People-First Leadership for CEOs: The Shift That Unlocks Growth and Accountability

In this episode of Growth Think Tank, I chat with Peter, the CEO of Your Your Money Line, about People First Leadership and its role in enhancing organizational success. We discuss the vital link between employee well-being and performance, highlighting financial health as a key stress reducer. Peter emphasizes the importance of empathy, accountability, and open communication in fostering a supportive team culture, leading to improved collaboration and reduced turnover. Our conversation reveals that prioritizing people is both a moral and strategic necessity for sustainable growth in businesses. Episode Highlights & Time Stamps 4:08 The Importance of Financial Well-being 6:25 Defining People First Leadership 7:47 Building a People First Culture 12:10 Values That Shape Leadership 16:02 Challenges in Implementing Leadership Values 22:22 The Impact on Bottom Line Key Takeaways ➤󠁯People-first leadership drives performance. ➤󠁯Employee financial stress directly impacts productivity. ➤󠁯Empathy is a leadership skill, not a personality trait. ➤󠁯Growth requires courage and accountability. ➤󠁯Feedback is an act of care. ➤󠁯Culture and accountability must coexist. ➤󠁯Retention is the clearest ROI of people-first leadership. About Peter Dunn: Peter Dunn (aka Pete the Planner) is an award-winning financial expert and leader in financial wellness. As CEO and founder of Your Money Line, he has helped shape the employee financial-benefits space. A longtime columnist for USA TODAY, author of multiple books, and host of Pete the Planner Show, Dunn is a trusted national voice on money and workplace financial health. He has also been named one of Indiana's most influential leaders by the Indiana Business Journal. How to Connect with Peter Dunn: LinkedIn: Peter Dunn https://www.linkedin.com/in/petetheplanner/ Company Website: Your Money Line https://www.yourmoneyline.com Blog & Media: https://www.yourmoneyline.com/hr-and-benefits-resources

• 0:00Speaker 00

  I gotta have fun at work. I gotta be able to joke with my people. I gotta be able to ask about their kids. They gotta be able to, you know, ride me for spending too much on youth travel sports. Like I've, I gotta, I gotta have a good time. And sometimes our energy is depleted. And so we gotta tap into the energy of the other people in the room. And if that's not the expectation, then people are just gonna be draining each other. So you gotta add energy when you can, and you're welcome to take it when you need it. So good vibes are always in the budget.

• 0:33Speaker 01

  Welcome to Growth Think Tank. This is the one and only place where you will get insight from the founders and the CEOs of the fastest growing privately held companies. I am the host. My name is Gene Heimert. I hope leaders and their teams navigate the defining moments of their growth. Are you ready to grow? Today, we talk about people first leadership. If you think leadership is about telling people what to do, I think you've missed the point. I don't sugarcoat things here. So if you don't know me, get used to it. If you do know me, you know that I come in direct and hard sometimes. Today, people first leadership will be something that I think you can understand in a way. Our

• 1:15Speaker 01

  special guest is the CEO and founder of Your Money Line. They are a company that as a benefit to employees, they help people fix financial problems. Now, I'm not paid to do this. It's not sponsored content. I just thought it was a very interesting business. And specifically, Peter, which I'll call Pete, was really able to frame in there the core elements of a people first leadership program at their company, why it's important, and he shares all that with you today. One of the things I want to share with you is a little bit of research that we've done. I don't talk about it as much, but this is still true as it is today. And I even asked Pete the same question, and I call it the impossible question. After doing hundreds of interviews

• 2:00Speaker 01

  with founders of fast growth companies like Pete's, I asked this question to those founders so that I get an understanding of where they are. And it's very different from what we see as corporate or enterprise level leaders would say. But these young leaders of, maybe not so young, but they're growing companies, and they are moving fast. I asked them, as a leader, what's more important, your customers or your employees? Once you think about what your answer is, be really genuine with this. Don't just say what you think sounds good, but what's more important, your customers or your employees? Well, 93% of Inc. 5,000 companies will say it's employees. When I asked Pete this before we hit on the recorder, he said it was employees, which

• 2:44Speaker 01

  is really not surprising to me because I knew we were going to talk about people-first leadership and we had a great conversation today. Hopefully you will get the insight out of it that is intended. And if I can help you in any way, please let me know. My name is Gene Hammett. I'm a CEO coach. We do coaching for companies that are in growth mode, that are facing some new challenges, new chaos, and they want to activate resilient, predictable growth, and they want to create a company that grows beyond them. If you're kind of curious about the work we do, the best thing you can do is sign up for our upcoming workshop. We do about two a month, but this workshop will help you understand how to be a better leader, how to activate growth across your company so that you don't have to carry the

• 3:29Speaker 01

  load yourself, you don't have to work as hard, you can let go of control, and we do all that in a 90-minute workshop. It's absolutely free. If you're curious about that, go to training.corelevations.com and it will help you be a better leader and help you create the kind of growth in the business that you dreamed of. It's absolutely free. It's for CEOs only, but if you go to training.corelevations.com, you can sign up and be one-on-one with me, or one to many actually, but we'll have one-on-one conversations and there's even some light coaching involved there. It's really just a powerful frame for you to be a better leader. Now, here's the interview with Pete. Peter, how are you?

• 4:10Speaker 00

  I'm good, Gene. Thanks for having me.

• 4:12Speaker 01

  We're going to have a great conversation about people-first leadership. Before we dive into that, let's put some context around this. Your company is your money line. Tell us about what you guys are up to.

• 4:22Speaker 00

  We fix financial problems for people and we do it through employers as an employee benefit. We've just learned over the last 25 years or so that people don't do their best work when they're financially stressed. Even as a CEO of this company, if I'm financially stressed about my own personal finances or the business itself, I am not as creative as I otherwise would be. I'm doing math at the closing table in the wrong way and that's problematic. So we solve underlying financial issues for employees to help them and to help the bottom lines of employers.

• 4:58Speaker 01

  I love this. I call it a movement, but this is just such a beautiful thing. Cause I think employees do get stressed when, when they're stressed with finance and it takes their mind off of, you know, providing ideas and solving problems and being better leaders. I'm kind of curious too, like, again, this doesn't, doesn't discredit you at all, but are you embracing as a company AI? As things change, or are you guys kind of still waiting to see what happens there?

• 5:27Speaker 00

  Definitely use AI internally, right? For instance, when, when a person has a ton of financial data, like all of us have a bunch of financial data. Americans tend to put a black box around their own data, 60 day black box. And what that means, Gene, is they don't really want to know what happened the last 30 days. And they're not really willing to look at what's supposed to happen in the next 30 days. So using AI, we can surface that for them in a more palatable way. And the way we do that is we serve about 800,000 people and we're able to create a podcast every single week. That is one of one is about a person's financial life from the previous week.

• 6:11Speaker 00

  And every week they get a podcast through the lens of financial health that just says, hey, here's what you did last week. Here's how it impacts your goals. Here's what's going on in the market economy. And it is one of one and that's how we use AI.

• 6:25Speaker 01

  That's a very unique aspect. I would love to go deeper with you, but we didn't come here to talk about the actual service that you provide. We talked, we want to talk about leadership. And I know that a lot of people say this, I'm sure you are going to back this up, but we're going to talk about people first leadership. So before we dive any further, can you define that for us?

• 6:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's just a matter of not only wanting the business to succeed, but wanting the people you work with to succeed. For a long time, I did not understand the importance of people on a team. As a former solopreneur, I was always interested in cloning myself, not finding people to contribute in other ways. Now I just want to clone my people, right? I have no interest in cloning myself, but I think that's the difference between being a solopreneur and managing dozens, if not hundreds or thousands of people.

• 7:25Speaker 01

  I think all of us have been through that. I know I did in multiple businesses I've started is if I could just clone myself and all of my decision and all my experience and skills and confidence, I would have it, but I never found the clone of me. I think it's an unrealistic approach to business. You have to find people that complement you, fill in the gaps, people that can do things that you can trust and empower. So let's dive into this. I don't know if you have a process that you thought about around people first, but like where would you take a company that was curious about a people-first leadership is a part of their driving force for growth?

• 8:03Speaker 00

  I would actually just turn to the values that we've created here. Your money line is the guide. I mean, it's sort of a chicken or egg thing.

• 8:13Speaker 00

  For us, our number one is lead with empathy. And what's interesting about that is any relationship or conversation you're in requires leadership and you don't actually have to be the leader to provide the leadership. So yeah, we want to lead our colleagues here with empathy, but we want to lead our clients and our partners and our vendors and our board members and our bosses with empathy. Another way to, I don't need, you don't need another definition of empathy, but another way to kind of frame this is give people the benefit of the doubt. That a big part of this is assuming positive intent. I'll tell you, Gene, that's something that is on my mind a lot these days is the importance of assuming positive intent.

• 8:57Speaker 00

  Because I think when we get stressed, we assume negative intent, that someone's out to get us or someone is politicking. And in fact, it's just not true.

• 9:08Speaker 01

  I would take that even a step further. If, if you have someone, they will make up the worst version of the story. And because if it's not shared, there's not a level of transparency. So lead with empathy. I am a hundred percent behind this and I'm thinking about all the clients we work with. If they did this as a natural way, this, they would have fewer problems for sure.

• 9:37Speaker 00

  Yeah. And there's an interesting aspect to this that requires people to opt in, right? I mean, you can put values on the wall, but people don't have to opt in. Something we do at our senior leadership level around here, and it's certainly trickle down is, let's say you're going through something in your personal life, and let's say it's the most deeply personal thing ever. And I'm not going to sit here and find examples for that, but just whatever it is, and it's horrible. If you start your interaction with whoever you're about to meet with and say, hey, I know we're about to have this really important discussion about all these sorts of things. I just want you to know, I am distracted. I have got all sorts of things going on. I'm dealing with, they're really tough, but I want you to know that if I seem disinterested or distracted, it has very little to do with how much I care about this. It has a lot more to

• 10:19Speaker 00

  do with just the natural human nature. I've had people say that to me that, I don't want to say save their careers, because that's all pretty aggressive, but I'll say, had they not said that, and then they just had the meeting they had, very different outcomes. So we are very free with that idea around here of like, hey, I'm not at my best today, just so you know.

• 10:41Speaker 01

  I have a little bit of pushback, but most people seem to embrace it. I have one of those concepts that we should not leave personal at the door. We should be willing to share with people that we trust, people that, that, that we know, or we have their back, they have our back, that we should be able to say, hey, you know what? I've got something going on at home. We're still trying to figure this out. I might need a little bit of grace. I might need a little bit of more time. I might need to work from home or whatever it may be, but I feel like it's better to talk about those personal issues than it is to try to hide it.

• 11:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, I'm with you. Like, yeah, for me, I think my most common phrase after someone starts with the generic is, if you want to talk about it, by all means, I'm here, we can chat through it. But also I want you to know, I'm not going to ask details of it. If that's something you don't want to talk about, I think that's just, it's like, oh, I have a procedure coming up next week. I'm not asking about a medical procedure. But I'll say, hey, you want to talk about it, let me know. Otherwise, I hear you. That's great.

• 11:42Speaker 01

  I like the way you treat this, and I think a lot of leaders would benefit from being able to have those conversations. Not that you're trying to do this, and you certainly don't want to gossip, I'll put that out there. But knowing the, what they're dealing with, that empathy, if we go back to that, is such an important piece. And at the end of the day, as leaders, I think we are here to create a place for people to feel like we have their backs, that we understand them. And it's really hard to do that when you don't have that empathy muscle. We went pretty deep on this aspect. Did you want to look at some of the other values?

• 12:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, there's a couple more. We go more superficial, maybe on those is grow courageously. Now, so there's, there's a declarative there. You gotta grow. You gotta grow. You can't come work here and just be the same person you were a year ago. It just doesn't work. But also, hey, by the way, growing super hard, so you're gonna need some courage. And so that is one. We have another one, own the outcome. I'm a huge personal responsibility person. My parents instilled that in me.

• 12:53Speaker 00

  And there's something great about taking responsibility for the good and the bad. Maybe to my detriment, my career has been built around the idea of something goes wrong, please blame me, please, because I could do something to fix it. If I'm pointing at somebody else and I gotta wait around for them to rally themselves, I will literally take the blame for anything, which is a slippery slope gene, right? Because we want accountability and we want to have those sorts of things. But as it relates, if I'm directly related, I'm in, because then I can do something about it.

• 13:26Speaker 01

  I have a pet peeve too. If my employees or people around me, my son, give my wife the pass because you don't have the same relationship with your spouse. But if they blame someone else, I don't have much patience for it.

• 13:43Speaker 00

  I mean,

• 13:43Speaker 01

  take ownership.

• 13:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, have a teenager once in your life and they do something. My daughter broke our dryer, our clothes dryer the other day, just messing around. She said, it wasn't my fault. I'm like, no, it was quite literally your fault. It just wasn't your intent and that's okay. But just don't ever say it's not my fault when it quite literally is your fault.

• 14:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, I am. I'll share with you and I don't know if you have a way to assess someone's level of ownership. Uh, I just did a workshop. We do this every um, uh, couple of weeks. And there's a question that I give them that's linked to values. And it's actually two questions, but uh, it's really simple to do. And I literally had someone in the workshop say, I love that so much. I've got an interview later today. I'm going to use it. And so it has to be indirect because if you ask someone, do you take ownership for problems or whatever? Everyone's got a story for that. But this question, two parts. First one is tell us, tell me about a goal that you set for yourself that you didn't achieve.

• 14:44Speaker 01

  And they, they tell you about that. Hopefully it's, it's, you know, business related or professional. And the second part is the, is the heavy lifting. Why didn't you get there?

• 14:54Speaker 01

  What I'm looking for is if they blame someone else, I know that when they, when it gets hard working for me, it'll, they'll blame me or blame something else, blame technology, blame the world. But those that take responsibility and say, it was me, I did not do this.

• 15:10Speaker 00

  That's so good. So good.

• 15:11Speaker 01

  That's a, that's a gift for everybody here. Peter, you, you get the, the, the power of that, that two-part question.

• 15:18Speaker 00

  I'll take it. I'll give you one more value. I know we got a lot to talk about.

• 15:21Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 15:21Speaker 00

  Uh, good vibes are always in the budget.

• 15:26Speaker 00

  I gotta have fun at work. I gotta be able to joke with my people. I gotta be able to ask about their kids. They gotta be able to, you know, ride me for spending too much on youth travel sports. Like I've, I gotta, I gotta have a good time. And sometimes our energy is depleted and so we gotta tap into the energy of the people in the room. And if that's not the expectation, then people are just gonna be draining each other. So you gotta add energy when you can, and you're welcome to take it when you need it. So good vibes are always in the budget.

• 15:58Speaker 01

  I love the way you've framed all this. I love the phrases that you've done. And it really does back up what you mean by a people-first leadership. I'm kind of curious, like, in installing this into your system, it's usually not a day one thing. It usually happens a little bit later. And when did you actually flip the switch or the inflection point of, we need to have people-first leadership if we want to have the company run the way we want it to?

• 16:29Speaker 00

  I ran my own business with just some support for about 18 years. And so to what I said earlier of like people for, I'm the people. Ah, that's what matters is I'm the one making this going. And as the business grew and I needed to have more substantial, talented, experienced people, I quickly learned that they're not cogs. You just can't plug them into the machine and just keep going. It had to do with getting them to accomplish what they wanted to accomplish and to hear their perspective. And so, I mean, I named myself CEO of this place well before I deserved to be named CEO of this place.

• 17:13Speaker 00

  And it's just now, you know, seven years, once we've been growing pretty substantially, that I'm just willing to say that I do the role of CEO reasonably well, because I, I just didn't, didn't understand it. But people are literally the entire part of our business, which is funny as a tech company, but it's true.

• 17:35Speaker 01

  Well, I am loving our conversation. We still got a little bit more time to unpack this. And I'm kind of curious, like, what are the?

• 17:44Speaker 01

  Any problems or any kind of difficulties you've had in getting the culture right around the people-first leadership? Because some people come in with egos, even though they say they don't have one, or some people come in disrupting things in a toxic way. Have you, I don't need names or anything like that, because I know you're a respectful kind of person, but like, have you dealt with any problems in this journey?

• 18:07Speaker 00

  Of course, yeah, I'll give you two sort of distinct ways to think about it. I'll name them now, so we can come back to them, because otherwise I'll forget. There's what I'll call the spectrum between culture and compliance, right? So we'll sort of hit that. And the second thing would be the unwillingness to give feedback when it's necessary, right? Maybe start there. Gee, my biggest growth area in the last three years has been my willingness, my newfound willingness to give clear, concise, and caring feedback to people when they're not meeting expectations. I used to couch it as personal preference, work

• 18:45Speaker 00

  styles. Yet, I would let those personal preference differences and work style differences fester as something I would theoretically hold against a person, yet they were unknown to them, which is heinously unfair. So that would be one. And again, like I said earlier, I'll take responsibility for that, and it probably persists in other areas of the business. So that's one.

• 19:12Speaker 01

  Let me just reflect on that a little bit. I'm going to reach down here, because you know what I'm pulling up. I've written a book on feedback. I call it How to Have Tough Conversations. I don't think all of them are tough, if you, if you understand what's in here. What you will find, and I won't be able to show this on the screen, but we have a framework, and there's 10 parts to the framework, and it's empathetic.

• 19:35Speaker 01

  We tried to do it in five, but we've realized that we just couldn't squeeze it all in. So it's 10 pieces to it. Many of them are just reminders. I'm not going to tell you that every little piece of this is an absolute earth shattering new thing. There are some absolute new things inside here, but empathetic is the basis for this entire thing. And just backs this up on what you're talking about. The willingness to give that clear feedback can create the kind of culture that you're, you're missing. But if you, if you avoid it, you'll never have what you want.

• 20:11Speaker 00

  I think what I've learned the most about that, I've trying to, failing at it miserably until you fail less is that you're, you're not assigning a label to a person who has certain characteristics or behaviors and say, well, that's just who you are. You're not saying that. You're observing a behavior and saying that altering that behavior will lead to better outcomes for, for what we're all trying to accomplish. And so it, it is both more caring and more clinical in a way. And it's a lot less personal, despite the fact that it's wildly personal.

• 20:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, I'm glad you brought that up. I didn't plant this around here. I'm not trying to sell books to you guys, but if you do want to go deeper with it, you're talking to the author, co-author.

• 21:03Speaker 00

  I love it.

• 21:03Speaker 01

  Wife is with me on how to write tough conversations. You can buy it wherever you buy books online. Uh, I'm going to remind you, we got to go back to the other one. The, the spectrum between culture and compliance.

• 21:13Speaker 00

  So we're talking about people, we're talking about culture. We're kind of talking about HR, to be honest, in, in a, in a, you know, universal sense. Um, I want people to have a great time. I want the culture to be amazing. I want to talk about what we did this weekend, but y'all, we got work to do. We got goals, we got to hit them and the good time cannot get in the way of accountability. And I think. I want to hold my people accountable. I want them to hold me accountable because we've developed the trust via culture. I don't want to say the whole point of investing in culture is to develop trust so you can hold each other accountable, but it's a pretty

• 21:54Speaker 00

  good byproduct. It's intellectual security, or intellectual honesty, or psychological safety, as sometimes people call it. I just, I view it as like, hey, let's build a relationship so you can all accomplish what you're trying to accomplish. I will never equate this to marriage, but I think most successful marriages get to a point where the trust is used to make the whole thing better.

• 22:23Speaker 01

  Well said. I love that the depth that we have around this and the clarity that you've brought to it, that people-first leadership is not something that is just pie in the sky. It doesn't do this. I want to give you one final question as we wrap up today. Like, how do you, how do you believe people-first leadership affects your bottom line?

• 22:46Speaker 00

  I'll go the cleanest answer, and then the probably a little messier one. The cleanest one is, turnover will kill your organization. If you do not have a good enough of culture to keep people, it will kill you. It will, it'll suck growth out. It is terrible, and it's not fun. And I know that, unfortunately. The other side of it is, for me, my goal on this earth is not to make as much money as humanly possible. So I start to look at what is my aim? What am I trying to do? I am trying to impact as many people's financial

• 23:24Speaker 00

  lives as possible. And I cannot do that without people co-opting the same idea. And, you know, numbers don't get you there. It's the relationships and the trust that you build that would help me accomplish my goals.

• 23:43Speaker 01

  Fantastic. Great way to end this conversation, Pete. I really appreciate you sharing your wisdom. Again, your company, Your Money Line, is doing incredible things. I watched some of the videos you guys have as a benefit package. Anyone out there looking for something unique, something that will serve your clients or your employees, let me be more specific, in a way that helps them be more financially literate and make better decisions. I think you'll have happier employees. I think it'll actually keep turnover in a better place when you have this benefit. That's my belief. And Peter didn't pay me to say that. This is not sponsored in any way. But I just believe in the uniqueness of this offer.

• 24:28Speaker 01

  Never seen it anywhere else. And I'm really excited to share that with our world.

• 24:33Speaker 00

  Thank you. Yep, thank you.

• 24:36Speaker 01

  Wow, what a great interview with this about people-first leadership. I love this concept. Surprise, we haven't already had this as a title before. We probably had some things around it. But this is spot on. I love Pete's take on values. Everything he shared was very helpful. Why it's important is just to hit that home. Because turnover is a killer. If you don't have people-first leadership, you will experience more turnover than necessary. If you have people-first leadership, you will have people that are connected by the mission, by the work, by the trust and the relationships that are built inside these organizations. And from there, the impact of the bottom line is just incredible. So hopefully you took this to heart.

• 25:21Speaker 01

  If you want to be a better leader, if you want to tame the chaos, stop being the bottleneck of your business, however you phrase this, our next training is available for free for CEOs. Just go to training.corelevations.com and it will help you become a better leader and create the company of your dreams that grows beyond you. When you think of growth and you think of leadership, think of growth and take, as always, the courage. We'll see you next time.