The skills and sensibilities we needed in the industrial age are no longer working. But according to my guest today, Saqib Rasool, we are approaching skills development as if we were machines – just sprinkle some knowledge or insert some new information and BAM we will transform our leadership style. Instead, he offers a different way to navigate these new skills and improve performance.
Today, we discuss how the leadership paradigm has changed and why our approaches to skill development often fail, because they rely on people fitting into rational machine models – which they do not! We discuss examples of how one crucial mindset shift works better, and why breakdowns are not a bad thing, but an opportunity for leaders to shift their mindset, engage in tough conversations, and listen to what is important to others – thus building the new leadership skills you need to succeed. We discuss how even the field of change management has changed and how you can shift from “power over” leadership models to “power with” models that lead to better results.
To access the episode transcript, please scroll down below.
Key Takeaways:
- Humans don’t give feedback; machines give feedback. Humans give opinions, both good and bad.
- The most dangerous and unproductive leader is the one who believes they have nothing else to learn.
- Be willing to set aside what you believe as true. Breakdowns can only be solved by being willing to hear the truth, no matter what it is.
“Even in industrial environments, the value is created in our ability to coordinate action with each other in conversations, to deal with breakdowns with each other, and to really see possibilities for innovation might exist in the breakdowns.” — Saqib Rasool
Episode References:
- The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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Saqib Rasool, CEO, Conceivian
Saqib is a serial entrepreneur, coach, and author. Starting his career at Microsoft, he later built several startups and founded a start-up accelerator. Saqib’s passion for cultivating leaders and entrepreneurs led him to study human potential, teamwork, innovation, entrepreneurship, and communications. Saqib has coached countless changemakers to unfold their potential, see the breakdowns ripe with opportunities, and set bold missions. He lives in the Seattle area and travels globally for work.
Connect with Saqib:
Conceivian: conceivian.com
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/saqibrasool
Facebook: facebook.com/saqibrasool
Instagram: instagram.com/saqibrasoolofficial
Conceivian’s Emerging Leaders Program. A Revolutionary Approach To Building Leadership, Management, and Communication Capacities for Upward Mobility In Career & Performance in Enterprises: conceivian.com/elp
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FULL TRANSCRIPT:
Welcome to the empathy edge podcast, the show that proves why cash flow, creativity and compassion are not mutually exclusive. I’m your host, Maria Ross, I’m a speaker, author, mom, facilitator and empathy advocate. And here you’ll meet trailblazing leaders and executives, authors and experts who embrace empathy to achieve radical success. We discuss all facets of empathy, from trends and research to the future of work to how to heal societal divisions and collaborate more effectively. Our goal is to redefine success and prove that empathy isn’t just good for society, it’s great for business. The skills and sensibilities we needed in the industrial age are no longer working. But according to my guest today, Saqib Rasool, we’re approaching skills development as if we were machines. Just sprinkle some knowledge or insert some new information, and bam, we will transform our leadership style. Instead, he offers a different way to navigate these new skills and improve performance. Saqib is a serial entrepreneur, coach and author and CEO of concevian, starting his career at Microsoft, he later built several startups and founded a startup accelerator, as he shares today, his curiosity for the design of computers led him to a curiosity for the design of human beings. Saqib passion for cultivating leaders and entrepreneurs led him to study human potential, teamwork, innovation, entrepreneurship and communications. Saqib has coached countless change makers to unfold their potential, see the breakdowns ripe with opportunities and set on bold missions. Today, we discuss how the leadership paradigm has changed and why our approaches to skills development often fail because they rely on people fitting into rational machine models, which they do not. We discuss examples of how the crucial mindset shift works better, and why breakdowns are not a bad but an opportunity for leaders to shift your mindset, engage in tough conversations and listen to what is important to others, thus building the new leadership skills you need to succeed. We discuss how even the field of change management has changed, and how you can shift from power over leadership models to power with models that lead to better results. Take a listen. Welcome to the empathy edge. Saqib, I’m so happy to have you here. We were just talking. It’s been probably over a decade since you and I met in person back in a coffee shop in Seattle to talk about all the wonderful things conceiving is all about. So welcome to the show.
Saqib Rasool 02:49
Yeah. Thank you, Maria. It’s really an honor and pleasure to be here and good to see you.
Maria Ross 02:53
Good to see you, good to see you. So you know you are coaching. You are an academy for change makers at conceivion. So tell us a little bit about how you got to this work. What are you most passionate about?
Saqib Rasool 03:06
Yeah, thank you for the question, Maria. I think that if I look at my career, the first part of my life, I was interested in the design of computers. I worked for Microsoft. I was in technology, and I think at some point in time, after spending some time at Microsoft, building my own startup, launching ventures, I began to be more interested in the design of human beings. I found out that technology is great to build, and after having lot of funding and technology and ideas and everything, what really made people succeed or fail is how who they were as human beings and how they were being, how they were acting. So that shifted my focus from working on technology systems to work on, I could say, Human Design, and that’s really brought me to where I am. I think
Maria Ross 03:57
I love that, that just that natural curiosity of how things work transferred from computers to humans. That’s so great Indeed, indeed. Yeah, so let’s talk a little bit about the leadership paradigm. I talk a lot about this, but you know, we’re going into a new century, and the old rules are dying in terms of leadership and in terms of what we understand successful leadership to be so why do you think that shift has happened? What’s going on with the shift from an industrial environment? That’s what was needed then, that is no longer really as important now,
Saqib Rasool 04:35
right, right into the heart of the matter here. I think that when industrial revolution began, we began to work with machineries that we also took human beings like machineries. We thought that the human nature could be fitted into exact rational categories. People will know exactly who they are, and what would they study, and who will they become? And we’ll have a stable life path and what certification and degree and all those imaginations that we had about what human beings were, I think that’s coming to an end. First of all, the mode of value production that for the longest time was all about output minus input, and that’s what value is. I don’t think that the value is created that way anymore. I think even in the industrial environments, the value is really created in our ability to coordinate action with each other, in conversations, to deal with breakdowns with each other, and to really see that what possibilities for innovation that might exist in breakdowns. In the old era, breakdown was a bad thing. If you made a mistake, you better swipe it under the rug. But in this new era, breakdown is inevitable, and so our ability to deal with with each other, in conversations, to to navigate action, there’s a new dynamic era in which that’s really, I think, where the value is coming from. And that’s a one major shift that I can just point at right away.
Maria Ross 06:10
Absolutely, I started my career several decades ago as a change management consultant, and that was all about the people side. It was actually a new function within the Big Six consulting firm that I was working in, because they realized that their technology implementations would fail if they didn’t acknowledge and shore up the human component. And so that’s where, you know, those change management practices within those consulting firms was born because they realized, oh yeah, we have to take people along with us. It’s not just about flipping a switch and then all the people will come along. So that’s kind of what I hear, echoes of that in what you’re saying in terms of that leadership model. So how is that mindset shift impacting what leaders need to be good at? Impact the skills they should have to be successful, right?
Saqib Rasool 07:02
So even if you take the function of change management in the old days, the change management was really about to perceive our current state and perceive a vision a new state, and then come up with set of procedures and policies and pushing people emotions and and their actions and fitting them into rational categories actually change management. There’s a book by Nassim Nicholas Talib called the bed of procrestus. You know the metaphor of the bed of procrestus? Procrestus was it’s a fable with a Greek innkeeper that invited people to his inn, and as they slept on the bed, he measured the people. If they were longer than the bed, he would chop off piece of their head and piece of the feet to make sure that they fit inside the bed. And if they were shorter than the bed, he would stretch them so make sure they fit the bed. And I think that was the beginning of the Big Five, the consulting, the change management. But even that very discipline of change management is now changing right. Change management is more about being able to navigate the contingency that comes up. We are living in an era where new contingencies, things we never anticipated before, some internal factors, external factors, changes in the moods and orientation of people. What is Gallup reporting now? Something like 70% people disengaged at work. That’s an emergence covid emergence, the emergence of AI, all these emergencies and contingencies and anomalies that are coming up today’s change management has to be about not the implementation of perfect procedures and policies, but the development of resilience and what you call empathy, the ability to see what matters to others. And this ability to see what matters to others is not a one time occurrence. It’s an ongoing, constant conversation in which we orient ourselves to others world that I think is a fundamental mindset, as you called it, that’s shifting the old mindset was my agenda, my mission, how my vision is and how I’m going to implement that vision, and if anybody got in my way, God bless them. But I think that style is no longer working. The style that’s really needed today is our ability to really listen and not just listen to repeat what the other person says and act like you’re listening, but really being able to suspend our opinion machinery that’s constantly running in the background. We cannot get rid of it. We are opinion making machines, and that’s going to go on and on, but the ability to put a pause on it, and being able to see what might matter to the other person, even if we decide. Agree, I think that one particular skill that’s required now than ever before, the command and control structures are not working, and the ability to power with versus power over that, I can highlight as a fundamental shift in the mindset or frame of mind that’s happening now.
Maria Ross 10:19
So much good stuff in there. I mean, I think your point around how even change management has changed is so true that it’s really, there really was a formula. There really was a methodology for how to manage change, and some of that framework still applies, but now we’re actually factoring differences in human beings and where they are and how they learn and what their experiences have been, that it’s not a one size fits all, and I think that all of those changes are good things, because it tells us that diversity and inclusion are becoming more baked into how successful companies get ahead by having those different ways of thinking, those different life experiences, but when you bring those into an organization, you can’t it’s kind of like change management. You can’t just bring them in and then still operate the way you’ve always operated. You’ve got to learn a different way to operate in order to harness the value of all those different perspectives and voices in your group. So you, you know, you spend a lot of time coaching and working with leaders on making this shift. So what are some of the ways that they build these skills? So they come to you and you’re like, these are the things you need to be better about. These are the things that are going to serve you better. What are some of the skills that you’re working with leaders on now to help them be more successful in this new paradigm?
Saqib Rasool 11:46
Yeah, I think a really great question, by the way, one thing I think we need to, let me preface that with something. One thing we need to get away from is the idea that skills could be built, like how we sprinkle salt on salad, you know, like their add ons. Attachments to people’s skills are not really attachments to people in which they could be lectured about something, and the skill could be built the way a sensibility for navigation, sensibility for working with others, could be built when we have a serious breakdown. For example, recently, I was working with a leader at a major healthcare company. This is they’re about to they’re preparing for acquisition, and this leader has been there for a while, but the new CEO came in, and the new CEO did not see their role as clearly as the older CEO. So what started to happen that a lot of friction begin to get built up, and I got brought into the situation. I had been coaching the CEO before CEO asked me to speak with them. So they were first like, wow, you know, you’re the CEO’s guy, and you’re gonna tell me on how to be. And I think that what I found that they are really well meaning people, but they really pay attention to what matters to them. So in conversations, I begin to ask both the CEO and the CFO to begin to pay attention to what matters to the other person. Now this is it feels like common sense. It feels like, Yeah, you should we I should be able to see, hey, if I’m gonna show up at your podcast for interview, one thing mattered to you. You said, Hey, you should have an external mic, and so on and so forth. And in my head, hey, I have a brand new Mac, and the microphone works really good. But that’s what matters to me, so the ability to suspend what matters to you and begin to be able to see what matters to the other person, in which the breakthrough does not come by trying to apply some you have learned, but rather, breakthrough comes by being inside the conversation and then suddenly There’s the light that goes off to say, ah, oh, I still remember when the CFO said, Well, I didn’t realize I was being a jerk and and he literally went to the CEO and said, You know what, I want to acknowledge that I was really being a jerk and I didn’t see that before. Yeah, I was only attached to what really mattered to me, and I was not listening what mattered to you now in this moment, both of them don’t realize, and consequently, CEO also own, that while I got hired by the board, I had an agenda, I had this productivity goals, blah, blah, blah, but I did not see what mattered to you was autonomy and independence and this and this department, and as both of them sort of spoke what mattered to each other, a new skill was developed. So to look back to your question, I think the skill development model that we have used for the longest of time in which we think of. Of human beings as information machines. And when we think about a skill, we think, if we sprinkle some information on top, people will know what to do. And I think that model itself is failing. I think the model that is now available for skill development is really courageously and boldly deal with the breakdowns that are right in front of us. This Gallup’s survey that is showing us 70% disengagement. I think it’s a matter of missing skills, because everyone is getting too isolated in their own little corner, and maybe in the language of your podcast, that they’re losing empathy. They think empathy is only like feeling good for others or having nice emotion for others. Empathy, in this case, is not like a personalized emotion. Empathy shows up as the ability to courageously have those difficult conversations that you don’t want to have the conversations that might put you at risk having those conversations. I think people can develop new skills of listening to each other, navigating together. You may not know exactly what that skill might look like ahead of time, but as you courageously open conversations that are really stuck that you’re afraid to have. You risk your identity, identity a little bit. It’s like playing on the field, not sitting on the sidelines, not taking training courses, but playing on the field and possibly giving someone else permission to tap on your shoulder to say, Hey, by the way, that was not well played. Do it again? Yes, kind of openness. Can, I think really, can really develop new skills.
Maria Ross 16:47
So what I hear you saying is that it’s not so much about different skills they might be lacking, but really, the first quote, unquote, skill they need to that will open the door to any of the other skills they need is the ability to embrace empathy and to find out what’s important to the other person and to actually have that conversation. Am I hearing that right? Well, said, That’s right. So how do you help your leaders take that first step? Because what if they’ve never been that kind of leader before, and then all of a sudden they’re in the conversation. Do you give them scripts? Do you role play with them? How do you get them to be in the conversation where all of a sudden I’m in the conversation with a leader, and they’re asking me questions, and they’ve never done that before, and that might make me feel uncomfortable, of like, Why are you all of a sudden asking what I think? And so how do you help them actually have that initial, those first initial conversations to find out what is important to someone else?
Saqib Rasool 17:49
Yeah, I think you said it. Well, it’s all of the above. I think it’s the role playing and scripts and everything, but they only do part of the job. I think the first thing I invite leaders to do is to be comfortable with being uncomfortable. Oftentimes, we are such animals of habit and comfort that anything that feels uncomfortable, we run from it. We don’t want to confront it. We don’t want to go into the conversation. We don’t want to take the challenge. Some people, some leaders, actually, even in positions, I’m working with CEO of another company, a major venture fund, and she is an extraordinarily nice person. Being extraordinarily nice has and very intelligent and well connected, but this being very nice has become a long term habit, but now in some places, you need to kill being nice doesn’t cut it. Being nice will not confront the major challenge and the issue that’s happening in the team. You need to give up being nice and take a risk. But the opposite of being nice is not being nasty. Yes, the misunderstanding the opposite of being nice is being direct, being straight, being go to the heart of the matter. So yes, role play, and maybe listening to conversations like this, yeah, really reflecting and pondering, yeah, and maybe giving someone else whom you might trust to help you, a mentor, a coach, a confidant to come and listen to what’s going on and giving someone else permission to call you out. How many of us we build, all of our identity, our I don’t want to say ego, because we are all egoistic, but really an identity we invest so much, as the Chinese say, means keeping the face. We are so invested in keeping the face that every once in a while, it’s okay to let your repetition be ruined a little bit and not be so invested in looking good feeling good, I say in my business, often time. That we kidnap ourselves in these psycho prisons, and we appoint two prison guards looking good and feeling good, and then these prison guards, they keep us in the psycho prisons where, like a god forbid, anything might look bad or feel bad, right? So to your question, I think the development of a new sensibility, a new skill, which is not like an information, but it is actually a matter of a nervous system and how your body engaged in the game. It begins by willingness to do things that are uncomfortable, and perhaps role play and thinking out loud. But no matter how much you prepare, the you know it’s cold outside, you prepare with all the jackets and everything, but the moment you go outside, it is cold now, right? Yes, preparation is a key, but also when you engage actually in the game on the ground, that’s what begins to then rewire your circuitry. So
Maria Ross 21:02
are there any interesting exercises you give your clients to learn how to be comfortable with being uncomfortable, other than you know, talking them through that? Is there any, are there any challenges you issue to them, or exercises you make them do? I’m just curious
Saqib Rasool 21:20
tons. I, as you, just asked this question right away, what comes to mind? Let me see. Let me pull something out from my repertoire. One thing I ask leaders to do is to hold a team meeting. In this case, I asked one CEO to hold a meeting with their ELT, with their executive leadership team, and issue the first statement to say, I promise whatever happens here, none of you will be in trouble. Okay, there will be no repercussions. I assure you, yeah, that you’re safe. Number
Maria Ross 21:54
one. Number two, that’s how, that’s how they started the meeting. Well,
Saqib Rasool 21:57
I asked them to write it down and start the meeting by saying that whatever is going to happen here you there will be no repercussions. You will not be in trouble. You have my promise. Everyone is listening. Number one. Number two, now say something to me that you have never been willing to say to me, take a risk, and whoever takes the greatest risk will be my closest ally here say something that you never want to say to me, Wow. Now what you see like the sushi chef, they begin to take the pieces of the filet. Let yourself be fileted that way. Let people speak to you what they’re so afraid and scared to speak to you and make the environment comfortable. So that’s one exercise that comes to mind. I often ask people to make a negative assessment. You know, one mistake we make in these kind of exercises. We tell each other, give me feedback, and we don’t remember. We forget too easily. We don’t remember that the word feedback actually comes from the industrial era. Machines produce feedback. You know, if you have a motor that’s going, clunk, clunk, clunk, clunk, clunk, that’s feedback. We human beings don’t give each other feedback. We give each other’s opinions. So but you have a negative opinion of me developing the capacity to listen to someone’s negative opinion. It could be grounded. Could be ungrounded. I may agree, I may disagree, but at least I should have the willingness to listen to negative opinion that I think is the beginning of the game. So this exercise asking your teammates to say something to you, make a negative assessment, give you a negative opinion, not like it’s a truth. And then the next part in this exercise is, don’t fight it. Don’t try to start explaining right away. I often tell them, no justification, no excuses, no ducking the questions. Simply say, Yeah, I could hear why you might say that. Thank you. Could be grounded. Could be ungrounded, and I’ve asked you to say that to me, yeah, and I hear you. We can explore it later. Don’t try to fix it right away, right? We listen to each other’s opinions like you have the wrong truth. If you give me a bad opinion, yeah, I will fix your bad opinion right now, right? And that results in a new fight. Here
Maria Ross 24:27
is, oh, my gosh, you just gave me this awesome idea to go back to, to people that I used to work with and say, you know, because usually we’re going back, like, Oh, can you tell me what you think I do really well. Just, can you tell me something that was really negative about working with me just so I can but this all goes back to putting ego aside so that you can embrace empathy and embrace another person’s point of view. Because if you’re able to do that as a leader, it shows that you still have a growth mindset. If you become a leader who thinks there’s nothing else left for you to learn that’s. The most dangerous and unproductive leader there is. So I love what you’re saying, and this is why, exactly why self awareness is pillar number one in my new book in the empathy dilemma. Because until we know what we’re dealing with and how we show up and what we bring into the interaction, we can’t emotionally regulate in a way that when other people have ideas or other people want to share their truth, we have no space for that. We’re going to meet it all with defensiveness and fear and trying to fix it, like you said. So we really have to become addicted to that growth mindset. Even when it comes to our own leadership style, there’s always, always, always going to be room for improvement. There’s no such thing as a perfect leader, and this is why the leaders I really admire are the ones that can surround themselves with people that are a, they deem smarter than them, and B, people they know that will challenge them that don’t think the same way they think. And, you know, I learned that lesson, a very valuable lesson, years ago, when I was working in corporate and I was looking to hire someone, there was someone that came through the interview process, and my immediate perception of that person was that they were really arrogant, and my manager said, I want you to give them another chance. I want you to give them a different exercise on their next interview with you, because I think that this person has very complimentary skills to you, so that’s probably why you’re perceiving this as arrogance. But I actually perceive this person as having some very complimentary skills, and I think you’ll make a good team. And we gave them a different exercise to do in the next round of interviews, and I ended up hiring that person, and it was one of the best relationships because, because he wasn’t like me, that was the whole point was that actually I couldn’t see it, yeah, and I needed someone to say, No, you need to go back and reassess your initial judgment of this
Saqib Rasool 27:03
person, beautiful, yeah, very nice. And in that case, you, you know, I say that to call out someone else’s arrogance, it needs to begin with taking responsibility for our arrogance, right? We are right. We are all arrogant people. And you know, I like to see arrogance as more like a technical issue, less of like a moral issue. Oftentimes, when we make such a program to see that as a technical issue, arrogance is over investment into an identity without preparation. So often time we are really invested into maintaining some identity, and we fail to see that we are not well prepared in a certain domain, in a certain area, in certain thing. So when we begin to take ownership of our lack of preparation about some area and say, You know what, maybe I don’t know as well as I think I do in this area. That gives the other person space an opportunity to say, Yeah, you know, come think of it. It takes a little while before somebody could say, you know, I’m a very arrogant person. Then take some enlightenment, yeah, and, and you talked about ego, how interesting I maybe we can put ego aside the way I say it. Ego is like a cloth for us to wear. It is when our cloths begin to wear us, we are in trouble. You know, for different times, like when you bring a mother, you need mother’s ego. You need to tell the kid, no, I know what I’m talking about, stop it, or you will get a timeout. That’s mother’s ego that says, I know what I’m talking about. But when you are an employee, when you’re a CEO, you need different kind of egos, and so we must be willing to let others dent our ego. The challenge is that we don’t want that ego, that identity, to be dented, we put all of our chips on the table to defend and protect our identity. I believe that if we allow our identity to be dented in place of it, a new kind of identity, a new a larger ego, that maybe include all the other egos. If we can interchangeably use ego and self with each other, yeah, larger self can emerge that has concern for broader areas, for broader communities of people. So
Maria Ross 29:33
yeah, and I love that you’re, you know, you’re using ego in the true sense of what it means, which is self and when I mean put ego aside. That’s more put my own arrogance aside, yes, my own self interest aside, right? Awesome. And I know that there’s two ways to look at that, so I love that. So you know, again, all of this sounds great is that, yes, we need to get better at listening. We need to get better at trusting, and that’s going to make us a more success. Successful leader. But what do you have to say to someone starting on that journey, someone that’s like, Okay, I know that’s what I have to do, but how do I get from point A to point B?
Saqib Rasool 30:12
I think that that’s an interesting question. How do I get from point A to point B? You know, I want to go back to earlier, what I brought up is like, what really matters here, if we try to absorb skills, like they’re good attributes, like we try to absorb collection or something body, or we try to take vitamin pill in the morning, I think that these kind of things cannot be done like this. I think it’s a big mistake when we build up this, these self development goals, in a sense, I think that I ask my clients to give up any kind of self development. The problem with self development is that it’s focused on self that. And if you want to cause an instant depression, start thinking about yourself. Soon enough, you will begin to feel not so good about yourself. So the whole trick is to take the focus off of yourself, and it’s like a light shining on you. Take that light and turn it onto others, and what really matters here, so then it’ll be more clear to you, where are you going, what the point is, what the point B is, what’s required to get there. But it’s not so much like it’s a journey of your vision. It’s more of a journey that in care and service to the community that you care about. You’re an executive, your community, as your team, yeah, as your team, your customers and and take a look what matters to them and be willing to listen to something you disagree with. I think the combination of to see what matters to other people, be willing to listen to something you disagree with, that can take you so far beyond to D to C to D to all the way to the last alphabet, and then all the way around again. Then you may go beyond this is what I call unfolding your potential. Your potential cannot unfold, or cannot be unfolded. Is that a right word? Your potential cannot be unfolded by you thinking about becoming something new, your potential can only show up when you engage with what truly matters and what is really broken, what is in the way, what is blocking, what is dissatisfying, to your customers, to your People, to your team when you deal with that, and you deal with it in such a way that you set aside what you believe to be the truth about the situation, something quite magical, we could say, something that’s quite mysterious in the religious language, something godly or in the in the corporate language potential is something mysterious that truly makes us human being, that can leap out and can take you beyond an innovation and possibility and power and financial power and all sorts of power together can begin to show up for communities. I love it.
Maria Ross 33:22
I love this idea of you having a very practical approach to the coaching that you do, which is, if you can get your coaching clients to focus on, like you said, what’s broken what’s breaking down, then that automatically puts them in a frame of mind of like, well, I have to find out why it’s breaking down, so I have to talk to the people that are impacted by what’s breaking down, which means I have to talk and listen to people, right? And so it’s it’s not I’m going to solve this by going into my office and making a bunch of declarations or putting a bunch of new processes in place. It has to start with me understanding why the breakdown happened, and to be able to do it in a way where I might hear some really tough information that may may actually be something I’ve done that’s caused the breakdown to happen. And I have to do that in a way where I can be objective about it and say, if my goal is to solve the problem and fix the breakdown, I have to be able to hear everything, every truth, yes, about what has caused it, even if that truth reflects poorly on me, then I have to be okay with that. And that’s why, you know my in my first empathy book, the empathy edge, I talked about one of the habits of an empathetic leader that they can practice is self confidence, building their self confidence so that what you’re hearing about how you may or may not have impacted what’s breaking down doesn’t destroy you. You know you’re still who you are and you have value, and it’s just a data point. It’s not attacking your inherent worth. Yeah,
Saqib Rasool 35:00
that’s right, an example comes to mind. Thank you. By the way, in a moment, I want to ask you, what is the empathy dilemma? But let me give you an example that comes to that jumps to mind. I was working with a Distinguished Engineer at a German company recently, and this engineer was really inspired by some speech I gave, and he hired me to develop himself. And in the first conversation, I said, Where would you like to develop yourself? And he said, Well, I would like to really give fantastic speeches like you did, and talk like you in English and so on and so forth. And this engineer was not originally from Germany. He had come from another country, and German was not his first language. And so in investigation, would turn out that what really matters is not so much that you learn to speak English how I do, or give speeches, how I do. I don’t really think my English is actually that fantastic. Anyways, I’m not a native speaker myself. But you know, before speaking with me, their self development goal, they had a goal that I’m gonna become very confident. They were dealing with, he was dealing with the self confidence issue. And the game plan was to improve communication skills by learning public speaking, and to improve self confidence. As we begin to investigate, we went deeper. Okay, what do you do? How is Office? How’s your communications with your teammates? And what do you do after you finish work? What do your teammates do? It turned out that he has been in Germany for over a decade, has never gone out with his colleagues one time for any social hour, because he has not yet learned how to speak German. So here, in this case, the point is not what you want. The point is, what is your community? What is the breakdown that you’re experiencing? And then his complaint was, well, you know, they always go out and they speak in German, and they decide priorities. And I don’t speak German, and I don’t always ask them to speak English. I say, Well, you know, you are in Germany, right? You’re working for a German company, right? Your colleagues are all German, right, so before you learn to do public speaking in English, I think it might be better that you begin to go out. You go to your colleagues, start with an apology. Say, guys, girls, I’m sorry I have been a jerk. Actually, I’ve been insisting that you guys speak in English, but the truth is, I need to learn to speak German. Would you forgive me and teach me how to speak German? He made that move and the whole game changed. They all begin to involve him in decision making about the product. They all begin to tease him, teach him. They gave him a German name. They they taught him how to cuss in German. Shy star. I’m learning the shy star is the shit in German. And so, you know, they the whole mood changed. The whole game changed. You begin to take evening course about learning German language. Recently, in a coaching call, he shared with me that they did a holiday party, and they all appointed him in charge of organizing the holiday party in the office. So this is an example where sometimes dealing with self confidence, we make up our mind with some imaginary virtue that we think we need to have. But why is that important? You’re a senior engineer. Public speaking is not on the horizon. That’s far away. What’s on the horizon and what really matters is that you are in conversations with your community, and if that breakdown is showing up and you’re not paying attention, then you’re playing the self development game, which I ask people to give up playing this kind of imaginary self development game. Like you said, go in your office and start thinking about strategies. Actually better to get out of your office and start talking to your constituents, start talking to your people and see what they have to say about you.
Maria Ross 39:31
I love it. Well. Thank you so much, Saqib, for all these amazing insights and for the work that you’re doing in the world. We’re gonna have all your links in the show notes. But for those that are on the go, where’s the best place they can get more information about your work,
Saqib Rasool 39:44
just go to my website. Concivien.com, C, o, n, C, E, I, V, I, a, n.com, and I’m constantly changing it, updating it. I’m starting and stopping new programs. You know. In my repertoire. I never imagined that I’ll be doing this kind of a work. I trained to be an engineer and entrepreneur, and so I am still learning on how to organize my offers and my work. So go to my website, and there’s all kinds of good stuff there.
Maria Ross 40:16
Wonderful. Thank you so much for your time today. It was great talking to you.
Saqib Rasool 40:19
It is an honor and pleasure. Maria, what a treat I look forward to the next time.
Maria Ross 40:23
And thank you everyone for listening to another episode of the empathy edge. If you like what you heard, you know what to do, rate, review and share it with a friend or a colleague. And until next time, please remember that cash flow, creativity and compassion are not mutually exclusive. Take care and be kind For more on how to achieve radical success through empathy, visit the empathy edge.com there you can listen to past episodes, access show notes and free resources. Book me for a Keynote or workshop and sign up for our email list to get new episodes, insights, news and events. Please follow me on Instagram at Red slicemaria, never forget, empathy is your superpower. Use it to make your work and the world a better place.
