This Isn’t Working – Stress and Success in Corporate America with Meghan French Dunbar

0:00John Busby:Being super stressed at work is not a prerequisite for success or for founding a company or for living and working in corporate America. My guest, Meghan French Dunbar, talks about her story, founding, scaling and selling a company. All of the things you'd want to do or be celebrated for as a founder, but was falling apart with stress behind the scenes. She's written a book called This Isn't Working and has dedicated the next phase of her career towards helping corporate America with this.

0:35hi Megan how are you good to see you oh I'm great Friday weather's beautiful how are you

0:41John Busby:that's right that's a great way to sum up what's going on I feel the same way um well I want to talk about the company you co-founded called um conscious company media actually before I ask about it though can you can you describe what it was a magazine you could find in Holpuz, but set the stage for what The Conscious Company actually was. In 2014, fresh out of my MBA program, I got fired from the magazine that I was working at via email at one o 'clock in the morning and had the bonkers idea that same night that I really, why didn't a magazine, a print magazine exist about impact driven or sustainable or conscious business?

1:23There's a lot of different terminology around this. That's what I studied in my MBA program. And so alongside a co-founder, we crowdfunded the concept of Conscious Company Magazine. We made just enough to cover the first print bill. And the first issue got picked up in every Whole Foods in the country. And so it went from like a cute little project, let's just see if we can do this to like, oh my gosh, now we have to do another one and we have to build a company. And so we did the whole entrepreneur's journey, held it together with duct tape and glue in year one, and then got investors, a bunch of 21 mission-aligned angel investors, scaled the company.

2:06We sold at the end of 2017. I stayed on a CEO after that, but we broadened it out from the print magazine, which was kind of the staple product that we had. But then we had events, we had podcasts, we had an online membership community. And so that's why it became Conscious Company Media was it was quite a bit more than just the magazine by the time that I exited.

2:28John Busby:So before you could go to the grocery store or bookstore and say, that's the magazine I worked on. And then fast forward to a few months later, you know, that's mine or that's ours. You know, that's the one I did from the ground up. That's so cool. And so you scaled this company to a national level and maybe your MBA training taught you how to do that. But it didn't train you for what you've been very open about, which I put in quotes. You tell me whether quotes are real, falling apart behind the scenes. Is that a fair representation of how you were feeling personally while the company was achieving success?

3:09A hundred percent. I mean, I had a few things that I didn't do particularly well. And one of them was pay attention to myself. I mean, my entire identity and sense of self-worth was wrapped up in my business, but I was also just consumed by it. It was like a grand love affair. It was like the first thing I thought about when I woke up in the morning. It was the last thing I thought about at night. I neglected my friends and family. I put off having children with my husband. Like, I just worked. It was my entire life and to the detriment of just not paying attention to the things that we actually need to keep us not just sane, but healthy and happy and whole as humans.

3:53And so there was just all the immense pressure, especially once we brought in the investors. And I will also say that the print magazine industry isn't a particularly great industry to be in. And so we just the financial stress of it all of just holding it together for my employees, for our investors, for this big community that we built. I just carried all of that stress alone and was very vocal about how to run a better business and gave talks about it and was in rooms that I never thought I'd be in. I feel like I looked very successful, but when just like on a normal Tuesday night, I was very unhappy.

4:33I was chronically stressed. I was constantly teetering on burnout and then sort of manifesting around in 2017. as like panic attacks and anxiety. And I just wasn't healthy. I wasn't well. And I watch a lot of people go through the same thing. And especially founders, like we love what we're doing, which is why we have brought it into the world. But then there's so much that gets wrapped up in it, especially as it scales. And you can sometimes lose yourself in the process. So I fell victim to that for sure.

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5:45John Busby:Check it out at business.com slash plus. That's business.com slash P-L-U-S. Thanks for being open with me about this and open with the audience. You know, hustle culture or whatever you want to call it is glamorized. And it's also it's also a good thing when work is fun. I think at the same time, there's as you have more more responsibility, not just work for yourself. You're working for your family. You're working for, you know, for your employees, your investors. It can get crazy. I think like we all have a balance in our work lives with respect to stress. I mean, I don't know that we can maybe you can correct me if you think differently.

6:30I don't know that we can go for being stress-free or not having any stress, but some or a lot is too much.

6:41John Busby:How do you start to distinguish between what's like necessary stress or necessary friction or like 100 % of your job can't be rainbows and the signal that there's a real problem? Yeah, I mean, there's a difference between the occasional stress or a stressful season and chronic stress. I talked about this recently with a fellow author, Amina Altai. She and I were talking about the difference between being in a season of stress versus like fully being in a system of stress. and that seasons by their very nature have a beginning and an end. And I can't tell you how many people I've talked to are like, I'm in a season of busyness or a season of stress.

7:27And like, oh, I have one friend who's been in a season of busyness for a decade. And so it's just paying attention. I, the thing that really helped me like back in the day, 2017, I had this like daily journal that every morning it just, it was like, how are you feeling today? What are your main goals and priorities? Like I had a bunch of stuff related to work and just the process in the morning of like writing down on a scale of one to 10, how I was feeling and then noticing like, whoa, like it's been, we're like on page 47 now and I'm still not feeling okay. hey, I just met an entrepreneur last week and she's using AI for this now.

8:09At the end of the day, she has like a little channel that is all about health and wellness. And she just logs kind of like, I mean, it takes two minutes for her to be like, here's how I'm feeling today. And then at the end of the week or at the end of the month, she can run a little synthesis and say like, hey, what are you noticing? Like we now have additional tools that can really help us see where we are if we take even just a few minutes at the beginning or the end of every day and make it a bit more of a system and a practice to intentionally notice how we're doing rather than just the and the other thing I will say is uh the glorifying the busyness I finally when I realized that we all do this I stopped doing it and the more of us that stopped doing it like I remember I used to see founders And like, it was like, we were comparing how much sleep we'd lost that week and how busy we'd been and like how much stress we were as like, as though it was a badge of honor or something.

9:09And so I just stopped glorifying it. And that became my own little personal stand, but it is not normal. even though every person I know says that they're stressed and overwhelmed and busy, that isn't normal and it doesn't have to be. So just not accepting that is a really good place to start of intentionally imagining that this isn't par for the course and it doesn't have to be. It's a good mindset shift to take.

9:37John Busby:How can a founder then escape the mental trap of you can't have both? Because it is true that you could always spend more time on work. So how does someone start to escape that mental trap? Yeah. I mean, there's everything from the macro to the micro. The macro question of, you know, is it possible to, quote, succeed in business and not destroy ourselves really was the seed that became the book that I eventually wrote. So after COVID, I popped up in 2022 and was looking around, thinking about doing another business. I don't quite know what I want to do, but I don't want to destroy myself. And so I talked to a bunch of founders and business leaders who actually seemed to be doing it differently.

10:33They seemed happy and healthy and well, and they were thriving. And they built businesses where their team seemed the same. And so when I talk about the macro, it's quite literally how you are running your business and the way that you think about it. Susan Griffin Black, she's the co-founder and co-CEO of EO Products. I guarantee you've probably seen them out there, soaps and lotions and stuff. Yeah, they've been around for 30 years in San Rafael. And she and her now ex-husband, who they are still co-CEOs together, when they started EO Products, it was with the explicit intention to build a business we wouldn't want to retire from.

11:12Like that is the foundational principle on which the business is built. And so we are force fed so many narratives, especially in the entrepreneurship world around scaling and exiting and what the purpose is of business. And there's so much glorification of maximizing profit, short-term scale, like 10Xing, blah, blah, blah. And if you can just take a beat and think about the macro intentions around why you are building this, and especially when you're the founder, you're designing the system that you are in every day and that your people are subjected to every day. And one statistic that just stays with me that I can't stop thinking about when I think about designing businesses is that 70 % of people now say that their boss or manager has as much or more of an impact on their mental health than their spouse does.

12:07When you're a founder and a leader, you have an immense responsibility to the people who are under you. And so how you design your systems is one of the things to really explore on the macro and then just on the micro level, as you're thinking about your day to day, the switch that I started to make was it's not about the quantity of the things that I'm doing. It's about the quality of my being. When you are not chronically stressed, when you have great mental health and you're doing things that bring you joy, when you're feeding your connection, when you're moving your body every day, you make better decisions.

12:43You show up in a much better place, able to be more attentive and present and listen. All of the things that we need as leaders, they subtly degrade the worst that we take care of ourselves. So when you start actually putting the dots together around what you need to do to be the best version of yourself, all of a sudden, you can make the business case quite clearly, in fact, for putting boundaries around your time, getting enough sleep, moving your body, like all the things that we actually need as humans because I have yet to find a human being. We are biological systems. And within that system, we all have the same parameters.

13:24And if you push the system too far, it will break. Full stop. Every founder that I know has had either a mental or physical health crisis that forced them into a position to reconsider how they were doing things. And I'm talking like Chip Conley, he had cardiac arrest on stage in the middle of a keynote speech because he was pushing himself so hard. It can be life-threatening. And so it is incumbent upon us as leaders and founders to slow down and take care of ourselves. Sorry, that was a very long answer.

13:56John Busby:I liked it. I'm trying to figure out which follow-up question I should ask next. And so the book's called This Isn't Working, such a clever title. When you were talking about listening, it just made me think of a pattern that I've seen. You and I have interviewed a lot of people over the years, people who have been very successful at business who are towards the end of their career or retired. And I've asked the question, like, what do you wish you had done differently? Almost all of them say, I wish I had been a better listener earlier. Like, that's like the number one thing that they say. And so this might be, you know, one of the answers to my follow up question.

14:32John Busby:But it's one thing to say, OK, I'm going to co-found a company with my spouse. You know, it's going to be a company that we're that we're going to never want to retire from, etc. Not all of us have that option. And so let's say I'm a CEO or I'm a senior leader or something like this. And I recognize I want to improve or fix the system for the people that that work for me. Like, like, where should I where should I start? Yeah, I mean, that was the entire premise of the book was kind of how do we do this better? And so fortunately, there are lots of people who have figured this out for us. This isn't a you have to just build it from scratch.

15:12People like Susan Griffin Black, people like Tarani Syrups. If you want the coolest case study in the United States, Tarani Syrups. If you've ever had a flavored latte, you've had Tarani Syrups. They're a hundred year old company based in the Bay. Nearly a billion dollars at this point for the last 34 years. They've grown over 20 percent year over year consistently for 34 years in a row. they double in size roughly every three and a half years and all of it is based on investing in people and in enhancing people's opportunities and so they really look at investing in people's growth and their wellness as the leading indicator of growth that leads to the financial outcomes and so there's mindset shifts but when we're talking about like day-to-day practical things that folks can start doing where they really want to start focusing on building a better system.

16:06The primary source of chronic stress in most people's lives is financial security. Like that is a good place to start. Can you confidently say that every single person on your team, regardless of their role, can meet and cover their basic living expenses and has a retirement account? We have in the United States, 40 % of people do not have a retirement account. 37 % of people couldn't afford an emergency of$400 or more. Financial security destroys people's lives. And we have a system that is built around minimizing costs by paying people the least amount humanly possible. But when you look at the business case for doing so, yes, you can cost cut as much as you want.

16:50But when people are financially insecure, research has found that they are five times more distracted at work because of chronic stress and their concern about their just living. This is Maslow's hierarchy of needs stuff. They are talking about on average, people lose seven hours of productivity per week if they're financially insecure. So the business case is there. So financial security is one that I always talk about and releasing the idea that hierarchy equates to value. We have such rigid paradigms around hierarchy, command and control, top-down management. And I am 100 % not saying, just flatten your organization.

17:33Everything's consensus-based decision-making. No. But the thing that most people do is that we pay the people at the top the most. They're the only people with the access to information. They're the only people involved in the decision-making. And we treat everyone very differently. And when you do this, one, you make it so people don't feel a sense of autonomy and respect and dignity. Like if you've ever been in a lower level position at any job you've ever had, and you've had decisions dictated to you, you don't have access to information and you're just, it's like they demand compliance. You're not really understanding why you're doing what you're doing.

18:10You're just told what to do, when to do it, who to do it with, when to do it by. And like, here's the plan. Go do it. And so that strips us of autonomy, which is a core human need. And so the organizations that have really, like, they include everyone in decision making. And again, this is collaborative decision making, not consensus-based decision making. but this is having everyone's voices heard so that you're sourcing the best collective wisdom, which drives innovation and engagement and employee satisfaction. The new employee satisfaction numbers that just came out, they're the worst they have been in a decade.

18:49Like 70 % of the global workforce isn't engaged at work. And then like one of our key sources that drives engagement is autonomy and having people ask for opinion and feeling valued and respected. So it's just like the mindset of everyone has a great opinion. You should be incorporating more people. And also I advocate for some hybrid or full-on form of open book management, like be transparent with your people and help them understand how the business runs, why it's making the decisions it is. Because once they understand that, they understand how their role fits into it. And they often source fabulous ideas on how to improve things that you never would have thought of.

19:30John Busby:the um torani syrups i i think i think i have it downstairs it's it's the would it be the vanilla i have the sugar-free vanilla you put in your in your coffee okay yes i'm on the same page they're the best and you know that's not the type of of business you would just think of of like that's the most important business that people have a ton here that's the most important business that people are are paid paid fairly or or or whatever because you would think of it as sort of like a simple and straightforward business. Within that, are there one or two things within that organization you might point out that they do where people could say, oh, okay, I can actually apply that?

20:10There's four pillars that they really focus on, one being financial resilience. And so that is getting everyone. And I mean, they're at this point, one of the largest, if not the largest manufacturing facility in the Bay Area. And they have a lot of entry-level workers, hourly workers, line workers, manufacturing floor, and they try to get everyone to a living wage as quickly as possible. So it's financial resilience built on living wage, not minimum wage, also full benefits for every full-time employee. And then they move toward what a pillar called shared success. and it doesn't necessarily have to be all the way to this extreme, but it is employee ownership, it's profit distribution, and it's annual bonuses for everyone based on top line revenue growth.

20:59And again, when we come back to hierarchy, not equating to value, oftentimes all the equity, all of the success of the business is typically reserved for just like the founders, maybe a handful of executives and investors. If you look at any of the research on employee engagement, as it pertains to employee ownership, like performance just goes off the charts and I understand employee ownership is a huge undertaking. So even just some element of profit distribution or annual bonuses for every single person on the team to make it, to turn the mindset from individual performance, the I to the we.

21:38If you're sharing profits with your coworkers, you're more likely to help them. You're more likely to collaborate. You're more likely to be engaged, invested in the company's success. They also develop their people with a high focus on continual growth and learning for everyone on the team. And this starts entry-level and hourly workers, like basic skills, transferable skills that will help them either at Turani or later in there. And they pay them for all this training. And once they complete a certain amount of the training, it increases their wage by a full dollar an hour for each module that they complete.

22:15So it's actually financially incentivizing people to grow and develop. And then the last one is they focus on autonomy, really helping people feel like they are collaborating in decisions and have the freedom. One of the crazier things that they do that I love, that I think is relatively transferable, especially as companies are scaling, is they don't pigeonhole people to their departments. So if you're in marketing and all of a sudden you're like, I am super interested in customer service, they call it career mixology. you can just switch and go to a different department and you like go around to a different department and they support you in doing so until you find a role that you would love.

22:55And this makes it so their retention rates are through the fricking roof because sometimes we get bored.

23:01John Busby:I was going to go there because, you know, if I, if I'm, if I want to try to debate you on this as like a dispassion analyst, I w I would say, you know, how does the CFO, So, you know, you know, think about employee engagement. It sounds it sounds soft, but you can see it in retention numbers. And then also something that a lot of companies challenge with is their best people. You know, instead of getting promoted from within, they just find a job elsewhere. And so and so, you know, if you're if you're retaining your best folks, they're moving up, they're going around. And, you know, the future CEO probably is somebody who worked in customer service and marketing and manufacturing and understands the whole, you know, the whole business.

23:48John Busby:I want to shift gears a little bit because you addressed something in a podcast that you did. I think it was a podcast last year where I've read many articles over the years about the best leaders in the world are women. And you took that head on. And so I was hoping that you could share your point of view with the audience, what you tackled with that. It's a fun one, but it's going to require a bit of explanation. So bear with me. So there has been a lot of research that has come out recently saying that women make better leaders. And I initially felt very smug about this and was delighted to hear this.

24:29But then as I was writing the book, I really dug into the research on leadership, what makes effective leaders, and came back with the thinking that it is not that women are inherently better leaders. And the reason why, all of us have the capacity to express many different traits. We can be confident and compassionate and vulnerable. We can listen. We can be bold and strategic, all the things. As humans, we've decided to make these gendered. We have like, we have quote masculine skills and traits and feminine ones. And we condition ourselves often as young children. We condition young girls to be agreeable and docile and to listen and communicate and to be caring and nurturing and all the things in little boys.

25:15We tell them that they should be competitive and aggressive and dominant and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You know where I'm going with all this. And then we associate leadership purely with the masculine because men have been in every single position of power in the business world until about the last 50-ish years. But like 3 ,000-ish years before that, it was like pretty much exclusively men in leadership roles. So we started equating leadership with the skills that men have. Stay with me. As women started coming into the world, then they had to learn how to be masculine, quote masculine, which in reality, these are just human character traits that we all have access to.