Let's Redefine What Success Means In Business

Welcome to Season 2, Episode 1 of The Hearth.

I'm so excited for Season 2, and I'm so happy you're here.

This season we will be exploring what success in business can look like.  How do you define success in the business world?  What does that look like to you?

This season my wonderful guests and I will be sharing with you different ways success can look like, aside from the numbers.

Yes, making a profit is important.  But this season I'm really going to challenge you to strive for more than just that.

In today's episode, I am going to talk about the 6 shifts I'm witnessing from the way things used to be in the business world, to how they are today.

The 6 shifts are:

1. Wealth- hoarding, specifically in the stock market.
2. Second, hustle culture.
3. Proft first.
4. The idea that burnout is expected.
5. Work = Suffering.
6. The idea of independence and hierarchy.

If something you heard today brought a smile to your face or a spark to your heart, and you’d like to connect with me, here are a few ways you can do that.

One is my newsletter, it’s where I put most of my time and energy when I’m not working with clients or on this podcast. Sorry social media! It’s a mix of real life stories, tips and tricks and of course updates on what’s happening with the podcast. Whenever something is going on with me or in my business, it always comes out there first.

Another resource that I have for you is my Guide to Doing Work Differently. The guide takes you through four inquiries into how you can build a more sustainable and equitable work environment for yourself and your team. It's a great place to start.

Last, if you’ve got a burning question, a comment, or a situation you’d like my eyes on, you can email me at candice@fortressandflourish.com.


If you enjoyed this episode, hit subscribe to know when the next episodes come out, and if you’re feeling generous, leave a review. Reviews help other like-minded folks find their way to this resource.

Learn more about Candice and her work here.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:04

The hearth is for you if you're a business leader with a team. Here, we have conversations about how to keep growing when you feel you've reached your capacity. When what you're doing is working, but you're starting to see the cracks. When there's a gap between where you're at now, and where you want to be. Here, we find ways to transition through the struggle of survival toward creating a thriving business that supports you and your team as whole humans. Your host is me, Canvas Elliott. I'm a business strategist and mentor who specializes in working with business owners. Who are going through periods of growth, especially when you're adding more people to your team. The practices and systems that worked when your team was smaller just don't seem to fit anymore. And when you're caught in stress and reaction, it's tough to reimagine the way that you created your world of work. Both your own personal one and the one that you created for others. I help people align their values and business practices to build practical, sustainable, thriving work ecosystems. And no, this isn't just some work utopia talk. To do this, I bring forward my decade long professional back ground in human resources and organizational development. Working with growing businesses across many sectors, and my decades long search for meaning and wholeness, which includes researching the history of work, and how it came to be what it is today. Practicing a trauma informed approach to business and integrating work, life, and spirituality into a meaningful whole. Let's take this journey together.

Speaker 2: 2:25

Hello, brave souls. Welcome back to the hearth for season two. I am so excited. To be talking with you today about how we can redefine what it means to be successful in business. And this is like something that's been on my mind for a long, long, long time. I remember years ago, getting one of those, like, business magazines. I think I was at an airport, and it was about, you know, being productive at work or what it means to be successful in business and all these things. And I just remember reading through all of these articles and disagreeing with the the dominant business culture that was coming through. And really, when I was peeling back the layers, realizing that there's so much that's underneath all of these things that we think are just, you know, the way business works. But really, these are choices that we're making. And that goes, like, way, way, way back to my education when I was younger. Learning about different cultures and that we can choose to do things in a variety of different kinds of ways and that the decisions that have led us to what we're doing today is one decision path that exists out of many. And so as we think about creating regenerative and sustainable business, I think part of that is looking at this idea of success and how we measure success. So in traditional sort of business books. The wisdom that gets put into that or what is in a lot of them is based on what has worked well for very large companies. Or for a small company to become a large company or how a large company has been able to continue to be large or to take over more market share. And a lot of that is founded in financial gain. And financial gain, I want us to think about as one of many metrics that we can use to measure what the success of a business is. When we use profit to define success, we get a particular set of outcomes. It selects for certain kinds of decisions and certain kinds of relationships. And when we use other things to define success, we drive a different set of outcomes. I'm not saying that like you know, we can't be profitable. We need to be profitable in order to be in business. Right? We need to take the financial support that's coming in through our businesses and figure out where we want to channel it so that it is both feeding our community and ourselves and our clients and our businesses in a way where we can keep going. To just kind of like let you know where some of my inspiration comes from in this. Is really in the field of ecology and sustainable systems and how we can adopt sustainable practice this is into the way that we do business. And I'm not talking about purchasing carbon offsets. Or funding an employee wellness initiative because those are really incomplete solutions. They don't take into account the structural issues that are at play and address them head on. They like those tackle a part of it, but really they're all work around for a bigger issue. And so what we wanna get to is like, what is the big issue? How do we not work around it? How do we address what that is head on? So on this season of the hearth, we're gonna look at alternative definitions of the successful business. I have a lot of guests who are coming on, who are gonna be illuminating the ways that smaller businesses and nonprofits are addressing systemic injustices with everyday actions. And we'll look at trends, talk to industry leaders and uncover what it means to be successful now and in the future. And in this episode, I'm gonna talk about six shifts that I'm seeing from the way things used to be. To a more hopeful future in the world of work. So I'll start with describing the past paradigm and then explain the shift to the new one as I'm seeing. And as with anything that I share on this podcast and just in general, you are welcome to take what works for you and, you know, what fits and what you like and to leave what doesn't. And you're also welcome to write me, to comment to, like, ask questions. I really would hope that this can be a dialogue and not just like a one way diatribe of mine into the ether of the interwebs. We're gonna start with wealth hoarding. This is one of those practices that we have inherited. Which is to create wealth and then to shut it away where it's not used anymore. One of the biggest tools for doing this is the stock market. With and one way that the stock market is used is that large corporations will purchase their own stocks and hold funds to increase stock value that could go towards other things like programs for employees, reusing wages, all different kinds of things. If you'd be starting a new arm of the business, what have you? But what we're seeing is that in this hoarding wealth trend, and I'm not saying that saving money is is a bad thing. I think that saving money is really important. I just think that in order for us to have a well functioning economy, we need to have a considerable amount of funding that is in circulation. We need to have funds that are being transferred from one person to another in order to be able to live the lives that we wanna be living. When there is a large amount of wealth that is withheld from the economy, it depresses the economy. And so in order to there are a lot of really interesting organizations like resource generation comes to mind that's working with younger folks who have inherited wealth to figure out what they wanna do with that wealth in a way that helps to either redistribute it or to write systemic injustices. But this for a long time, you know, even I know within my own family, this is like, a goal. Right? Like, get the money, lock it away so you can't use it, so it'll be there for later. But what's happening with this is if you look back, I looked at some research that was done by Pew Research. In nineteen seventy, sixty two percent of the wealth in the United States was held by middle income families. So that means that the majority of the wealth of the country was held by this middle class. Which was arguably very beneficial for for the people who were in that middle class. You know, it's not to say that there were not issues related to you know, inequality at that time. There were. There definitely were. But what we saw then was more of an a participation in commerce by this middle class and the creation of a larger middle class, more people who had more financial capabilities. And now we're in twenty twenty three when I'm recording this. So now the amount that is held by the middle class is just forty three percent. So it's decreased. And where that money is going is it's not going to the bottom end of the spectrum. To help to alleviate the the injustices and the offering of working poor or people who are unable to work. What we're seeing is that this money is going to upper income families. And so it's that is increasing in that way. What this translates to is greater wealth inequality. And when there is greater wealth inequality, that means economic instability debt and inflation. And these are things that we're seeing right now. In our economy, we're seeing highs and lows recessions. Coming back from recessions. We're seeing younger generations with tons of debt. I mean, I know personally I have an amount of debt that is just wild to even think about. And then inflation. I mean eggs.eggs is one of my son's favorite words right now, but eggs are like six dollars a dozen. Or more than that even sometimes. It's just so expensive. I remember when I could get a dozen eggs for a dollar. When we look at this like hoarding wealth versus redistributing wealth and our businesses. What does that look like? So one thing that we can do is to create jobs that are middle income jobs. So we can intentionally create jobs that ensure that people are going to be able to earn enough in order to be able to have enough to pay for not just their basic living expenses, but also some things that they would like to have. We can talk about what's happening with the income of our businesses and with the salaries of our employees. In ways so that we there's a conversation that's happening and so that the conversation isn't just, like, how can I possibly be paying this person this much money and they're only doing this much for me? But really shifting the conversation to a human deserves to be able to support themselves and to live where they live. And in order for the humans in my company to be able to afford to live here, I need to be able to pay them this much. And so if I'm going to pay them this much, how do I create the systems in my business? And create a business that really supports their growth and my growth. So this is that shift that and it it's not just like a dream. You know? Like, I'm really seeing these conversations starting to happen with business owners and with nonprofit directors and I find it to be really inspiring. Number two. Shift number two. That I wanted to touch on is hustle culture. Huddl culture. So probably a lot of you are familiar with this term by now, but If you're not, what we talk about when we talk about hustle culture is this idea of always needing to be productive. The feeling of always being behind and it is so ingrained in our ideas about work ethic. Like, if you are a good worker, you work hard, you work long, you work, you know, more than anybody else, you're more productive than other people, like, all of these things. Right? Culturally comes from various things. But some interesting data that I have sort of, like, dug up as I was looking into hustle culture or hustle and, like, productivity in the US is that the bureau of labor statistics, which is a fascinating website to check out. It has all kinds of information about what people are paid and the workplace and productivity and all these things. But they did this study and they found that the productivity per American worker has increased four hundred and thirty four percent since nineteen fifty. So your average American worker today is worth like four workers in nineteen fifty. And there's a lot of ways to kind of hash out that percentage and that that shift and that change. Right? One of them is to say that it should take less than one quarter of the work hours to afford the same standard of living as nineteen fifty. So the increases in worker productivity, much of it has to do with mechanization, computers, any efficiencies that have been created. And so as these efficiencies are created, instead of lessening the burden on the worker, it's actually increased the burden on the worker. So the worker has to become more and more and more productive in order to keep up with the changing dynamics of the workplace. And this came up in a conversation with with a a colleague, client of mine recently where a younger person to the workforce was talking with her and she was thinking about adding and some kind of AI tool to the workplace. And it was gonna save, like, twenty five percent of this younger person's job. And the younger person asks, like, so does that mean I'm gonna be working thirty hours a week instead of forty hours a week? Like, it's just a machine that you're getting basically to do the work that I've been doing, but I still have to input the information into the machine. It's not like my work is less valuable because you've invested in this thing to help me. It's actually increasing the value of the work. Right? And that's not the way that we look at it from a traditional business standpoint. From a traditional business standpoint, we say, okay, I'm gonna invest in this machine to help my worker do things faster. That doesn't mean that my worker gets to work less. That means that I get to pay my worker less to do the same or similar work that they were doing before. Or my worker now has to retrain themselves on additional skills in order to keep the same number of hours and get paid the same. As we, like, are in the middle of this, I perceive a shift happening here as well from this like over emphasis on productivity and hustle toward a more sustainable amount. Of work. I'm really seeing how bringing downtime into work time. Is helping people both mentally and physically. So I'm gonna go into more detail about this in a in a future episode. Part of the hustle narrative is this assumption that we should always be in stress all the time and that it's good for us to be always stressed out. That it's expected, really. It's kind of like a part of the like like, you're you're worthy if you're experiencing intense amounts of stress ongoing for years at a time, but it's really unhealthy for us and it's not sustainable and it's part of why people are burning out at such an intense rate. Especially when you look at that number, right, like four hundred and thirty four percent increase in productivity since nineteen fifty. Like, that is a lot of of productivity that people are expecting to take on every single day. So part of the shift is encouraging, you know, reliable schedules building socialization and rest into the equation, and thinking about I don't know if you track hours thinking about a utilization rate or something like that where you're expecting people to be productive and working on profitable activities for a certain percentage of their work time. And then people have another percentage of time that they can be using on other things. And what happens is if you give people this ability to, you know, be in productivity, be in a little bit of stress, and then back out of it and be able to rest then they're able to be more creative, more innovative, people are better able to solve problems. And productivity actually increases. If you incorporate you know, rest and especially predictable scheduling into people's work lives. So this is this is that. Hustle, no rest to finding a more sustainable pace, I think, piece of of puzzle. Another one is the profit first thing. And I talked a little bit about this in the beginning, but the idea behind profit first is that business owners put profit at the forefront of accounting. And it is important to have profit as a part of accounting, and it may even be important for profit to be the first thing that you're thinking about in accounting. But what I often see is that profit is the only thing or, like, really primarily the only thing that is driving decision making related to accounting. And what that does is unintentionally through unconscious bias. There are negative impacts that happen when account when when profit first is the only or the primary filter by which to think about your financial decisions. And unintended negative impacts include things like discrimination, wealth inequality, and the upholding of oppressive systems. It's like I deserve this money. My business has made it. I'm going to save or hold away as much as I can, which gets into the the hoarding piece of it. These people need to work harder the hustle, right, in order to deserve any of this. And so that dynamic of I made it, it's mine. When really you run a business, all of this is everything that you do is reliant on many people to get done. You need to work harder in order to deserve more, which people are already working four hundred times harder than they were fifty years ago or four hundred times more productive than they were back then. But that dynamic makes itself into, like, bakes itself into a lot of decision making about money and how much people are paid, who gets what job, how people are, like, punished for different kinds of things at work or withheld from promotions or all these different kinds of things. And so the way that the business owner makes the decisions is based on these underlying dynamics And then, but the result that happens on the other end is the discrimination and wealth inequality. It's like discrimination and wealth inequality are symptoms of these other issues that are really at play. And one of the tools that implements these unfair types of systems is the idea of profit first. And not using anything else to determine how money should be spent. And some other things that have come up at least in conversations that I have been having with clients is Dignity First. So what are the decisions that are going to uphold the dignity of everyone that's involved? And how can we, you know, be affordable while also upholding a value and creating profit? What are the tools that we can bring in? The the ways that we can channel the funds, the financial resources that we have so that we're not solely driving profit, but we are also supporting the dignity of the people who work together with us. And so Dignity is one that comes up, but there are others as well. And if there are things that you use to kind of make financial decisions that are not just solely based on profit, I would love to know. What those are. I know for me equity, sustainability, and wellness are ones that are a part of. My decision making process. Next one is the idea that burnout is expected. And we basically, like, re traumatizing people. And it comes it comes out of this, like, hustle first kinda dynamic, which we already talked about. But, you know, we contribute to overwhelm. And burnout by having these really, you know, sometimes unrealistic expectations. You know, we think they are realistic expectations because of how maybe we have come up in the workforce. But really, if you take a step back and inquire into what the work life is, of your employee. Some of the things that you might be asking for could be unrealistic or at least like they are not feeling supported in the amount of work that they needed to do. And so when that happens, you have more turnover, you have less adaptability. And it looks like, you know, people are putting on a face for work. Like, there's my you know, who I am when I'm at home or when I'm with my friends, and then there's who I am when I'm at work. And when there's this division, a strong divide between who I am and who I am at work, it creates conflict not just within the person, but also, like, with everybody in the workplace. Right? And definitely not everyone feels safe or actually is safe to be fully themselves in the workplace. But in a world of work where people can keep going and feel like they can keep going and I and actually enjoy what they're doing, it's essential for people to be able to be themselves at work. And not feel like they have to, like, put on a face or be someone else or something like that in order to work. And so how do we do that? How do we create space for people? When we think about this, like, term of psychological safety. And what happens in that space when people are more fully themselves at work, when they are able to bring up their questions and problems and issues. You're gonna have more connection. You're gonna have more problem solving teamwork, innovation, and you're gonna be able to avoid the burnout. And keep the people with you for the long haul so that you can keep doing the work together. Going along with this is and I have subscribed to this one for many, many years is that work means suffering. Like, work and suffering are the same thing. So, like, if you're not suffering, then it is not work. And the problem with this is that it's really extractive. You're pulling the work out of the person. Right? It's not sustainable. No one can do that forever. And often I see guilt and fear as ways of manipulating people into you know, work that that is suffering for them. And it keeps people stuck instead of growing. And so if you have people who you feel like are stuck in this place, they're not improving. There's some like guilt and fear that's happening in the stations, I think, you know, it would be good to look into this, like, what are your thoughts around work and suffering? Maybe it just starts with a conversation with yourself. But if we shift this from work means suffering or my company means suffering for me. I hate, like, I just was reading through some comments on the thread the other day, and they were saying how it was a bunch of business owners. The question was, like, Are you how often do you wanna burn down your business? Are, like, how often do you wanna, like, yeah, destroy your business or leave it or whatever. And there were so many people who were saying, like, every week, every month, a quarterly, every year, And then there were just a few people who were like, no, I never have felt that way about my business. Like, I love my business and what it is. And it got into this, like, kinda back and forth. But I think it has to do with this core issue of the work and the suffering piece. And if we can shift to work means fulfillment, then we have empowerment, we have people who have agency we have people who feel like they have choice and a way for them to thrive. And those are essential for us to be able to keep doing this important work. That we're doing in the world. Alright. And we're onto our last one for today. Thanks for sticking with me all the way through so far. This is a lot of information that I'm sharing all at once. And just know that you can go back and listen to this again and I'll be sharing more in-depth kind of peaks into different parts of these trends. Over the course of this season. So more fun yet to come. Okay. So this brings me to the last shift that I wanted to talk about in this introductory episode to redefining success in business. And that is the idea of independence and hierarchy. And the shift that is happening related to this. So traditional business a lot of our society is actually founded in this idea that people are independent like, the American work ethic, right, is, like, pull yourself up from your bootstraps and you know, make it happen, the American dream. You can do whatever you want. You just have to work hard enough. And we have this paired with hierarchy. So we have designed our government in such a way, you know, for example, government is one way to look at it. But we have designed our government in such a way that there is there are many local governments, right, like cities, And then there are counties. And then, you know, this is in the United States. For example, this is how a lot of governments are organized around the world. But so in cities, counties, then we have states, and then we have federal government and we have one person technically who's the head of the federal government. Right? So we reinforced the idea of independence with one person and hierarchy within the way that we have formed our government. And often, this is the way that businesses look. We have one person who's at the head of the business that are often called the chief executive officer, which we can get into a whole conversation about how we decided to put the word chief at the head of our businesses. And all of that colonization stuff, but that's for another episode. And then there are levels of management, and then there are people who are working on the front lines. That's how a lot of our businesses are set up. And so and then on our in our families too, although family structure is looking much different now than it has in the past, But if you go back to the fifties, which is when a lot of the, like, traditional business knowledge is sort of sourced from and still is informing a lot of our our practices. You have, like, demand, who's the head of the house, and then you have the wife who's like sort of reporting to him and then you have all the kids. Right? Or you can look at it as like a grandfather kind of figure and then, you know, the different generations that happen under that. But the assumptions that happen within this is that that an individual is responsible for the inequities that they experience within our systems. So an example of this is, like, she didn't ask for our rates. We know through research that women are much less likely than men to ask for raises first of all. And when they do ask for them, they don't ask for as much. So that's not an individual woman's issue. Right? That is a systemic issue that is happening, that is affecting many women. And so what we needed to look for in our systems of pay and our work is how do we make sure that we understand that the women who work for us are not going to ask for as much or as often. And how do we make sure that they don't get left behind as we're doing different raises for different people? And And there are different ways to do that depending on your organization, but that's one to think about. And but it's and to bring it bigger than that is that it's our moral decision to uphold or to address these innate qualities within our own sphere of influence. So we can use hierarchy to create division between decision makers and those who are on the receiving end of division of decisions. Or we can create unity. We can create spaces where everyone comes together and makes the decisions together. So within our spheres of influence as business owners, there are so many opportunities that we have to work on these issues of independence and hierarchy and to transition them to the spaces of interdependence and decentralized leadership. And when we talk about interdependence, we recognize that we are dependent on those around us. In a in a beneficial way, like, what we do affects others and what others do affects us. I mean, with employees. Right? We're interdependent on one another. Like, I could not do the work that I do without my team of people who is helping me do it. And they wouldn't be able to do what they are doing without me driving the work that's coming towards them. Right? And so Interdependence is an essential thing to understand as a leader. And one way to be able to show how important that is, to live that out, is to create ways to decentralize the leadership of your company. So it's not just you that's making the decisions, It's not just you that's driving everything forward, but it is really a collection of people who are all working together to do this. And when we bring more different perspectives and ideas to the table, I really believe that we come up with better solutions to the problems that we're facing. And that brings us to the end of this episode. Thank you so much for sticking with me. I'm releasing three episodes today since it is the start of season two. So if you want to keep on going, I know this was a lot. But if you wanna binge, on next is Erica Court Day from the pause on the play podcast. And she and I have a conversation about diversity, equity, and inclusion in the workplace. And some of the unseen dynamics that are at play there. I hope that you are having a great week and if you're looking for some help, feel free to reach out.

Speaker 1: 41:08

I would love to hear from you. Hit subscribe to know when the next episodes come out. And if you're feeling generous, please leave a review. Reviewers help other like minded folks find their way to this resource. If something you heard today brought a smile to your face or a spark to your heart and you'd like to connect with me, there are a few ways to do that. One is my newsletter where I put most of my time and energy when I'm not working with clients or with my family or working on this podcast. Sorry, social media. The newsletter is a mix of real life stories, tips and tricks, and of course, updates on what's happening with the podcast. Whenever something's going on with me or in my business, it always comes out there first. Another resource that I have for you is my guide to doing work differently. This guy takes you through four inquiries into how you can build a more sustainable and equitable work environment for yourself and your team. It's a great place if you're looking for somewhere to get started. Last, if you've got a burning question in a comment or a situation you'd like my eyes on, you can email me. All those links are in the show notes. Take care, brave a soul. Catch you next time.