Ep. 104 Monty Waldin interviews Jeffery Tobias Halter (YWomen) | Monty Waldin's Let's Talk Wine Biz

Italian wine podcast. Chinching with Italian wine people. Hello. This is the Italian wine podcast. My name is Marty Walden. Today's guest is Jeffrey Thabias Holter. Jeffrey is from Wisconsin, but now lives in Atlanta, and his company is called Y Women, corporate gender consulting. That's y with a letter y as opposed to w h why why women. So you gotta just explain what is all that about? Yes. Certainly. Thank you, and thank you for having me on. I was, invited to speak at, wine to wine by a group called Women of The Vine. They're friends of Steve Kims and and Deborah Birner has brought people over. We are here to really talk about advancing women in business, and that's what I do. I call on and work with Fortune five hundred companies I work in the industry with people like Gallo, Moah, Tennessee. I work with Coca Cola. I work with large multinationals, and the y represents the y chromosome because you don't have to convince women that advancing women is a good idea. You have to convince men. And so my job focuses on helping companies create strategies around women's advancement, but then more importantly getting senior leaders, men, eighty five percent men to buy in and leverage these opportunities in front of them. I mean, the absolutely obvious question is why are you not a woman? Yeah. That's funny. You don't have to hear this from women. There are unique things that I can say to men that they just hear differently. It's literally thereby. I I could, your your listeners are probably familiar with Cheryl Sandberg. You know, she's written all these books. We could stand in front of the same senior leadership team, say the same things. They think she's a raging feminist, and I'm the smartest person in the room. And it's because I'm actually playing to their bias. Sometimes men just need to hear it from men. Yeah. I mean, Tom would say that's kind of almost defeating the object. And I I'd get where you're coming from, and there is a logic behind it. But, I mean, and obviously, I'm not open. It's got two blokes talking about out. Right. Women's issues. You know, it still does seem a little bit odd. It does. You know, and and and the challenge is we've been talking about this at least in the States for for forty years. Yet progress is still really slow. What I've talked about is not advancing women as the right thing to do, but I consider myself a business consultant. I've spent twenty years in line in sales and sales management. So I bring a very general management mindset to it. So how can we leverage women to grow revenue to increase operating profit through better talent management, through better engagement. And then also, it's a baseline expectation now that you have a strategy around women. And if you don't, your competition is going to come in and steal your best and brightest employees who happen to be women. So this is what the work that I do. I mean, what's the logical consequence there of what you're doing? I mean, you know, ultimately should you be out of a job? Yeah. I don't think that will ever happen, because what's fascinating is you can't talk about women without talking about other macro trends. And so in the US, in Western Europe, in Italy, ten thousand baby boomers a day, largely white men are retiring. That trend is gonna continue every day, every year for the next eight years until we're all gone. So think about what your senior leadership team looks like today. Eighty five percent, probably old white men. New entries into the workforce in all of those countries are women, minorities, being defined as multicultural or multinational and millennials. And so you're gonna have this huge shift of talent whether you're ready for it or not. And smart companies are getting ahead of this. I work with a lot of companies. Their entire leadership team is over the age of six Where's that company in ten years if you haven't groomed your young talent and if you've lost them along the way? And so that's what we help them do. So when you say getting prepared for it, I mean, a cynic would say, right, you're just gonna put in a couple of extra restrooms for the ladies. Yeah. This is really important. It's not just hiring women. You know, this is I'm I'm not an expert in the wine industry, but you would not take bad grapes and blend them with your regular grapes and expect to have great wine. You take great grapes of multi dimensions and you bring them together. So this is not just a token hire women solution. This is finding women who are equally capable to take on those roles and be successful. France is actually an interesting scenario almost seven years ago, they they mandated that certain companies had to have fifty percent women on their boards. And they said, oh my god, where will we ever find these women? They just don't exist. Seven years later, they have amazing women making a fifty percent of their boards. So there's amazing women out there. The problem is most men don't know how to find them, which brings me back to the work that I do. But isn't it more about men not wanting to have them? It's not a question of not wanting to find them or not being able to find them because they don't want them in the boardroom. Yeah. And that's what's really fascinating. What I find in my work is thirty to forty percent of men actually want to help women, but they don't know how to do it. They don't know what it looks like. But that's an easy excuse, though. Isn't it, you know, I can run a big company, but I don't know how to get a woman on the board. It doesn't sound very, very real. It what doesn't sound real is, you know, help me understand what to do because it's not one thing. This is the challenge of of any type of leadership development today. It's it's fifteen different things. It's everything from your HR maternity policy, to your promotion policy, to there's a lot of bias in performance management in the way we evaluate people. Women are often in a double bind dilemma where they're either too hard or too soft. They're never just right. And so progressive companies put steps into place to take that assessment to a non bias level then be able to promote those. But here's the really fascinating one. The men who want to do this work have a personal connection. And there's a lot of research that shows men who are very progressive in wanting to advance women are fathers of daughters. And so the daughters are coming home on Sunday night. And hypothetically, you're a division president, and you have thousands of people working for you. What do you do when your twenty year old daughter says, dad, what are you doing to advance women in workplace. And for many men, it is this complete epiphany because we don't make a connection that if we're not helping women today, our daughters are gonna inherit the same bias and behaviors that we know exist, and we tolerate. But but think about the worst sexist you may have in your workplace. Would you want your daughter working for that individual? Probably not. And so when you make it personal, it changes things. This light bulb goes off. And all of a sudden, they realize Oh, my gosh, I need to do more. But realizing, oh, my gosh, you need to do more and actually doing more. There's a big gap between those two between the intention and the reality, especially if you're on a board yourself. Yes. And you know that maybe your next promotion will hinge on x, y, or z factor. And you think if I broach this, are either gonna think, Hey, you're just batting for your daughter, or you've gone soft. And this is really fascinating because, catalyst, the research company in the US has done amazing research. And it says actually, from a financial standpoint, companies who have three or more women on their boards have fifty six percent greater return on investments. And so there is financial proof with companies that have three or more women on their board that this makes sense. But it's not just about putting women on their boards. It's about driving a culture of inclusion down into the entire organization, because everybody can put three women on their boards and not see any change. So it's not just changing the top, but it's changing the culture so that everyone progresses equally. Okay. Obviously, don't wanna get too much involved in American politics, and we won't mention any names. But hypothetically, the fact that the US has never had a female president, does that make your job easier in some ways or harder? I what I would tell you is being in the corporate world it really doesn't change my work. There is a perception that once you put one woman in, we've, quote unquote, fixed the problem. So you're saying the token, the token appointment? The token appointment. Yeah. I I think a good example is, you know, we we had the first African American president ever for the last eight years. And, racial tensions in the US certainly aren't any better than they were eight years ago. And so if if, Hillary, had gotten elect did. I actually think it would have been a, well, we we've solved that when in fact, we haven't solved anything. We we put one woman in one office. Isn't that also challenging your job? But, you know, you're paid to kind of quotes not directly, but indirectly get women in important positions? Yes. Is, again, the temptation for you and your work, while we got, I got a, on the, on a board of eight angry white men or whatever, and I got one woman on that. I've done my job. I can go home and sleep easy. Yeah. This is really fascinating. And, and part of this is just my approach. I work with companies who already get it. And want to get better. So I'm about raising the bar. I'm not gonna come into a company that has eight white angry men and say and convince them why they need to advance women. I wanna come into a company And, you know, Moah hennessy comes to mind. Big multinational. They invited me in to do some work with them. They want to aggressively promote women. This is the message from the top of the organization to the bottom. What's their motivation though? Is that for share price? Oh, yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. It's about recognizing it. Isn't that really cynical though? It's like we're not we're not we don't want more women on the board or running stuff because we think it's the right thing to do. The right thing to do for us is is our share price stays stable or rises. That's our mindset. Isn't that totally defeating the object of the I I don't think it is. Because I don't and and bear in mind my role as a business consultant. I want businesses to grow their money, you know, when McKinsey comes in, when, Deloitte comes in, you know, they're they're not bringing in social experiments. They're bringing in how can I make your people better? How can I put more money on your bottom line? The belief is if women benefit in that, then I'm wholeheartedly in agreement. It's kind of the argument. It's funny because, many times when I'm with my clients, I will do something called flip it to test it. And what that means is if, you will never hear a man say, well, I only got that job because I was a man. You hear women all the say at times, say, well, I only got that job because I was a woman. And you know what I tell them? So what? Many men get their job because they were at the right man at the time. And so if it moves one more woman forward, it's advancing the total cause. And it goes back to the point that we don't have this endless stream of talent. And so you've got to do this. This is not just a social experiment. And and a good example, Amazon today, you know, in in the US, There are about twenty million job openings today. As boomers retire, there's gonna be about another thirty two million jobs created. There's fifty two million jobs in the US. Do this math for your local country, but there's only thirty million people graduating. So there's twenty nine million jobs that are gonna go unfilled. And so I've gotta be a place that you wanna come to work, which means I value diverse I value inclusion. I value women. I value your lifestyle. Bring your pet to work. Whatever it takes, because going back to your earlier point, we could be having this conversation about millennials who are just as cynical about why do I wanna come to work for your company? Are you doing good things in the world? Or are you just making a buck? And the point is today in America and and in many multi nationals, you have to make a buck, but you also gotta do a good thing. Yeah. So so the two are very much inter find. Sure. I mean, you're sort of, I mean, I don't know how many women are on the Supreme Court, but it I mean, I think there's two out of nine, isn't it? Yes. Right. So that's again a sort of sign of that. And I think, in terms of ethnic minorities, maybe one. One. Yeah. So, you know, there is a long mention about Obama, the first African American president. In terms of, you know, women is is one demographic, if you like. What about minority women or from minority, ethnic groups? Yeah. This is interesting. And, obviously, this is a very US conversation we're having. Very, very touchy subject as well. Well, you have you have different dimensions as you move around the globe because, you know, the the things that we would call multi multicultural in the US are primarily around race. But we, you have the same issues in Europe or our multinationalism or or or other aspects. It's, the com the the issue compounds when you, when you move into women of color. There there's obviously, greater challenges that are there. And, you know, it's sad to say that sexual harassment such a front page item in the news every day. Yeah. Not just in the US. It's Not just. No. It's everywhere. And, it's like this is new news. You know, I've been in corporate America for forty years. And, and it's not like this is the first time this has ever happened. So I think the power of the companies has shifted to the employees because you need me if I'm really bright and talented. Well, it obviously does if if it's a jobseekers market. If it's if there's high unemployment, then it it switched flips back to being a company. And it's not just high. It's not just the fact there are a lot of jobs. It's do you have the right skills? So, example, I was doing some work with IBM. Today in the US, There are four hundred thousand job openings in cybersecurity, which is a hot topic. And you have to be a US born citizen to get those jobs. So if you have a background in cybersecurity, you can name any amount of money you want companies are gonna hire you. And so this war for talent is very, very real. And and it's the same in in Western Europe as well. You know, I think maybe the next twenty years, your largest demographic group will be Hispanic. Is that correct? Yeah. You know, the numbers are changing sometime between twenty, forty two, and two thousand and fifty. Hispanic will will eclipse Anglo has the largest minority. So I've I've worked in California. My my classic impression there was if you're Hispanic, you're gonna be out in the dirt under the heat pruning or clipping vines, you're not gonna be in the boardroom. You probably won't be in the wine unless you're cleaning some barrels. Yeah. And what, you know, you, you really have to be almost a sociologist and look at this. If if you think back to the nineteen hundreds with the Italians and the Jewish coming to New York. It really takes about three generations. You know, that first generation works hard, it may be blue collar, a service skill. Yeah. To survive. They they want something better for their children, their children finish high school. And then the next generation goes on to college, doctors, lawyers. And so even though the numb evolution in the US, where the majority may be Hispanic, but it's probably doctors and lawyers, you know, moving into that. What's your ultimate goal? Is it are we gonna get to the stage where, you know, on a board of nine? We say, right, we need, at least four or five women. We need one angry white man. We need one African American. We need one his panic and somebody with of Asian origin. How how do we gonna get that anal about things? You know, I it's funny because I get asked that question all the time. And here's what I here's what I put it back to. You run a business. You track and measure everything. You measure paper quips, you measure spillage, you measure bottles. I don't care what industry you're in, you measure it. But yet, god forbid, we measure how many women or minorities or or people of color we have on our board. What I'm gonna tell you is do what's best for your business to match the consumer graphics of your country. And if today your your country is, you know, one hundred percent white male and one hundred percent white male are spending all of the money in your country, then I'd like to see that because it does go back to women, control seventy two percent of the US economy. Well, as as purchases, you mean? Yes, as purchasers. So seventy two percent of the B2C economy, seven trillion dollars in the US. Basically, the entire US economy is based on women. I think they should have a greater voice on who's on the board of directors of these companies. It just makes common sense to me. Okay. Jeffrey Tabaya's Alter is, yeah, I just kind of embarrassing being a man saying, thanks very much to another man talking about women in The fact you're asking means you're one of the good guys. Well, I don't know for all your listeners, you know, when women, when they take over, please remember us. We were here for you supporting you because they will take over. That's the other thing. It's just a function of time. Yeah. I mean, when you say they will take over you. That's not fear. That that's is that join your voice or fear or That no. That's, well, as the father of a daughter and the father of a granddaughter, that's some joy. But it's also being very much a realist of what the world looks like today and embracing that. Thanks, Jeffrey, Tabice Otter. It's really nice to talk My pleasure. Corporate gender consulting, and never heard that term before, but I have now. I'm the only one in the world. Really? Yeah. That's true. Well, thanks very much for coming in, and I wish you every success. And I wish success to Women minors. Thank you. My pleasure. Follow Italian wine podcast on Facebook and Instagram.