The people lens isn’t about being nicer to people. It’s about taking people seriously enough to hold them accountable for clarity, alignment, and results.
The people function tends to land in one of two places. Employee advocacy: protect people from the business. Or administrative process: run the paperwork that keeps the business compliant. Either way, the role is reactive. Either way, it sits downstream of the decisions that actually shape how work gets done.
Gia Ganesh, CPO and SVP of People and Culture at Florence Healthcare, calls herself a business leader who takes the lens of people. Not a people leader who happens to work in business. The accountability isn’t to engagement scores or retention metrics. It’s to execution speed. Are people decisions accelerating the company or slowing it down?
People decisions compound. And they compound fast.
Hire someone, see how it plays out over a few quarters. Move someone into a role, give it time. The feedback loop feels long.
Gia sees it differently. The right person making the right calls creates momentum that builds on itself. The wrong person making the wrong calls detracts immediately. Not eventually. Immediately. People decisions are a force multiplier, she says, and leaders don’t appreciate how quickly the math works, in either direction.
The damage from a bad hire becomes structural before anyone names it. A good hire often goes unnoticed because the work just flows. Nobody traces the cause when things are going well.
Hiring is the most consequential business decision an organization makes repeatedly. It belongs at the center of strategy, not at the end of a requisition process.
Underperformance is usually a clarity problem, not a motivation problem.
Someone isn’t performing. The default diagnosis is motivation. They’re not hungry enough. They don’t care. They need a better incentive structure.
Gia’s experience points somewhere else. Unclear context. Ambiguous priorities. Unspoken trade-offs. A mismatch between what someone brings and what the role actually requires. If someone can only walk and they’re on a team that runs, no incentive fixes that. It’s a fit problem, or a communication problem, or both.
The shift shows up in how managers run one-on-ones. Here are the goals, here are your priorities, here’s what I need from you this quarter. That’s how the conversation usually goes. Gia inverts it. Can you tell me what our business is trying to do? How does your work connect to the team’s goals? What trade-offs are you making? Who are you depending on?
Two people can sit in the same room, talk about the same project, and be working toward entirely different things. The gap between what a manager assumes and what an employee is actually building is where performance quietly falls apart.
Culture doesn’t hold. It dilutes with every hire.
Naming the values, setting the norms, creating the rituals. Leaders love the origin story, the early days when everyone was aligned and the energy was right.
Gia has watched what happens next, growing a team from 10 employees to over 275. Every person who enters either adds to the culture or takes something away from it. There is no neutral hire. The operating rhythm that felt natural at 30 people starts requiring deliberate reinforcement at 150, then again at 250, and the work never finishes.
Hiring is the most important cultural act. Not the values on the wall. Not the offsite. Not the Slack channel. The decision about who you bring in, repeated hundreds of times, is what the culture actually becomes.
Want to know what an organization values? Look at who they keep hiring and what those people do when nobody is managing them.
The lens, not the function
People leaders have been arguing for a seat at the table for years. What Gia does differently is attach specific accountability to the position. Not influence, not advocacy. Accountability for whether execution speeds up or slows down based on how people are hired, managed, and supported.
Take the people lens seriously and you hire as if every person changes the culture, because they do. You check for shared understanding before you question someone’s motivation. You stop treating people work as the soft side of business and start treating it as the place where execution lives or dies.
The people lens doesn’t make leadership softer. It makes it more honest about where results come from.
