Skot Waldron:
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Hi, welcome to another episode of Unlocked. I am Skot, and today we're going to talk about unlocking the potential of people so we can unlock the potential of our organizations.
I've got Hamza Khan on the show today. Hamza has an awesome brain. It's super awesome, and you're going to get to experience it on the show today. He is doing all types of things, he's breaking molds, he's building things, he's speaking and sharing all types of information with all types of people. He's got an organization called StudentLife Network, where he reaches 2.7 million students and helps them prepare for the future of work.
He's been featured on VICE, Business Insider. He's got a TEDx talk called, Stop Managing, Start Leading that's been viewed over a million times. He's worked with PepsiCo, LinkedIn, Deloitte, PwC, Trivago and over 100 colleges, universities, all types of things.
This guy has got some gold for you today. Every little snippet is like a TEDx talk. So listen up for the gold inside of the things he says. Make sure you get to the end because that's where he brings it all together. I'm really excited to have Hamza on the show. Let's do this.
Hamza, welcome to the show. It's good to have you.
Hamza Khan:
Skot, thank you for having me.
SKOT WALDRON:
Yeah. Let's just dive right into it and start with-
HAMZA KHAN:
Let's do it.
SKOT WALDRON:
New book, Leadership, Reinvented.
HAMZA KHAN:
Hey, hey, hey.
SKOT WALDRON:
You didn't call it Leadership, Invented because it's already there. Tell me about the title of that first. Why are you arguing that we need to reinvent leadership in the first place?
HAMZA KHAN:
Great question. I've likened the analogy to poker or have used the poker analogy, and I've gone all-in on this idea essentially. In 2015, I delivered a TEDx talk called, Stop Managing, Start Leading, and that was during a transition point in the conversation around old leadership and new leadership. I just had the feeling, based on my experiences and my ground truth, that the old style of leadership wasn't working. The Theory X style of leadership which was coined by Douglas McGregor ... I don't remember when, long time ago ... The idea is that essentially workers lack motivation. They're in need of constant prodding and micromanagement and that they're ungrateful. It just assumes the worst in people essentially, and that produces a sort of style of leadership that is avoidant, aggressive and mostly authoritarian.
I felt as a Millennial at that time that that was inconsistent with our experiences. When I say our experiences, I was talking about my generation. I felt that I was and my colleagues and my peers and my generation was quite the opposite. That we were intrinsically motivated, that we were well-intentioned, that we were hard-working, that we were self-motivated. All of those things, and that the old style of leadership was inconsistent with how we wanted to be managed. But I think therein lies the rub. We didn't want to be managed at all. We wanted to be lead. That was in 2015, put the TED talk out there and caught fire. I mean, it's an idea that is still spreading right now. It's gone viral. It's taken a slow fuse approach over here, and it's spreading all over the world. I mean, not a week goes by where I don't receive messages from people from Germany, Australia, Singapore, you name it, telling me that the idea has resonated with them.
What happened during COVID-19 is I got to see something quite phenomenal. I got to see a widespread instance of the amygdala hijack. For the listeners who don't know this, this is a phenomenon in which humans that experience sudden, unexpected stress have a part of their brain known as the amygdala override and essentially hijack the prefrontal cortex, the part of your brain responsible for executive function, complex planning, creative thinking, et cetera, et cetera. The amygdala takes over that prefrontal cortex and sends blood everywhere else, preparing you for fight, flight or freeze.
For the last year-and-a-half at the time of this recording, everybody around the world, leaders in organizations of all shapes and sizes, of all backgrounds regardless of industry, seniority, experience, have all been stressed beyond belief. I mean, everybody's either in a different state of fight, flight or freeze. What has happened is that we have confused people stepping up for actually sinking to their level of training and character. Every leader that you see, whether they're running a government, whether they're running a nonprofit or a corporation, at least in the early days of COVID, you saw them for who they truly were. They were either prepared or they weren't. The leaders that consistently failed their people, failed their organizations and failed the end users were ones who were stuck in the old paradigm, were still practicing and insisting on practicing Theory X. The ones who've been able to transform their organizations and move forward are the ones who subscribed to the better model, Theory Y.
It's not leadership invented. That has already been invented. But what is happening, at least for the last 20 years, is an increasing tendency towards leadership being defined as something that elicits voluntary followership. In order to extract voluntary followership, in order to earn voluntary followership from Generation Y, Generation Zed, it's going to require a whole different toolbox. It's not going to be narcissism, it's not going to be psychopathy, it's not going to be Machiavellianism. It's going to be four distinct values I think. Servitude, innovation, diversity and empathy.
SKOT WALDRON:
Very good because I believe that we speak the same language and there's a lot of things I teach when I'm coaching individuals about how do we lead in the 21st century. What's a 21st century leader look like? It's no longer, and one of those elements is, we now need to lead through influence, not positional power.
HAMZA KHAN:
Amen.
SKOT WALDRON:
Generations, the rising generations are no longer going, "I respect you, and I will listen to you because you are two levels above me on the organizational chart."
HAMZA KHAN:
Sure. You have the corner office. You have the title. You have whatever.
SKOT WALDRON:
Right. It's no longer that, that earns your respect.
HAMZA KHAN:
Exactly.
SKOT WALDRON:
It's the, how do you treat me, are you giving me adequate support as an individual, do you care about me, and are you giving me adequate challenge? Are you pushing me in a healthy way to be better? Are you giving-
HAMZA KHAN:
Absolutely.
SKOT WALDRON:
Me the tools and resources to be better? That influence is what's going to gain traction, not the fact that you have that corner office, like you said.
HAMZA KHAN:
Skot, this is well-documented too. You look at any Gallup State of Work Report from the last five years, even probably before then, and you can see that what is important for new entrants into the workforce is not money, it's not title. It's actually responsibility, it's meaning, it's purpose, it's culture. I mean, the evidence was in front of us all this time, and it's just a shame that some leaders insisted that the old paradigm was still alive and thriving. It clearly wasn't.
If the pandemic has shown us anything, it's that once everybody is forced to dissolve the theatrics and move away from the optics that maybe glossed over some organizational inefficiencies, once everybody started working from home and things become more merit-based and the emphasis came on the actual work and how organized a workplace was in terms of clear objectives and clear results, once the leader couldn't rely on their bag of tricks, we clearly saw and we quickly saw the separation of these two leadership paradigms.
SKOT WALDRON:
I totally agree. I think you speak to this. You spoke to this a little bit in your intro statement, but the leaders ... Let me back up and say ... When COVID hit or when some big event hits of stress, something transitions, some kind of emergency happens, some adversity pops in, it's too late to all of a sudden create a brand. We saw companies and organizations across the globe that were all of a sudden going, "Oh, wait, wait, wait." With the Black Lives Matter movement, we saw a lot of that too going, "Oh, wait, but we value diversity." It's like, "Wait a second. Wait, what?" This is the first [crosstalk 00:09:59]
HAMZA KHAN:
Where'd that come from?
SKOT WALDRON:
Yeah, it was just like-
HAMZA KHAN:
Where's the receipts, man?
SKOT WALDRON:
Exactly. It was like people were going, "Yeah, I know that you say that, but I work here and I don't feel that way." They're being called out. Because all of a sudden it's a fire drill to all of a sudden get our values up to par and who we are as leaders and what we want to do. The time to have been working on that was the years, the decade before that emergency happens.
HAMZA KHAN:
Absolutely. 100%.
SKOT WALDRON:
How do you address that?
HAMZA KHAN:
I think we have a really [inaudible 00:10:33] example that all of the listeners would have had at least exposure to one if not all of these different characters in the story over here.
I'll start with a play that I came across when I was in my undergrad, Oedipus Rex. It opens with a city undergoing a plague. So, very timely, very relevant. There's a plague that's ravaging the city, ravaging the country, and the titular character, the King, is so overwhelmed ... I mean, this is a narcicisstic King, this is a King that subscribed to the Great Man Theory of Leadership. That it's all about the title, it's about the largess, it's about big, sweeping gestures to take care of its people ... He's trying similar approaches. He wants that one thing, that one cure that'll fix the problem and of course, it's a tragedy. It's a Greek tragedy, and it backfires tremendously.
Now you look across the global response to COVID-19, you think about the strong man club. You think about Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, you think about Donald Trump in the States, you think about Boris Johnson in the UK. Similar ilk in terms of these are leaders that were caught up in the old paradigm. That they believed that the leader could grandstand and deliver platitudes and find the one magic cure and earn the adoration of the public because that is the world in which they thrive.
But COVID required a different type of leader. COVID required Jacinda Ardern in New Zealand, a leader who didn't look like the traditional leader, who didn't sound like the traditional leader. Might have, for all intents and purposes, been bullied in the school yard by those three "Great Men" leader. The right thing to do during COVID was to be empathetic, was to be respectful of diversity, was to be innovative and was to be an assertive leader, was to prepare in the years in advance of that leadership moment for something like that. Her response was masterful. It was about listening to the experts, it was about taking swift, decisive action, it was about doing things that are boring, things that are uninteresting, things that are in service of the people and not necessarily giving in to the same theatricality.
I think about this one example of Jair Bolsonaro going to the town square saying, "There's no such thing as COVID. COVID has been eradicated. We got herd immunity." I swear, like the very next day he contracts COVID. I mean, you couldn't have written a better plan unless it was Oedipus Rex.
All of this is to say if a leader in a moment of adversity doesn't step up, if they sink to the level of their training and character, and if the pandemic is nothing but a portal, if adversity is nothing but a catalyst, then the only way to be prepared for these leadership moments happens during the times when nobody's watching. Happens on a day-to-day basis. Happens the most boring way. It happens with every email, it happens with every town hall meeting, it happens with every piece of legislature you pass or process that you create. It's truly the boring things that happen during peace times when you can incrementally increase the difficulty, increase the level of challenge so that you build resistance, and then over the long term that resistance coalesces into resilience. Organizational resilience, personal resilience, you name it.
SKOT WALDRON:
You talk about a few different things. You listed them at the very beginning. But these four principles that we talk about in your book. You've hit on a little bit of them. You've mentioned these words. So you've got servitude, innovation, diversity and empathy.
HAMZA KHAN:
Empathy. Right.
SKOT WALDRON:
Let's kick off with servitude and talk about what that has to do with operationalizing, maximizing who we are, unlocking who we are as organizations and as leaders. What's the idea of servitude?
HAMZA KHAN:
The idea of servitude is essentially about making everyone on your team better than you. This is something I'm actively working on. I'm aware that I came into this role here at StudentLife Network and Yconic with quite a big skill set and a well-honed skill set, both soft skills and technical skills.
I would be making a grave mistake if I insisted on keeping all of that information and skills to myself, if I don't allow people around me to be better than me, I don't allow them to thrive and step up and essentially make me obsolete. I think the best indicator of success as a leader for me would be if I'm no longer needed on my team. If I can empower everyone around me to do their job and do my job better than I can so that frees up my capacity to move on and work on the next challenge. But I think that leaders get it twisted. I think maybe it's deficit thinking, maybe it's [Fanin 00:15:11] thinking. They hoard their knowledge. They hoard their experience, and they try to create power imbalance as a leadership tool. I think that's the wrong way to go about this.
SKOT WALDRON:
Making them better than you. That's awesome.
HAMZA KHAN:
That's it. That's it. It requires a leap of faith because I understand. From my perspective I'm a little scared. I'm not going to lie. I think that if I make everybody better around me and if I'm no longer needed, there might be a conversation about, "Hey, Hamza, there's the door. We don't need you anymore." I have to reconcile with that cognitive dissonance. But I trust the process because every other time that I've done this experiment, every time I've seen it play out in other arenas, it has always ended well. That people who make other people better cultivate internal champions, the organization as a whole succeeds and that their leadership is then recognized and then shifted in a different direction. Shifted to another portfolio and priority area.
SKOT WALDRON:
But here's the thinking around that. I know that we have a little bit of this self-preservation mentality at times.
HAMZA KHAN:
Exactly.
SKOT WALDRON:
Of, "What am I afraid of losing? What am I trying to hide? What am I trying to prove?" This afraid of losing at times prevents us as leaders from truly investing everything into our people because we're afraid of losing, maybe that positional power or that thing that we brought to the table. So instead of thinking that, why wouldn't we sit there and say, "Hold on a second. By making every single one of my people better, it's also elevating me."
HAMZA KHAN:
Absolutely.
SKOT WALDRON:
It's almost like I'm sitting on an air mattress and the more I pump air into the mattress, the higher I rise as a leader.
HAMZA KHAN:
Oh wow. Yeah.
SKOT WALDRON:
That mentality is what's going to help everybody around it me go, "Yeah, we have some of the skills you've taught us. We have some of those gifts you've brought to the table. But because you've spread this love and because you have invested in us, we hold you on a higher pedestal."
HAMZA KHAN:
Skot, it's a team sport, truly. Running an organization, being part of an organization is not an individual sport. There's no point of LeBron James being the best player on the Los Angeles Lakers if everyone around him sucks. LeBron James has a burning desire to make everyone on the team, Drummond, Kuzma, I'm blanking right now. But the entire roster has to be able to play at an elite level because the end goal is not for LeBron James to win MVP. The end goal is for the Los Angeles Lakers to win the championship.
SKOT WALDRON:
True. True that. Let's talk about innovation. That's the next one. So we've got servitude and then innovation. Tell me about innovation.
HAMZA KHAN:
Innovation is all about anticipating change. It's about anticipating change before it happens and positioning yourself appropriately for that. Sometimes here at StudentLife Network and Yconic we suffer the innovator's dilemma. This is very common. It's not unique to us by any means. We have to reconcile between serving today's customers and then serving tomorrow's customers. If you go all-in on today's customers, it comes at the expense of being well prepared for the paradigm shifts of tomorrow. Sometimes if you're so future focused, it takes away from conducting responsible business today. So it's all about balancing the needs of today and the needs of tomorrow, ensuring that the inside of the organization is changing faster than the outside of the organization.
Jack Welch, ex-CEO of General Electric, has a fantastic quote. He said that, "If the rate of change on the outside exceeds the rate of change on the inside, the end is near." You think about the very typical organizational life cycle, an organization is introduced, it grows, it matures, and by the fourth stage, it has to do one of two things. It either renews itself or it declines. If it doesn't renew itself, it doesn't reinvent itself, it always ends up either in stagnation, and stagnation will eventually lead to the inevitable outcome, which is failure, collapse, acquisition, bankruptcy.
In order to be prepared for that fourth stage, to renew, I think the leader has to enable the culture or has to create a culture of innovation at the organization where people feel empowered to speak up about where the iceberg may be if we're thinking about the Titanic, acknowledging that the iceberg is a threat and then having discussions with the team about how to maneuver around it, how to dodge it and how to then chart a course into the future. That's really what innovation is. It's all about creating the capacity amongst everyone on the team, not just within leadership but everyone on the team to see change and prepare for it.
SKOT WALDRON:
Because no longer are we ... This goes back to the team sport idea ... But no longer is it one person that we rely on, that hero, that LeBron James we're bringing on to the team to carry the whole team all the way through. Tom Brady. Everybody's talking about Brady coming and leading and being this pivotal person that won the Super Bowl. Now, Tom Brady's a great leader, right?
HAMZA KHAN:
Right.
SKOT WALDRON:
But it took the whole team. Tom Brady can't catch the ball, right?
HAMZA KHAN:
Exactly.
SKOT WALDRON:
Tom Brady, he doesn't run the ball.
HAMZA KHAN:
Right.
SKOT WALDRON:
And he doesn't block. He's not the lineman. In taking everybody in, how do we innovate and that idea of a team and how do we pull in people that are going to help us collaboratively win? This is another 21st century challenge is how do we manage agile teams that are so diverse and globally located and working remote? That's another thing that we really need to pull into this innovation conversation.
HAMZA KHAN:
I love your analogy of Tom Brady and the Buccaneers. Tom Brady is the nucleus of the organization. The team is built around him. You have this superstar, you have this all-star, but can't do it by himself. It's the best example of a team sport. You had to bring in Gronk, you had to bring in AB, you had to anticipate what it would take to beat Kansas City. So when they designed the team, they designed it as the Kansas City killer. They sort of positioned the team around Patrick Mahomes and that team and their weaknesses and exploited it essentially in the best way possible. Yeah, that is a great sports comparison for an organization when you're talking about innovation. It's about anticipating change and preparing yourself today for that reality tomorrow.
SKOT WALDRON:
So good. So let's talk about diversity. How does that play into what we're doing?
HAMZA KHAN:
Okay, so this is interesting. I understand that there might be many listeners right now who are like, "I get it. Diversity's important. We have to bring in diverse people into the organization." You have to think about that along the lines of race, background, gender, sexuality and there might even be a resistance or aversion to it because it might seem like tokenism or whatnot. I would caution those people to think about the end result. I mean, bringing in diverse people into the organization is just step one. Inclusion is activating them, and in activating them what you're really hoping to get, if you're going to squeeze this fruit, the juice is going to be diversity of background, diversity of experience, and diversity of perspective. That's what you want.
Now, often what happens is diversity of background, experience and perspective correlates more often than not with diversity of people. I think sometimes in mainstream media, at least, we flip that conversation. It becomes distracting unfortunately. What you want to do, and this heads back to innovation, if you want to help your organization envision the future, you want to help it be connected and empathetic with your end users, you have to allow for the breaking of homogenous patterns of thinking. Homogenous patterns of thinking happen in boardrooms, in decision making settings where people share a similar background. They might be connected along the lines of race, religion, gender, sexuality, income, class. If you have people that share the same background, it's going to produce more than likely the same types of decisions, the same types of thinking.
The best example I can come up with is that really distasteful PepsiCo ad that happened a while ago. They'll be the first to admit that it was just a blunder. I'm laughing ... It was Kendall Jenner solving the Black Lives Matter crisis by giving a can of Pepsi to a police officer, and there you go, the problem's solved and everyone's dancing and having a great time. That ad was created in a rush. It was created by a creative director who had the best of intentions but fastened together a team of people who thought just like him. When you look at the composition of that team, not bashing by any means, but it was just a bunch of White people. A bunch of White people trying to make a grand comment about Black culture, about Black Lives Matter, about injustice in the Black community. That disconnect was a direct result of people in a room who share the same ideas but also as a result have the same blind spots.
When we talk about diversity, we're really talking about including and unlocking a full spectrum of the human experience so that decisions about people can be made by those people themselves or at least representative of those communities. It's about enabling the full participation of everyone on your team. I think this connects to servitude, innovation and empathy in really amazing ways.
SKOT WALDRON:
Because I think there's also a danger of the loud voices of society saying, hey, these genders, these races, these whatever are underrepresented in leadership and in businesses and in corporate America or wherever. The danger here is that we potentially start looking and start saying, "Okay we just need to find a woman." Then we start to do what I call sympathy hires.
HAMZA KHAN:
Sympathy hires, yeah.
SKOT WALDRON:
It's like, "Well, I'll just bring on this person," and then I start treating that person like a sympathy hire. "Hey, I just hired you because," not that I'd necessarily say this, maybe there are people that do, "Hey, I hired you because we need a woman on the team. But I don't really need you to talk too much. I just need you to kind of sit there and just be a woman on our team so that we can say we're diverse. That we're inclusive of these people."
What I always feel is important when I'm coaching people is the same realm of diversity but I talk about it from a sense of yes, there is those diversity ideas you're talking about but also diversity in voices and communication style and personality.
HAMZA KHAN:
Totally.
SKOT WALDRON:
You're going to have those people that are so in tune with people and that can empathize, truly empathize and sympathize with how people are going to react in an organization. But then you have those others that are just straight-up process, military-like thinking, driven, going to win at all costs.
Neither of them are wrong. We need that diverse perspective in order to understand how we're going to roll out a specific plan, a specific whatever.
HAMZA KHAN:
Of course.
SKOT WALDRON:
Those are kind of two different ideas of the sympathy hire versus even the communication style of diversity or what. Any thoughts on that?
HAMZA KHAN:
Oh absolutely. I mean, I don't even know where to begin. Right away, an example that comes to mind is one of my mentees, a brilliant Black woman who graduated from University not that long ago. Had applied to all the major record labels here in Toronto, and they all offered her a job because she's got this incredible toolbox of technical skills, is attuned with pop culture at the level of Generation Zed, that hybrid between Gen Y and Gen Zed, and was especially adept at TikTok. Which is something that all of these record labels have been trying to infiltrate unsuccessfully. When they do it, it's them sort of picking things that they read in Strategy Magazine and Marketing Magazine to try to reverse engineer things and meaningfully interject themselves into the timelines of an audience that can clearly tell that it's manufactured. It's not authentic.
So they find this person, and they make her an offer. She rightfully says, and she asks in the interview process, she asks, "I'm curious to know. What has been this team, this organization, this leadership's response to the Black Lives Matter protests that took place in 2020?" Many of them came up short. Most of them came up short. They were just like, "Ah, we didn't post the black square. We didn't actually know. We did this, we did that."
She was just unsatisfied because she understood that if she were to join these organizations, she would have been a token hire, A. B, they would have downloaded the responsibility of those crises responses to the one Black person, the one Black woman on the team.
The record label that got her attention that ultimately courted her and that she said, "I'm going to work with you," was able to answer honestly and say, "This is where we dropped the ball. Here's how we've changed internally to respond to that. We now have a committee on the team, leadership has been shuffled around, and now have got programs and processes in place that will recognize you and value you accordingly."
It's just been so cool to watch this paradigm shift where once upon a time the sympathy hire would be very common and people would just be happy to be there. But this next generation is holding organizations to a higher standard if you will. I'm not sure that directly answers the question, but I thought that analogy would be worthwhile or that anecdote would be worthwhile.
SKOT WALDRON:
I think that's really good because, and we see this usually from the other side and she is showing a level of leadership that I think a lot of leaders need to recognize. In that hiring process, it's about calling up, not calling out because that's what ... I'll coach a lot of leaders about that. There's a tendency for maybe a dominant leader to come into a room, call somebody out in front of everybody in there. It demeans them, it pulls them down, they don't feel great. There's not a level of trust and influence brought there. But by her coming in and saying, "Hey, I'm going to hold you accountable because this is going to make you better, and in order for me to want to come on board and pour into you, I need to understand what you're doing." For this organization to say, "Hey, you're right. Call me up." Calling us up is about helping us be who we were designed to be. Be better, right?
HAMZA KHAN:
Yes.
SKOT WALDRON:
It doesn't mean that we didn't falter. It just means that we have potential to be great. Using the diversity angle, because that's what we've been talking about right now, how can we not call people out, but call them up? In a sense of, "Shame on you for not having more diversity," it's, "Hey, what can we do to make sure that we're implementing change, and then being authentic about that change for the future. Not just doing it to do it, but that we actually walk the talk."
HAMZA KHAN:
I think that's great, and I have a whole chapter in the book dedicated to that about calling people in. I like calling people up as a better ... If I have to do another edition, I'd probably use calling people up. I think that's much better than calling people in. At least it's much more memorable and provokes better ideas.
You're right, if you call people out, it usually has the opposite effect. I mean, it shames them, it makes them double down on their opinions, and it marginalizes them, it creates factions where factions don't need to exist. But if you call people in, it's much more long lasting. You bring them in, it's usually done privately, it's done with the best of intentions, it's about focusing on the issue and not necessarily the person, and it truly results in transformation. The way that she described, this mentee of mine, described the reaction of the people who interviewed her, it sounded like there was a profound moment of enlightenment for all of them in the group, where they all just had an aha moment being like, "Wow, if this is the next generation and we want to attract top talent like this, we need to change internally."
SKOT WALDRON:
Yeah, that sounds smart.
HAMZA KHAN:
I totally agree with you.
SKOT WALDRON:
That's good. Okay, let's hit on the last one. Empathy.
HAMZA KHAN:
Let's do it.
SKOT WALDRON:
What's the idea around empathy?
HAMZA KHAN:
I get this quote wrong all the time. I really need just commit to memorizing it. Daniel Pink, author of one of my favorite books on sales ... But when we're talking about sales, not traditional sales, true sales. True sales, which is convincing people to part with their resources in a mutually beneficial way. Daniel Pink said that, "Empathy is seeing with other peoples' eyes, feeling with their hearts, hearing with their ears."
For me, what empathy is, it's the connective tissue between servitude, innovation and diversity. It's the connective tissue between people. It's all about developing attunement, and it's about developing attunement from the leadership to every member of the organization, from every member of the organization with the leadership. But even beyond that it's about developing achievement and understanding with the people that you serve. In our case here at StudentLife Network and Yconic, we serve students, we serve parents, we serve educators. If I lacked empathy, if my team lacked empathy, we would make decisions about them that would be irresponsible and bad decisions. We would make assumptions about them. We would force products, services, contest, campaigns that just would miss the mark. We'd know very quickly if it wasn't working.
Instead, what we do is we have practices in place whereby we will encourage dialogue with our audience. If they respond to an email we send them, we personally respond back to them, no mater how difficult it is to scale that practice. Not a single message goes unanswered. We have regular round tables. We're checking in, we're reading their pulse, we're sending them surveys. We're celebrating them and meeting with them offline as well. There's a real desire on the team to want to connect with our end user. I think that's powerful and that translates internally as well.
We're changing, especially during COVID, we've really ramped up the frequency of communication and connection that we have with our team because the virtual paradigm is pulling us further and further away. The serendipity of being in the office and seeing each other and catching up on our weekends and going out for dinner and drinks is lost now during this lockdown situation. We compensated for that by having, weekly, bi-weekly one-on-ones, time on a Friday where we just have no work and we sit for an hour and everybody brings coffee and we just catch up, retreats, the works.
Empathy is just about trying to understand other people, where they're coming from and not making assumptions about them. It's about getting them to truly disclose and share what their pain points are, what they hope to gain from their user journeys and understanding that before a decision is made.
SKOT WALDRON:
Even if we can't truly understand, truly put ourselves in their shoes ... I will never know what it's like to be a Black female that lives in White corporate America. I can't truly, but just the effort will build the trust and build the influence that we're looking for. That goes a long way. I think that most people, I would say, are not like, "Hey, you'll never know what it's like to be a Black female in White corporate America. You'll never get this. I don't need anything from you."
It's more about if I see that there's a mutual trust, a mutual understanding, a mutual effort going on to understand each other ... Again, that Black female may not know ever what it's like to be a White male in corporate America either. When you look around the table and see whose represented through diversity, how are we being innovative in what we're doing and maybe the diversity part is the innovation part, how do we serve one another, how do we exercise empathy? So all these components of what you're talking about are, like you said, I think the glue that holds those all together is that empathy piece and what we're doing there. So I think that's really smart how you tied that in.
HAMZA KHAN:
Well, Skot, it forms a virtuous cycle. With servitude, you increase an organization's capacity. With innovation, you anticipate change. With diversity, you enable participation. With empathy, you develop attunement. When all four of those things happen, what you essentially create is you create a perpetually changing, self-disrupting, human-centric, values-driven organization. Which means that when you arrive at that fourth stage of your organization's evolution, you're always going to renew. You don't have to worry about declining because you're changing faster internally than the external environment demands. You're changing before you have to.
SKOT WALDRON:
So smart, man. I don't know if you could say that again. What does it enable? Those words were beautiful but you said them fast.
HAMZA KHAN:
Yeah, sorry. Okay.
SKOT WALDRON:
What is that phrase?
HAMZA KHAN:
Yeah, by operationalizing servitude, you increase your organization's capacity. By operationalizing innovation, you anticipate change as an organization. By operationalizing diversity, you enable the full participation of the people in your team. By operationalizing empathy, you develop true attunement with the inside of an outside environment. Then all four of those values, SIDE, S-I-D-E, the bright side of leadership if you will, coalesce to make your organization perpetually change-friendly. When you become change-friendly, you're constantly disrupting yourself, you're becoming more values-driven, human-centric and you're preparing yourself forever to arrive at that fourth stage of the organization's life cycle with the confidence that you will renew every time. You will renew yourself as an organization every time, and you will change before you have to. You will self-disrupt before you are disrupted.
SKOT WALDRON:
Oh my gosh. Mind blown. Well done. That was so good. Okay, so you're offering a free copy of your book, Leadership, Reinvented.
HAMZA KHAN:
Yes.
SKOT WALDRON:
That's awesome because I'm sure there'd be plenty of people out there that would buy it as well. First of all, tell people where they can buy it-
HAMZA KHAN:
For sure.
SKOT WALDRON:
And tell people how they can get a free copy. That's awesome.
HAMZA KHAN:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Absolutely. Thank you for the opportunity. This was a lot of fun. I mean, I could have easily done another two, three hours if you had time. We should do this again. I'd love to be back if you'll have me. I would love to invite you to my podcast whenever you get a chance. You can buy it on Amazon or anywhere books are sold, Barnes & Noble, Target, Kohl's, Indigo, Chapters, wherever you buy books, Walmart. It would mean a lot if you could go and grab a copy off of Amazon and leave a review. That really helps me out.
To get a free copy of the book, share this episode. Share this episode online, tag myself, tag Skot, and we'll randomly select one of the people who shares it.
SKOT WALDRON:
Yeah. Very cool. Oh, so smart. If people want to find out more about StudentLife Network, where do they go to find out more information about that?
HAMZA KHAN:
Check it out, it's studentlifenetwork.com. We also have a sister brand, yconic.com. Y-C-O-N-I-C.com. Check them out. Right now they are serving Canadian students, but we have ambitions to expand into the States for all the listeners tuning in from south of the 49th parallel.
SKOT WALDRON:
Nice. Well done. All right. Well, very cool. I loved having this conversation. It's been really well thought out, and I can tell that you're passionate about this. You're easy going. Awesome conversation. I know the audience is going to get a ton out of it.
HAMZA KHAN:
Thank you. I had a lot of fun. I appreciate this.
SKOT WALDRON:
SIDE. Servitude, innovation, diversity, empathy. S-I-D-E. Really, really good. Am I right? So good.
So servitude. How do we make people better than us? How do we pour into them so much that they know that we are for them? That they know that we're working to build them up to be the best thing that they could possibly be.
Innovation. How do we anticipate change? How do we get in front of adversity? How do we make sure that we're prepared for that? When that happens, are we caught off guard or are we ready? Are we being proactive? Let's be proactive, not reactive.
Diversity. How do we activate the people in our organizations through diverse thinking, through diverse backgrounds, diverse cultures? Those types of things are going to add value to everything we do as an organization.
Last is empathy. The thing that's going to tie all of that together is seeking to understand before being understood. How do we understand those around us to make them feel valued, heard, understood? To want to bring their best to our organization. The more we lift them up, the more they will lift up our entire organization and everything else that we're trying to do. We pour into them, they pour into our customers and our clients. It's a ripple effect, and if you haven't gotten that yet, get it. Because the more you pour into them, the better things will get for you. It's not about you, it's about them. It'll come back to serve you as well.
Thanks a lot, Hamza, for being on the show. Everybody please go check out his book and share this. He's offering to give you a free book, a free copy by sharing this to your audience as well.
If you want to find out more information about me, you can go to skotwaldron.com. I've got a list of free resources there and all these interviews and some other things about what I'm doing. You can go to my YouTube channel. Please like, subscribe, share, do all those types of things there. I would love that.
Thank you again for being here today. If you have any questions, email, reach out, do whatever you need to do, and I would be happy to help. Thanks a lot for attending this and viewing another episode of Unlocked, and I'll see you next time.
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