Hamza Khan Helps Us Reinvent Leadership in the Workplace
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In this episode of Relationships at Work, Russel chats with academic and best-selling author Hamza Khan on the importance of reinventing leadership to improve the workplace and the employee experience.
A few reasons why he is awesome – he is the academic, keynote speaker and best-selling author of The Burnout Gamble and his latest book Leadership, Reinvented, he’s a two-time TEDx Talker (his 2015 talk is now at 2.1 million views), lecturer at Toronto Metropolitan University’s School of Media, podcast host of Ideas Into Action. Is the co-founder of SkillsCamp, a leading soft skills training company and has worked with such clients as RBC, Microsoft, PEPSICO, Linkedin and more to help them with their future of work.
Connect with, and learn more about, Hamza on his platforms:
“We’re starting to see now finally, that organizations and leaders that are prioritizing anything other than the welfare and the thriving I would say of their people, are experiencing turbulence and will eventually tumble into the chasm of time. I’m absolutely certain of this.”
Hamza Khan
Russel Lolacher
And on the show today we have Hamza Khan. And here is why he is awesome. He’s the best selling author of the burnout gamble and his latest book leadership reinvented. He’s a two time two time TEDx talker. His 2015 Talk is now at 2.1 million views, lecturer at Toronto Metropolitan University’s School of Media podcast host of ideas into action, co founder of skills camp, which is a leading soft skills training company and has worked with such clients as RBC, Microsoft, PepsiCo, LinkedIn, it’s a long list of clients and more. He’s helping them with their future of work. And he’s here today to talk about leadership reinvented. Hello Hamza
Hamza Khan
Russel. Wow, that was easily top three introductions I’ve ever received in my life. Thank you.
Russel Lolacher
I’m competitive. I gotta work for two or one I got I got to see what I can do if I can get to those top spots. Thank you for that.
Hamza Khan
The number one was WWE ask I can’t remember what event it was. I just remember walking out thinking why are there no pyrotechnics here?
Russel Lolacher
I can’t touch a Ric Flair or a over the top kind of introduction that way, but I’m in good company if WWE is my competition.
Hamza Khan
That was great. Earlier in my career, I cut my teeth I suppose, between the University of Toronto, Scarborough, Ryerson University, now known as Toronto metropolitan you and Seneca College, where you and I have a very interesting connection. Russel, you are one of the founders of the graduate social media certificate program at Seneca College of which I was one of the earliest instructors.
Russel Lolacher
Fun Facts. Yeah, I was on the program advisory council to start that off. Yeah,
Hamza Khan
Thank you for doing that. That was absolutely instrumental in my career and my development as not just a professional but as a human being as well. So I’m eternally grateful to you sir, I am here because of the work that you’ve done.
Russel Lolacher
Damn, well let the blushing commence. Thanks for that. Before I get into all this reinvention of leadership in the workplace, because we love the employee experience and workplace culture, I something jumped out at me when I was looking you up a little bit, which is around the skills camp program. You have some interesting phrasing because there is such a push and a poll against the phrase soft skills Yes. Which immediately you’ll see people go no human skills, soft, makes them diminish soft makes them the opposite of hard, which isn’t what this is. Why are you still using or why do you use language like soft skills?
Hamza Khan
Excellent question, man. I’ll let you in into a typical day. At the Parnell con household where both my partner and I are English students and communication culture, students were always overanalyzing I would say words and discovering etymologies that were that were unknown to us. And we get a little frustrated with the term soft skills, we feel like it’s something that we have to use to appease or make sense to decision makers in the current zeitgeist, however, we are noticing the change. It’s something that we started seven years ago, I believe, six or seven years ago. And now it’s so awesome to see the HR profession to see the C suite, and especially the next generation clue into the idea that these are not soft skills. And to your point, that soft implies some sort of hierarchy. And that would be lesser in the hierarchy, for whatever reason, culturally ordained, but what we’re calling it internally are hot skills, essential skills, human skills, critical skills. And I cannot wait for the day when we can just drop soft skills altogether and call them, whatever, whatever makes sense in the zeitgeist. And I hope I hope that essential skills sticks, because we’re living through an interesting time. And you do work at the heart of digital disruption. And I’m sure you’re familiar with, you know, what’s happening in the world of AI and how that’s going to change the future of work. You know, chat, GBT is something that I’m paying close attention to. And you know, I feel like by no later than 2045, and McKinsey reckons it’s going to happen a lot sooner by 2027, that everything that can be disrupted, anything that can be automated will be automated. So the work that’s going to be left to do in this post technological disruption world will be profoundly human. It’ll require those essential skills that will require us to operationalize and maximize the very things that make us human.
Russel Lolacher
Interesting title that you call “Leadership Reinvented.” So by saying that we’re implying that I’m getting into you know, the words, it implies that leadership needed to be fixed to begin with. So why does leadership need to be reinvented?
Hamza Khan
Oh, man, I am tempted to just go all the way down the rabbit hole here and tell you about my third book that’s coming out. Well, I’m making the scene that he’s gonna come out next year or the year after, I’m taking my own sweet time working on this because of the depth of information that I have to ingest and make sense of but the reinvention is interesting, because leadership has gone through multiple iterations. And I would say in the last 150 to 200 years it seemed Three distinct iterations, it’s gone from this command and control top down, authoritarian Theory X style of management. And I’m sure Russel, you and I earlier in our careers, we experienced that style of management held it, there’s still some remnants of it in our respective organizations right now. And I understand why because a lot of it is sunk cost fallacy. It’s a lot of fear of change, and it’s working for some people, but it’s not working for most people. And then from Theory X, we went into Theory Y, which assumed the opposite, assume the best and employee’s laissez faire style of management, hands off, empower the employee, but it didn’t go far enough. It didn’t go far enough. And so the reinvention is calling for a complete flipping of the organization’s purpose. An organization’s purpose used to be at least in the corporate sector to generate a profit and everything was beholden to the profit. And I think that the relentless pursuit of the profit has revealed something that I think is now manifesting into, I think, I don’t think it’s conjecture, but I feel like we’re in late stage capitalism, I think that the world that we live in has all of the hallmarks of late stage capitalism failing system. And I think that’s because we’ve allowed the system to persist for as long as it has, where there’s been a small group of people that have been running organizations to maximize individual utility while accepting, neglecting or provoking the disutility of most. And so leadership reinvention is calling for these very leaders, to change their internal compass, and to now focus on improving circumstances for employees, for customers, communities and the planet. And I want to give them the confidence that doing so putting people first is actually good for the business. There is no dichotomy of leadership when it comes to prioritizing the mission and prioritizing people, that if you prioritize people, you will naturally prioritize the mission and you will naturally produce a profitable or a successful nonprofit corporation or government agency.
Russel Lolacher
We constantly use phrases like the future of work is almost buzzword at this point, almost residual drinking game like innovation.
Hamza Khan
No one knows what it means. I don’t even know what it means.
Russel Lolacher
When we talk about the future of work, especially when it comes to leadership we talked about and you were talking about this in your 2015 TED talks about it. Here’s what leadership is going to be here’s the future of leadership here it but we’re all talking about things that employees have wanted forever, man. So the future of work seems to be always no, we want it now and have been telling you we want this now forever. So it feels like the we’re living in a future that just never seems to be realized. Am I wrong?
Hamza Khan
Man, I’m, I’m getting fired up man, you’re making me want to pull out my current reading right now let me just pull this over here. I’m reading this book, sorry, called death in the hay market. And the title is death in the Haymarket, a story of Chicago, the first labor movement and the bombing that divided Gilded Age America. So for the listeners, Labor Day, is honoring the Haymarket affair of 1886. And check this out. There were protests happening all over Chicago, and across the United States, and even in different parts of the world, to reduce the working hours of the typical workday from 16 to 14 to 12 to eight hours a day. So something that we take for granted, and 2023 that we have eight hour work days, came after a long period of revolt, and then eventually bloody strife. And so history is peppered I would even say, littered with examples of creators of labourers of people who are doing the work trying to advocate for a more humane way of working, they’re trying to advocate for, you know, better health care, benefits, meaningful work, less monotonous work, greater job security, you name it, but the concessions have not been made. And through this research, which initially began as me search, because I was like, Hey, man, I’ve been a bad leader. I’ve been a good leader. I don’t understand what my motivations were. When I was behaving at cross purposes with my organization, I was trying to maximize profitability. I was trying to maximize individual utility, but I also had good intentions, but I was neglecting my staff. And I can go into some stories about that later. And why was that happening? I was trying to find a boogeyman. Why are people behaving this way? I mean, is is the reason why Walmart eventually, you know, as of yesterday, so we’re recording this in late January, just yesterday, they decided in the United States to raise the minimum wage for their for its employees to $15. It’s like, whoa, that’s like a decade too late. If you ask me. Why is this happening? And the answer isn’t, isn’t simple. It’s not evil. It’s not like some fat cats sitting at the top of their organizations with their legs on their desks, puffing cigars just being like, how do we screw over the employees? I mean, yes, there are examples of that happening. And the media tends to sensationalized them, but for the most part, it’s Leaders are operating from a place of fear. They’re stuck in these fear cycles of competition prediction control separation, they’re trying to trying to maximize parts, they’re maximizing individual benefit. And what happens is they just get caught up in these cycles of active inertia where they think they’re doing the right thing. By competing along the lines of the marketing mix, you know, place product plays out, whatever, whatever the marketing mix that we learned is, and we’re starting to see now finally, that organizations and leaders that are prioritizing anything other than the welfare and the thriving, I would say, of their people are experiencing turbulence and will eventually tumble into the chasm of time. I’m absolutely certain of this.
Russel Lolacher
2015 28-year old Hamza comes out on a TEDx stage. And does a TED talk about how management doesn’t have a role in the future. But leadership. Sure shit does. Yeah, you scared the crap out of a lot of people.
Hamza Khan
I scared the crap out of myself, man.
Russel Lolacher
But having said that, I mean, you were I use air quotes. A visionary even though it kind of felt like that. It’s like, oh my God, he’s providing concept of providing direction and vision and trusting your staff with a novel concept. Yeah. But from 2015 to 2023. What’s changed? I mean, the pandemic seem to accelerate everything. I love there’s I think there’s a political cartoon where they’re like, So what changed the what was the factor of change your organization the most? Your CEO? Nope. Your change agents? Nope. A pandemic? Yep. Like it was really people that had nothing to do with it. They were forced to do it. 100% But again, there’s been a lot of change. So what have you seen from from 28 year old Hamza to now.
Hamza Khan
Wow, good math. By the way? I didn’t realize I was 28 when I delivered that talk.
Russel Lolacher
Oh, you were adorable.
Hamza Khan
It just again, it’s BC – Before Coronavirus, I don’t remember much. It’s gonna be the long COVID that I’m still dealing with. Man, that talk was fascinating. Because I did it from it. Wow, I have a hard time watching that talk. I think I’ve watched it like twice. Second time I watched it. I was like, this isn’t as bad as I thought it would be. Because I’m a such a novice speaker, I can see my body language. It’s so closed. And but but the idea was so pure. The idea was that the way we’ve been managed, is inconsistent with behaviors and expectations of the generation I was a part of back then I guess I still am a millennial. And it’s certainly true for the next generation Gen Zed, and it will continue to be true. Revolutions never go backwards. Revolutions never go backwards. And so there’s no way that future generations are going to put up with a tyrannical, autocratic style of leadership that prioritizes the needs of the owner, the operator, the CEO, and the organization while behaving in an anti subordinate way. So I did that talk and man, I, I’ve never really told the story in full. I’ve alluded to it. I’ve added bits and pieces in the opening of leadership, reinvent, and I think I might have said this on a couple of other podcasts. But the day after I did that TED Talk, I got called into my boss’s office like that same night, I got an email being like tomorrow morning, first thing in the morning, I need you in the office. And I got dressed down, I sort of got I got dressed down for doing that TED Talk, you know, why don’t you tell me? Why are you putting these ideas out there, these are seditious ideas are going to undermine the established order here at the university. Now I have to account and I have to explain to my coat moment to to my colleagues, why we’re running some rogue shop over here. But I’m like, you know, it’s not really a rogue shop. We’re winning awards. We’re clearly the talk of the university or blueprints are being replicated not just across the country, but around the world. Students are happy, staff are happy, like, what are we doing wrong here? And I think the wrong thing that we were doing was just up ending the existing order the established order. And, you know, could I have been more delicate in the way I went about presenting this idea and get, you know, got gotten buy in for that? Yeah, I could have but I think throughout the process, they would have neutered the language of the talk. And I would have to remove the things that made it as effective as it did. So I did that talk. It got rave reviews from people who were bought into that message. And then there was a bit of a lull and I think that during that low I was losing my confidence in the message because I was seeing so many manifestations of bad leadership, destructive leadership, toxic leadership, rear its head and you know, Mount mount mount some defenses and comebacks over the over the next couple of years. And then the pandemic happened, like you said, and what became very clear and what was the impetus for me writing leadership reinvented was how sudden unexpected change adversity. It forced leaders to act in ways that are truly aligned with their leadership potential and disposition. There’s this misconception that leaders step up during times of a crisis but the opposite is actually true. They sink Back to the level of their training, values and preparation. And man Russel, did we see some leaders fumble. I mean, who who people are during a time of a crisis is really who they are. And we got to see clearly the equation change for what employees value in the workplace. We got to see leaders who were operating from a place of fear, or were behaving in very selfish ways they were they were exposed. And that talk that TEDx Talk, just got a new life at that point. Because people were like, Whoa, this is putting into words how I’m feeling right now. Or my boss is insisting that I come into the office, even though we’re in the middle of a global pandemic, where they’re forcing me to do all of this extra labor to go above and beyond without fair reward and compensation, where they don’t have the skills to help me work remotely. And then it got a new wind once we started emerging from the pandemic, and then this conversation of return to the office started to happen. And you had employees say, but we’ve been not only productive, this organization has been thriving for the last two years. And now you want us back in the office? Why? And so I’m just sitting back and I’m watching all of this happen. And the thing that I was hoping would happen with this TEDx Talk several years ago, that the conversation would enter the zeitgeist in the consciousness of the you know, the workers so to speak, would elevate so that they would demand better for themselves. I think it’s happening. Sorry, I get really fired up about this shit, man, I think definitely, definitely the Haymarket. It’s it’s stoking, stoking my anarchist tendencies. Maybe.
Russel Lolacher
I love that you said that, because I’m always been a champion of the idea of mindset over tactics. Because we seem to confuse leadership as if you checkbox, these seven things. You’re a good leader, which we both know is not a thing. It’s all about mindset. Because if we go to conferences, we go to conferences, we get fired up, these are great ideas, then you go back to your office, and you don’t do any of them. Because you’re, you’re you. And if you were doing those things, you would have been doing them already. So the idea that COVID really put a spotlight on mindset versus tactics seems to be now bleeding into like you’re saying return to work, because remote work seems to be that conversation that’s still happening. Have that yoyoing? Have you Oh, no, everybody, no, no, wait, come back. No, no, everybody can leave. And we’re not seeing it from the biggest organizations to still. Do you feel like that’s always being tested? Or is just this the latest flavor?
Hamza Khan
I’m curious to see how this is going to play out. And you know, without naming some of these large organizations, we’re quite familiar with one of them that is now insisting on his people coming back, and I’m hearing from the ground level, sorry, on the ground, but not just from frontline employees, even from directors and above that the do this because that’s the way it’s always been done or the don’t question this, this is the way it’s going to be moving forward is not producing the intended outcome. The intended outcome is commitment. But no one’s commitment. No one, no one’s committed, people are just compliant at best. But for the most part, they’re resisting because again, for the last three years, people have worked effectively from home. And so we’ve shown especially in the realm of knowledge work, that collaboration can happen that the serendipitous conversations can happen if we have the right platforms in place like Slack, or MS teams that allow for that fluid chat, and people are happier. And I said this earlier, like the equation has changed, people are now valuing time with family, you know, time in nature, not being in a cubicle when the sun’s out, shortening their commute, and not unnecessarily putting themselves in danger. With the commute every single day, eating better, so on and so forth. It just seems like a more human way to work. But with that being said, there are some compelling reasons to bring people back into the office. But unfortunately, the leaders are not going about communicating that in a way that is getting the buy unnecessary. And there’s so many different ways that you can persuade people to come back into the office, but it has to be a discussion, there has to be a dialogue. It has to be done in consultation with employees. And unfortunately, that’s not being done. So this this chasm that exists between the employee experience and the leadership experience is becoming more pronounced, it’s getting wider and wider. And there’s so many stats that can illustrate just how wide this is, for instance, McKinsey put out a report that showed that on average leaders rate workplace dimensions associated with health and well being. And so these would be things like, you know, employee benefits and the commute time to work. You know, how supportive and how psychologically safe they feel and those sorts of things. On average, the leaders rate at 22% higher than subordinates. So there’s like a, like a different reality almost for leaders. So that’s just one of them. And then Edelman found in a survey of I think, 21,000 people across 34 different markets. It’s weird how I remember that but I don’t remember the, the how old I was when I was doing my TEDx talk. There. They found that for the most part, frontline workers, Gen Zed, parents and women were surviving or struggling during the pandemic. But meanwhile, leaders were thriving. And like, this is the sort of thing that chills me to my core that makes my blood boil right after because unlike men, the answer is right there. And you suggested earlier, like, We know what needs to be done, but it just it’s not happening. Like why is this will not resulting in the desired outcomes. And that’s what I spent all of my days thinking about.
Russel Lolacher
And yet those same leaders will drop the word innovation into every other email. Well, still, you know, but it’s not how I like to work, but it’s not how I like to work. These do not line up. And that’s leads me to my next question, which is definitions. Now, one of my biggest pet peeve is that we will use words and I count leadership as a big one. innovation, diversity. These are words we throw around, but actually never really defined for organizations leadership being one where you touch in leadership reinvented on leadership is about intention. It’s about opera opera operationalizing There you go. Put a damn word and I can’t pronounce. It’s ongoing. It’s continuous reinvention, this and more. That makes leadership sound complicated. Do you think its leadership is complicated in trying to get it to be understood by others?
Hamza Khan
Oh, man, what a good question. Leadership is very simple, but it’s difficult. It’s not complicated, but it’s very difficult. Because the easy thing to do is to wield power. The way it’s always been weld. Was that the right word? To wield it?
Russel Lolacher
Good communication, bad grammar, but go with that.
Hamza Khan
Then you dishonouring, my alma mater is here. So it’s easy to just take a one size fits all approach to leading and that’s not really leading, that’s managing that’s wielding power, you know, and there’s different phases of power, there’s coercive power, there is, you know, agenda power, there’s, you know, paradigm power, and we can, we can go into the four dimensions, three, four dimensions of power. But that’s not relevant to this. It’s not going to produce the desired outcome. So if you’re just managing it, and you’re not supposed to manage people, you’re supposed to manage things like budgets, processes, events, people, people are meant to be led. But if you are to lead in a way that is in accordance with the light triad of leadership, this is what people have been, employees have been demanding for a long time, they want the inverse of the dark triad. And for those not familiar with the dark triad, that’s subclinical levels of Machiavellianism, psychopathy, and narcissism. This is essentially how you have you know, make the rich guy richer, that person who exists at the top of the organization, stamping everybody down below them. The inverse of that is the light triad. And it’s composed of the inverse of those traits. So you have Kantianism, which is the belief that people are ends not means then there’s humanism, this is a belief in the dignity and worth of every human being. And then there’s faith in humanity, which is the belief that people are fundamentally good and worth investing in. If you take that approach as a leader, and you distill it down to this idea that a leaders job is to create more leaders. And I will take it a step further a leaders job is to make themselves obsolete, that is difficult for for, for humans to internalize, because we have a defense mechanism that wants to protect the resources that we have. And so this idea that giving away power, and helping other people to take things away from you, it just seems counterintuitive. And so that results in counterproductive workplace behaviors where the leader withholds information, they create information asymmetry, they become antagonistic towards people that are underperforming, they become punitive, and they try to preserve their little domain over there. But they don’t know that what happens as a result of that is the organization becomes closed off. And if an organization becomes closed off to the external environment, that’s when the rate of change on the inside of the organization slows down. And if the rate of the change if the rate of change on the inside of the organization fails to keep pace with the rate of change on the outside, that’s the end. So in some the leaders job is very simple. It’s to create more leaders. And that’s going to require them taking a individualized approach to every single person that reports into them, to learn about them, to care about them to help them thrive, to remove obstacles from their path, to communicate with them in a way that helps them grow and helps them learn in the organization. And I know even just saying this, and like that is exhausting, especially if you get to like more than three direct reports. And so the easy thing again to do is to become closed off and to become an authoritarian leader or a manager. But then, you know, if you’re trying What does I think Tolkien said it best shortcuts now result in roadblocks later? So if you take shortcuts with managing people in the present, it’s only going to result in organizational failure down the road. So it’s just better to lead not manage.
Russel Lolacher
You introduced some cool concepts in the book as well, which is the idea that we live in a VUCA… vuca word. Sounds like a swear word, but it does. Volatility. Uncertainty. Complexity.. Exactly VUCA YOU. Volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity is the world we’ve lived in and accelerate, it’s in the pandemic, but you have an antidote called SIDE. Do you think that’s, do you think that’s the answer?
Hamza Khan
It is a answer. It’s not the answer. I think that people have their own flavors for essentially the same thing. So so for the listeners VUCA, or buckets, we’re gonna call it now as volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity as undeniable characteristics of our ever changing world. And then you also have the UK equivalent of that, which is Barney, brittle, anxious, nonlinear and incomprehensible. And then PwC introduced a really good one recently that I’ve been thinking about more and more, it’s adapt, asymmetry, disruption, aging systems, polarization and trust diminishment. And everybody feels this, everybody sees this, you open up Twitter, you watch the news, you listen to a podcast like evidence of VUCA, Barney and adapt, they’re everywhere. And it feels like the rate of change in the world is accelerating at a breakneck speed and people are unable to keep up. And so the chaos is causing people to experienced different levels of an amygdala hijack the fight flight and freeze response that many of us felt at the beginning of the pandemic, but to override that, I think, the SIDE model operationalizing and maximizing servitude innovation, diversity and empathy. It enables you to anticipate change, and then enact the change well before change is required. So instead of resisting chaos and adapt Barney and VUCA, they’re all pointing to the same universal force, it’s entropy, the scientific concept that explains how if left unchecked, disorder and randomness tend to increase over time. So if left unchecked, you know, a person circumstances a nonprofit, a corporation or government agency circumstances are not going to improve, it’s going to require ingesting and constantly staying abreast of trends happening in the external environment, and ensuring that the core of the organization is changing faster than the outside of the organization. And to do that, I propose that those four values servitude, innovation, diversity and empathy will unlock people’s potential in the organization to again anticipate change and react to it well, before it happens. But there’s other values as well. You know, I’ve also talked about attunement, resilience, creativity. You know, I’ve talked about honesty, openness and transparency. The core idea governing any of these traits, these values is if they’re prosocial or not. That’s that’s really it. And this is underscored by a model that called a D factor of personality traits. Russel, have you heard about this? I haven’t. But now I’m curious. This is really cool man. psychopathy, Machiavellianism, narcissism, sadism, and any sort of aggressive anti human anti social traits that human beings have or exhibit are all governed by what’s known as the D factor of personality. And the D factor of personality is just this, it’s the tendency to maximize individual utility at the expense of group utility. So you maximize what’s good for you while accepting, neglecting or provoking this utility for others. And so just as long as you’re operationalizing, and maximizing a trait, or any number of traits that are going to make other people’s lives better, that’s, you know, a surefire way to anticipate and react to change. Because you’re not disabling somebody, you’re not preventing them from sharing information with you. You’re not preventing them from gathering information and acting on it in a way that’s for the group’s benefit.
Russel Lolacher
So how do we get there? What are things? I mean, you talk about servitude, you talk about innovation, diversity, empathy, all important, as well as resilience as well as creativity. And I’m seeing leaders that want to make change going, Oh, my God, where do I start? Do I just do empathy for the next three years and get to servitude later? Like they’re looking at it all a cart almost or? Because all of it seems like a lot. And it’s a lot for a lot of people to take in, especially if you’re trying to change the type of leadership that you’ve been perpetuating. Yeah. Where do we get going?
Hamza Khan
Man, I’m glad you asked that because I’m, I’m becoming very self aware in this podcast. And I’m like, Man, I’m just throwing haymakers here. I’m just giving every model every every anecdote possible. I’m just like overloading the audience with information when that comes in. You’re doing that thing again, where you’re just getting really fired up and you just want to give everybody everything in your head right now, which I’m happy to do, but I think I have a responsibility as a communicator, to distill it and so I’m glad Yeah, Ask that question, a acronym that I came up with recently, which I laughed at first, because I’m like, oh, man, I’m just another another speaker with a weird acronym. But this one’s really, really funny man, I asked an audience of grocery store owners how they want to be described by their employees and 2023. And they gave me great words, right? I have some of them over here, let me just read some of them out to you. They said things like, I want to be, my boss is inspirational. My boss is positive, my boss is inspiring, my boss is always available, my boss is supportive, my boss is compassionate. And all these things were good. And I said, You know what I want your employees to describe you as I want them to describe you as hot. And everyone in the room was like, what? And this one lady, she put her hand up, she’s like, I don’t think HR would be okay with that. I’m like, no, no, I’m gonna, I want you to be hot. No, I want your employees to describe you as hot in a way that is very much aligned with hrs expectations. And I broke hot down into honesty, openness and transparency, I want them to I want these leaders to be described, I want leaders who are listening to this podcast right now to be described by their employees, as honest, open and transparent. And, you know, honesty in this case would be synchronizing perceptions of the organization. So I alluded to this chasm that exists between leaders and their subordinates. I think that honesty is going to require everyone in the organization, especially leaders, gaining an accurate understanding of what it’s like to be employed at that organization, and creating a psychologically safe space where people can provide candid feedback about their working conditions, are they happy? Are they well resourced? are they experiencing any of the upstream factors that influence burnout? So there’s that then openness is holding space for others, I can’t tell you how many leaders wrestle I speak to that don’t have one on ones with their employees. And I’m like, Oh, my goodness, like, I don’t know how to tell you guys, but your organization is gonna fail. If you keep this up, you’re gonna tank this organization, how do you not talk to your employees? And they’re like, Oh, we do annual reports. I’m like, that’s not good enough, man. Like, the reason why you’re seeing levels of burnout and turnover and disengagement in your organization is directly connected to your employees not feeling like they have a partner relationship with you. And then finally, is transparency make success unquestionably clear, everybody should know what we’re working towards, there needs to be a clear purpose, a clear mission, vision, a set of values, principles, and a purpose and a way for people to assess if they’re contributing to that in a meaningful way. You know, and this is this is simple, just have clear objectives. And key results have clear areas of responsibility, and then structures where you’re over communicating what those are. And so I think that if leaders want to do anything dramatic, but quite simple, but that will produce dramatic results this year and beyond just keep things hot.
Russel Lolacher
What that brings up for me is that and you didn’t do this, but it does. A lot of minds go to this going, Okay, we need to talk to the frontline staff, we need to make them more engaged, we need their leaders to be more hot. And yet we have middle management, which are also leaders who are also not feeling inspired, motivated, getting an open environment, feeling the transparency, and yet their C suite will look at them going make make that happen, make that happen for your staff, when they themselves in the middle are not feeling this. So they don’t see modeled behavior. They don’t see their own inspiration. They’re getting burnt out. But then they’re supposed to create this utopia for their own staff. So what is the end? I mean, it’s almost a missing middle in another way. So what are your what have you seen around that area?
Hamza Khan
Wow. And this is very peculiar, because I recently read that 70% of leaders, middle managers, especially are feeling used up by the end of the workday. And that phrase used up correlates very strongly with full blown occupational burnout. And that another report that I read found that 86% of leaders, which is almost all of them, are two to three months away from leaving their job to restore their well being I mean, this sound the alarm is this, this is out of control here. So yes, absolutely. Frontline staff are feeling IT managers are feeling it. And I think it is a direct reflection of the intention, behavior and purpose or lack thereof of the senior leaders. I’m very, very aggressive when it comes to this. I do believe that there’s no such thing as bad employees, there’s only bad leaders. And if there are bad employees that have been there for a long time, that is a direct reflection of the leadership and their inability to transition them swiftly out of the organization. So what needs to happen as soon as possible is you know, the leaders need to sit down and just reinvent their their leadership style altogether. Because if they are experiencing resistance and just half assed compliance in an organization That’s not an employee problem. That is that is a distinctly leadership problem. And that’s, I don’t want to mince my words. I don’t want to add anything else to that. I’m happy to qualify this. If there’s anyone listening to this right now that’s like, no, but no, I have a unique situation, no problem, reach out to me. And we can diagnose this together. But trust me, somebody that lives, sleeps and breathes this, that is always the answer. It’s always leadership. And I’ll just give you the model over here. There’s two, the leadership theorists. And researchers agree that there’s really only two paths to leadership. There’s a dominance path, and there’s the prestige path. And the dominance path uses things like coercive power, reward power, and I forget the other one over there, but just basic, basically, you know, carrot and stick top down, exert control. And it’s very forceful. Now, the dominance path can work if everybody is bought into the mission. So for example, if you’re in the theater of war, you do want a dominant leader, because everybody knows what the mission is, and you want somebody screaming at you and yelling at you and helping you to navigate those amygdala hijacks that you’re experiencing time. And again, if you’re a basketball coach, you want to be a dominant basketball coach, while the game is being played. Because things are happening in a very, very fast click. You know, I imagine that you just need to force an outcome in those situations, but everybody has to be bought in. For the most part, though, in organizations, corporate government, nonprofit, the prestige style of leadership is the only one that gets replicated, you can try the dominant style of leadership, but it’s not going to be copied because people don’t like being tyrannized they don’t like being dominated. There’s only two sub paths within the dominant within the prestige leadership path. And that is referent power. And there’s also skilled power, expert power, referent power is behaving in a way that’s friendly, and encouraging. That’s human. And so it’s like a soft power, if you will. And again, thinking about that false dichotomy of soft and hard from earlier. And then the other one is expert power, where you have expertise, but you’re also sharing it and teaching other people how to develop similar expertise. So right now, I’ll wrap it up, put them up, put a button on this. If there’s resistance, and if there’s half assed compliance in an organization, I think that the senior leaders need to take a hard look at how they’re leading the organization. Are they approaching it from a dominant perspective, dominance perspective, or prestige perspective? And there’s a fairly good chance that it’s, they’re using dominance, where prestige is necessary.
Russel Lolacher
Are you hopeful at all Hamza? With the idea of maybe, maybe it might be because with millennials, and I love when I bring up millennials, and I still do this today, and I bring millennials and you’ll see the older generations roll their eyes. I’m like, they’re not children anymore. This is middle management. Is Iceman mid 40s. So with millennials coming in, and Gen Z, Gen, Zed Gen Z, depending which country are in, which aren’t putting up with the same shit that I put up with? Yeah, and I’m more jealous of them than I am thinking they’re upstarts. So are we? Are we hopeful? Are you hopeful that with this new generation coming in and literally looking at these organizations and not putting up with what you call active inertia? Or you are Yeah.
Hamza Khan
Wow, man, this is a last night, I just had a depressed, depressed moment, if you will, I was just sitting down and I was just comprehending the changes that are happening in the world of work. And I looked at my wife and I’m like, do you think everything’s gonna be okay? She’s like, Yeah, of course, it’s clearly working. And I’m like, I don’t feel like that sometimes, man, I feel like, I feel like we’re regressing. I feel like we’re moving backwards here. But I have to remind myself time and again, that revolutions never go backward. And the changes that we’re seeing now even though we’re seeing mounted resistance coming from different industries in the finance sector, we’re seeing certain leaders in the in the news, getting lauded for turning up the heat at their at their workplaces, like Mark Zuckerberg being like, we got to turn up the heat. And Elon Musk being like, we’re gonna have to become really intense. And I’m like, Ah, man, and they’re being celebrated. But I have to remind myself that the reality of employees on the ground very different, that people are smarter that the level of consciousness has been raised. And that this conversation that we’re having today, wrestling, everybody who’s tuning in, you’re part of the change. You’re now listening to these ideas being exchanged by Russell and I, you’re forming your own ideas about your place in your respective organization. You’re looking at your boss differently. You’re thinking about your leadership style differently. This is perfect. This is fantastic. And I have seen a net change just in the last 10 years that I’ve been doing this. I mean, the fact that I think it’s self evident that we’re still talking about this TEDx talk that was done in 2015. Eight years later, to me, that’s a sign that clearly we’re moving in the right direction that enough conversations are happening. enough resistance is being mounted to the old management playbook. It gives me hope. And again, I come back to this book over here death in the Haymarket, I hope that this current movement doesn’t result in the unnecessarily bloody struggle that happened in 1886. But that it’s going to give way to a, hopefully an honest, open and transparent conversation between the people who are running organizations right now and the people that are actually doing the work in the organizations. And it’ll it’ll yield a better way of working I’m I’m hopeful for utopia, but I will accept a more humane workplace.
Russel Lolacher
I can’t think of a better segue into my last question, which I’m so what is one simple action people can do right now to improve relationships at work?
Hamza Khan
All right, here we go. One simple action. And I’m going to give you both sides of this, if you are an employee, insist on structured and frequent one on ones with your boss. And if you are a quote, unquote, boss, and you know, don’t think of yourself as a boss, you’re a leader, you’re not a manager, you’re not a boss, or a leader. And leaders help other people, leaders lead from behind. If you’re not already having structured and frequent one on ones, with your employees, with the people who you serve, not the other way around, they don’t serve you, you serve them. Do that ASAP. And let me go into some specifics here, you should try to have these one on ones weekly. And if you can’t do weekly, bi weekly, at most, if you’re waiting for a month or a quarter, or at the end of the year to have your one on ones, it’s too long, keep them private, they should be pre scheduled, they should be fixed, hard coded in your calendar, they shouldn’t move unless there’s an absolute emergency. And the structure should be very simple. Divided into three, keep it a 30 minute meeting for the first 10 minutes. It’s your employees agenda. And you have to give them the psychological safety necessary to use that 10 minutes to disclose anything that’s bothering them about maybe you and your working relationship. Or they can elevate concerns where they can bring proposed solutions to you where they can talk about their family, they can talk about their friends, it’s whatever they want to talk about for 10 minutes, let them let them express the middle 10 minutes or then your agenda, what you want to see improved, you know, where you can celebrate some of their accomplishments, where you can give them some candid feedback that will help them to overcome challenges in the future. And then the last 10 minutes should be future focused. Because I think a lot of people right now, and they have been feeling this for a long time, but especially right now are feeling uncertain about their place in the workplace. They feel like, you know, they might not have a job, they feel like you know, you as a boss, I’m speaking to the bosses or the leaders right now that you have it out for them that you’re looking for ways to fire them use those last 10 minutes to assuage their fears. And to give them some long term perspective, tell them about what your plans are for them for the next five to 10 years. In fact, flip it back to them and say where do you want to be in this organization 510 years from now you develop an individual path moving forward. And those structure those frequent one on ones will be an absolute game changer because it has been proven time and again, Google’s oxygen project oxygen study, found that high performing leaders tend to have more one on ones and frequent one on ones with their with their subordinates than leaders who didn’t. And then also employees who have partner like relationships during their one on ones with their with their leaders tend to report greater life satisfaction than those who don’t. And that phrase right there greater life satisfaction, man, I get chills when I talk about it because we’re not talking about the future of work throughout this podcast. We’ve been talking really about the future of life itself.
Russel Lolacher
That’s Hamza Khan. He’s an academic keynote speaker and best selling author. Thank you so much for your time, sir,
Hamza Khan
Sir! Oh, thank you. This was this was absolutely wonderful. Thank you. And I’m really grateful to Mike for making this introduction.
