layoffs. We were in a company that promised things, like a faster turnaround time to get onto the platform, 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. We would have customers that would try to do this and then 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.

This was a platform that would take some time to work up on, to understand. 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 count is archived? Oh, they're not here anymore.” They never announced. It was just a disappearance. This was not even just externally they were managing expectations, but internally, we didn't know-know. On both sides, there was lack of that. That's a direct example of he 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.

Now you're losing customers, you're losing trust, and you're extending timelines. I mean, the amounts of leakage of real dollars throughout that process is insane. 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.

Cristina Amigoni: 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 we promise short implementations, we deliver short implementations and we have these many implementations in a month, in a year. See? We're succeeding. 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 customer's needs, implementing whatever 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. Where's that on the spreadsheet?

Alex Cullimore: It's amazing. It wasn't unique just to that company. We've seen it happen like, there's this tendency and this is going to be a bit of a rough comparison, but I think it holds. There's a tendency in companies to do what, essentially, the U.S. government has repeatedly done with the wars in the Middle East. We'll get into it and then we're like, “We did it.” They're like, “What do we do? Do we mission accomplished? Are we done?”

Cristina Amigoni: Killed a bunch of civilians? Kill the kids?

Alex Cullimore: Then it’s always like –

Cristina Amigoni: What do we do?

Alex Cullimore: We accomplished what we were going for, and you're like, “Okay, first of all, no. I don't even know what – nobody knows what you started.” Obviously, the conflicts continue for years after these declarations of success. We've seen this in companies, too. 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. It's not really implemented, because we're all redoing all the work and the actual fulfilled implementation and actual finished change isn't going to be done for several months. 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, what are the chances then of making a mistake? At which point, you have more chances of losing trust.

Cristina Amigoni: Oh, many.

Alex Cullimore: More chances of –

Cristina Amigoni: Tax notices.

Alex Cullimore: Yes. Yes.

Cristina Amigoni: That’s how the mistakes came back to the bottom line.

Alex Cullimore: Oh, God. Yes. Yeah.

Cristina Amigoni: Hundreds of thousands of dollars in tax notices, because of bad implementation. You want to talk about bottom line, because of the human component not being there? There it is.

Alex Cullimore: Yes. Specific example of the personnel and implement it, and having unrealistic deadlines, and then trying to announce that those are okay and ignoring where that's actually going. Because and then you can say, well, we budgeted that much for this project. Then if you just shadow the other hours and say like, “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. This is how budget spreadsheets can be designed to lie to you about what's happening.

Cristina Amigoni: Every spreadsheet can be designed to lie to you.

Alex Cullimore: Yes.

Cristina Amigoni: Have you ever tried filing taxes 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.

Alex Cullimore: I donated to clothes and one of those shirts was worth $7,000.

Cristina Amigoni: Exactly. I gave it to charity. My estimate is that I gave $50,000 of worth of stuff to charity. How did you appraise it? With the wind. [Inaudible 0:09:50] 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 into turbo tax?

Alex Cullimore: 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?

Cristina Amigoni: Exactly.

Alex Cullimore: We've talked about this before, but the consistent impulse is to look at the things that are easy to measure. The things that are easy to measure are just not the high impact ones. There's a couple of things that might somewhat relate to it. You do have to look at your P&L from a general standpoint of like, are we losing money, or are we gaining money? 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 has entirely sunk your budget, unless it's a wildly expensive tool. 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 necessary and it costs $100,000 a year,” whatever it is. That's a human problem, a psychological, safety problem. 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.

Cristina Amigoni: There's so many ways to leak money. 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 –

Alex Cullimore: You're about to say something that's not true.

Cristina Amigoni: I know. The most businesses exists 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 the corporation. We want humans to use it, even if they're hiding behind titles, or whatever the shareholder something, something, something. Ideally, and this is where I realize there's a lot of probably assumptions here, most humans, this is to make it for most humans, as many humans as possible to make it better. Not just a few that are going to end up living alone, because nobody else can afford to live, or get healthier.

Everybody else is going to die. You're going to 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 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. 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, the stuff that can't be measured in a quarter, the stuff that can 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.

I'm 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.

Alex Cullimore: We've talked about this a dozen times before, but the AI implementations were there just like, “We're measuring adoption, we're measuring usage, we're measuring that people are using it.” Everybody was like, “Cool. I'll log in, ask one question to ChatGPT. I've used it. I'm done.” Then companies were like, “Wow, we have 90% usage and 0% ROI.” It was what you're actually measuring and what you were hoping to do was find some efficiencies, find some whatever.

You're not measuring usage of AI. you're supposed to measure, I don't know, whether you've 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. 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. 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.

Cristina Amigoni: Yeah. No, it's not usually helpful if you're lying.

Alex Cullimore: That's the tagline for this episode. It's not helpful if you're lying.

Cristina Amigoni: Don't lie on your spreadsheets. Everybody knows when you're lying on your spreadsheet and everybody knows you're lying on your spreadsheet.

Alex Cullimore: You made your spreadsheet, now lie on it.

Cristina Amigoni: Yes. I am pretty sure you can get AI to lie on your spreadsheet, too.

Alex Cullimore: I'm pretty sure that even if you tried to have it tell the truth, it might lie on it.

Cristina Amigoni: Yes.

Alex Cullimore: There’s 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.

Cristina Amigoni: Yes. Yes. Which mind you, I caught that we were using AI to help us create some content, marketing content. This statistics kept coming up of like, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, 30%. I'm like, where the hell did you get that from? Because it's not in any of our notes. It's not in any of our documents. I actually went and asked Claude. I'm like, “Tell me where you got this from. Because we didn't tell you that number. That number doesn't mean much for us. Also, we didn't tell it to you. Why is it showing up as a quote, or a measure of success in our marketing material?” 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?

Alex Cullimore: I like how low the bar is for AI models that I'm a little bit impressed. I'm like, “Wow, I told the truth? It admitted to lying. That's amazing.”

Cristina Amigoni: Oh, I made it up. If this actually happened, can you give me the source? I'm like, it didn't happen. That's the source.

Alex Cullimore: You just said it didn't happen. I don't have a source.

Cristina Amigoni: Now a number that happened. It was like, well, you know, can you find a source that maybe can verify? I'm like, no, I can't. These are the reasons why I can't. These are the reasons why it doesn't make any sense to have that number. I'm like, “Oh, okay, I'll remove it.” I'm like, “Thank you.” But again, this is one number on one piece of paper. In that productivity bottom line report of using AI, I'm not just wasting an hour telling the AI to take away the makeup number and to stop using it in every other document, so they'll have to manually delete it.

Alex Cullimore: You lose time trying to figure out if you could trust that piece of it. Then even more time is going to be spent on discerning whatever comes out in the future. That's going to be a different train, which is actually, even though you're talking to a bot, that's a human leak. The leak is there's now a lack of trust, which ends up – which is a huge one that happens between bots 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. 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 an unnecessarily expensive work around 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. 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 P&L of like, here's how much you spend on a salary.

Cristina Amigoni: Again, eliminating both departments is not the answer.

Alex Cullimore: You could do that in the same way that eliminating all of your code will eliminate the bugs in your softwares.

Cristina Amigoni: That's a good analogy. That is a good analogy.

Alex Cullimore: This function doesn't work, so we just removed it. Okay, well, the customers did want it though, right? That was actually a big part of our value prop. Okay.

Cristina Amigoni: Yeah. I was going to go for something like, you can eliminate just you don't want to waste time washing dishes, so you get rid of all the dishes in your kitchen.

Alex Cullimore: That's a good way of doing it. Yeah. These two dishes, I don't like washing them. Even though I need them to roast the turkey, they're gone. Anyway, now we're cooking a turkey in a toast rub and it's just not working the same. It does take 17 hours and it smells terrible.

Cristina Amigoni: Yes. We eliminated the dishwasher too, because it uses – if you look at the bottom line, 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.

Alex Cullimore: Also, I love the thought process that goes into this. Like, oh, man, people are always the biggest expense. Yes, because people are the thing powering your entire business. 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. Okay, but now the car can't drive so far.

Cristina Amigoni: Yes. Or even better, I'm like, changing these tires every year, because they get consumed. It's really expensive.

Alex Cullimore: You got so excited for that, she unplugged her microphone.

Cristina Amigoni: I somehow use telekinetics to unplug the microphone, without touching it.

Alex Cullimore: If I was to guess at the very end of that analogy, because it cut off halfway after wheels, you're talking about removing the wheels of a car.

Cristina Amigoni: I'm talking about getting rid of the wheels of the car, because it's expensive to have wheels.

Alex Cullimore: Yes. This is like, if you don't know where your actual traction, and I'm not saying that you don't have to replace the treads on those wheels, that's the same thing as like, trying to improve teams. Yes, there's going to be inefficiencies between teams, but that's why you need human leadership, so you fix those inefficiencies, not eliminate the humans. Then you don't have a business. That's fun.

Cristina Amigoni: Yeah. Exactly. You just don't have a business.

Alex Cullimore: Yeah. You've really cut those costs, though. Congratulations on your Q1 report, but what are you going to do for Q2, 3, 4? Then in Q3, they announced we're hiring, which still announces if like, it's a big growth opportunity, but it's because six months ago, we had people go and it took us three months to realize we're flailing.

Cristina Amigoni: Yeah. I just read, actually, somebody that's basically predicting, which again, it doesn't take a genius, or an economist, or anybody doing a study for a year and a half, that all these hundreds of thousands of people that are getting laid off now are going to get all rehired back next year. I'm like, so why are we causing suffering internally and externally and to the bottom line?

Alex Cullimore: Because very briefly, for one earnings report, it sounded good. Then that was the earnings report right before the CEO's bonus was approved.

Cristina Amigoni: 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 R&D. Somebody needed to make a lot of money, which again, I'm still trying to figure out what the hell they're going to 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 you caused suffering for everybody involved, just 360 degrees suffering, so that you can have a bunch more money in your portfolio that you can't possibly use as a human.

Alex Cullimore: I just don't think 100 billion is enough, you know.

Cristina Amigoni: Oh, that's the other piece in the Simon Sinek podcast that he talks about, is somebody that he's acquainted. I'm going to repeat it, because he says it in a podcast. It'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. When Simon asked like, how much did you lose? He was like, “Well, 80%.” He's like, so whatever you have less is still way above any human could possibly need to survive and live in a very, very, very good way. So, what the hell is the problem?

Alex Cullimore: Yeah, what's the problem here?

Cristina Amigoni: You still have hundreds of millions of dollars, which you can't pause. Your lifestyle has not changed at all. What you can do has not changed at all, so what's the problem?

Alex Cullimore: Yeah. Yeah. That brings up the interesting through line here that empathy is the cornerstone of all these pieces, right? Because if you understand that what the people are going through, you'll make a little bit better choices that would have helped in understanding the customer journey and the company we were talking about that we worked for, 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. It's something that just is having empathy helps you reach across the gaps of departments and understand what has to be done. Then finding things that work around 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 going to show – that's going to show up on the bottom line. It also isn't going to have its own budget line. All those efficiencies will show up in just a better P&L. 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. That means parsing who's telling you what and making sure 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? Make sure it's not just what their department just always happens to be operating at exactly the level it needs to be. Is that suspicious? Maybe it is, but to verify these things. That's the 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.

I get the temptation and we are in this weirdly unnecessarily rushed world, where 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, you can choose whatever stats you want. You can frame it however you want. If you have a rare disease that only one in 100,000 people has, and then the next year, two in a 200,000 people have it, you can say like, it's the same, or you can say there was 100% increase in this disease.

Cristina Amigoni: Yes, exactly.

Alex Cullimore: How are you framing it? The only way to know the truth of this is to actually build trust. The only way to do that is to be human. That is my long-winded way to get to that thesis.

Cristina Amigoni: Yes. If we can pivot from the rant and the soapboxing to the we keep talking about being more human, having human leadership, focusing on the things that are hard to measure, I’m thinking, may be helpful if we actually explained how to do that.

Alex Cullimore: Yeah. Here's one story that we have used before, but it's prescient. In the middle of large changes, organizations tends to look for like, where are we in the stages of this linear change that we laid out? As we know, change is not linear. It happens in all kinds of ways. People have moments of losing identity, gaining identity, feeling lost, 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 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 resisting some of the change? Are they in the learning zone, and 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 might be advocates for the whole thing? People would change from a couple of weeks to next, but that ended up being an important way to measure this. It was an 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, not do this. You just adjust that as your assumptions change, as people go through different emotions. That was a huge one that we have used often to help decode what is more human and what's going on behind the scenes. That helped push large complex transformation through.

Cristina Amigoni: Yeah. That's a great example. 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? How long can they be stuck? What's causing them to be stuck? 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. It's always this other department's fault, always.

Part of that, and we saw this in large scales, we saw this in smaller scales at a project level. Somehow, it's always the same culprit. Every project, you've got 10 projects, eight are on red, and it's always this specialist, this SME’s team, or this functions team. I'm like, really? In every single one of them? Then, the thing is that when you actually start talking to people and understanding their experience, you realize like, oh, that's not true at all. 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 the 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, so we're going to lay them all off and hire new ones.

Alex Cullimore: Yeah. Yeah. There has to be a deeper investigation. It's not to say that there are people who might need to be cut for the benefit of the team. Maybe there are people who are a drag, or there is a team that is underperforming. 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 I don't have to worry about it this quarter, or for my performance review, or for whatever.”

Whatever it is, it's easy enough to get into those habits. I'm not even saying – I'm not trying to blame anybody. That just happens 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 I've heard that this team doesn't do well. Maybe it was their fault. Maybe that's what happened. Maybe it's just a gap. It's over there. It's a 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. It doesn't help you resolve it.

Cristina Amigoni: When you think about, so what do I measure? If I can measure the easy stuff, what's the hard stuff? 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 use to collaborate. 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 use 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.

Alex Cullimore: 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 project is 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. 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? What has helped with that? 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 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, there seems to be a problem with the engine, let's get rid of the engine.

Cristina Amigoni: Yes. I don't I don't want to keep washing dishes, so let me get rid of all the dishes.

Alex Cullimore: Yeah. I wouldn't have to wash dishes if I didn't have them.

Cristina Amigoni: Exactly.

Alex Cullimore: 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.

Cristina Amigoni: I somehow open the faucet, 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.

Alex Cullimore: Does it take a while? Sure. But I don't have to do dishes.

Cristina Amigoni: Exactly.

Alex Cullimore: Dinners are 75 minutes long and I get six bites in.

Cristina Amigoni: I know. My electricity bill is lower. My water bill is lower, because I don't have a dishwasher to run anymore, because I don't have dishes.

Alex Cullimore: Look at my P&L sheet. I mean, I would be able to tell you that if I weren't currently marinating some raw noodles in my mouth.

Cristina Amigoni: Look at this financial success. Oh, my God. I know, my mouth hurts just from the hot water and having pasta just marinating under my tongue until it's cooked.

Alex Cullimore: Yeah. I love the idea that like, yeah, starchy. Anyway, you've heard it here from the very calloused mouths.

Cristina Amigoni: Focusing on the humans is not measurable as easily as you would like it to be. It does impact the bottom line in many, many, many, many unseen ways.

Alex Cullimore: Yes. Just because it's not measurable does not mean it's not having an impact, or not easily measurable. It's a force to try and try and go a little deeper. Dig a little deeper and realize that where you're losing money isn't where you think you're losing money.

Cristina Amigoni: Exactly. It's not that simple. If it's simple, you're doing it wrong.

Alex Cullimore: Also, an investment in that is it can have a huge ROI. You invest in resolving conflict. You invest in leaders that can foster in this kind of environment. Now you've got wheels turning in a totally different direction. The P&L sheet looks a lot better. It will also be for “unknown reasons,” because it's hard to measure. You start 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.

Cristina Amigoni: 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. 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, it's not fast enough. That's the same. It’s like, sure.

Alex Cullimore: Now you have time being spent. Yeah.

Cristina Amigoni: Plug your car in in a normal outlet if you want to, because you don't want to spend the extra money for a bigger charger. What you can do is limit –

Alex Cullimore: Yeah. It feels like a big upfront cost. But then, what if that's way more efficient, both you gain time on the other and you gain – maybe it's a more efficient charger like, yes, it costs you $1,000 or something to install the outlet and put the new charger. Maybe that's the upfront cost. It does feel like sticker shock looking at that upfront cost, because the savings are hidden, because it's those hours that you save not finding a supercharger. 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 did and what you spent. If you're unwilling to go through the sticker shock phase, you'll never get there. Invest in your people.

Cristina Amigoni: Invest in humans. Yes, invest in your people, or humans, the humans people.

Alex Cullimore: People, most likely humans in your company.

Cristina Amigoni: Yes. Thanks for listening.

Alex Cullimore: Thank you.

[END OF EPISODE]

Alex Cullimore: Thanks so much for listening to Uncover the Human. We Are Siamo, that is the company that sponsors and created this podcast. If you’d like to reach out to us further, reach out with any questions or to be on the podcast, please reach out to podcast@wearesiamo.com. Or you can find us on Instagram. Our handle is @wearesiamo, S-I-A-M-O. Or you can go to wearesiamo.com and check us out there. Or I suppose, Cristina, you and I have LinkedIn as well. People could find us anywhere else.

Cristina Amigoni: Yes, we do have LinkedIn. Yes. Yeah. We’d like to thank Abbay Robinson for producing our podcast and making sure that they actually reach all of you. And Rachel Sherwood for the wonderful score.

Alex Cullimore: Thank you guys so much for listening. Tune in next time.

Cristina Amigoni: Thank you. 

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