IDL79 Season 2: Lift: Being a Transformational Leader with Faisal Hoque

What is the difference between being a transactional and a transformational leader? Why must you seek out diversity and collaboration and celebrate it? Are you a gardening leader?

In this podcast episode, I have the pleasure of introducing a new author and leader, Faisal Hoque. He’s an entrepreneur; he’s worked with GE; he’s started several of his own companies, and he’s been featured on a number of media outlets. His latest book, Lift – Fostering the Leader in You Amid Revolutionary Global Change, is releasing right now! In this episode, we dig deep into the difference between transformational and transactional leadership. We discuss how to be a leader in a post-pandemic world, and what it means to be a gardening leader.

Meet Faisal Hoque

Faisal Hoque is the founder of SHADOKA, NextChapter, and other companies that focus on enabling sustainable and transformational changes.

Throughout his career, he has developed over 20 commercial business and technology platforms and worked with public and private sector giants such as the US Department of Defense, GE, MasterCard, American Express, PepsiCo, IBM, Home Depot, and JPMorgan Chase.

He is a 3 times winning Founder and CEO of Deloitte Technology Fast 50 and Deloitte Technology Fast 500™ awards.

He has authored a number of books on leadership, innovation, mindfulness, resilience, organizational transformation, and entrepreneurship, including the #1 Wall Street Journal and USA Today bestseller Lift – Fostering the Leader in You Amid Revolutionary Global Change.

He holds a strong belief that it is through knowledge sharing that we may provide the greatest clarity on how to improve our collective future.

Visit Faisal Hoque’s website and connect with him on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

IN THIS EPISODE WE DISCUSS:

• Become transformational instead of transactional - 09:31

• Empathy is the solution - 15:47

• Seek out diversity and collaborate - 27:55

• A gardening leader - 35:05

Become transformational instead of transactional

If your goal is to become a holistic, impactful, and sustainable leader, then you need to focus on making positive changes in the lives of others.

That is what it means to be truly transformational.

In any aspect of life, you can choose to be transformational instead of transactional. Focus your energy and intention on educating yourself and helping others because it transforms the world and the business into a better place, rather than being transactional about time, money, and putting a cap on compassion.

Empathy is the solution

Empathy is the ability to relate to someone. It is a skill that you can develop over time, and it is an essential part of building a successful business and creating a fulfilling life.

Empathy and mindfulness go in tandem because you have to be mindful of how your actions impact others.

The power of empathy is that it allows you to build genuine emotional connections with people, which helps you to motivate them faster and make progress. It helps you to find solutions, bring people together, and maintain a healthy momentum.

Seek out diversity and collaborate

Being a transformational leader means that you encourage people to develop their unique skills, and you create a collaborative environment wherein these skills all intermingle and support one another unto achieving success after success.

Transformation, therefore, comes from personal development and inter-personal collaboration with a shared goal in mind.

A gardening leader

A gardening leader is an example of a transformative leader who values and supports collaboration.

They nurture individual skills and qualities within their people, support their development, weed out insecurities, and change their approach to each environment because they know that each individual requires a unique approach.

Resources, books, and links mentioned in this episode:

BOOK | Faisal Hoque - Everything Connects – How to Transform and Lead in the Age of Creativity, Innovation and Sustainability

BOOK | Faisal Hoque - Lift – Fostering the Leader in You Amid Revolutionary Global Change

Visit Faisal Hoque’s website and connect with him on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

Join the Impact Driven Leader Community

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Email Tyler: tyler@tylerdickerhoof.com

About the Impact Driven Leader Podcast

The Impact Driven Leader Podcast, hosted by Tyler Dickerhoof, is for Xillennial leaders who have felt alone and ill-equipped to lead in today's world. Through inspiring interviews with authors from around the world, Tyler uncovers how unique leadership strengths can empower others to achieve so much more, with real impact.

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Empathy and mindfulness goes hand-in-hand. You have to be mindful of your actions and mindful of your surroundings.

Faisal Hoque

Podcast Transcription

[TYLER DICKERHOOF] Welcome back to the Impact Driven Leader podcast. This your host, Tyler Dickerhoof. If you're watching on YouTube, hey, what's up? If you're listening, wherever you're listening to your podcast, man, glad you're here listening. Today, I have an absolute treat, one of, if you've listened to many episodes, hopefully you have, a great joy that I have is when I come across a new author, a new leader, someone new to me, and I read their book, I listen to them, I get to learn about them, and I'm like, man, we have layered in this learning from two different places. To me, it makes it a lot of fun and today I have that opportunity to speak with Faisal Hoque. Faisal is a entrepreneur. He's worked with GE, he started several of his own companies, he's a tech giant. He's been featured everywhere, does a lot of different work, multiple book author. He has Lift, He has Everything Connects. His latest book is Lift, coming out right now, and I'm excited to have this conversation because we dig deep into the difference between transformational transactional leadership, where transactional leadership has fit into the landscape in our world and really, this post pandemic, this idea of our world has changed. We have this conversation with a tech background, but yet this ethereal, you got to do the work. You got to get your hands dirty and really, a leader's greatest opportunity is to be a gardener. You're going to hear more about that in this conversation with Faisal Hoque. Can't wait for you to listen in. What an enjoyable time I had with this gentleman, and glad to call him a new friend, and can't wait to meet up with him, get together with him, and have more of this conversation later. So, take some notes, get ready for this one. [TYLER] Faisal thank you so much for joining me today. Man, I'm excited to talk to you, one, as I've learned about you and I've learned about your involvement, tech industry and all your entrepreneurship, everything you've done, that's one thing. But then I also know that this leadership stuff that you've dug into and writing this book, the latest book Lift and all the other content that you have, I'm excited to talk to you today about leadership, to talk to you about some of the tools. One thing you just shared is this latest book Lift that as I shared, who the audience of this podcast is, one of the things you talked about is writing for your son. So I'd love for you to just kick off and start there and start there from the perspective of writing this book and speaking to an audience, a newer generation, a younger generation, what really drove you to bring all the pieces and parts together? [FAISAL HOQUE] Sure, let me back up a little bit, I wrote Everything Connects, which was my last book 6, 7 years ago. I then I stopped writing. That book is about mindfulness, creativity, innovation. I stopped writing, partly I got deeply involved trying to help our government agencies with their transformation and technological changes and efficiency and cost savings, that sort of things. So last year, beginning of last year or maybe end of 2020 I published this and publishers said it's time to do another book because we have pandemic, we have global unrest of all kind, lots of misinformation, political unrest, climate change, and technology has completely changed the field. It was already changing, but the way we work, the way we communicate because of pandemic, it took us to the next height. So I was, I said, oh it's a lot of commitment to write a book. I don't know whether it's the time. And my son just went to college, freshman at that time and I was on the fence. Then what happened, I started thinking about it, and I found out that my son has multiple myeloma, which is a blood cancer. So he had to come home from college, just shortening the story and my good friend, Laurie and my publicist she said, "You have to write it because you told me the same thing." When her son had a brain tumor and brain cancer a while back, that was many years ago, he's not 26 doing well. So I shifted my head. I said, "I have to do this," because with mist of all global crisis, there's always some personal crisis that every one of us go through whatever that is; family, career, finance, mental health, physical health, whatever. So I dove into this full blown, and I said, I'm going to write it from the point of global context, but the undercurrent is going to be how am I coping with it and also, can I have something, it is something for my son's generation where they can look at it as a, what were they going through? Because many of them have been going through college, maybe their first job, maybe their second job, some mid-career, younger generation who's trying to motivate their team, but who are completely out of touch because they're not having the physical connection. So a lot of those factors drove the ideas behind it. I categorized it in these four drivers, the pandemic, if you look at pandemic, not just staying home. A lot of people lost their family members, all stuff. I had my mother nursing and I couldn't visit her. My wife was the same thing. Then you saw these global shifts, the massive global shift and mood and misinformation. Doesn't matter which side of the political camp you were in. You saw the technologically starting working differently. Then the climate change those, the four drivers. I said, okay, well, if I have to look at that, what should we do? I said, well, first thing you have to do is really develop a acute sense of empathy, because you have to be able to relate to others in order to see where you are and how you can relate to them. Then leadership is a funny word, because nothing happens with leadership if you can't execute it. So you need some sort of a systemic pattern to make things happen. That's where system thinking came in. Then the last piece of it that you have to learn from experience. You can read books, you can go to school, but nothing like doing it. I mean, you said you were into farming and whatnot. I'm into cooking, and my neighbor has a big farm. We are big family at a hobby farm. I mean you learn from doing things, you have to get your hands dirty? Otherwise, you can't really learn. So that experiential learning is critical. Those are the backdrop of what was going on in my head. Then obviously I had a lot of help from a whole variety of people, my research team and others and we were able to dive into it pretty quickly. It came together quite nicely within six, seven months. I can't believe that this, May is when my son got diagnosed, and he's doing well now, but now it's just about a year, and we have the book out, and I didn't think I could pull it off. But you never know what you can do till your back is against the wall, and you find a new way of doing things. [TYLER] Well, I mean, there's, people are motivated by two things, desperation and inspiration, and I think you encompass that. I shared this earlier in preparation. I've got to spend the day with you before we ever got onto this and see your face. One of the things that I want to, you layered in something there that I really love, is this idea of being able to speak to your son. As I look at it as this generation of leadership, and now we're in the midst of financial turmoil. It's what is our economy going to do? We're recording this the beginning of June, 2022, and we can already see things that are going to happen. I look at that from the perspective of yourself. I experienced the 08, 09, 07 timeframe where you were obviously deep into that as well. As I find myself in conversation, having with people, it's like, well, this is what I learned. There's a part of me that reading through this book, there was a change in your life at some point where you learned to give it a backdrop, the importance, the imperativeness, the being better of transformational leadership as opposed to transactional leadership. You talk about that a lot in the book, and I'd love to know where did that come from for you? [FAISAL] I know, I mean, as I shared with you, I'm in the tech industry, my main line of business is building cutting-edge technology for business improvement. That's what I've done ever since I was maybe 19, 20. I have 19 years or 20 years old. And I've gone through series of classic entrepreneurship where you build a product, you raise a lot of money from VCs, you run fast and crash even faster and get fired from your own company because you're not getting along with your investors and whatnot. So I've gone through all that and so as time went by I found that running fast and building things for yourself or for ego is something different when you're young versus if you have, if you're fortunate enough to discover what really makes you happy at a later stage of your life. So that's, and I've gone through this transformative growth myself compared to when I was, let's say, when I was 24, then in my mid-thirties and in my mid-forties. Now I'm in my fifties, early fifties. I've gone through those stages and I was very fortunate to be able to work with a wide variety of people from all part of the world and a wide variety of industry with different motivation. People who are in public sector, they have a different calling that people who in private sector, people who are overseas maybe not in the US trying to do stuff like in social entrepreneurship stuff. Those are very different mindset but there is a common theme. The common theme is that you cannot make any impact if you cannot relate to other people. That's very that's very personal and emotional. The more you can relate to people it actually gives you an empowerment to elevate yourself from where you are and try to do stuff for other people. By the way, there's nothing more gratifying. You don't learn this when you're young. You learn it as you grow older. I mean, there's nothing more gratifying than trying to do something for other people. It makes you feel good? I mean, that's actually why I figure out about myself. One of the reasons I love to cook is because when you feed people, it makes them happy. So that's, it's very simple and very rudimentary, but that actually can translate to anything you can do. So when you're writing something you want to write from your own experience and share your knowledge, but you want to, you hope that it will actually do something for somebody or if you want to build a product that may have an impact for other people. So it changes your perspective, I think as you go to various phases of your life and you learn, and you build confidence by saying it does, there are things that we absolutely cannot control. I mean, a lot of the things that we are talking about, and even the looming financial, I wouldn't call it disaster yet, but the down cycle that we're noticing, or the war, whatever the case may be. I mean, as long as you keep building your own skillset and you try to put yourself as collective us, versus just yourself, I think things are going to be okay. By nature, I'm an optimistic person, and despite my professional, personal career, whatever disaster I have had I don't think I have, I mean, I have followed that principle, and it served me well. Then I increasingly surprised myself how much I could take in terms of adversity because there's nothing like dealing with your child's life-threatening illness and just hunker down and say, "Well, I'm a thriving career, but I want to do more." Actually, one of the reasons I wrote this book, and I set up a new organization, so all the proceed is going to go to cancer research. I mean, I'm not a doctor, I'm not a medical scientist. I know how to write, I know how to build a product, so my immediate thinking was, okay, let me do something that's going to generate some revenue, but I can take that revenue and give it to people who can do something with it to, for people who may be suffering from that. I guess what I'm trying to say is that the genesis of leadership action can come from many things. It can from adversity, just like you said. It can also come from other inspiration. It can come from whatever. Your motivation may be different, but your opportunity to make impact is enormous, in whatever thing that you can. It just takes a different mindset and different way of looking at it. [TYLER] One of the keys that you write about, and I mentioned earlier, that was probably the word that drew me into Lift was empathy. What I find is it's really a, is probably one of two words in business acumen that I find most misdefined or misunderstood. Humility is one where people are still have a hard time figuring that out and empathy is number two. So, I love to ask someone, especially like yourself, who's so ingrained as empathy is the solution, how do you define empathy? [FAISAL] Empathy has many definitions. Different people define empathy differently. The way I look at empathy is the ability to put yourself in somebody else's shoe, at least to be able to relate what they may be going through. The reality is that each person goes through different things, and each person feels it differently, acts differently, does things differently. So you're never going to be in their shoe, but you absolutely have, can develop that emotional awareness. It talks upon this little bit in my previous book called Everything Connects. The second edition, by the way, is coming out later in the year, which I've bulked it up. There's a whole addition on mindfulness, because empathy and mindfulness go hand in hand because you have to be mindful of your action and mindful of your surrounding. What that means is that you have to really tune to somebody else's feeling and be able to try to put yourself in the similar situation. I mean, for example, pain is pain. For example, so if you said, "Look, well, I can relate to you because you may have a broken leg but I know what a pain is because maybe you have a broken arm." We're not really having the same thing, but you understand pain. That's way to relate empathy and actually, if you look at it, one of the greatest learning, perhaps from the pandemic was that where the entire world was coming, going through one type of crisis together. So it actually made people more empathetic, and they say, oh, they can't go out so I guess I cannot go out either. So then must be in the same book. They can't visit their grandparents or their elderly parents because they're some somewhere else. I can do that either. It was a great lesson in forced way of trying to relate to somebody else's situation. What that allows you to do is that then you can start thinking of others first than yourself. It actually takes a certain level of discipline to practice empathy, especially when you're talking about in a work environment and leadership environment, because everybody's not our family. We can feel a family member's pain, but it's harder to feel a general stranger's pain or a co coworker's pain. But you have to have a conscious practice of empathy that allows you to say, okay, well, maybe I should not be as hard on that person. Maybe they're going through something. For example, I have a lot of colleagues all over the place all over the world, different time zones and different background and different expertise and different age group. By the way, I have lots of young developers, and then I have my colleagues in my government work that I do they are at a different age group but each one of them is going through different things. You have to stop yourself and let them express and build that personal connection and that actually will allow you to motivate people much better and faster than say, why didn't you come to work at 10 o'clock yesterday? What happened? Immediately that puts in the rather than say, are you okay, something went wrong or something, or do the break. I mean, this simple gesture of kindness allows us to connect. I wasn't that way when I was in mid-twenties, because I was very driven. I was very demanding to a certain extent probably very arrogant because I know it all. When you're young, you actually don't, well, I mean, you don't realize how little you know. But as you develop your skills, and as you develop your, go through different stages, some of these things get better, but you have to have a conscious practice and discipline to get to that fine tuning. Without that, nothing happens. [TYLER] So you've talked about, in the book, you talked about it just there, that style of leadership that you had, which was very transactional. It's very, what are you going to do for me today and if you're not, then I have no use for you. That's that ideology. You had that, you shared that, I've experienced that, I've gone through that myself. Why do you find that a generation of leaders have that style of leadership? What do you think drives that? [FAISAL] Well, because, I mean, you have to look at where does it come from. I mean, if you look at if you look at high performance people, I mean, and often they're the one who becomes leaders because they're high performers, and they know they're natural born leaders. For a high performer and natural born leader, it is very difficult to understand that not everybody acts the same way and does think the same way, even though each one of them has enormous talent and opportunity to contribute. So it starts from there, and then you pick up any management book. I mean, these conversations, these words that we are finally beginning to use now, like empathy and mindfulness and emotional intelligence. These are not the words you saw in seventies and eighties, and even in nineties. Pick up any management books, and there was, okay, here's the five pillar of success, put together a project plan, put together a milestone, and you track people by the milestone. So there's that aspect of it, and there's the other aspect of it that we are short-term outcome-driven society. So if we have a one back quarter, then the life is over. And it's proven, I mean, like, I don't know whether you see this, there's a new book. I'm not remembering the name, it criticizes GE, Jack Wal of his management practice, because he was very much, and I was in Jack's GE when I started my career. I mean, he was very much about the A players, B players and C players, and very much a transactional type of leadership style where you would manage things quarterly and you grow through financial acquisition. If you look at what has happened, they stopped innovating. Creative people left. They stopped innovating, and it has become a yesterday's company. The ripple effect of that happened long time after Jack retired from, from GE. And if you look at now, compare that to a lot of these new generation companies who are looking at things, okay, I've got this massive problem to solve. I know we're not going to make money, but we're going to somehow survive and we're going to get to it and we're going to focus on extracting the creativity of our people and then create something that is for long-term and not for the next quarter that impact is far more meaningful and if we don't get there, and we learn this in several cycle now. You talked about 08, and look at what has happened in last five years. It seems like the faster we try to run and faster we want to leave behind people who are not meeting the milestones, the farther we are falling behind. There's a reason for that. Because everybody doesn't learn the same way. Everybody just doesn't contribute that same way. Everybody doesn't measure success the same way. So the trick is looking at people and hone into their learning style and their creativity and their ability to make impact. That's the biggest challenge and role of a leader to make; extract and make the people who will make not only impactful contribution, but they'll surprise you. But you have to even nurture them. Then nurturing takes a lot more harder work than just looking at a spreadsheet and a milestone. [TYLER] It's such this confluence of so many different things. You touched on Jack and I want to get there for a moment because I think I read that same book, and I can't remember the title of it. I don't know if it's about the secession plan of Jeff Emmel, is the book that I read in that change. But one of the things that I found is understanding that everyone has value. I wrote this down and this thought that when I was going through Lift, and I want to grab it here quick, because one of the things that I understood and you pointed out is when you accept that everyone is different and other people have strengths that you don't have, and your ability to really foster that, it doesn't make you weaker. It makes you stronger. Instead, you're weak when you try to bring everyone into an organization that has the same strengths as you. I think you made a point here, the implementing of your transformational leadership, and it's be aware of your weaknesses and be okay with that through this self-awareness process. To me, that's so imperative and I think is --- go ahead. [FAISAL] No, I mean, you're right on. I mean, look, I didn't write live by myself. I had two contributing authors and researcher. I have a whole, I mean, if I really count all the people that I recruited just to do this Lift project, I think there's about 25, 30 people from different type of background expertise. There's a whole publishing team. So any creative output that has any substance and even a chance to resonate with other people and "lift" them up, you need to be able to tap into different people with different skillset. Different people with different skillset is going to have different personality. They're going to have a different way of working. Their bio with them is going to be different. Some people like to work early in the morning, some people works at night better, a wide variety of personality and skillset and work style that has to be meshed together to do something. None of these is a solo project. If you want to make any impact, everything is output of major collaboration. So the collaboration, and who do you want to collaborate? You don't want to collaborate with people who exactly does the same thing and same way, same personality. It won't work. You have to collaborate with people that adding something to the pot. So it's like making a pop gum. I mean, you get different ingredients and then it becomes a gum but the challenge is that I mean, we talk about organizational psychology and organizational culture is big topics these days. And you say, okay, well, what should be our culture and as the leader who sets the culture? I would argue that is the people who sets the culture, is the collective people's input that sets up the culture. I mean, you can have some common things that you have to be disciplined, but your definition of discipline may not be the same as somebody else's discipline. Discipline may, one person discipline may be that I work best at 12 o'clock at night, but discipline may be that that person goes to work 12 o'clock at night every night. My discipline maybe, I'm an early riser, so I get up at 4:30, 5:30, That's my discipline but I cannot say that other person is not disciplined because that person works at 12:30 at night. I don't really care what your way of working as long as you have a basic ethics and a respect for some other people, and you want to incorporate other people thought process and you have a "self-discipline" to execute something. That's what creates the framework of a culture and execution of collaboration. Let's face it, you talked about this generation. I mean I've always been this way in the sense that I think when you want to do innovative project, it's never the case that you're working with not just same people, but not even in the same organization. If you just look at Lift, I'm literally working with like four, five different companies and different organizations that are doing different things. Like, we just developed a whole coursework, that's a very documentary style coursework, which was done by a different team. The design team is different, the PR team is different, the people who were handling the e-commerce are different. So these are different organizations. You really, as a leader, it's your role to being able to pull these together and adapt yourself to their work style versus asking them to and adapt to your work style, because that you'll never be able to extract the best out of creative people if you're asking them to adapt to your work style. The leadership's role is really as an enabler. Just using Lift as an example, I think the reason it came together so quickly and midst of my own personal crisis is because I was able to hone into that, and I trusted the process, and I trusted that the people who are working at a various portion of this project, they will do their utmost and will end up with something meaningful. I'm just using that as as an example. [TYLER] I think you tap on a couple different factors there, the values. To me, as you said a leader doesn't make the culture. A leader either steers it one direction or other saying, "Hey, we're going to embrace more of that, or we're not going to it." It's that corrective measure, steer away from the guardrails but that's all based upon the values of the people. To me, you talk about this collaborative community, I want to be a part of that. I want to be a part of that I can bring my uniqueness, but that it's valued and I know if I bring that to the table and you bring your perspective to the table, man, we're going to come up with something much better than what either one of us could individually because of our differences but yet we've already established, I talked to you about this before, I value so much your perspective, because it's similar from a value point of view, but man, we're totally different spectrums of our experience. [FAISAL] Of course, obviously, there has been a lot of talk about diversity and inclusion and all that stuff, and we mostly focus on diversity or inclusion when it comes to, let's say, race religion or sex or gender. But I think that if you can move it up at one level up and say, okay diversity and inclusion comes from really honoring other people's talent that they bring to the table, it gives you a whole different perspective because then you don't really are not saying, well, I have to have a Asian team member or an African team member, or this team member, that team member. It's really that different perspective that you are trying to incorporate. So I think that's very important. You talk about value. I mean, that's the philosophical and almost like the spiritual tenant of a leader that holds it together. That's the glue that makes things together. So many ways, a successful leader is a spiritual and a philosophical leader who knows how to create the proper infrastructure by taking other people's experiential learning and infuse it into whatever they're trying to accomplish. That's when the magic happens. I'm very fortunate that I have been able to experience that multiple times, because each time I do one of these projects, I mean, I obviously, I think from a building a business point of view, but I look at each one of these uniquely projects that I take on every couple of years, and I look at them, it's like a making movie. You make one movie with a bunch of people, and then you make the next movie, and maybe you'll work with some of the people next time or not, but it's that same basic principle that you apply and it's real, very rewarding. I mean, it's super rewarding and creative and rejuvenating. I mean, it allows you to reinvent yourself. [TYLER] So taking that, what you just said, and this idea of this gardening style leader, a gardening style leader is like, "Well, this plant needs that. I just need to make sure the soil is fertile and everything's there so the plants can grow." At times that means, oh, I have to use different skills. Maybe I'm not good at adding fertilizer. I need to add water. Knowing that, to me, those are the soft skills. I mentioned to you that I wanted to dig into the Jack Welch, because I think there's an imperative thing that I believe was missed and I believe as I was the one that Welch leadership style, this hard aggressive, it is extremely competitive. But one of the things that I missed, and I think many people did, because they celebrated that extreme competitiveness but yet, as I read more and I discovered more, and I saw it after the fact, the actual empathy and soft skill that; he had the stories of when he would go to actual plants and spend time with the people working there. That wasn't discussed in what he was great at as far as his style of leadership, but to me, those were the skills that allowed those other things to actually be effective. [FAISAL] No, look, you're right, I mean, it is a gardening style of leadership that makes things, especially if you look at this newer generation. I know we talked about this extensively because the newer generation are not just from an age point of view, is from anybody. I mean, they're far more empowered. You don't have to work for GE. You don't have to work for Microsoft. You can take a laptop and sit in your dining room table and work. We are far more empowered than we were ever in the past. What that created now is that we have more options. Those leadership style wouldn't attract the best people anyway because we all have different option. It doesn't matter whether you're sitting here in Stanford, Connecticut, or like myself, my colleagues who are sitting in, let's say somewhere in Italy or somewhere in India or wherever. It doesn't matter. I mean, you have the same access and you are far more empowered than ever. So right there, you actually have a flattened that host mentality that you will perform otherwise you'll be gone. Now the answer will be great. You don't have to fire me. I'm resigning. That's why this whole conversation about the great resignation has been trending because it's like you have option. There's many factors to that, but that's one of the reasons, is that you have options. So that hard edge leadership would not allow you to bring in the best talent anywhere. That's number one. Number two is that winning at all cost, winning by demolishing other people along the way, it absolutely does not work. We win when we all win and it's not that we have to have the same reward. It rewards based on your contribution but we don't have to win at all costs, and we don't have to win by putting other people down. That has been in our culture very much so in say, let's say eighties and nineties and even 2000. It doesn't work. The younger generation wouldn't at all go for it because they, even look at this way, I mean these factors that if you didn't go to right school and we're not born in the right family, you couldn't do anything. That's absolutely not true. Our entrepreneurship culture, especially here in US, has proven them time and time again. I'm a college dropout. I didn't go to any Ivy League school. I've got deeply involved in academia, which I never planned in my wildest imagination but anything is possible. That's because you can learn. It comes from the ability to learn and ability to exercise your talent from anywhere and everywhere. So if you are that hard edge leader, you're not going to attract those people. They're going to go somewhere else. Right there is a motivation for a leader, especially if you're a business leader and you are that hardest competitive leader to change your leadership behavior because you're not going to, it's not going to work. I mean, we have proven that, and now more than ever, especially last three years, we have proven that the world is a far different place than it was before, emotionally, technologically systemically, everything has changed and it won't work. It's just a different place. [TYLER] To the leader that is sitting there saying, "Let's get back to normal. Let's get back to what it was in 2019. Let's get back to, oh, we were doing so well back then, then we had this pandemic we had to deal through, and let's get everyone back in the office, and let's just get back to normal." The oversight, the absolute miss is we're never going to. It's for good and bad, I mean bad because of, obviously you talk about the health challenges, the impact on our society, but for good, because we've realized there's a better way. [FAISAL] Yes, and by the way, extremism is never good in the sense that when the pendulum swings in one direction there's an impact. So there's this very ancient Eastern saying where it says that if you have your string tuned so hard, it stops making music or it breaks. So it's a really notional balance. I mean, you can't have people just be at home all the time because you lose that social connection, especially for the younger generation. I mean, they need to be a part of a physical team from time to time to learn collaboratively. You need that human interaction. You couldn't sit and Zoom calls or team calls or whatever anybody's using seven by 24 and work. You have to have that human connection, nor it is necessary to be it a office desk in your cubicle every day, eight hours a day. I mean, that doesn't make people productive either. So is this a fine balance and funny way of saying this because, and I just, a fast company just ran one of my articles today on this very topic about where I touched upon the fact that, okay just because you're remote doesn't mean you have to lose that human connection nor you have to go other extreme where you have to have everybody in the office every day, and that's the formula for more productivity and creativity. It doesn't work either. So you have to have the balance. It's not about free food and fussball and staying there seven by 24 and living your, we've gone through that phase too. I mean, every Silicon Valley company had free food and ping pong table and thought that would be the great calling for productivity because everybody is going to be there seven by 24. I mean, that's like being at home stuck in a room for seven by 24. You need to see, you have to connect with outside in order to extract what's inside and you can't do that if there is not that balance. You need that. We use this word called intentionally omnivores, not in Lift, but in Everything Connects. It carries over. It's the idea of that you have to experience many facets of the global society and global learning. Only then you can be productive and creative. It doesn't come from isolation. [TYLER] You talk about this and lift this experiential learning, how do you figure out how to lead is you have to go be in that spot. There's additional to that I've learned, and to me it's called layered learning. So it's taking that experience, but then coming in and having discussions with others like, well, what's working, not working? Within a capacity of your leadership community, it's like, hey, help me understand where am I missing the mark? Where am I not meeting the needs that you have as a team? Where can we collaborate better? I think having that ability to be vulnerable enough and humble enough to say, I'm just trying to figure this out. My job is to help you achieve our grand vision. That's my responsibility and role, and my response and role is to you as the performer, but we're all performing together. How can we get there? To me, as I gather that from what everything you've written and what you've talked about, when a leader can embrace that man, it not only frees them, but it frees everyone else. [FAISAL] Absolutely. I mean, leadership can be a burden. I mean, it can be a very big burden, but more and more you talk about being vulnerable. I found myself, especially last one year because, midst of going through my son treatment and doing this book, plus I have two running organization that I'm dealing with, where I'm leading and I often found myself telling my team members that guys, "I need a break. I can't deal with this today." I think it was refreshing to them to see that and it motivated them even more because it was, if this guy can do this why wouldn't we do this? So it's important to be able to relate with other people by opening yourself up. And it's not a weakness to say you can't do something and maybe somebody else can do it better. As a leader, it's your job to uplift that person, extract that person and put them on the pedestal when they deserve to be put on the pedestal. That's how you create great projects. I mean there's not a single piece of music that, I wouldn't say never, but I mean, nine out of 10 times, every piece of music is a music created by a collection of people, which is extremely a creative process. Same with building a software platform or putting up that great meal or building a farm, whatever the case may, or building a community. These are very much of the ability to bring people together for a cause and executing it from that point of view. [TYLER] To wrap up here, one of the things I'm really intrigued is, as you're invested so much in this technological transformation of organizations for the best, what do you see that's going to be a big stretch for a lot of current leaders the next few years? [FAISAL] I think t's many-fold because things are increasingly very, very complex. For example, the people who know soft skills and people who know the various things that we just talked about, they are often are not very in tune with technological, fast-based that has happened in the global society. So there's a disconnect. Then the people who know deep technology often have the inability to exercise all these things we are talking about and bringing people together. Then the last piece of it is that constantly telling yourself, I need to learn something new, and I have to have this notion of beginner's mind where I have to learn something new because I don't know what I knew tomorrow doesn't really work today, that that renewal and reinvention process is not always there. Each of these things that we just talked about, you can spend a lifetime just studying empathy or a lifetime just studying system thinking or lifetime thinking, studying a reinvention process or an effective load of technology, for example, cybersecurity or whatever. Data science, which is really my feel. But you could spend a lifetime thinking and doing those sort of things. The trick is you know that you're not going to be able to learn all that. The trick is that, can you learn how to tap into people who are best into each of those areas and constantly nurturing them and learn from them, but also trying to take their output and make something out of them as a total impact on a particular project or a particular organization or a particular community, and gets larger and larger on the country, and then on a globe. I mean, one of the reasons we have created this fragmented society as a globe is because we have been living in very silos. Organization lives in silos, community lives in silos, countries live in silos and we've forgotten, even though we know we are an interconnected society. If nothing else, pandemic showed that to us. I mean, an outbreak in one place immediately impacts the entire globe. We've forgotten. That was a wakeup call to show that you can't live in silos and the next generation leaders are going to be best if they have that mindset that I'm not going to know everything. I don't need to know everything. I just need to know how to tap into people who know those things that I need to tap into and make something out of it. You are really a conductor. A leader is a conductor. Leader is not the drummer or the guitarist or the celloist. You have to be the conductor, but you may choose that you don't want to be a conductor. That's okay too. [TYLER] Yes. Well, and that I think is the, it comes back to what you said earlier, not to belabor this, but it's how a lot of people have ended up in leadership as they were high performers. I think we need to reidentify, what does a, a great collaborator is the person that needs to be leading, not the highest performer, the individual performer, because those two skills do not enhance an organization's growth. I believe this, and reading through the stuff, you have this idea of embracing the digital transformation. I think if you do that and you do that in a sense, to meet the internal and external customers, all those involved, man, that's where things are actually going to improve. But yet, instead of being afraid that we're going to lose human connection, no, just understand, model that through the improvements. How can we enhance our connections? How can we make it easier for me to serve customers, both internal, external? I believe that's what you're really professing. I love it because to me, that's what's going to allow organizations to really strive and thrive going forward. [FAISAL] Absolutely. It applies in every industry, by the way. It's not just business. I mean, look at how we treat patient and try to take care of people who are sick. The healthcare, look at how we are trying, how the government needs to serve the citizens. Look at how the educational system needs to change because the learning pattern has changed and the materials are not the same. The creative people don’t learn the same way as people who are very much focused on a structural learning. These are missed opportunities if we are not in tune to all the things we've talked about. It is not just about building a better business, it's really about building a impactful society. It doesn't matter where your station in life is, you can practice this and you can make an impact. You should, because it's fulfilling. I mean, it's truly fulfilling when you get to tap into that, and it doesn't have to be just about financial success. Of course, we need financial success because that allows us to be opportunistic, to do all other things. But it is not about building a better business for financial success, because that's not often successful. By the way, that's not often even long lasting. If you do a case study on GE, that's perhaps one of the biggest learning, because Jack's GE was all about financial performance, yet at the end they didn't really sustain that innovation that they were appreciating and striving. [TYLER] Faisal, thank you so much. This has been great. I could go on for hours. I want to be respectful of your time and I'd rather queue it up for another time for us to sit down and maybe have a gumbo. If I make it to connect, I'd love to. Thank you again for all your time. [FAISAL] Thank you. Thank you so much. Really enjoyed it. Thank you. [TYLER] There were two moments in that conversation with Faisal that I really just like, oh man. One of them, when he talked about how, through the process of writing the book Lift and working with these different companies, that he had to take a moment to say, "Hey guys, I can't do all this." I think that amount of vulnerability, and I didn't get to say this to him, but I wish I would've, was like a younger Faisal might have said, "Oh, I got this all figured out," and roughly and abruptly just push through or push people away so he could go and deal and not say, "Hey, I need help. I don't have the capacity in this today." I think that that learning, that maturity that he shared, that he had to learn from when he was 24 and an early executive when he got fired from his company by the investors to who he is now in his fifties, a man that has learned a better way as he talked about this idea of cooking and putting all the special ingredients together. If you've listened to the last several episodes that have been featured here on the Impact Driven Leader podcast, we've had those conversations coming from different guests. And I didn't intend that. It just happened to be, that came through conversation and that came through conversation because it's that meaningful. A leader's greatest opportunity is to be a collaborator. And Faisal talks about in his book, Lift, the difference between a cooperator and a collaborator and I really like it. A collaborator helps everyone get better. They use the different resources and abilities of everyone to perform at a higher capacity. A cooperator just gets along. They just say, let's get through this. Maybe the easiest way for me to cooperate is just disengage. I'll go do my own thing. That's not collaboration. That doesn't make organizations great. As a leader, as a performer, do you have the opportunity to do something better, to be a transformational leader If you choose to collaborate. It's not about what you bring to the party. It's not about how do you protect yours? It's saying, hey, I have a bigger vision and I need your help. If we do this together, man, I know we can do something really special and being willing to say it's not about my individual performance. It's what little bit I can bring and what you can bring. Man, that's what's going to make a total difference. I learned about this leadership in network marketing. It's this volunteer army of how do we accomplish something greater? I'm thankful for that helped me grow as a person and I'm thankful to have conversations with Faisal so that way I can share with you too. I'd love to do this. I talked about it in this interview, layered learning. That's something I believe in tremendously, the experiential learning as he talked about, but also that layered learning. That's what happens in our round table. I'd love to invite you to be a part of that round table where we go through a book. We don't go line by line through the book chapter through chapter, but we use it as a prompt to have real life world conversations, just like Faisal was talking about. That's how you learn to be a transformational leader with the desire to transform others' lives through your capacity to collaborate. I know you need a group to do that. That's what I've learned. Faisal talked a little bit about it too, and I'd love to invite you to be a part of the Impact Driven leader round table. If you've gotten value out of these episodes, I'd love to talk to you about that and see if you could join and be a part of our community. Otherwise, man, thanks for listening in. I'd love for you to share this with someone. If you're not a subscriber on YouTube or listening, love for you to subscribe. Make sure you get notified every Friday whenever a new episode comes out. You can also subscribe to my newsletter that comes out on Friday, introducing each podcast episode. Then there's also two blogs that get launched on my website Monday and Wednesday every week, where you can learn a little bit what I'm learning about too because there's all the process of learning as he talked about. Thanks for joining in. Thanks for being a listener and a viewer. Till next time, have a good one.