In this episode of On the Brink with Andi Simon, I had the pleasure of speaking with Lotus Buckner, founder and CEO of HLB Talent Solutions and author of The Joy of HR. Lotus is a dynamic leader in the human resources field with experience spanning corporate environments, startups, and everything in between. Her insights on HR’s evolution and intentional leadership are essential for understanding today’s workplace.

Lotus Buckner’s Transformational HR Journey

Lotus’s path to HR began during college when she stumbled upon a management and HR concentration. After taking her first HR class, she discovered her passion and launched a career that has spanned nonprofits, healthcare, universities, and startups. Her first role at a nonprofit hospital turned into an 11-year journey where she advanced from intern to head of HR, managing significant growth and leading efforts through the COVID-19 pandemic.

Her experiences have shaped her understanding of how HR functions differ across industries. From resource-heavy corporations to scrappy startups, she emphasizes how organizations require distinct approaches to people management. This adaptability is a key theme in her book.

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Finding Joy In the Corporate vs. Startup HR

In larger organizations, HR often revolves around specialization, with leaders focusing on well-defined roles. In contrast, startups demand versatility and a generalist mindset, with employees wearing multiple hats. Lotus embraced this shift when she transitioned to leading HR for Chowbus, a food delivery tech startup. She describes startups as spaces where creativity and adaptability are paramount, which prepared her to establish her consulting business.

During her corporate career, Lotus often encountered leaders who viewed HR as the solution to culture change. She notes, however, that true cultural shifts require the engagement of everyone in the organization, not just HR.

How HR can Build Intentional Leadership

Lotus stresses the importance of intentional leadership. While traditional leadership styles have value, she argues that today’s diverse, multi-generational workplaces require leaders to go beyond standard approaches. Intentional leadership involves tailoring strategies to individuals and situations, making room for nuance and customization.

One key takeaway? Leaders need to approach their teams as unique individuals. “One size no longer fits all,” she explains. Leaders must invest time in understanding their people, using thoughtful root-cause analysis to solve problems rather than jumping to conclusions or relying solely on “best practices.”

Lessons for Leaders

Lotus emphasizes the importance of focusing on foundational skills. Here are her top recommendations for leaders:

• Personalize Your Leadership Style

Recognize that every team member has unique needs and motivations. Build relationships and adapt your approach to suit their individual strengths and challenges.

• Invest in Communication

Many workplace issues stem from poor communication. Leaders must ensure clarity, share information openly, and engage employees in meaningful dialogue.

• Lay a Strong Foundation

Before implementing new technologies or strategies, take the time to analyze needs and gaps. A solid foundation prevents missteps and ensures long-term success.

• Embrace Agility

Modern leadership requires flexibility. Leaders should remain open to changing circumstances, whether in response to external disruptions or evolving team dynamics.

The Joy of HR

Lotus’s book, The Joy of HR, reflects her belief that HR is more than a function—it’s a driver of organizational success. By weaving together her personal journey with insights from other HR leaders, she offers a practical guide for aligning people strategies with business goals. Key themes include relationship building, intentional leadership, and fostering inclusive cultures.

Final Thoughts On How to Make HR Joyful

As I reflect on my conversation with Lotus, one point stands out: leadership is a balance between strategy and human connection. Whether in a corporate environment or a startup, leaders who take time to observe, listen, and adapt are better equipped to navigate the complexities of today’s workplace.

You can learn more about Lotus Buckner’s work at TalentRemix.com or connect with her on LinkedIn. Her book, The Joy of HR, is available on Amazon and other major book retailers.

Other Podcasts you will enjoy include:

411: TaRita Johnson Tackling the Challenges of DEI and Belonging

406: The Greatest Journey of a Woman Entrepreneur in Mental Health: Dr. Barbara Brown’s Story

414: Ilene Rosenthal: Inspiring a Revolution in Children’s Education

Additional resources for you

Reach out and contact us if you want to become a woman entrepreneur with a business that has both great profits and significance.  Let’s Talk!

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From Observation to Innovation,

CEO | Corporate Anthropologist | Author
Simonassociates.net
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Andi Simon: 00:00:02 Welcome to On the Brink with Andi Simon. I’m Andi Simon, and as you know, my job is to get you off the brink. I look for interesting people who are going to share with you their stories and in the process, help you do something very important. If you’re going to improve or change, you need to see, feel, and think in new ways about whatever it is that’s troubling you, whether they’re personal or professional. The idea is that when you hear someone else’s story, your mind begins to adapt its own story. And if they could do it, so can you. So today I have with me Lotus Buckner. Now, Lotus is a wonderful woman who specializes in the human resource area. She’s got a book called the Joy of HR. Now, I was an executive vice president of a bank. I will tell you that HR was not joyful. It was necessary and important. And then I was in health care for seven years as an executive. And HR was not my favorite or unfavorable place, but HR has gone through its own evolution, and the one thing that we saw, and I know as a consultant working with organizations, is a lot of different obligations have been put on HR as if they can change the culture.  HR needs the right people to build diversity, help them stay in all the kinds of things the organization may aspire to become and sit down into the HR world, but it really is much bigger than that. It’s in the management world and in the individuals, and if you keep pushing it down to HR, it may never happen because that’s not necessarily their strength or their will. But Lotus is going to tell you about her own journey. And in that story, she’s going to help you see how that’s evolved and that the work she’s doing. Now, let me read her bio. She’s a founder and CEO of HLB Talent Solutions. She was also the Vice President and Head of People and Culture at Chowbus, she’ll tell us a little bit about her bosses and she really understands how HR differs in startups versus corporate environments, and how to get the best of both worlds without sacrificing goals and values. She understands different approaches in small businesses and startups and in the corporate environments.  Why these differences matter for HR practitioners is essential. They aren’t the same worlds that you’re living in. You know, as an anthropologist, people say, you know, how do you study? You know, business, don’t you study small scale societies? And I say, what makes you think of business isn’t a small-scale society. They have rituals, rituals of initiation, all kinds of the things that small societies have. She’s been recognized by Crane Chicago Business as a notable HR leader, and she’s the winner of several leadership awards by the American Hospital Association. So with us today is a woman who’s really going to help you see, feel, and think in new ways about this wonderful thing that we call human resources. Lotus, thank you for joining me.

Lotus Buckner: 00:03:04 Thank you for having me, Andi.

Andi Simon: 00:03:06 Tell the listener or the viewer, who are you? What’s your journey been like? What’s your story? Share it please.

Lotus Buckner: 00:03:13 What a wonderful question, I wish I knew. Yeah, I think it’s an ongoing journey. But you know, I really kind of fell into this world when I was in college. I was the kid who could not decide on a major. I think I went through about six majors while I was in school until mom was like, time’s ticking and so was money. Let’s go. And I ultimately wanted to make an impact. And I’ve always wanted to make an impact in the world. And so my school had launched a new major in community and nonprofit leadership, and I just thought, wow, that really fits with a lot of my values. And so I ended up majoring in that. But they made me pick what we call a professional concentration. Where I went to school is basically a minor, and I’m looking down the list and nothing really appealed to me, but one was management, human resources. I had no idea what HR was back then, but I was like, maybe I would like to go into management one day. I’ll do that. Well, I chose that, took my first HR class, fell in love, and the rest is really history because once I took that first class, I still remember my professor and still talk to her.  And once I took that class, I knew that’s what I wanted to do. And funny enough, I went to a nonprofit hospital for an internship in HR and ended up there for about 11 years. So it really kind of coincidentally meshed with my chosen degree. And so that went really well but grew my way there to lead their HR efforts and spend some time in it while I was there, as well as operations, which I talk about in my book. How important I think it is that HR leaders understand the business and have a different purview than just the little HR silo that we might live in sometimes. And so that’s kind of how I got into this world.

Andi Simon: 00:05:11 You know, I have a wonderful gentleman who I’ve interviewed a couple of times. His name is Sri Kumar. And I said to him, I’m truly a believer in chance and serendipity. And he says, well, actually, God is watching you. And I said, well, I don’t really believe in God. He said, but he believes in you.  And I laughed and I said, okay. I accept that as an explanation of why my life has been really a lot of good. I’m finding things a little by chance, a little by design, a little intentional, and a little by luck or smart. But sometimes the stuff has come. And I went, oh, that’s exactly right. Just as you’re describing. And sometimes it comes. And I said, well, that’s interesting. And a detour is okay, as long as I get back on my own path and your life has had some of the same qualities to it. So I fully appreciate when you look down the list and nothing appeals to you. And there was and you jumped in and said, oh my, because I too remember my first course and my first professor and the things he said about anthropology and I said, I don’t want to do it. I want to be it. And that becomes who we become. So this has been very interesting for you. So you spend time in hospital care for a human resource, and after that you didn’t jump into your own business, did you?

Lotus Buckner: 00:06:34 No, I did not. So while I was there, we grew a lot. We went from 2000 to 4200. From 4200 to 17,000.

Andi Simon: 00:06:42 Oh my goodness. Yes.

Lotus Buckner: 00:06:45 So it’s also, you know, 11 years in one place, but there was a lot of change in those 11 years I was there. And, you know, I ended during Covid, so I led Covid efforts there before I left, which was very interesting and gave me an amazing perspective on the way I lead HR. So from there, I was recruited to my alma mater to lead their HR talent management arm, and that was just really exciting. It was a totally different model. It was a huge university, University of Wisconsin, a very decentralized model, which I had never experienced before. Even though we were big in healthcare, I always had a central team. This was very decentralized, so that was a really cool experience and then got recruited away to a tech startup, which actually was my dream for a really long time. But it’s a hard industry to break into, and I came from these giant companies and corporations so very different.  But my experience with growing companies, doing a lot of mergers and acquisitions and scaling was really helpful in innovation. I built a lot of those even though they were big companies. I started brand new teams within HR at those companies, and so that really lended itself well to the startup space. So I went there and was the VP of People at Kobus, which is a kind of food delivery, you know, think of an Uber but for ethnic restaurants, big focus on Asian restaurants is how it started. But it really started growing into the ethnic restaurant space. So a lot of what you think of as mom and pop shops, a lot of immigrants owned restaurants that don’t have the resources or technologies that really understand them and that they understand because of some of them, it was hard to get on to Uber. The support system for them wasn’t the same, the language wasn’t the same. So that’s who we really served. and then we moved into the pose space as well.  So really became a SaaS company in the end.

Andi Simon: 00:08:50 How interesting. While you were there, then, were you experimenting with your own side hustle or business, or how did you begin to get into your own, into LBE talent Solutions? So does that sound like all of your training came from the corporate and the startup, and then you and finish my sentence. What happened?

Lotus Buckner: 00:09:13 Yes. So I actually started my side gig back when I was at the hospital and so focused a lot, did speaking engagements out of there, did a couple of kinds of ad hoc projects and consulting. But most of my clients throughout that time where it was a side gig was really executive coaching. And so coaching a lot of kinds of directors and above level leaders, just helping them through both career decisions, but also just leadership decisions, challenges they were facing with their teams. And the interesting thing that happened when I decided to finally go off on my own and leave kind of corporate America behind for a while, I say for a while because I was open, who knows if I’ll be back.  But when I quit my job last year, I noticed an interesting trend in my own business, and a lot more founders were coming to me for coaching, and so that was just super interesting. I don’t know the exact reason, but I think there’s a combination of some burnout and more people going off on their own. And then also just this new desire, seeing how the world of work changed so quickly, this new desire of how do I navigate this going forward? How do I create sustainable cultures as a founder when I’m at an early stage right and the plan is for the business to continue to scale, which means that the people will continue to scale as well. So that was an interesting shift. So the last year or two years has been focused a lot on founders actually. and then last year I wrote my first book and published my first book. So really took a little bit of a break from client work and then focused on that, but just launched a couple months ago.

Andi Simon: 00:11:08 Yeah, I know, and having three books out myself, they are fully intense, focused and birth and it’s an interesting process. And the Joy of HR is a very powerful one. One of the things that you and I chatted about a little bit is the lessons that you’ve learned, the observations. You’re very much an anthropologist and how you observe these things and then make sense out of them. But, you know, what you really discovered is that corporate and managing the people in a corporation is different from small, more startup businesses and managing the people. They’re people. But then the needs they have, the conversations you have, how you lead them differently and how do you get the results because leaders are only good if you have followers who know what has to get done and give the audience some perspective that you came away with and that you’re beginning to develop your own both expertise and consulting world around. Because I think it’s extremely valuable.

Lotus Buckner: 00:12:06 Absolutely. Well, there are so many differences and there are also similarities. But I think the difference is when I was working in these big companies, no matter where I worked, Andi, everybody complained that we were short staffed. So no matter where you go, you’re always going to be short staffed. But it was really interesting to me because I bought into that. I fed into that when we were in these big corporations and we had all these resources, but it never felt like enough. It always felt like we needed more to be able to accomplish what we were expected to accomplish. And then I went to this store because I had this itty-bitty tiny team and nobody complained. And it was just so interesting when I reflected on that. So that was kind of the biggest thing that I laugh about when I talk about the differences in those environments. And I think a lot of what I noticed is in this startup space, a lot of people, if that’s kind of all they’ve known. So we had a mix. We have some people from big companies like I did coming into the startup, but a lot of the people where startup was their thing. That’s all they’ve really known. And for them, it’s just this, this scrappiness, I hate to use that word. Everyone uses that for startups, but for lack of a better word, the scrappiness of a startup, they were very just used to wearing multiple hats. They were very used to this, this different kind of work ethic where you aren’t a specialist. Everybody in a startup is a generalist, and you learn as you go and you take out things that you have zero experience in.  And I actually think that’s one of the coolest things about a startup. Whereas when you go into a big corporation, sometimes there are a lot of specialists and you’re forced to or pressured to or encouraged to specialize. Unless, you know, as you continue to move up, you can become a little bit more generalist. But as you kind of go into a career there, you are often forced into a specialization because there’s so much that goes into HR. So kind of in some ways it makes sense, but there’s so many different areas that I think that was the biggest difference.  But when I think about how I led those teams, when I went to the startup, I really had to spend some time reflecting on my own leadership and how I was going to do things differently at a startup, because that was not the world I came from. That is not my comfort zone, but I really wanted to succeed there. And ultimately, when I think back and what I did at that time, when I really think about where I had success as a leader, whether it’s a startup or a giant company. Intentional leadership is kind of what I fall back onto because we can talk about servant leadership. We can talk about authoritative leadership. We talk about all these leadership styles. That’s like, there’s a ton of research on that. And we put people in these boxes. But what I’ve learned is actually modern-day leadership requires us to go beyond those kinds of defined leadership styles. And really, what’s going to be sustainable as leaders is using really great intention in the way we lead, because we live in this world now, whether it’s multiple generations in the workplace, different work styles, different cultures, different races, we have so many differences that we get to embrace now and that we talk about now, which I think is really cool. But because of that, as leaders, there’s no one size fits all. There never was. But it’s really in our face now that there’s no one size fits all and one strategy isn’t going to work for everybody. So really customizing our approach as leaders in a very intentional way is a leadership style, if you will, that I actually think is sustainable.

Andi Simon: 00:15:57 It’s interesting listening to you. I mentioned I have leadership academies, and the thing that I try to focus on is that leaders and followers are connected. And so the question becomes, what are you going to do to get the job done with and through other people, which is at any level? That’s in my mind what a leader is. And while we don’t talk often about managers, I’m not quite sure how we’ve gone from managing people to leading people. and we can play around with names. When you’re in a large health care system or a large accounting firm or a large not for profit, you can only succeed as a “leader” if others hear what you’re saying.  And don’t simply abandon whatever you’ve agreed to be accountable for getting it done. Really feel like they belong to the organization, and it matters that they’re doing it. These are feelings that good leaders have to create exactly how it is. It’s not always that simple to know because it says much about who you’re leading, as it is about who you are as a leader. And I’ve done so much work in culture and culture changes that hierarchical rules-based bankers can dictate. But if you’re an entrepreneur, you abandoned that ship real fast. On the other hand, I’ve taught entrepreneurship at Washington University, and my entrepreneurs who came in said they all need a type of ace because if they just came in with all their ideas every day, nothing ever got done. And so it becomes an interesting awareness that one size doesn’t fit. You really need to be intentional to your word as well as reflective and see what works. and sometimes you have to shift to become more rules driven.  And other times you need to be relaxed and let things flow and be much more collaborative and really build relationships. I mean, it’s very intentional. Leadership requires intelligence. And I say that because we haven’t talked about intentional leadership before, but that’s what comes to mind. Does that resonate with you?

Lotus Buckner: 00:18:06 Yeah, I think when I think about intentional leadership, I do think a lot of those things, like you mentioned, sometimes you need to be one thing, sometimes you have to be the other. You have to be agile, right? In the end, it’s really about being agile. That’s what happened when Covid hit. All of a sudden, there was this pandemic that affected the entire world. And a lot of us froze. What do you do when you have spent your career relying on best practices? So I talk about this a lot because I don’t want to harp on, you know, much on best practice because I don’t necessarily think it’s a bad thing.  I actually think there’s a lot of great intention with best practices, and it’s actually good to look at best practices. But I often think when I think about best practice, I think what happens when there is no best practice or what happens when that best practice doesn’t apply to you because the role, the industry, the profession, the team that you’re with, the culture that exists within your company, all those nuances can affect how that best practice is actually going to work or not work for you. So it’s not always going to work. Even if it weren’t for a million other companies, it might not be for yours. And then what do you do in that situation? So I really encourage leaders when I think about intentional leadership, it’s really encouraging leaders to take the time to do the boring work. We are always chasing shiny new toys, the new trends, the best practices, the new technology. I think everyone wants to do all of these things that thought leaders are talking about and that they see all over the internet and that they hear about in conferences.  But if you don’t have the foundation, a strong foundation, none of those things are going to matter because everything is still going to collapse if you don’t have that foundation. And to get the right foundation, we have to go back to basics. We have to think about intentionally taking the time to do the root cause analysis. When I come into a new team or I come into a new company, or I’m on a new project, or we’re thinking about launching a new initiative, I encourage leaders to really take the time to say, what is the demand? Why are we doing this? Who do we have in place? What’s the supply like? What skills and talent do we have already on the bench? How do we take advantage of that talent on the bench? Where are our gaps and how do we fill those gaps then appropriately, where we’re bringing in, where we create inclusive cultures and we’re bringing in diverse talent and that all of that kind of goes seamlessly together. That sounds so simple, right? But it’s not, it’s actually quite complicated. And it takes time and it takes thoughtfulness or intention in order to accomplish that. So that’s what I think about when I think of intentional leadership, is taking a step back and putting some thought into how we’re going to lead, whether that’s an initiative or a team or a company.

Andi Simon: 00:21:06 Well, listening to you, I’m smiling because what we often find is that the words people say aren’t what others hear. And our stories in our mind influence what the reality is that we think is happening. And it’s so complicated because the things that happen in a pandemic or otherwise, an acquisition and merger and new technology. As someone who specializes in helping organizations change, the new is frightening. The amygdala wants to hijack it. You know, your brain hates the unfamiliar, even if you know you must do it, and therefore your initial reaction is to fight it or flee it, or appease or, you know, deny it, delete it. Sometimes I feel like I’m being deleted but on the other hand, it is happening.  And somehow, we need to figure out how we’re going to change to address it, because more of the same isn’t necessarily going to work. And I use the metaphor of staging theater. I like theatrical metaphors, because if I can tell someone you did that really well when you played Macbeth, but now we’re playing Hamlet, the metaphor seems to make it seem doable as opposed to frightening, I said, and I’m really never going to be on stage doing that. You are. And so how do I help you find the script? Practice it. You know. Understand? Where are you going? To stand on the stage with others. How are they going to all readjust? Because if Robert Redford could do it or Vanessa Redgrave, so can you. You just need different tools now to play a different role. And that’s what change is all about. But leaders need to understand that because they’re on stage playing the role. They’re the director or they’re watching and applauding and they are changing today.  It’s not an army where you’re in the front. This is so interesting. You enjoy what you do don’t you.

Lotus Buckner: 00:22:59 I absolutely love it. Yes. But as I mentioned you know my story started because there was a point where I experienced burnout. And I didn’t realize that until I started hearing from what felt like the world, it was all of these other HR professionals in my network and then people reaching out for services. So my clients and I were hearing them talk about the burnout that they’re experiencing. And it hit me like, wow, I went through that. And so, you know, I wasn’t immune to that, even though I do love what I do, it was really about reinvigorating that joy that I had by focusing on these things, by focusing on the things that matter and, in my profession, and the impact that I can actually make. And that was really a motivation for the book to really share that story and story of stories of other top HR leaders who did the same, and perhaps help some of these people experiencing burnout, either in each other or as leaders.

Andi Simon: 00:23:58 Yeah. Is there anything in the book you could share or tell us a little bit more about the book? Because I think it’s an interesting book.

Lotus Buckner: 00:24:04 Absolutely. So I really focus on five areas. I’m not a big list person, so I know a lot of books are like, here are five things you can do, and it’s a recipe for success. I don’t believe that. Like I said, I really believe in nuance and being intentional about how those nuances play into your strategy and what you’re looking to do. But there’s five areas that I talk about when I think about the successes that I’ve had in merging people: strategy and business strategy, what those areas were that really were really key to that, regardless of industry and size of company that I was at, what are those things that were common? And one you mentioned already is really relationship building, which again, sounds simple, but I really break it down in the book and give lots of examples of how to do that better and more intentionally and more strategically.  And then we also touch on communication. And there’s a whole chapter on that which some people think is really wild, but I just strongly believe and have so many examples where we jump to assumptions when there’s a problem and we jump, we use those assumptions and we create these solutions, and then they fall apart and we wonder like what happened? The best example I can ever give anyone that I think people relate to is executives love to when there’s a problem, they love to just throw training at it, right? Just train them and then nothing changes and you wonder why you’re like the training was that. No, the training was fantastic. But train in itself. It’s part of a strategy. It cannot be the only piece of the strategy. And so.

Andi Simon: 00:25:50 I’m laughing. Yeah. Yeah. You know the one and only solution is to train them. And then what happened.

Lotus Buckner: 00:25:57 How many HR professionals have heard that. Right. And so that’s just the most relevant probably example. But we make these assumptions and we solve for things that aren’t even the problem in the end. And so doing, having that tension, doing that root cause analysis, what I have found over and over again in my career is so many times when we do that intentional root cause analysis, it comes down to a lack of communication. We didn’t tell someone something. We didn’t involve people we didn’t share. We didn’t change management appropriately. And so it’s really interesting because that was a very common theme throughout my career, whenever there were issues and we solved for those issues using other strategies. And when that didn’t work, and we came back and looked at it more intentionally with more thought, we found out it was a communication issue. So I spent a whole chapter on that, and then I spent a whole chapter on intentional leadership, to which I know we’ve talked a little bit about already, but I break it down into different steps that we can take and things that I think are really important for intentional leadership. And I’ll give you one here that I just think is the best one if you don’t take anything else away. I’m a believer in borrowing concepts from other professions and other industries, and I’m glad.

Andi Simon: 00:27:22 I’m with you.

Lotus Buckner: 00:27:23 And one of those is from product management. So I have a lot of product manager friends and they talk. They always talk about customization and personalization. And I think HR and leaders in general, not even just HR leaders, but leaders in general, really need to adapt to that. And so what I mean by that is as leaders in customization and personalization, it’s the push and the pull. We as leaders need to ask for information. We have to get to know our employees and our team members and understand what their needs are in order to serve those needs the best, in order to lead those people better. But we also need the pull. So we have to be open. We have to be open to what we don’t know about them, what they haven’t thought to tell us. We have to be open to the fact that they might need to pull from us what they need.  They might need to pull out some leadership that we did not think of yet. And so I really love that concept, and I think we should be applying that more to leadership.

Andi Simon: 00:28:24 You know, I thought you might be going down a different path. And that is to think of your employees as customers. And if you did, you’re selling them all the time. On why they should be there.

Lotus Buckner: 00:28:36 Yeah.

Andi Simon: 00:28:36 And instead of assuming that they are there for a job, think of them as people who you want to retain, develop relationships with, have long time involvement, engagement, all the words that are out there. But it’s a little like a customer and the difference is minor. First you work hard to recruit them. That’s not that different from finding a good customer. And then you want to continue to provide services that they can act on. So, you know, humans aren’t that different in those two different roles. But to your point, you know, the customization, the personalization means that this isn’t just another person, this is a person. And if they’re going to be on your team, a baseball team, a football team, it doesn’t matter what type of team, you need to think about them as a very valuable resource there. As an anthropologist, I always take my clients. First thing is gone hang out, go watch what’s actually happening. You know, I love to hear the stories that people talk about what they think is happening, but that’s all their perception. But if you go out with a CEO or director or vice president to their clients or to their customers or to their employees, and just hang out on the floor and watch what’s going on, listen to the conversations in the lunchroom. You know, I just think that what happens is that if I bring that information back as an observer, they delete it. They, you know, you didn’t hear it. Right. But if they hear it and we hear different things, we walk out of an ethnographic room like that, listening, writing down all the things that we heard, comparing notes, and discovering we were in two different places at the same time.

Lotus Buckner: 00:30:18 Intentionality.

Andi Simon: 00:30:19 That’s exactly right. And so what they heard was how to fit it into their box. And when I’m listening for all the gaps and where there are opportunities on the side, on the edges, I don’t want them to build a new sandbox. But if you keep thinking that I want out of the box thinking now, I just want you to know what’s going on in the box because it isn’t what you think it is. And how many times do you watch a production line or customer service? I had one client sit in the customer call center and listen to the calls coming through, and they discovered a whole different person than the data was suggesting, was calling. It was a real person with a real need. And there’s customer service. People were moving them through that process as fast as they could without really thinking about what the opportunities for. So it is a tool that I add to your toolkit because a little observation might open up great opportunities. We are unfortunately about ready to wrap up.  So would you mind suggesting 2 or 3 things that you want our listeners or viewers to know to leave with so that their takeaways are clear, and then you can tell them how they can find you.

Lotus Buckner: 00:31:26 Absolutely. Well, I think like I said, the biggest takeaway, I think, is really personalizing and customizing our leadership style because one size no longer fits all. And that’s a really huge step if you take that one step only. I think that you’re on your way to intentional leadership. But it’s really about how can we be more thoughtful and take a moment to do maybe the more basic, more boring thing, which is to do a root cause analysis and be more thoughtful before we jump into solutions, jump into following trends and best practices, jump into implementing and spending all this money on a new technology where we’ve done the real work to set the foundation and make sure that that foundation is really strong. So I would encourage people to do that first.

Andi Simon: 00:32:15 Good. And I please add to everyone who’s listening and watching.

Go hang out, see what’s really going on. Listen to folks at lunch, let them tell you their stories, and just be humble and kind enough to be willing to listen before you jump to solutions that you may not match. What has to get done? Where can they find you, Lotus? And how do they buy your book?

Lotus Buckner: 00:32:39 Sure, I am at Talentremix.com is the website and the book is on Amazon and should be on any site where you buy your book. So whatever your favorite site is, their Barnes and Noble Walmart.com, it’s on all of those and you can also find me on LinkedIn, I would just ask if you’re listening and you want to connect on LinkedIn. Let me know that because LinkedIn can also be a pool of scams. So it’s hard sometimes to get through that in black. So connection to.

Andi Simon: 00:33:11 Oh LinkedIn, LinkedIn, LinkedIn I have, I don’t know, 13,000 friends on LinkedIn and me, I wonder who are you? And then I have another 13,000 who are followers.

That’s 25,000 people just on LinkedIn. And I post because I hope that it helps them understand how a little anthropology can help their business grow. But I’m never quite sure if the message is getting through or it’s just lost in all of that abundance. And, yeah, it’s an interesting phenomenon talking about, you know, new stuff. It’s been a pleasure. Thank you for joining me. Let me wrap up, if you don’t mind, and having me and I’m going to encourage everyone to think about human resources, HR, through the people and the culture in which you’re trying to get things done. You know, think about this is not abstract, but as real, you know, what is it you’re trying to get done? Who are the people and how do they act now? And what is it you’re trying to get them to do tomorrow? Because at times they are changing fast, and so is everybody trying to figure out what to do. My three books On the Brink: A Fresh Lens to Take Your Business to New Heights, which was a catalyst for our podcast, is on Amazon with great joy.   Rethink: Smashing the Myths of Women in Business. Lotus is reflecting, you know, a woman who has built a career and now a company in business. There are wonderful women there who want to tell you about how they said, of course we can. Everyone said, no, you shouldn’t be a geologist. And they said, why? And another said, you know who can’t be a president of a college? Of course. And so it’s fun to share the unshakeable. And my newest book, Women Mean Business, is out almost a year now, and we’ve sold 10,000 copies and enjoyed great, great success with 102 women who want to share with you, their wisdoms. So there are 500 wisdoms in there, plus women who have succeeded in smashing the myths. And we love sharing. And that’s the whole joy of this. So Lotus has been a pleasure. Thank you for coming today. And I want to tell our folks, listen to what Lotus is telling you. Don’t jump, you know, take your observations, turn them into innovations.  Begin to think about what’s really happening. Don’t assume your assumptions are right, and if anyone’s pressing you, tell them. We must really know what’s happening before we try and lead people someplace and listen to the people. They all help you get to place you’d be amazed. Particularly what entrepreneurs learn early on is that people are smart, they know where they’re going, and they want to help you get there, and they want you to succeed, not to abort. So it’s been a fun thanks again. Goodbye, my dear friend. Thank you. I.