Culture. Inclusion. Consciousness. Diversity. Empathy. Community. Leadership today is not only about setting a vision for the road ahead and a business plan to execute against it, but also about building a culture and mindset that makes business success possible.
Join MINDWORKS host Daniel Serfaty for Part 1 of a very special two-part conversation with global thought leader and best-selling author Dr. Raj Sisodia, and Kelly Lockwood Primus, an expert on inclusive leadership and cultural dynamics, and a thought leader and contributor to Forbes, as they explore the role that leaders and leadership play in these new constructs.
Culture. Inclusion. Consciousness. Diversity. Empathy. Community. Leadership today is not only about setting a vision for the road ahead and a business plan to execute against it, but also about building a culture and mindset that makes business success possible.
Join MINDWORKS host Daniel Serfaty for Part 1 of a very special two-part conversation with global thought leader and best-selling author Dr. Raj Sisodia, and Kelly Lockwood Primus, an expert on inclusive leadership and cultural dynamics, and a thought leader and contributor to Forbes, as they explore the role that leaders and leadership play in these new constructs.
Daniel Serfaty: Welcome to MINDWORKS. This is your host, Daniel Serfaty.
Culture. Inclusion. Consciousness. Diversity. Empathy. Community.
Leadership today is not only about setting a vision for the road ahead and a business plan to execute against it, but also about building a culture and mindset that makes business success possible.
As a special two-part conversation in MINDWORKS’ series on Leadership, today I am honored to have two global thought leaders who will join me for a discussion on this new and radical way to look at leadership, and how doing good actually leads to doing well.
Dr. Raj Sisodia is Distinguished University Professor of Conscious Enterprise and Chairman of the Conscious Enterprise Center at the Tecnologico de Monterrey in Mexico. He is also Co-Founder of Conscious Capitalism Inc., and has published fifteen books, many of them bestsellers, including:
- the New York Times bestseller “Conscious Capitalism: Liberating the Heroic Spirit of Business”,
- the Wall Street Journal bestseller “Everybody Matters,”
- and his last book, “The Healing Organization: Awakening the Conscience of Business to Help Save the World.”
Dr. Sisodia has consulted with and taught at numerous companies, such as AT&T, Verizon, Kraft Foods, Whole Foods, Tata, Siemens, Sprint, Volvo, Walmart, McDonalds, and IBM. His work is an inspiration to many business leaders around the world today—including yours truly.
Kelly Lockwood Primus is Chief Executive Officer of Leading NOW, a global consultancy that guides current and future leaders in creating more equitable organizations. As an expert on inclusive leadership and cultural dynamics, Kelly has worked with CEOs and executive leadership from Fortune 500 and Global 1,000 companies to identify barriers, and develop solutions to help change behaviors and company culture. Kelly also shares her knowledge around the world about how diversity and inclusion and leadership and how these topics intersect with her expertise as a businessperson. She doesn’t just consult, she actually practices. A thought leader and contributor to Forbes, Kelly harnesses her passion, knowledge, and expertise, and finds it exciting and personally fulfilling to be guiding businesses on the right course to achieve their culture and diversity goals.
Raj and Kelly, welcome to MINDWORKS. What a gift it is to have you both on MINDWORKS at the same time.
Kelly Primus: Thank you so much for inviting me. Appreciate being here.
Raj Sisodia: Happy to be with you, Daniel.
Daniel Serfaty: You're very welcome. So let's have some fun together. Let me ask you first to introduce yourself not via the bio, the very shortened bio, I must add, that I had to read to our reader right now, but how did you come to what you are doing today? Kelly, your professional trajectory has led you to your current position. So what is it that you do as CEO of Leading Now?
Kelly Primus: It's a great question. Sometimes I question that myself. I think the best way to answer that question is it's a balance, right? I spend part of my time problem solving for the organization, for clients, and getting into the midst of identifying solutions, but on the flip side, as someone leading an organization that's about building leaders and building inclusion, you got to keep your eye on the horizon.
So I spend part of my time thinking about, "What's coming next? What should we be paying attention to?" versus the day-to-day, "How do we get it done? How do we make sure organizations are really thinking strategically about how to build the kinds of leadership and the kind of culture that they want?"
Some days I'm looking far out the window, and some days I'm buried head down really getting into details. So it's an interesting role. I didn't know I'd end up here when I started my career. It's probably some of the most passionate work that I've done so far.
Daniel Serfaty: Thank you for sharing that. I'm going to tell a secret to our audience here. Most of the people working for you in your organization are women. Is that a random number or is that a random observation or is there a purpose to that?
Kelly Primus: So percentage-wise, you're right. There are more women in the organization than there are men. Do know that I took leadership of the organization just a couple of years ago. Many of them were already on staff, and then couple of years ago when all of this happened, the organization is currently part of a merge of two different organizations. One was called Leading Women. So that organization was staffed and led by women only, and the other organization was a blend.
So right now, as you look at us in this newly merged organization, yes, there are definitely more women on staff and more women consultants. We do a lot of work with women in leadership, but what we've learned is that many of the challenges that women have are also faced by underrepresented populations. So it ended up being a perfect blend, but you're right. There are more women on staff, but doesn't mean we're not paying attention to what's goes on past gender.
Daniel Serfaty: I was actually making that as an interesting observation because a lot of the organizations, in a sense, have to get in touch, I believe, today with their feminine side in a super positive way. I think it's not the emphasis on diversity and inclusion and participation, and that angle certainly is reflected by the composition of your staff.
Raj, you wrote important really paradigm shifting books, such as Conscious Capitalism, The Healing Organization, and you look at it as the enterprise, as a society of the organization. My question to you is that, what is a role that leaders and leadership play in those new constructs?
Raj Sisodia: Well, it's a critical role, really. I mean, without leadership, you really don't define what an organization is about or what it's going to focus on and what it can achieve. So I think the role of leaders is central. Building on what you were just talking about with Kelly, this whole theme of the feminine and the elevation of the feminine has been a major part of my work as well.
In fact, when I wrote Firms of Endearment, one of the things that I observed in there, people use words like caring, and compassionate, and conscious, and so forth to describe those cultures. I said there's a lot more feminine energy in these companies than you find in typical companies. That led me to more explicitly study that. I wrote a book called Shakti Leadership, which is embracing feminine and masculine power in leadership, and it's about the idea of wholeness.
Ultimately, we need to cultivate wholeness, which is simultaneously integrating the masculine and feminine within all of us. You don't have to be a woman or a man, but regardless of what gender you have, you can show up as a whole person because as Carl Jung said, "Every man has an inner woman, every woman has an inner man," right? So really, what we have done systematically in society is suppress that feminine side, the caring side, the nurturing side in men and women.
Of course, we have sidelined women, and women did not have the right to vote until 100 years ago and couldn't own property for a way long time and even in this country and so forth. So I think this is the century where all of that is going to change and it's changing rapidly.
Finally, my friend Lynn Chris uses the metaphor of the bird of humanity has been flying with one wing tied behind its back for millennia. The century when that other wing gets unfurled and the bird of humanity can soar higher and go further because of that long overdue change. So I think this is very much about being whole, a whole human being.
Integrating those sides in India, as you know, we have gods, many, many god sides and each of them is symbolic of something. One of them is called the Ardhanarishvara, which is a depiction of a figure with one side of the body being masculine and the other side being feminine. The idea is we are born with these genders for various purposes, but then ultimately, our journey in this lifetime is towards wholeness.
So it is about bringing that caring, nurturing side to the fore for somebody who's born a male and is bringing the other elements, the discipline and courage and all of that to the forefront as well. So I think all of that is part of this journey for me.
Really, the real crystallization of that came a few years ago in 2018 when I worked with a coach for the first time. When I told her the trajectory of my work leading up to 2005, before that I had done very conventional academic strategy and all of that kind of stuff, and then everything that happened after that with these books, she said, "Do you realize that you were trying to impress your father for 45 years? You spent the last 15 years honoring your mother with your work. You're really bringing her energy and what she stood for into business and leadership."
That was a really clarifying thing for me because it, indeed, if I think about it now, that was the differentiation in a way. This is something that is needed in the world, and I happen to embody more of my mother's qualities than I did my father's qualities, and it came naturally to me to try to bring some of that.
Daniel Serfaty: Thanks for sharing that. It's amazing how the intimate and the personal has projected onto the corporate and the enterprise and the business, and that's really what it is about. We are talking about all this characteristic that normally we associate even at the intimate level with an individual or a person. Now, we are looking at those qualities, consciousness, all these things at the corporate level.
Could we just deviate a little bit here? Again, going back to the role of leaders and leadership in all these models, in a sense, I remember about 25 years ago when the internet started to emerge and the world realized that people are going to be very connected, hyper connected, directly, 0.2 points, not having to go through the normal hierarchies of societies and corporations, people have started to advocate the death of leadership.
I remember even reading an article entitled like that, that because people can have instant access to information and instant access to each other, who needs a leader to coordinate all that? So is leadership still relevant today when our colleagues, our employees, our citizens can basically have access to anything they need to do their work? What is the role of leadership in all that? Are leaders becoming obsolete?[DM1]
Kelly Primus: You know what? I think leaders are even more critical now than they were 25 years ago, specifically, because there is such a plethora of information out there. How do you know what's real? How do you know what's true? Just because you can Google it doesn't mean it's the right answer, right? So you think about the lack of trust in the news, the lack of trust in information that's being put out there. How do you help? People who are so divided in their beliefs and their thoughts come to agreement on something even within an organization.
I think leadership and demonstrating that ability to help bring different perspectives together and coming up with the solution that works for hopefully all is one of the most critical things we need right now. So I'd advocate it's even more important today for leadership skills and capabilities and competencies to be taught and to help leaders take charge and help their organizations who are looking for the right answer.
Raj Sisodia: Yeah. I agree with that. Fact is that human beings have evolved tremendously and not only all the technology that we have access to, but if you look at human intelligence, if you look at the research that has been done on IQ, the Flynn effect it's called, James Flynn, an intelligence researcher who looked at IQ data, which normally gets standardized, the IQ results every decade. So 100 is always the average, but if you look at the raw data, there's an underlying trend of 3.5% to 4% increase per decade in IQ over the last 80 years that he looked at the data, right? So it's a compounded 3.5% per decade.
So what that means is that the average person today would be in the top 2% of intelligence 80 years ago just given that. So we are more intelligent just in terms of analytical capacity. We are more educated than ever before. We are more conscious than we have been in our history as human beings. I mean, that's a continuous evolution that we are on.
So the human seed has never been more potent. Ordinary people are capable of extraordinary things. Your average person today would've been considered a genius 80 years ago. So people are capable of extraordinary things, but we still need leadership to coalesce all of that extraordinary potential into something meaningful.
One of my favorite thinkers is Peter Drucker and he said, "There are only three things that happen naturally in organizations: friction, confusion, and under performance, and everything else takes leadership," right? So you could take the most brilliant, thoughtful, caring, concerned people, put them in a room, come back two hours later, you will find friction, confusion, and under performance until somebody steps into the role of leader, somebody takes on the awesome responsibility of leadership, which means creating a vision for what is possible, where do we want to go together. A great leader can see beyond the horizon to possibilities that others don't even imagine.
Then how do we get there? How do we use our collective capabilities? Now, we know people have so much that they can offer, right? So there's just so much there that we can tap into, but it still takes that coalescing energy of the leader to harness that, and then to align it and point it in a direction that is going to elevate everybody and is going to create meaning and purpose for everybody.
Daniel Serfaty: I like that you reinforced something that Kelly said earlier about this notion of the leader as an ambiguity remover or a clarity provider, if you prefer, that notion that there is so much, even if our individual intelligences have gone up, as you pointed out in the past a hundred years or so, but there is so much out there that there's that thirst for clarity about what is, but also clarity about what could be, and that basically becoming the role of the leader.
Actually, I have a question for you. We'll return to that theme later. COVID, in the past two and a half years, if any, there's been a lot of ambiguity and uncertainty introduced in our societies, our companies, our markets, et cetera. Have you seen firsthand a shift in the role of the leader and the meaning of leadership during those two and a half years of pandemic? What are some of the shift to the trends you have seen in term of what qualities leaders are being asked to show?[DM2]
Raj Sisodia: Well, I think we've seen an elevation of empathy and understanding of our mutual vulnerability and a recognition of what really matters. Now, I think putting the wellbeing of people at the center of what we've prioritized, I think the best leaders have done that. It's about protecting the people in a physical sense, first of all, maintaining their health and safety, but also protecting them in terms of livelihood.
There's some pretty amazing and heroic stories that I've seen about the lengths to which companies have gone to try to make sure that people are going to be okay. I think it's opened the heart and awakened the sense of interconnectedness, interdependence, and shared vulnerability that we all have as human beings. We recognized how connected we are and how vulnerable we are in this time.
Of course, it has also led us to innovate more rapidly. Anytime in recent history, we have made changes within a matter of weeks that normally would take months or years. As they say, we have pivoted in so many ways. We have discovered the ability to cooperate with others, competitors or within the same industry or with other industries or with the government, and so forth.
There's been a higher level of cooperation, I think. So we've exercised certain muscles I think in this pandemic in terms of rapid change, innovation, cooperation, caring that I think will hold us in good stead as we go forward because this is not the last pandemic. There will be others. Of course, we have got the largest pandemic of all, which is climate change, which is an ongoing slow pandemic, but accelerating, and we're going to have to apply what we have learned in a much larger way as we go forward.
Daniel Serfaty: Kelly, I want to hear your take on what Raj just commented on. What are these things?
Kelly Primus: Bravo. Absolutely right. The last couple of years absolutely has required current leaders [inaudible 17:55] in 2020 to start recognizing that the style of leadership needed to change and actually started changing. We've talked about this many times over the years and the reality of it is if you look back, when we were talking about 25 years ago, on what did leaders look like back then and what was expected of them and having been in business back 25 years ago, and that's just the last time we'll talk about how old I am, there were many qualities that I had to suppress as a woman leader that is now being coveted by male leaders who are now demonstrating these skills and saying it's so important to be empathetic, and it's so important to listen, and on and on, and you're looking at them and going, "We've been talking about this forever, guys. It's about time, right? It's about time you recognize what it takes to be a full, whole leader."
So I absolutely agree with Raj. I know that, Daniel, one of the things that you were concerned about is that we were going to have a love fest here, and that we're always going to agree with each other because we do have very similar perspectives, although come at it from a different perspective, but the only other thing I want to share about what I saw in the last couple of years with leaders, the willingness to be vulnerable, absolutely, but to a limited audience. They weren't showing vulnerability to the people in their company because employees were expecting you to have the answer even if you didn't. The whole notion of VUCA was something that the volatility of what happened, how uncertain everything was, it wasn't an easy fix. The complexity was there.
The last piece I want to share about this is March 9th, 2020, I was with a client doing a presentation for their International Women's Day celebration. We were talking about in advance, "What is it that we're going to be sharing at this time?" We had done all kinds of stuff on leadership.
I said to them, I said, "I've been having this feeling that we really need to be talking about the pace of global change in business and how much more rapid things are happening that leaders have to respond to and manage whether they feel good about it or not."
When I used VUCA, volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity, as my example of how to manage change in the pace of global change right now, my ambiguity was the coronavirus. That was my example. It was new. We didn't really know what it was going to do. Flights to Asia had been shut down. Shipping lines had started to stop bringing goods out of Asia, but it hadn't really hit Europe that hard yet. We're right at the tipping point of basically all hell breaking loose.
In those two years, and even today, that pace of having to make decisions not having a tried and true answer, not knowing what's coming next, not recognizing exactly what this was going to do to supply chains, to business as usual, no one had any idea, and yet leaders had to step up.
So yes, caring for your employee, being empathetic, listening and so forth, critical, but layer on top of that the need for speed, the need for decisiveness when you don't have the answers or even a framework to work within because you're working with something you've never seen before.
I think that there's a few, and I know that, well, I think we're going to be talking a little bit about competencies and so forth, but there are a few things that COVID and the pandemic and the civil unrest here in the US really changed the way leaders had to show up every day, and part of it was massively dealing with ambiguity.
Daniel Serfaty: These are very moving anecdotes. I mean, we all went through that moment. It's amazing that you could sense that already. The VUCA, for the audience, is an acronym that Kelly just unpacked for us, but the A part is about that ambiguity and that you can sense that already at the beginning that that thing is going to provide a lot of ambiguity to our environment, how [inaudible 22:12] we either cope with that.
Kelly Primus: Business being so global. 2001 when the SARS virus came out of China, we learned about it, but it was maintained mostly, right? 20 years later or 19 years later, here comes something that because of the way humans are traveling, because of the way business is so interrelated and global, this thing spread like wildfire. Nothing like that has ever happened before. You had to know. You had to. If you were a leader of an organization, it should have been pinging your radar the minute they stopped flying planes to Asia or out of Asia. That right there you should have said, "We're in trouble." The second clue was shipping lines.
Daniel Serfaty: As both of you are commenting about those characteristic of leaders that you have observed, I mean, you've worked with some of the leading organizations or business organization in the world, each one of you in your own career, I'm going to ask you a question that probably the most asked question in MBA programs all the time, and it keeps going at it even though poor people have provided some answers about leaders. There is a myth of the leaders, especially in this country, almost a worship of leaders of business leaders, and we put them on a pedestal and then we enjoy destroying them very quickly just after that.
There is a myth that in some terms that true leaders, whether they're in politics or in business, which is really our focus or otherwise, are born not made. What is your own take? What do you believe in that very simple but profound implication question? Are leader born or are they made or is that both or is that neither? Raj, you want to take a shot at that?[DM3]
Raj Sisodia: Yeah, no. I believe leaders are developed. Leaders are grown. Leaders evolve. By the time somebody gets into a position to be a leader, they've experienced a certain amount of life and they've accumulated certain wounds and certain traumas and certain experiences. Unless these leaders are self-aware and unless they are also focused on their own need for healing from those traumas, they will end up being very reactive leaders who get triggered by certain things, right? They are coming from a place of inner wounds and traumas.
I mean, we can think about some of the bad leaders in the world are the people who have done the most damage. I think we find more examples of terrible leadership in the world today than we do great leadership. That's some really short supply, and we can see that all of them are acting out from certain impulses that exist within them, that are a result of wounds and traumas as a wounded inner child that exist within every cruel leader.
So I think it is a matter of developing yourself. As we say, you need to heal yourself. You need to understand your own triggers. When do you get hijacked? As Carl Jung said, "Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will drive your life and you will call it fate." So I think everybody can become their own version of a leader once they have done the work, and the work is around self-awareness, knowing themselves, and then loving themselves, which is often a challenge because a lot of people are filled with self-loathing because of their conditioning and their parenting and everything else that may have happened to them, and then discovering their unique essence, so being themselves like, "Who am I and how can I then be that and bring that into the world?" the authenticity, as Bill George has talked about, authentic leadership.
So I think it is about every person discovering their own unique purpose that's a function of their qualities that they were born with and, to some degree, they're nurturing, and then becoming whole, so healing the splits that exist within them, and that includes the masculine, feminine, but also includes what I call the elder and child energy, and integrating all of those, and healing, behaving what needs to be healed.
I think we have an epidemic of post-traumatic stress injury in the world. I think everybody has trauma of different kinds. We've minimize them most of us because we say we didn't get sent to Afghanistan or Iraq, so what right do we have to complain about things that happen to us, but the fact is life is difficult and there are traumatic things that happen as a matter of course when you are growing up, and then there are the other things that happen that might be quite distinctive.
So there is trauma at every level. There's personal trauma. There's family trauma. There's ancestral trauma, which now we are finding through epigenetics. Actually, it's carried forward into our genes from generations ago. We weren't there to experience the trauma of our forefathers, and yet it resides within us. If you look at every culture, given the extensive history of war and conflict that human beings have had, that trauma exists.
In this country, most people have either some trauma that comes from having been enslaved or having been the enslavers, right? In India, it comes from all the caste system and all the abuse and all the rest of it, right? So there's ancestral trauma and then there's collective trauma, the pandemic, the Ukraine, the shootings that happen, climate change. I mean, these are all kinds of traumatic things.
So I think what I'm saying is that the ability to be a leader exists, I believe, in all of us, but there are certain things that hold us back and constrain us from being leaders, but I believe all of those things can be worked on because remember, we all have to lead ourselves, right? So whether or not we're ever put into leadership, we have to learn how to lead ourselves, and most people are not good at that. Why? Because they're subject to all of these things that I'm talking about.
So once we address all of those and we work on ourselves and become aware of who we are and cultivate those qualities and work on healing ourselves, then I think everybody can become a leader. Now, even within that, some people will have a greater capacity. So there is some degree, just like we have different IQs. Rather that cannot be changed. There are certain other things. So yeah, there are certain attributes that will help us, but I think most of what we are dealing with are things that happen to us and that we can rise above them and heal from them and become the kind of leader that we are meant to be and have the potential to be.
Daniel Serfaty: Thank you. Kelly, you have an opinion about that, I'm sure.
Kelly Primus: Yeah, I'm sure.
Daniel Serfaty: Born and made.
Kelly Primus: I think it's both, actually. I think it's both because I believe that there are leaders at every age and every level of any organization, and even in grammar school. You have people who naturally seem to take leadership roles within school rooms and so forth with having no actual training to be that person. It's just a combination of factors that happen to them, whether they are born with type A personalities or they have a very high ambition level or things like that that isn't trained. It's there.
Some of the work that we do, we talk about in business. There are leaders at every level, whether they're running a team or not. They could be an individual contributor. So it's really how do you define leader as to whether it's made or if it's natural.
So there are very charismatic people out there who are at any stage of their career who may be a very good leader of people or leader of others or inspiration to people, but then there are those leaders who are made during crisis, who may never have stepped up before, right?
So sometimes it's what happens to you. Sometimes it's innate, and then sometimes you can be trained to be a really great leader when different perspectives are given to you, and new ideas are brought to you, and you have exposure to more people, more ideas, new information.
So I think it's not one or the other. There's this beginning that might send you on a faster trajectory, and then there are those who, because of fire or crisis or whatever, step up and become a leader. Raj, I'd love to hear what you have to say about that.
Raj Sisodia: No, I see. So there's research that shows that introverted people actually are very effective leaders in the long run. They are the larger than life personalities and the highly charismatic and so forth, but they're much more rooted in their ego and they might be from a self-serving place, not from a serving place, right?
Of course, servant leadership, that's the kind of leadership that is found to actually be more impactful and have a positive impact on the people that you lead and you generate more trust. So I do believe that all kinds of people are capable of being leaders. Some people seek it and trust themselves into those roles, and others very often the most effective leaders or potentially effective leaders don't seek out leadership.
Kelly Primus: No. They get dragged kicking and screaming to it.
Raj Sisodia: Yeah, because we've associated leadership with power and ego and all of those people associate it with corruption, right? So as Peter Senge said, "Power and virtue need to go together," and we've created systems in which the most powerful are not the most virtuous, they're the most ruthless, and then the most virtuous do not seek power because they associate power with corruption.
Kelly Primus: Right. Exactly, with all the negative connotations that come with it. Exactly.
Daniel Serfaty: Well, I'm going to ask you to share, if you have examples. You don't have to give us your name, but examples in your work as you've interacted with so many leaders, whether it's in industry or in communities or in congregations, doesn't matter, but could you share a couple of key qualities that you have observed in a domain, in domain, you tell us, that, really, either you would expect a leader to possess or you learned from that leader that, "Oh, that one is important"? Can you share such examples with us?[DM4]
Raj Sisodia: I've been studying conscious leaders for last couple of decades, and historic figures in business, in politics, but also contemporary leaders. I've tried to distill what I have learned in terms of what defines them into an acronym, and the acronym is SELFLESS. The word itself is important because you cannot be a selfish human being and call yourself a leader. I've come to strongly believe that because that means that you're going to look at the people you lead and you're going to see them as ways for you to achieve your personal goals, that, "I'm going to use all these people to get to whatever goal I have," which is typically define power and money. So that is the definition of a tyrant. That is not a leader.
A true leader is there to take people to a better place. We talked about self-actualization that Maslow had, but then Viktor Frankl talked about self-transcendence. Are you able to think beyond the self, to the collective self? So I think that is an essential prerequisite. You have to fundamentally be more of a selfless person, but you have an ego, but as the Dalai Lama said, it's a serving ego, it's not a deserving ego, that you're coming from that place.
Then it stands for the qualities. So it starts with strength. You have to be a strong human to be a leader, and what that means to me is moral courage, which we can see how short supply that is in the world today. How many leaders can we point to? Yeah, Zelenskyy right now, obviously, but we can probably name a hundred on the other side for people who has shown up as craven and completely lacking in principles, and completely opportunistic. You need moral courage and you need personal power, not positional power, not the power that comes from having a title and a chair and all of that, but actually, it comes from within.
So if you think about a Gandhi, Gandhi was never elected to anything, never the head of any organization. He literally had zero positional power, and yet he had extraordinary personal power that came from his own being and how he cultivated himself and the way he taught others to do's and inspired Mandela and King and so many others. So strength is number one.
Then energy and enthusiasm. I think conscious leaders are driven by purpose, driven by something transcendent and important in the world, and that feeds them. That gives them tremendous enthusiasm and energy.
Then the next one is love. You have to be rooted in love, and that combination is critical. Strength without love is journey. We've had lots of those leaders in the last century from Hitler, and Stalin, and Mussolini, and Mao, and many others in the world today. Love without strength is ineffective. So it's that combination. As Martin Luther King said, "We must be tough-minded and tender-hearted." So that combination.
Then then F is for flexibility. You have to show up with the right energy in a given situation. You can't be always showing up in the exact same way. Then long-term orientation. You're not thinking just, "I'm going to be CEO for five years so let me just focus on what I can get outcomes in that time and then I don't worry about what happens later." It has to go beyond your tenure. It even has to go beyond your lifetime. As the Iroquois Confederacy required of their chiefs, you think about the next seven generations or, actually, think about seven generations, the three, four generations back and three, four generations forward. So how do you make sure that you're acting in a way that's aligned with that?
Then the last three are different kinds of intelligence, so emotional intelligence, spiritual intelligence and systems intelligence, so knowing yourself, knowing others, systems intelligence, understanding how things are interconnected and interdependent, and spiritual is the role of meaning and purpose in your life and the lives of the people who lead. So that's what I have learned about this, and I can think about great leaders who exemplify that in the world today. We can talk about that if you like.
Daniel Serfaty: You put the bar very high, Raj, I must admit, your SELFLESS. How many? These eight qualities that you listed, and Gandhi, and Mandela, most are just human beings trying to go through life, these are very high bars for leaders, but leaders don't have to be Gandhi and Mandela to be leaders. Do they?
Kelly Primus: You're right. Raj, wow. This is great. I couldn't write this down fast enough, but I did. I got it all, and I noticed that you had two Es in SELF, energy and enthusiasm. So thank you for that. I like this and I'm going to be quoting you on this at some point, no doubt.
What I wanted to share is, Daniel, I heard what you said, and I think that there's perhaps one word, and you'll have to figure out how to add this to your acronym that's missing, and it's curiosity, the desire to learn, the willingness to expose yourself to new situations and new perspectives and so forth.
So to me, curious is absolutely part of the best leaders, and it's those leaders who choose to say, "Status quo," or "I've learned everything I need to know to be good at this. No one's going to share with me something that I don't already know." It's that ego you were talking about earlier. Those are the CEOs who fail at some point, whether they fail in the role or they fail shortly after getting out of the role because they don't recognize how important getting those different perspectives are and being curious and wanting to know more and exposing themselves to opportunities to get different perspectives, those leaders who are so embedded in their own ego who say, "I know everything."
Raj Sisodia: That is a critical one, and that acronym doesn't capture everything, of course, but if you look at probably the leader in the world today that I admire the most in the business world is Satya Nadella at Microsoft. Satya came seemingly out of nowhere, although he had been at Microsoft in different roles, but he succeeded two larger than life characters, right? So there was Bill Gates and then there was Steve Ballmer. Now, Gates was, of course, the brilliant nerd, arrogant. Somebody came to him with an idea, he didn't like it, he would say, "That's the stupidest thing I ever heard and don't ever come to me with anything like that," and he created a culture in which everybody became like that, right? Everybody's like a mini-me.
You got Steve Ballmer, who was like the street fighter. I mean, he was just pounding the desk and jumping up and down on stage and taking a sledgehammer and destroying a 3D logo of a competitor, and just created this frenzied energy, and those 14 years were terrible. Microsoft became almost an irrelevant company in the world and was headed towards death and decline.
Then Satya comes along and really reconnects because they had achieved their purpose, which Bill Gates had articulated, a computer on every desk, a compelling vision when he articulated it. By the time Satya came along, it was pretty much a commonplace, right? Having a computer was not an unusual thing, but he created a new sense of purpose, but very importantly, he brought empathy into that culture. He modeled vulnerability.
At his first offsite meeting with his team, he shared his own challenges in his life, his special needs son, severely disabled, who actually died about a month ago now, his daughter, I mean, just his upbringing, everything about himself at a very deep level. Everybody then opened up and they're all connected at a human level, and they made empathy one of the key virtues, qualities of Microsoft's culture, empathy for yourself, empathy for each other, and for the customers and understand their pain and how can we be resolving that.
Another big thing was what Kelly just talked about, which is a growth mindset. Microsoft was full of smart people who are highly educated and accomplished in their field. It used to be a know-it-all culture. Now, it's more of a learn-it-all. Everybody is always learning. You have a beginner's mind, right? You continue to cultivate that all along and you learn from each other and you learn enough from our side. So you're constantly growing and evolving, which I think is true even if you're not a leader. As a human being, the day you stop growing is the day you start dying, right? So that's something that we as humans should be doing.
So yeah, I think they are. If you look at the track record, what Satya Nadella has done in his now eight years as CEO, he's taken that company from 300 billion to 2.3 trillion in market value, the second most valuable company in the world. No CEO has ever created that much value, but more than that, it's also on all the other dimensions, right? If you look at their sustainability environmental side, if you look at diversity, if you look at the future of work, if you look at every dimension, this company is ranked number one under just capital rankings and it came out of nowhere. I thought Microsoft was an irrelevancy now. Suddenly, he's made them into an extraordinary company. Shows the power of leadership.
Daniel Serfaty: Exactly, shows the power of how a single person at the right time understand the zeitgeist basically of that time and can change the direction of the company. 2.3 trillion is not a bad number, but the ability or the willingness to learn. I think the curiosity, Kelly, that you bring us, it's a wonderful addition. I wonder whether or not as part of this whole construct of SELFLESS, which I took notes, too, and I will quote you, too, Raj, in the future because I like it. It has the rings of truth.
I wonder, actually, as part of that, you mentioned enthusiasm and, Kelly, you also mentioned some positive features as part of this curiosity, is being optimistic, a key component of all that, a key dimension, almost like orthogonal to all that that covers all these dimensions, just seeing the positive in things.
Kelly Primus: So you know what? Many years ago in an organization I was working in, there was a statement that we used to use, and now that you say it this way, I'm desperately trying to put it into my head, but it was about seeking abundance as opposed to looking at-
Raj Sisodia: Scarcity.
Kelly Primus: ... scarcity. Thank you. Yes. So in a way, it is about being optimistic, but it's about recognizing, I think, and this has proven very successful for my career is recognizing that it isn't an or, it's an and, right? How can we make sure from an optimistic standpoint, view it as abundance as opposed to saying, "There's only so little and I'm going to hang onto it with both hands."
So having optimism, and being curious, and the growth mindset, as you say, Raj, all of those things makes people want to know more. When we limit whether we do it ourselves or someone limits it for us, the opportunities to do that, we miss so many innovative ideas and putting something that we just learned over here together was something we already knew that gets us so much further along the way than if we weren't looking for new information.
Daniel Serfaty: Thank you for listening to MINDWORKS. This is Daniel Serfaty. Please join me again for the next episode. We welcome your comments and feedback as well as your suggestions for future topics and guests. We love to hear from you. You can tweet us @MINDWORKSPodcast or email us at mindworkspodcast@gmail.com. MINDWORKS is a production of Aptima, Incorporated. My executive producer is Ms. Debra McNeely and my audio editor is Ms. Lindsay Howland. To learn more and to find links mentioned in this episode, please visit aptima.com/mindworks. Thank you.
[DM1]Question 2: In today’s fully connected world, with ubiquitous networks and instant access to information, is leadership in business still relevant? Why?
[DM2]3. What have you learned about leadership after more than two years of COVID? Has the meaning of leadership changed?
[DM3]6 There is a myth in some literature that true leaders are born, not made. What do you believe?
[DM4]7 Let’s share examples from your own research and experience: Pick one from the business, medicine, education, or any other domain, and describe one or two key qualities/behaviors that you would expect a leader to possess.