Is HR a Job in Politics?

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Enrique Rubio: When you use something that is good, right? And you use it as a scapegoat for your own other incompetence, your corruption, how broken you are as a human being. And more sadly, when a large number of people think that's why they are struggling because of that scapegoat, then we're in a pretty bad place.

David Rice: Welcome to the People Managing People podcast. We're on a mission to build a better world of work and to help you create happy, healthy, and productive workplaces. I'm your host, David Rice.

My guest today is Enrique Rubio. He is the founder of Hacking HR. We're going to be talking about what's going on around DEI, the reality of politics in the workplace, and if HR can prevent organizations from ending up on the wrong side of history, or their people, for that matter.

So Enrique, welcome. 

Enrique Rubio: Thank you, very relevant and timely conversation that we are about to have. Thank you for inviting me. 

David Rice: Yeah, no problem. 

I want to start by asking you, cause like me, you've been around for a while, you've been obviously connected with HR for a long time. When was the first time you felt like politics had become ingrained so heavily in people's minds and personal identities that it's essentially unavoidable for HR? 

Enrique Rubio: I think that's been forever. I think the impact of politics and what it does on people has been around for, ever since we evolved and became what we are today as humans.

I think in the U.S. at least, the past, perhaps 50 years have been very divisive and the line is not anymore. It used to be a line of, more taxes, less taxes, more, bigger federal government, a smaller federal government involvement of the U.S. in global matters, or just staying isolated from the world.

But I think that line is, that's not the line that exists anymore. I think we've seen the impact of a class of very wealthy people that They are perhaps not necessarily thinking about the future of the entire country and their own wealth, by the way. They are thinking more about how to make their bank accounts bigger.

So the line is not anymore between more or less taxes. The line is, how can I get more from the government to benefit me? And the overwhelming majority of the people less, because money is a finite resource, right? We don't have an infinite amount of money. We don't have an infinite amount of resources.

The more one person takes, the less there is for another person. And I think that because that's been happening in the past 50 years, we have become a lot more polarized because this class of very wealthy people has brainwashed a massive number of people in America, a big percentage of people and made them think that the reason why they don't have opportunities, the reason why they can't find a job, the reason why they can't afford health care.

The reason why they are not progressing in the way they want to progress in life is because the other person across the street who looks different than them, or thinks different than them, or loves different than them, or is part of a different political party, are not because of that wealthy class of people that has bought out politicians that are taking some of those resources.

So that's been happening for a long time, but the past 50 years has been. More acute in the U.S. The past 15 years have been really insane, particularly since the election of President Obama in 2008 and more especially since the passing of the Affordable Care Act, what we call Obamacare is the same Affordable Care Act, by the way, for the people who are still don't know, that is the same thing. 

I don't know, if you've seen interviews with people saying ah, I don't want Obamacare. I want Affordable Care Act in yeah, it's the same thing. That's another sign that you've been brainwashed by people who are trying to make you a hater of those who also want healthcare. And we're on the same kind of like side, right?

But you've been brainwashed anyway, the past 15 years have been very polarized and very divisive. And there's no way for the workplace. There's no way for HR to take a step on the side and to prevent its involvement from the world of politics. That's not going to happen, at least not while we continue to be as divided as we are.

So I will say then to your question in a short way, the past 50 years have been divisive The past 15 years have been horribly polarizing, and we may not say it because we are the victims or sometimes the victimizers of that political polarization, but we are this next few months and right now, by the way, but the next few months, we are going to start to feel that political polarization, the people that I was blaming before for my problems, Are people who are equally suffering because now I am going to become a target when I thought they were going to be the targets.

So there's no way for the workplace to not be actively involved in these conversations, especially HR. 

David Rice: Yeah, I agree with that. I think because I asked the question because I think there's a temptation to feel like, people didn't used to carry this around so much and I do think that's true to some extent that we have more maybe like a sense of Oh, you don't talk about certain things at work or that kind of thing.

I do think you're right, like the election of Obama just changed things and we've seen that sort of sense diminish. That's why I asked that question. 

Enrique Rubio: It's a very relevant question because I, sometimes you think that the things that are happening to others won't happen to you. And that is not true. That is true in a normal democracy.

That is true in a country where the laws are applicable equally to everybody. And where you know, that maybe there's one company that is firing people in one sector and you're like, I don't work in that sector. So it's unlikely that something will happen to me, but there are times in history. Where everybody becomes the target, even the people who started supporting the regime that promised them to make others the target.

When somebody tells you, if I come here and tell you that I'm going to make your life better by making somebody else's life worse, believe me that you will become eventually a target because eventually you will be a rock on my shoe. Eventually you will be an obstacle to my agenda. You can't build a great country.

You can't build a great society by promising or thinking that to improve somebody's lives, you have to make other people's lives worse. If anybody in the world promises you that, please believe that you, even if you support that, you will be a target at some point. And that is what's happening right now.

The people who supported a political movement. That was telling them, you don't have a job because immigrants are taking your job. There's drug on the streets because there's drugs are coming from other countries and you're not progressing because they are taken away from you. And you support that thinking they will make my life better when they take all of this away from these other people, they will come for you.

Eventually they will come for you too. So there's no way to escape this. There's no workplace. And I know this is some of your questions that you wanted to talk about today, but you see some workplaces aligning themselves with things that put them in the wrong side of history. And I can promise you this, me being an exilee from my own birth country, Venezuela, that I had to escape because of dictatorship.

Any company that aligns itself with the wrong kinds of things, it doesn't mean that you can't be in favor of changes, even if you don't agree. But if you are aligning yourself with the things that are wrong for society, because you think that you are carrying favors from a regime, they will come for you.

You are not safe. Whatever you're doing is temporary. Maybe it's making your pockets bigger. By doing the wrong thing, but they will come for you too. So we can't escape that. 

David Rice: I think you're right. 

And when we talked before this, you mentioned that at present, there's this feeling of like hopelessness going around, things are moving in the wrong direction is the way a lot of people are feeling that does get translated into the work environment.

Enrique Rubio: It sure does. 

David Rice: Would you say this is a moment? In which culture and having a people centric culture in particular is more important just for the health of your people, but also for the business. 

Enrique Rubio: Definitely. And it's been very important for a number of years, but I'll say that now standing up for what's right for what's human, it doesn't mean that you have to wear a political banner or wave a political flag.

It's interesting, by the way, that now when you go out there, I was telling this to my partner yesterday, I was telling her, isn't it ridiculous that now when you say, I am a kind person in the political spectrum, we know who you support and who you don't support. Imagine how messed up we gotta be. To think that if you say, I believe in kindness, I believe in love, I believe in inclusion, I believe in belonging, people will know, oh, you are this and not that.

Isn't that stupid? Don't we all want a kinder society, a society with more love, more inclusion, more belonging, more opportunities? So right now you say that whatever you say, and people will say, Oh, you are, probably a liberal, that's what they would say, you don't support the MAGA agenda, whatever, right?

But the truth is that, yes, we have now put a label on things that should be human and should not be. Political, at least not partisan. But the truth is that because we can't escape this, and I am hoping that people remember, and I am hoping that the pages of history of the history books narrate with precision, what is happening right now, any company, any person that knows that this country will exist in the long run, that society will outlive Donald Trump and his administration and all the awful things that are happening right now, because that is true.

This is not the end of our country. You have to think what you want to be remembered for, what you want your legacy to be. So if you today are aligning yourself with the wrong kind of things, Once again, we will remember that, and the right kind of things is saying we believe in a culture of inclusion, like you asked before, we believe in a culture where people can thrive regardless of the color of their skin, God or not, that they praise to, or the person they love, whatever their gender or their sexual identity or gender identity is, we want a workplace where everybody feels that they can thrive And because of the performance, because of their integrity, because of their qualifications, and that will set the baseline for all of us.

That's one area in which you have to double down, saying, we want to build inclusive places where people feel that they belong, regardless of the seemingly different things among us, right? Eventually. The people that don't believe in this will tell you, I'm not going to buy your beer.

And remember a couple of years ago when some people say, I'm not going to buy bot light anymore. And they ended up buying bot light again. I don't support the NFL anymore because Taylor Swift is, hanging out with this guy and they watch Taylor Swift and they watch NFL. I don't like NASCAR because NASCAR now is, woke.

They still watch NASCAR, right? But if you as a company, you say, okay, I'm going to delete diversity from my principles and my values to serve that small group of people. The rest of us will remember, the rest of us will keep you accountable for that because you will be a coward if you end up doing that.

So to me, this is a critical time to double down on what's human, not political, not partisan, what's human. And if you have your shareholders and your shareholders may be worried about what that means for the business. Create the case, tell them now that we are a diverse workforce, look how much better we're doing versus when we were not so diverse.

So this is paying dividends. This is better for the business. Our finances are doing better. Our brand awareness is growing. Our stance for the right things in society is being recognized. You just present that case to, again, your shareholders. Or your stakeholders in general, but we will remember those companies that are not doing the right thing.

David Rice: You're talking about the politics of the day here and it's DEI, they just keep talking about it and we've seen SHRM take a step back now. We've seen a lot of companies start to distance themselves from it. And I think broadly though. We also see that it's going to continue in some form. How are you feeling about things around DEI and where do you see it ending up in the next couple of years?

I'm curious, do you see the narrative changing again? Cause as we talk about history this tends to happen with it. It has a down cycle and then something happens and all of a sudden everybody's back on board. So do you see that sort of narrative shift happening again? 

Enrique Rubio: Yeah. Let me first remind everybody, especially those here in the U S and it doesn't matter if you support Trump or not.

Just think back or remember what happened in 2020. The rise of the Black Lives Matter movement after George Floyd was murdered. And then, obviously, the Black Lives Matter movement became the scapegoat. Of by then Trump's government, right? So it is all, we can't deliver for our people. Deficit is skyrocketing.

We are telling people not to wear a mask to protect each other because black lives matter, right? All of it was black lives matter. Then from 2021 through 2023, it was woke, the woke virus, you ask them what is woke and they don't even know what woke is, right? If woke is being empathetic and kind and loving and accepting of everybody.

I am the most fucking woke person in the world because I want more for all, and I want people to feel included. So it was woke, and now it is diversity, equity, and inclusion. And next year, they will forget that diversity, equity, and inclusion was the scapegoat, and they will blame something else. They will blame, I don't know, you're not a religious person.

I don't know what they're going to blame, right? They will blame something. When you use Something that is good and you use it as a scapegoat for your own order, incompetence, your corruption, how broken you are as a human being. And more sadly, when a large number of people think that's why they are struggling because of that scapegoat, then we're in a pretty bad place.

But I think what's going to happen in the next few years is some companies will align themselves with Trump's government. We already seen them. Facebook, no diversity targets. Diversity is out of the question. No more moderators on Facebook, Google, which has been incredibly disappointing for me because I always saw Google as a company that was like a role model for me.

I always talked about, Oh, look at all the awesome things that Google is doing. And I'm very disappointed of them removing diversity, equity, and inclusion from the values on the things that are important for them and removing. Things from their calendar. Who the hell cares if you have in the calendar black history month, Hispanic history month, Cinco de Mayo.

What the heck? Everybody wants to go and eat tacos and drink tequila. Why do you remove that from the freaking calendar? Who is being harmed by having that in there? But there are some other companies too, that will rise to the occasion. The Ben and Jerry's of the world, the Costco's of the world.

They surprisingly, some companies in Wall Street saying, we are going to continue investing in diversity, equity, and inclusion, which has been very surprising to me, to be honest, caught me off guard as well. So they're saying, we're going to get rid of the things that we know don't work, but we will continue to invest in this.

Those are the kinds of companies that will rise to this challenge. And we will say, that you aligned yourself with a malignant policy. That didn't deliver any value for you. And it was not because it was a mandate from everybody because we don't live in a dictatorship, at least not yet. And you can still do the things that you want to do.

Look at all these other companies. They double down on the human things and look how well they are doing. One last thing that I want to say about this, by the way, if anybody's tuning in and listening to this. I'm thinking, I don't support DEI, I just challenged them to do one tiny thing, one tiny change, one tiny change, don't say that you don't support DEI, say that you don't support diversity, equity, and inclusion, don't call it DEI, call it what it is, stand out there and say, I don't support diversity, equity, and inclusion.

SHRM, don't say anymore that you don't support the E in DEI. Out there say, we don't support equity. That's why we removed it from our values. Just say it, say that you don't support equity. Because when you use the acronym of something, you are removing the meaning of that something. You are depersonalizing what that means.

When you say I don't support diversity, equity, and inclusion, you're not just saying that you don't support women in the workplace. You're not just saying that you don't support people of color advancing in the workplace. You're also saying that the person who has a physical disability and needs a ramp to go into the office, you're not supporting them either.

You're also saying that somebody has Down syndrome, you're not supporting inclusion policies for them to come into the workplace. And by the way, 1 billion people have some kind of disability in the world. What you're saying is I believe in a world where those 1 billion people should not have an opportunity.

Call it what it is. If you don't support DEI, don't say that you don't support DEI. Say that you don't support diversity, equity, and inclusion. And then Maybe you will start to feel like, oh, wow, it sounds pretty awful to say that I don't support inclusion, that I don't support diversity, that I don't support equity, right?

Maybe that alone, that nomenclature alone can help people think differently about it. 

David Rice: I love that. Yeah. 

When we were talking beforehand, you brought up the workplace as being an avenue for civility, and I love that idea. I, like a lot of people, I long tried to keep politics out of my work relationships. I believe that you don't talk about politics and religion with people who aren't your friends and family, right?

I used to feel this way. I still do to some extent, right? But that doesn't mean that other people feel that way. And aren't going to stick their politics in your face. And we need mechanisms that promote civility and decency around these discussions because it's eroded with Facebook comment sections and people act sometimes in real life.

I used to think people only act that way in online forums, and in some cases, it's not true now. What are some of the things we need to do to make the workplace one of those mechanisms in our society? 

Enrique Rubio: Yeah, that's a very good question. I did my master's degree in public administration. I always liked politics and I'm thankful that I'm not in politics because that world is has become so awful.

And I always saw it as a way to serve people. I'm thankful that I found another avenue for my calling of serving people via HR. I remember when I was doing my master's degree, we would always do these exercises where you would have to role play. And sometimes you will have to role play a very evil person in the world.

You will have to role play, dictators defending themselves in the international court of justice, or you would have to be a criminal defending yourself. And it's not that we were criminals. It's that you were thinking. As if you were that person in that moment, to create the skills in us, the capabilities in us to have debates and arguments like on the extreme without killing each other pretty much in a classroom.

I feel we have to go back to something like that at a society, at a societal complete level, like all of us together in classrooms, in the workplace, in church. If people go to church in various places where you can have. Honest conversations about the things that are happening without killing each other, without hating each other, in family, you have to do it with civility.

And what that means is that you begin by setting up some ground rules. And if you can commit to those ground rules, have the freaking conversation. I don't watch a lot of talk shows anymore, right? But you got a guy like Bill Mayer, right? I don't like the guy, by the way. He invites right wing politicians, left wing politicians, and he calls them all out.

He's a liberal, like more like on the liberal side, but they have this very heated conversations. They don't kill each other. And maybe at the end, neither of them convinced each other to switch sides or to get a little closer to their political opinion, but who knows? You never know. So for me, for example.

It is trying to cultivate an understanding of why would anybody not support diversity, equity, and inclusion? And maybe this hasn't happened to me because I am like in an echo chamber of people that do believe in that. But maybe they come to me and they say, you know what? This is why I don't believe in that because I was passed over a promotion after working all these years and getting my top performance.

By somebody who I know was less of a great performer than I was, but they needed to meet a quota. And because that happened to me, I don't believe in diversity, equity, and inclusion. And that person would have a valid point that we need to discuss. Do I agree that's what's happened across the board?

No, I don't think that's what's happened across the board. And we have the data, evidence based opinion here saying that's not what happens across the board, but it's the experience of that individual person that I can't delete by saying, no, but it works. Even if it didn't work for you, it works for others.

We just have to listen to that person and say. That sucks. And it's awful. Let's talk about it. Let's have that understanding and you reach an agreement. Those conversations should happen in the workplace. You just provide the guidelines. You just provide the ground rules for people to be able to talk about these sensitive topics.

There may be other topics that you may want to avoid. You don't have to talk about abortion in the workplace. You don't have to talk about maybe other topics that are incredibly polarizing, right? But there are some topics that you can definitely talk about, and maybe those topics where we differ from each other, but not so much, maybe that's how we start getting together and saying Oh wow, you're a liberal, but you're not stupid.

Oh, you're a conservative, but you're not stupid. And then we say, Oh wow, we have more in common than the things that separate us. And again, I'm not an idiot thinking that everybody would agree with something like this. There are people who are on both sides. Completely obtuse, and they will never, ever see anybody else's point.

But the majority of us are not there. That's why I think it's important to have this conversation in family, at church, in the workplace, whatever we have to have them. 

David Rice: Yeah. The more we have it, maybe the closest disability we get, and especially just seeing the human being on the other side.

Enrique Rubio: Just think about once again, just two basic examples which honestly, I just can't understand how this happens, you tell somebody, DEI is responsible for all our problems. And then you go and ask them, all right, you don't like DEI. Okay, no, I don't like DEI. Okay, but what's DEI?

I'm not sure what it stands for. I have seen these things firsthand. If you don't even know what that means, how can you be in favor or against it, right? There are multiple videos of this where people say, I want Obamacare to be resigned and I want the Affordable Care Act to continue. If we were able to have that reasonable conversation, we should be able to tell them.

Obamacare is the same thing as the Affordable Care Act. 

David Rice: It was only named that by politicians. 

Enrique Rubio: Yeah. It's just a different name, but it's the same thing. So you've been brainwashed by people who want you to hate me because I say Obamacare and you say Affordable Care Act, but it's the same thing. You know what I'm saying?

So we should have these conversations tariffs. I know that I'm going beyond DI and HR. We have to talk about all those things. We have to talk about all those things. 

David Rice: Tariffs impact the business, right? 

Enrique Rubio: Oh, they do. 

David Rice: That's a fair conversation to have. And like, when we talk about the example that you're giving with the ACA and Obamacare, it's the same thing how DEI gets reduced to race and gender, but it impacted ageism. It impacts veterans causes, accessibility for... 

Enrique Rubio: Neurodivergent people, accessibility. 

David Rice: It's only been made into a race and gender thing because that's the thing that people get fired up about. 

Enrique Rubio: That is correct. Yeah. I think it's a disgrace that the governor of Texas resigned it. policies. This guy has a physical disability.

He's on a wheelchair and he needs ramps to go into his office. He needs an accessible workplace for him being the governor to be able to work. So it's like he rode up on a ramp to go to his office, and then he tore down that ramp for others not to be able to cross it, who had the same condition he had.

That is awful, man. Like, how do we do that to other people? How can I climb a ladder? That allowed me to grow and progress and then kicked off the ladder so that other people can go up on it. That's awful. So we need to, again, that's why I'm saying, I said before, if you oppose, first know what DEI is and say that you oppose diversity, equity and inclusion, but know that if in your family.

You have a member of your family who has a physical disability. You have a member of your family who has maybe some sort of mental challenge or is neurodivergent. If you have a family member who is a veteran, if you have a family member who, whatever, you know, the multiple things that fall into DEI, they will be negatively impacted as well.

I don't know if you remember what I said at the beginning. If they promise you to make your life better by making somebody else's life worse, they will eventually come for you. So when they tell you, we are against DEI, removing it from everywhere because we don't believe in women, transgender, and people of color progressing, in the life ladder, eventually they will come for you too, and they will make it about you, whether you notice or not, they will make it about you too.

It's funny, because all of these people who are so hateful, they have a playbook. It's you know exactly what they will do next. There are no surprises when people that are this Malignant and cruel in the way they act, exactly what they will do because they are not the first ones to be cruel.

They are not the first ones to be malignant. There's a playbook. Number one, blame others. Number two, remove the rights from those others. Number three, under the desk, start deciding things that will also impact the people who voted you in the first place because you promised them to make their lives better by making somebody else's life worse.

We can't progress like that. That's not going to make our country great. 

David Rice: No, I agree. 

For leaders now as we think about our organizations, when we think about these big social issues, things like DEI, valuing technology over people's, our sustainability practices, whatever it is, it feels like a lot of these decisions leaders are making about the future of the workplace, like we said at the start, they have the potential to land you on the wrong side of history, right?

If you don't do the right thing. What are some of the values in particular as it pertains to HR that we need to be looking to adhere to right now to ensure that our organizations in five, 10 years, aren't seen as the ones that got it wrong? 

Enrique Rubio: I may get a little philosophical here with this answer, right?

But it all comes from here, right? Build a workplace that number one, you feel proud of build a workplace where you would want your son or your daughter to work for. And start from there, if you build a workplace where you know that your teenage daughter or your toddler can work for in the next 20 years, you may be doing the right thing.

If you want them to go to a workplace where they will be accepted, if they end up being gays, for example, where they will be able to work if they end up having a physical disability or if they currently have a physical disability, know that what you're building today will either make them proud of you.

Or not, if you want to build a workplace where you want them to work, build it, not just for them, build it for all as well. That means that for HR, building inclusive workplaces, paramount. Building workplaces where you believe in diversity, building in workplace where you put the human first. And again, I know that if you're a business, you gotta make money.

My business have to make money too. And I understand that, but it's very rare. That's the wrong concept that we have in our minds. It's not very rare, actually, it's very common to believe that to do something that is for the humans means doing something that is against the business, and it's not true, it's just not true.

You can build a workplace that thrives and succeeds by also helping people thrive and succeed. This is not an oxymoron. The two of them are two sides of the same coin. They are not diametrically opposed to each other. That's the kind of principle that has to guide your activity. How do I build? A business that is successful in the short, medium, and long run while helping the people be successful as well.

When you begin with, let me build a workplace where my sons and my daughters and the kids that are around that I don't know would feel proud of working for. One, and number two, let me make sure that my policies are creating a workplace that succeeds while helping people succeed. You are on the right path.

That may mean different things for different people, but that is the right path. You can't build a great country. You can't build. A great organization by excluding others, we're not going to make America great again by making it great for one group of people in the short run. That's the same for a workplace.

If you are Google and you remove religious holidays from the calendar, if you remove Cinco de Mayo from the calendar, that's not going to make you great. That is going to alienate a massive amount of people that now won't believe anything that you say. So you just made a mistake. Imagine you end up marrying a Mexican and you tell that Mexican, Oh, when I was the leader in Google, I removed Cinco de Mayo from the calendar.

Will that make them feel proud of you? Probably not. So I know this is so simplistic to say build something that you will be proud of having others work for, but that's like the inner calling, right? It is let me build a workplace that I know people will say Oh, I just cut my veins, and I'm like, die hard for this company.

Are you building that? Probably not. If you're doing this stupid stuff that excludes people. 

David Rice: It sounds simple, but in practice, it's not so simple. Right? 

Enrique Rubio: The business leaders in this company, these are not idiots, man. These are not people that are stupid. 

David Rice: No, we're talking to smart people.

Enrique Rubio: We're talking about some of the smartest people in the world doing the wrong things. So I just can't understand. The banality of reducing complex things. Two simple decisions because you think that they are aligning you with a government, right? But again, there are some decisions that you can support because you think they are the best thing for the country and they are the best thing for the business landscape.

But there are decisions that I don't think anybody would ever think, especially any smart person, would ever think that they are the right thing to do for society. And these companies know that. They know that they are doing wrong things. And they are still doing them because they think that by those things only making sense for their business and not for the people that's going to be enough for the long run. And it's not. 

David Rice: Yeah. HR is used to being the bad guy sometimes. But when we talk about things like politics in the workplace, even something like employee experience. We're getting to this place where you can't make everybody happy, right? And if that's what you're trying to do, you're gonna suffer as the HR person. Because you can't be everything to everybody. 

Talk to me a bit about, for HR, because we're in this time where we're seeing a lot of compassion fatigue, we're seeing a lot of I call it that, I'm, sometimes I call it people fatigue, honestly, because You're dealing with a lot of emotions and a lot of people's needs, right?

And so talk to me about creating sort of healthy boundaries for yourself at work. Cause we see HR folks suffering from those types of burnout and it's hard meeting the demands of this job. 

Enrique Rubio: I post a quote very often that says you can't be everything to everybody all the time, that's going to kill you.

And I am not just talking metaphorically. I am talking sometimes literally. If it doesn't kill you today, it's going to kill you at some point because it's consuming you. It is burning you out. It is destroying your mental health, your physical health, your emotional health, to try to serve all the people all the time for everything that they want.

That's never going to happen. Now, there are many ways in which I could answer this question, but I'm going to answer it in one way, and that is being very clear about what your culture is. So let me give you an example of this. If you are a company that today believes in diversity, equity, and inclusion, and you are a diehard diversity, equity, and inclusion, because we know this works and it's worked for us in the past, and you hire a Black man or a Black woman to be your chief diversity officer, because you're investing in that, and you fire them six months down the road because you want to align yourself with the Trump administration, what were you in the first place?

You were not clear. You messed up somebody's life, somebody who believed in your vision and your mission, somebody who aligned with you. So you made a mistake. Same thing. Let me talk about a less polarizing example. When you tell somebody you can work from this company, we have a flexible work arrangement here.

We just want you to come to the office at least a couple of times per week. And when you can't come a couple of times per week, that's totally fine. But let's try to aim at a couple of times per week. And six months down the road, because Trump said, I don't believe in remote work, then you are calling all these people back to the office and saying, no, we're just removing all of these benefits.

And now you've got to be back in the office. What you ended up doing is making somebody's life miserable. And now you will have to respond to that for not being clear at the beginning. Yes, you don't have to satisfy everybody in all things all the time. But if you're very clear at the beginning about, especially HR.

But this is not HR, by the way, these are the business leaders that are making this decision. So anybody blaming HR for this is making a mistake. HR has agency to present a case, but HR doesn't have the agency to make a decision about the direction of the business. So whenever you blame HR for something, Please be sure that it's most of the times I'm not saying all of them, but most of the times it's extremely unlikely that it was HR making that decision.

It was a business leader behind them saying, thank you so much for your input, but this is what we're going to do. So if you're not clear from the beginning about what you are, then you're going to find yourself having to satisfy people that you promised something to. But something that you couldn't sustain something that you couldn't keep because it was like either you were gaslighting them, or maybe you, as HR, perhaps you didn't even know that this were going to change your business leaders are making those decisions.

So I'm using this small example to say that there are ways in which you can avoid the certain burnout that will happen to you if you try to satisfy everybody with all the things, all the time, just be very clear from the beginning and people will select themselves out of that situation. It's like looking for a romantic partner, right?

You can have your romantic partner and say. My job has me traveling 95 percent of the time and your potential romantic partner may say, I'm sorry, but I want to be with somebody stable in one location and they self select themselves out of that situation. Same thing in the workplace. But if you don't do that.

Or if you radically change your policies from one extreme to the other, pretty much overnight to align yourself with the wrong thing, those people will probably stay in your job, very disengaged, by the way, but for quite a while. So now you will have to serve them and that's going to create some level of burnout in you.

So one tiny example of how to avoid that. But the ultimate message here is. No matter what you do, you can't satisfy everybody in all the things all the time. 

David Rice: Couldn't agree more. 

Now for HR leaders that are having a little bit of trouble navigating these times, right? Cause they've got these leadership decisions to deal with, whether it's, layoffs or DI efforts being slashed, or like you said, the changing return to office mandates and all these other things, right?

There's a lot of uncertainty all the time. One of the most important things, I say this all the time on podcasts or when I talk to people is I really think community is like the way that's going to help us see this through. And the other problem that we have though is that I think in our society we're just pretty bad at building community.

Talk to me about the importance of really All of us learning to be better community builders in our lives, but in particular for HR to be community builders in their workplaces and with each other. 

Enrique Rubio: I recently read something really cool. And I'm totally going to butcher it because I can't remember exactly how it was, but it was something like this.

We are dealing with 21st century problems with a brain that was created to live in the forest and to sleep at night and to go hunt for a couple of hours and then eat. Number one, number two, we are dealing with problems that society is forcing people to solve individually when in our evolutionary history, we solved collectively, humans didn't hunt alone, humans didn't survive alone, humans didn't evolve alone, we evolved as a social animal in collaboration, with cooperation, with negotiation, in community, in tribes, and That evolutionary gene, which you can't delete in 200 years, and that's pretty much when all this mayhem of society has been happening, you can't remove our evolutionary and biological history with societal norms overnight.

And what that means is that in very simple terms, our brains are not created to operate individually. Our brains are designed by evolution to operate collectively, to operate in groups, in tribes, and by the way, not even groups as in social media with 10, 000 followers in groups of 20 people in very small groups that you can survive and thrive together, but the workplace, look at a school is always something that you do alone.

Yes, you can work with your team members, but you do mostly alone. You go to the workplace and your performance is alone to meet people these days. Awful. I just wrote an article last week on loneliness, the tragedy that is for society, because our brains were not designed for that. So community is the answer to solve not only our most complex problems and to explore opportunities.

It is just the way we are. It is who we are. When we are not part of a tribe, when we are not part of a community, we are trying to override thousands of years of evolution, and that's not going to happen. It's not going to bode well for anybody. So we do need to invest. In either creating communities or being active part of a community that's not being part of an association, by the way, it's not being part of SHRM as an association.

I'm saying I'm a SHRM member. That's one thing. When I say being part of a community, I'm talking about your neighbor's association, your HOA. I'm part of a main support group here in I live in a very small town. So to have a men's support group in my small town is phenomenal. I'm talking with people that are dealing with issues that we talk about very vulnerably.

And that weekly two hour meeting for me has been phenomenal. That's what I'm talking about when I talk about community. So it is more important than ever. That we engage in community activities, whether it is creating community or actively involved in an existing community. One last thing about this is that to deal with all the insanity happening in the world, particularly is artificial insanity created by politics, because we shouldn't be creating all these problems for us, but we are.

So it's a lot of manufactured anxiety, manufactured panic, manufactured issues. Politicians are dumping on society to keep us divided. To deal with all of that alone, oh man, that's horrendous. You may feel a lot of pressure, you may feel hopeless, like we talked about before, join a community, talk about with other people who may be feeling the same way, but just talking about it, just verbalizing that anxiety that you may be dealing with, that sense of hopelessness, just saying it to somebody else, that alone has a cathartic effect on your mental health and your emotional health, so we have to be part of our community.

If for no other reason than the fact that biologically we are engineered for that, for community. 

David Rice: Enrique, thank you for coming on and I appreciate it. 

Before we go, there's always a couple of things I like to do at the end of the shows. First thing I want to do is give you a chance to tell people more about where they can connect with you and find out more about what you have going on.

Enrique Rubio: Thank you for the opportunity to be here and talk about all these topics that As you can see, I am not afraid, like before the election of Donald Trump for his second term, I was not talking about politics. I was more let me avoid this conversation. I can't avoid it now. I'm, some people won't like it.

Some people will say like, why the hell are you talking about this? I'm deciding to be on the right side of history. And I'm deciding to talk about these things because I'm standing up. You will remember me standing up, hopefully in months or years from now. That's why I talk about these topics in this way now, more organic and openly.

But if people want to reach out to me, I'm on LinkedIn. Just look me up, Enrique Rubio. I connect with people on LinkedIn and talk to everybody and have fun chatting or debating. I love debating politics. I think it's a wonderful conversation to have if we do it right. 

David Rice: Last thing that we do on the show is I have a little tradition here where you get to ask me a question, so I'll turn it over to you. Ask me anything you want. 

Enrique Rubio: What gives you hope about everything, but particularly about our country, the U.S. 

David Rice: We do things, we go in these cycles. There's a book called The Fourth Turning. It's an interesting book. But it argues that U.S. history, world history also, but largely U.S. history, runs in this 80 to 100 year cycle, in which you have a spring and everything is amazing, like post World War II era is this spring, right?

There's the growth of the middle class, there's a lot of burgeoning ideas around like art and literature and expression and all these cool things that were happening at the time. And eventually spring turns into summer, and summer is like a very peaceful period of people are largely doing well and there's a lot of innovation and things are changing, but it's generally a nice time.

And then there's sort of an autumn period where things sour a little bit or start to, and I love autumn, here's the problem in real life. So I don't like that, I don't, I don't like the framing, but I get it. I understand what they're going with, like the nature reference of things like dying off, or they argue that there's a shift in the way people are feeling, the way people are acting, the rhetoric of politics, whatever it is.

And then there's eventually like winter, and that is like a period of harsh turmoil and Where a reset essentially happens of some kind and like we've seen it in the past was like World War II or the Civil War or, you go back through history and it's about every eight and a hundred years, we have these big reset moments and I'm, we're at about 80 years since World War II ended.

And so we are in this period perhaps where there is great turmoil and it feels like something big is coming. I don't know what, but it feels like we're on the cusp of a transformative moment, but I also generally believe that you emerge from these moments different, better, a different level of perspective.

And I'm hoping that in maybe Eight to 10 years, we'll look back on this and go, everybody has something to learn from that. 

Enrique Rubio: Which is why I also think about the people who actually stand up in the moment because you will remember them and say, who are the champions of goodness in the world? The people who remain true to their values because their values were good.

Even if we disagreed with them at the moment in which they were saying it. 

David Rice: Absolutely. Enrique, thank you for coming on today. I really appreciate it. 

Enrique Rubio: Thank you so much for inviting me. 

David Rice: Listeners, if you haven't done so yet, head on over to peoplemanagingpeople.com/subscribe, sign up for our newsletters. You get all these podcasts, all of our latest work straight to your inbox. So be sure to check that out.

And until next time, stand up, be on the right side of history.