Huh.

which is driven by, as you know, my philosophy is driven by the behaviors that define your values.

Tell me about how a senior HR person When they realize the CEO is allowing a member of their team not to live the values, and that member's team's behaviors trickle down and impact others in the other departments because they interact with them, and other departments are complaining, why are they behaving that way? They're not part of our organization's culture.

They're acting counter to the culture.

How does an HR person... successfully bring to the C-suite conversation that Losing five key people just costs us half a million to two, three million dollars.

And it's all because of one person allowing people to behave badly.

If we got rid of that person, our profit would improve, our retention would improve.

You know, we don't we don't do enough of that.

But my experience is that typically doesn't happen.

Okay.

Let's switch gears a second to one of my favorite topics, organizational culture.

And, you know, one of the things is that there's a lot of organizations that have these values on the wall that don't mean anything.

And employees walk by and kind of cringe and realize their bosses are hypocritical.

In many cases, lately, I've met with senior leaders who think they are living the values, but it's the people underneath them that are not living the values.

And I challenge them and say, well, that's because you're allowing them not to live the values.

Okay.

Have you seen, like, firsthand situations where one person costs the company far more than their revenue contribution? Like, do you have examples of where one person has kind of spoiled the whole carton of eggs, per se?

Yeah, there's quite a few.

Unfortunately, there's quite a few.

I have a two by two grid where I, on the vertical side, I put behaviors and the horizontal side on the bottom, across the bottom, I'll put results.

So if you're high on results and high on behaviors, you're in the top right-hand quadrant.

And I call those, you know, those are your heroes.

Those are your superstars.

How do you measure someone's impact on culture, though?

And so I'm sure at the time you didn't realize that you were witnessing a history event.

No, I just went because it was the right thing to do, to stand up for social justice, to stand up for your neighbors, to make sure everybody had equal opportunity to work and put food on their table.

And my father couldn't go because of a commitment he had.

But he found a church group in Shrewsbury, New Jersey, that was going.

And I went on the bus with them.

And it was just a phenomenal event.

It was overwhelming.

What message were you trying to communicate through your work and your writing?

Why do you think it's become so popular in business and leadership conversations?

I think it's because it's easy.

You don't have to think as much.

You just classify people into certain categories.

And then you start to treat them that way.

And it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy in some ways.

Because you treat them that way, they respond that way.

So how do leaders start managing these stereotypes instead of managing the individual? Like what happens when leaders manage stereotypes instead of the individual?

[laughs]

And they re- Some of the words, they just, you know, they hallucinated and came up with their own words.

And when I reviewed it, if I was judging them for an interview at the time, I would say, "What are they talking about?" The other thing is is First, First Nations, uh, Native Americans, First Nations in Canada, they have a language structure which is slightly different.

Now, they speak perfect English, easy to understand, but a double negative is still a negative.

So if the bot is trained that a double negative means a positive, but they say a double negative, then it's gonna be misinterpreted.

So these language programs misinterpret it.

The other problem is, and this is well known, that people of color are not well interpreted by AI, and women have a difficulty with AI in the way they're interpreted.

Yes.