The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Human Capital Investment Strategy: Six Steps to Cultivate Potential and Yield Competitive Advantage by Cynthia Bentzen-Mercer

Episode Date: September 8, 2025

Human Capital Investment Strategy: Six Steps to Cultivate Potential and Yield Competitive Advantage by Cynthia Bentzen-Mercer https://www.amazon.com/Human-Capital-Investment-Strategy-Competitive/dp/B0FKNQ6TC5

You wanted the best... You've got the best podcast. The hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready, get ready. Strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times.

Because you're about to go on a moment. Monster Education Roller Coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. The Voss here from ThecrisVos Show.com. There you go, ladies in the early season that makes official. Welcome to 16 years and 2500 episodes of the Chris Voss show, bringing you all the latest and greatest authors that are out in the marketplace, sharing the wonderful stories, their journeys of life, and all that good stuff.

In the meantime, before you get to our guest, make sure you refer to the show to your family, friends, and relatives. Go to goodrease.com, Fortress, S. Chris Foss. LinkedIn.com, Foreshs, Chris Foss, 1, on the TikTok, and you and all those crazy places in it. Opinions expressed by guests on the podcast are solely their own and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the host

or the Chris Foss show. Some guests of the show may be advertising on the podcast, but it is not an endorsement or review of any kind. She's returning guests with her prior book, and now she has a new book coming out, February 3, 2026. It is entitled, human capital investment strategy, six steps to cultivate potential and yield competitive advantage. We have Cynthia Benson Mercer on the show. We're going to get into her details and how

she can help your life be better and help you succeed. She is a distinguished talent and organizational development strategist with over three decades of international executive leadership experience across multiple industries and the co-founder. of the zeal of the heel. There you go. We'll find out what that means. Her expertise centers on her ability to actualize human potential, which is detailed into her book.

We had her on the show, I believe, prior. Now, near next, a practical guide to mid-career women to move from professional serendipity to intentional advancement. Welcome, Dr. Cynthia. How are you? I am awesome, Chris. So good to be back with you. So good to have you as well.

give us your dot coms. Where do you want people to find you on the interwebs? Absolutely. So cynthia Bensonmercer.com and check the spelling in the show notes. And then on all the socials at Dr. Cynthia Benson Mercer. And the link will be on the Chris Fox show too so you can find it there. So Cynthia, give us a 30,000 overview.

What's inside this upcoming book? Yeah. You know, so when I started with the first book, I was really focused as the title would imply on professional, ambitious women and helping them to be. be more intentional in their career advancement, really taking a page out of the book of men, because men tend to be a lot more intentional. One of the things that occurred to me through the book tour and working with men and women in business and my 30 plus years in corporate America

is that we are still using very old traditional means to how we identify, select, attract talent into our companies and that we're missing a major opportunity for competitive advantage. So the through line, really, of human capital investment strategy, is if you are to treat your human capital portfolio with the same rigor and intentionality that you do your financial investments, you will have greater success, yield greater competitive advantage and, you know, really be at the top of the game. And I mean, this is something that is really important. Human capital is very expensive.

It's expensive to recruit. It's expensive to find people that can work for you and all that stuff. And so it's a big deal. And when you lose human capital that does a great job, you know, a lot of people leave companies now over leadership issues. They don't feel like they're well-led. They don't feel like they're well-invested. Maybe they don't feel like they're appreciated, right?

Absolutely. Well, and I think it's a couple of things, too. you know, Chris, as you look at the labor market right now, you know, we all keep hearkening back to COVID, post-COVID, pre-COVID, et cetera. But the reality is the dynamic shifted. So many people really leaned into their own agency around the work environment. And so as you said, people will leave jobs because they don't like the leader they work for, they don't feel as though they're being invested in. I think the other reason people leave jobs is that they're not able to, to show up and do what they're wired to do best.

And so we so often select based on these really limited pools of people and back ourselves into a corner. And then we don't always get the person in the job that is really the best fit for the role. And I think that that's where corporate America leaves a lot of money on the table, honestly. Oh, yeah. I learned a long time ago that one of the most important thing is, is you take a

time to hire. And you'll be able to hire better. Yeah. Yeah. Higher slow, fire fast. I like that. Yeah, that's the, I think that was the quote I was looking for. But yeah, you know, we used to have so many employee problems, you know, back when we were starting our companies. And, you know, we'd hire off the first interview. And oh, this person seems like they're great. And we just, I just found by doing two, three, sometimes four, if we weren't sure, interviews with people. It was really interesting in bringing them out. And then, of course, teaching me and my staff, my vice president, my executive secretaries to shut up during the interview. Let the people talk.

Like there would be people that would be like, well, you know, I did go to jail for six years. And you're like, oh, hey, you'll love this job, you know. And I'm like, you're missing out, like everything. And what's interesting, too, is like people, the further they are in the interview process, the more they're just like, the more they're just like laid back, like by the third and fourth interview, they're showing up their pajamas and they're putting their socks feet up on the desk and they're telling you all their horror stories and everything you want to know. You're just sitting there going, oh, so you murdered someone in 1971.

And you've been fired for every job. You know, you really start finding out shit. And that makes all the difference. Well, absolutely. I mean, most of us can put on a persona for 45 minutes to an hour, right? So I can be all that you want me to be for the one-hour interview. But over the course of time, that consistency of how that person shows at starts to definitely wane. I like to think about it as adding science to your gut.

You're going to have a gut instinct about individuals. You may have high likeability. You see them as somebody, wow, they're a great fit. And they kind of fit our team and they're kind. But we kind of fall in love sometimes with candidates early on. like you said in that first interview. And then that's not the person that shows up every day they're after because we haven't done enough due diligence to really add science to our gut.

Boy, the quality of employees we had changed dramatically, the problems we had, sex harassment lawsuits, just people that we hired that completely lied on their resume, people that were lazy or awful employees, it was crazy what we would have to deal with. And yeah, it all went away when we started, you know, we still had an issue every now and then. But yeah, you could flesh people out. But human capital is so important, like I said. I mean, most people leave companies because they don't feel like they're raised well and done well and everything else. So talk about some of the things you talk about in the book, how to apply investment principles like risk stratification, portfolio balancing, and forecasting to workforce planning.

Yeah. So, I mean, here's the bottom line. When I wrote this book, after spending a lot of years in a corporate environment and predominantly the human resources side, it was really clear to me what gets the attention of C-suite leaders, right? I had been a C-suite leader. I knew what got their attention. And generally, if you can speak in the language of business or financial terms, they're going to, you know, those in charge, those with the responsibilities for multimillion or billion-dollar budgets are going to listen. And what was fascinating to me is, Most CEOs, most leaders, want to think about their people as their greatest asset, right? We hear that all the time. It's on billboards, et cetera. But when push comes to shove, we ultimately, more often than not treat the people's side of it as a labor burden. And so if we were to think about that differently, and so that's why I took the six-step financial model. So, Chris, think about if, you know, with all your investments, where you've got your funds, you know, your portfolio, of assets and so on, you're thinking deeply about, or someone maybe on your behalf is helping

you think deeply, about where are you investing? How diversified is your investment portfolio? Maybe you have an investment that's been really lagging and at some point you're like, we need to get out of that. That's not producing the kinds of returns we were expecting. Or maybe you have something on the watch list. We think that there's potential, but we're not sure. that's exactly the same approach that I employ with a human capital investment strategy. And it doesn't dehumanize people. It's really quite the opposite because at the end of the day, you know, our funds don't have a choice. They're sitting there.

Our people have a choice to come back to the next day or not, right? So the six steps really looks at your human capital from an investment strategy. What does your portfolio look like? where is it strong and performing against quantitative and qualitative measures, not just likability? Where do you have risk? So are you over leveraged someplace? For example, spent some time of my career in health care.

And when we started to stratify the data, we had a lot of people exiting based on retirement. And we did not have a great balance of new incoming talent. Well, that's a huge risk. But if nobody's looking at that and balancing your portfolio to say, we have to be intentional about ensuring that we're preparing for this known turnover. And then it's where are you spending your time and energy? We spend a lot of time trying to get people with all the parts and pieces instead of betting on the raw talent. Instead of saying, I can teach the skill and knowledge piece, but I can't teach the raw talent piece. So let's bring that in and have a complement of the pros that, you know, can do it in their sleep,

but also these individuals that have all the talent that we can teach. And so how are we balancing the portfolio? And then how do you put rigor around that? Because it's not a one and done, especially when you're talking about a large organization. Most definitely. It's so important. And it makes such a difference in the quality of your people, the quality of teams you're building. You know, you get less people in that are saboteurs or.

the negative nancies or we used to call them the tubers back in the day in the car business they would be the people that come to work for you and they kind of drag everybody down the tube everybody out it's kind of a it's kind of a term i never heard really much but they would be people that would be very negative and they would you know a lot of times they would infect your company with really negative sort of attitudes and ideals sometimes they you know and they they were just coming up with ways not to work. Yeah, 1,000%. Being able to isolate those people is just so freaking important.

Well, think about it, too. That's culture, right? Because if you think about the culture of your organization or the person listening thinks about the culture of their organization, it's all about who you select, who you develop, and who you promote. So you bring in the tuber or the naysayer or the negative Nancy or whatever you want to call them. And eventually, that, sort of becomes how the culture starts to migrate and especially if that person gets promoted

because then what message am I sending? The message I'm sending is that's the kind of behavior that gets rewarded. So be more of that. And it doesn't take very long for those infiltrators to start changing the whole feeling of the company culture. And so knowing up front, what am I looking for and getting that right person and is absolutely critical. Yeah, most definitely. So tell us about some of the journey that you went through in life. What got you down these fields and writing these books and doing the work that you do now? Yeah, I love that question.

Well, and like a lot of things and like a lot of women, I studied for the first book, you know, some of it was really unintentional. Started down the path. I thought that I was going to retire Barbara Walters and be a broadcast journalist. and before I landed any kind of big gig, I found myself in business and loved it, loved everything about business. And early on sort of happened into human resources. But for me, human resources was always this weird, I don't know, it was a dichotomy. I always felt like I was a business person first and an HR person by choice. So it was about data and evidence and strategy and business goals.

And oh, by the way, then how do we connect people to that model? So both of those aspects led to my first book, which was, how do I help more women be more intentional? Because I got lucky, worked my ass off, but I also got lucky in a lot of situations. So how do we help more women be intentional so they're not banking on right place, right time? And then the flip side of that was having spent so much time in a corporate environment and realizing we are missing the boat when it comes to really understanding how to leverage human capital.

So book two was really to solve for the fact that I feel like there's this best kept secret about how do you find and bring in the best of the best and then let your business flourish because you know what, people that love what they do delight everyone around them. So how do we do get more of that? Team, good team building, good stuff and everything else. Tell us about some of the stuff that you have on your website that you do as you're offering for business. So there's a couple of things. I work one-on-one.

So with the person listening that is a executive leader, I do a lot of executive coaching one-on-one. It's one of the things that I'm very passionate about. I work with men and women. Their needs and challenges show up differently and very individually. so it's highly customized. But I also do a fair amount of organizational consulting. A lot in the succession planning and readiness space, I'm finding particularly in organizations that are multi-generational,

so companies that are family owned and operated that are going through generational transitions that really need help and guidance in terms of thinking about how do I prepare the next generation of leaders to continue the family legacy. But that's true in, you know, the corporate environment as well. So those are the two areas I spend most of my time. Do a fair amount of keynote speaking just to get the word out. But my best days are when I'm helping a CEO through a major challenge around how do they equip their organization for the future and helping leaders to really unleash their potential. I think we overlook so much of our natural human potential.

and we rely on the old bag of tricks way too often. And that's changing a lot with automation and AI and machine learning. You know, we're just going to have to show up differently. Yeah, definitely. AI is going to change. What impact do you think A is going to have to management and what CEOs maybe need to pay attention to in your mind? Part of what we still see is that organizations continue,

leaders continue to rely on Industrial Revolution era metrics, and filters. How many years of experience do you have? How many organizations have you served in? Did you bounce around, et cetera? Cognitive assessments. You know, can you solve the puzzle as quickly, et cetera? The reality is machine learning, AI. All of this is going to do a lot of the cognitive blocking and tackling for us. And that's brilliant. That's going to be amazing. which means that we have to leverage the human part of the human capital. So the future of work around complex problem solving, complex strategy, and conceptualization, thinking about lots of disparate things and how they hang together, those are the kinds of

things that leaders are going to have to continue to push on and develop more so than skill and degrees are going to remain important in certain roles. And everybody has to have requisite skill set, right? I don't want somebody operating on me that doesn't have a medical degree. I'm probably not going to hire an executive assistant that doesn't know out of type. But I might hire an executive assistant that doesn't know Excel and would send them to a class because they could learn that. But I can't teach them to anticipate my needs. I can't teach them to be service oriented if that's just not how they're wired. So I think it's going to be what has historically been called soft skills are not going to be considered soft in the future.

So we're not going to be so soft in the future. You know, if you hire well, you're going to get better people. You're going to find out more. You know, my biggest problem was just getting my staff to shut up in the interview. You know, they'd always be selling the company and selling the job. And you know, trying to be nice and, you know, trying to get the person to do it. What you need is to have them sell yourself. And then you want to find out stuff. Like, I used to find all sorts of stuff out. I'd be like, I'm looking at your resume.

There's a three-year gap here. What was going on? They go, no, it's not. And I'm like, yeah, there is. I can read. Right, right. And they were like, well, let me see the resume. I'm like, it's your resume.

You wrote it. If you don't know there's not a three-year gap on here, then what's going on? Yeah, that's a flag. And after pressing, he'd been in prison for those three years. Oh, okay. Yeah. And it was one of those things that the old staff had missed, hadn't paid attention. No one had really read down the timeline of the resume.

And he'd left it right on his resume. Like, if you were smart and you had gone to jail, you would just kind of, you would, you know, you'd bracket them so that no would be the wiser and, you know, no one would. But, you know, just asking these questions, listening. And then, of course, help building a staff, you know, like you talk about in your book, building a culture where top talent chooses to stay and grow. And you make some good points. There's a lot of people that can grow into stuff.

Like, I think if I was to mass hire again, you know, I would be looking at people's emotional intelligence, how their ability to deal with problem solving, how their ability is to deal with stress, how they emotionally react or whether they use logic and reason to process. And I would be looking a whole lot more of those sort of qualifications. I'd be looking at, you know, are they innovative? Can they think outside the box? I think that's why Google has, you know, those weird sort of out-of-the-box interview questions that are kind of famous.

And I think maybe a lot of people do that now, but you want to see how people handle stress. People should do that also in their relationships, by the way, when they're dating. Yeah, there should be a test for that, too, shouldn't there? From a resiliency perspective, conflict resolution perspective. Yeah. But you bring up a really important point. And one of the things that I double down on in here, human capital investment strategy is using some kind of predictive, validated instrument.

So even with four interviews or five interviews where you're hopefully getting, you know, underneath the iceberg, if you will, and figuring out anything that's been sort of unexplored, is the reality is a formal structured interview, whether you build it internally with the right expertise or you purchase a behavioral-based structured interview externally, you're going to increase the validation, the predictive validity of future performance exponentially. Because we know that through study after study after study, that a regular interview where you and I are just kind of shooting the crap back and forth has about a point two validity. And so those are not odds I want to take to Vegas.

but if I can get a 0.5 or more in terms of a validity and it's going to say to me that this person has the natural gifts and talents to be successful in a particular job, that's something that adds science to my gut. And so that's when you say that, you know, Google questions and so on. But again, you want to make sure it's highly validated, predictive assessment and is used for selection purposes, not something that's interesting or just gives you insight into somebody's personality or communication style. Then you can say high likeability. They have the requisite skills and knowledge, right, the minimum standard of skills and knowledge, but ultimately they have raw or developed potential. That's where I'm rolling the dice. That's if I'm going to bet on

somebody, I'd much rather bet on the fact that they are innovative, that they are resilient to use your examples, that they have high emotional intelligence. Then I can teach them the essence of health care, the essence of, you know, wholesale distribution or the, you know, radio and media, et cetera. Definitely. You have something on the website called the seven-minute pivot. Do you want to tease us out what that is? Yeah. Thank you for asking about that. So, Chris, this is what I would invite you to do. And for the person listening, every day. Now, let me, let me start by saying what if not. It's not meditation. It's not your spiritual reflection. And it's not creating a to-do list or general journaling. Okay. Because oftentimes people hear this and they're like, well, I already

meditate or I already do a daily devotional. This doesn't replace those things. You know, do you in terms of those things. But the seven-minute pivot encourages you every day for seven minutes. We can all find seven minutes, more than five, less than 10, to think about a prompt of what is really on your mind, on your heart that day, that's standing in your way of happiness, success, movement, joy, whatever it is. So today, for example, I challenge folks to think about what is the one thing that's standing in my way of total happiness? here's the key it's time bound so it creates a cognitive sense of focus neurologically when you set the clock when you set a timer and you know it's time bound for people that don't like being in their feelings there's an end of that you know seven minutes is eventually going to ring out for people that like to sit there too long and maybe sulk and you know manifest this is going to give them a time

limit, cut in paper, and you ask yourself, what is one thing that's standing in the way of my progress on X today? You pick your prompt. And for seven minutes, you're jotting down. And the point is to get under the thing. I'm tired. Well, why are you tired? Because of this. Well, why is this? And you keep asking yourself why. Here's the most important point. Before the seven minutes is up, you ask yourself, what's one small thing I can do today to slightly adjust the direction of where I'm headed with this. So you're not taking a leap. You're not taking on the whole thing. You're saying, what is one small thing I can do today to slightly move in a different direction? You know, and the reality is if you do that seven minutes every day for 365, you have 2,55 minutes

of introspection and action. And that's where it's different than meditation and spiritual journeys, et cetera, is it not only are you being introspective, but you're taking an action. Think about those tiny pivots and how different the end result is in terms of where you end up, little tiny steps that take you in a completely new direction. It's helped me with conflict situations. You know, I needed to have a tough conversation and I was really stressing about it. Why am I stressed about this? What's, you know, what's bothering me about it? What's one small stuff I can take? If I'm nervous about being on your podcast, why am I nervous about that? It's one small stuff I could take to feel more comfortable.

Whatever it is, but here's the thing. It is so empowering and liberating. And the bottom line is I've had clients and individuals that have really got on this journey and started to do this practice on a regular basis. And they feel more clarity, greater focus and out of their head and actually moving forward rather than, you know, those of us that can just kind of stew about the same thing over and again. Yeah. Well, so people can find out more about how that works. They can discover that by click on the button there in your website. That's right. So Cynthia Bensonmercer.com. And there is a

21 day challenge where you have 21 prompts. We know that 21 days makes a habit to have your 21 prompts. And then there is a seven minute pivot practice guide that just kind of walks you through the process. So if you aren't taking notes right now, you can print it off. It's a seven. It's It's free. It's there for your use and hopefully make some positive change in your life. You also have a podcast you're coming out with. It looks like in September. Tell us about that.

I do. My podcast launch September 3rd and it is entitled Climbing the Corporate Ladder without breaking a heel. So the target audience is ambitious professional women and those who love and support them. guests from everything from women's health to intentionality in business to boundaries and juggling all the many things that we have on our plate some amazing experts that really allow us to spend a little bit of time doing our own learning journey investing in ourselves and having some fun with it because you know like you the podcast has to be kind of equal parts education and

and entertainment for it to be as fun for us as it is for the listener. Oh, yeah. It's got to, I mean, it has to be entertaining. I mean, people, people tell us they'll give,

they'll give a guest about 10 minutes, maybe five minutes on the show. And the number one thing they look for is energy. And, you know, even if they don't like, you know, because we have a diverse amount of content on here.

We call ourselves the Netflix of podcasting because there's just so much stuff you can binge. If you want to binge politics or history or, or nonfiction or romance. And so it's all here, business. Right. And, but people tend to listen to everything, like, 96% of the shows they consume. And I think they bail at the end, skip to the next one when they know that I'm rapping.

But that's why it's almost 96%. That hurts your call to action at the end, doesn't it? A little bit, yeah. Most of our call to action at the end is just, bye, see you tomorrow. And I think they know that. So they're like, skip. I do the same thing with podcasts when I listen. I'm like, when there shows rapping, I go skip and go to the next one.

But yeah, I think that's really great. Starting a podcast, you've got the book coming out, and anything else we need to promote while you're here. I just think that if you're listening and you are ready to unleash your full potential and a coaches need coaches as well, right? I always think of best in class football players, best in class baseball players, best in class baseball players, best in class vocalists. they have coaches that are constantly moving them to the next level of their potential. I strongly invite you to reach out. I'd love to have a strategy session and talk about your potential and how we bring it to exponential success. And if you're leading an organization as an entrepreneur, a small company, or a large organization,

capitalizing and making certain that you are investing in your human capital, absolutely guaranteed will deliver on competitive advantage. And I give you all the steps to do that in the human capital investment strategy. If you buy during pre-sale right now, comes with $728 of bonus material that you get straight away. So it's a great value. Well, thank you, Cynthia, for coming the show. We really appreciate it. Thank you, Chris. It's always good to see you. Thank you. Give us your dot-coms, too, so people know how to book that strategy, call the button they can find on your website. Absolutely. Cynthia. Bensonmercer.com and on all the socials at Dr. Cynthia Benson Mercer.

Order at the book, wherever fine books are sold. You can pre-order it now. Focus out February 3rd, 2026 called Human Capital Investment Strategy, Six Steps to cultivate potential and yield competitive advantage. Thank you, Cynthia. Thanks for honest for tuning in. Go to Goodreads.com, Forgestchess, Chris Foss, LinkedIn.com, Forchess, Chris Foss, one on the TikTokati and all those crazy places in the internet. Be good to each other. Stay safe. We'll see you guys next time. And that should have us out, Cynthia Great.