EP 222: Rehumanize Leadership with Hamza Khan
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EP 222: Rehumanize Leadership with Hamza Khan
Hamza Khan is a well-known keynote speaker, best-selling author, and award-winning entrepreneur. He is recognized for his TEDx talk "Stop Managing, Start Leading," which has been viewed over two million times. Khan advocates for rehumanizing workplaces to achieve inclusive and sustainable growth, inspiring purposeful productivity, nurturing lasting resilience, and navigating constant change.
In this episode we explore the future of work, Hamza shares more about his experience after the TED Talk and we discuss needed leadership changes and how we build a more human centered world.
Guest Links:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/khanhamza
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/hamzak
Twitter: https://twitter.com/HamzaK
TED Talk Stop Managing Start Leading: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_HHnEROy_w
Link to the show:
Please find all resources like video, audio, show notes and as well some shorter clips of the episode at the show page: https://www.jensheitland.com/podcasthome
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Transcript:
(This Transcript is AI generated)
Jens Heitland: Hello and welcome to the Human Innovation Podcast, the podcast for innovative leaders. I'm ye hosts Jens Heitland, my guest is Hamza Khan. Hamza is a well-known keynote speaker, bestselling author, and award-winning entrepreneur. He's recognized for his TED Talk, stop Managing start Leading, which has been viewed for more than 2 million times in time.
Of this recording.
Hamza, advocates for Rehumanizing workplaces to achieve inclusive and sustainable growth, inspiring, purposeful productivity, nurturing, lasting silence, and navigating constant change.
In this episode, we explore the future of work.
Hamza shares more about his experiences after the TED Talk and we discuss needed leadership changes and how we build a more human-centered world. Please welcome to the show, Hamza Kahn.
Hello Hamza. Welcome to the show. How are you doing?
Hamza Kahn: Jens. Thank you for having me. I'm doing very well. This is very surreal. I've been listening to your podcast, in fact, this morning at the gym. I was listening to an episode with Jem Fuller. Really enjoyed that episode and it's a nice companion piece to what I imagine is gonna be a fantastic episode about human-centric leadership.
But it was so surreal for me to go from listening to that podcast to now speaking with you. It's just one of the wild things that happens in my life. I get to immerse myself in the media as a consumer, as a learner, as a listener, and then in the same day I can actually switch, wear a different hat and be the one contributing to this body of work that you've produced.
So all of this is to say I'm doing fantastic. Even better now that we're chatting.
Jens Heitland: Yeah, I'm really looking forward. I think there are so many common things we have starting with the human in the center. Before we go into your tad talk and as well into your book, but let's talk about who are you as a person and how did you get to where you are today?
Hamza Kahn: Wow. Every time I'm asked this question, I feel like I give a different answer because my conception of self is still developing. I'm learning so much about who I am and the space that I occupy and how I answer that nowadays. I. Is I say that I'm a speaker, I'm an author, I'm an educator, I'm an entrepreneur.
I currently live in New York City. My birthplace I've lived most of my life in Toronto, Canada, but last year my wife and I relocated to New York to explore a new adventure and to potentially reconnect in the belly of the beast with some of the issues that I know we're gonna talk about today.
Human-centric leadership, the future of work resilience, burnout. All of these topics might come up. And my focus in terms of the work that I do and the research that I do and just my own interests are around questions about who does the work, when and where is the work done, and how is the work done?
And increasingly why work is done. So I'm very much focused on the future of work. And I guess the subtopics within that would be modern leadership. They would be enhancing resilience with a focus on burnout. They would be navigating difficult change and purposeful productivity aligning individual wise with organizational wise.
What else where this current position in life originated from? I guess the first inflection point I can think of the clearest one that I can think of is working in the Canadian post-secondary education system. And that was a really fascinating time in my life where I was working primarily as a marketer, as a communicator.
So my job was to help colleges and universities better communicate with their students, with the goal of helping those students feel a sense of place and belonging so that we could usher them from high school through post-secondary to their dream jobs. And when I think about what I was doing at the time with increasing resolution, it has.
Translated very nicely into this current role that I occupy as a quote unquote thought leader in the space of human-centric leadership. In the future of work, I'm essentially trying to do the same I was doing all those years ago, which is to help people find a sense, place belonging and meaning in the world of work, and to get out of survival mode and get into a place where they're thriving and to make that thriving automatic and subconscious for them almost.
So I started in marketing and communications in the post-secondary education sector. I then translated that into an entrepreneurial journey where I started my own consulting firm. And then I spun that off into a publication and subsequently the company that I've. Most recently started is a soft skills development company called Skills Camp.
And we're in a rush to teach as many people in the world, hopefully all 9 billion of them, how to unlock the tremendous upside of human-centric skills. Jens, you and I know both what those are, the soft skills, collaboration, productivity, critical thinking emotional intelligence, so on and so forth.
And so I'm really enjoying spending my days fixating on this problem of how do we help people thrive in the future of work? And I believe that the answer is by leaning into the things that can't be easily distilled down to binary code, the things that can't be reduced down to ones and zeros, the things that chat g p t can't do.
Yeah.
Jens Heitland: There's so much in it. Let's unpack it. Sure. Start with your TED talk. For everyone who is listening to this Hamza did a TED talk six years ago and you started the TED Talk with I'm a horrible boss. Yes. Tell us a little bit about that story.
Hamza Kahn: Jens. I have only seen that TED talk twice in my life.
I no way, don't like watching myself speaking. I don't like hearing my voice. I get very uncomfortable watching myself. I don't know why that is. And so I'm really grateful that you took the time to, to watch that and to speak about it. The message that I shared in that TEDx talk was essentially to stop managing and to start leading and to understand that those are two very different disciplines.
You manage things, you manage processes, you manage budgets, you manage events, but people are meant to be led. And I presented that idea at a time in my life where I believed that in my heart, but I didn't have the skills, the communication, and the confidence I have today. So when I speak about that same topic today, if you juxtapose a video from 2023 with that video from six years ago, I mean, wow.
The fact that you said six years ago is like, whew, how much time has passed? Night and day. But I most recently watched that video for the second time ever, last year, late last year. And I thought to myself, wow. First of all it's not as bad as I thought. And in fact, there's some really good stuff here.
Like there's a sincerity and a purity in that message. And what's interesting is when I did that talk six years ago, it was ahead of its time. And it was so ahead of its time that my boss, the night I delivered that TED talk, sent me an email saying, come to my office tomorrow morning.
And when you get a vague email like that from your boss, you know, it's not gonna be you know, a promotion possibly a demotion and possibly you getting fired. Thankfully, I didn't get fired, but the conversation was very stern. It was, you disappointed me. This is paraphrasing what my boss said.
You disappointed me. The message that you're sharing over here is very seditious. It's undermining authority. And I insist that you go on an apology tour across the institution and let people know, let my colleagues know specifically that you didn't actually mean everything that you said.
Because I was advocating for things like flexible working. I was advocating for things like unlimited vacation. I was advocating for things like servant leadership. Now, when we talk about this in 2023, it's like, oh, of course, right? But back then it was in a large organization with a lot of bureaucracy, a lot of layers, and I slept on that.
And I didn't go on the apology tour. I did clarify some of my comments. I did add a little bit more color and some more context to my ideas, but I didn't apologize for that. And I'm so glad that I didn't apologize because it was one of the best and worst things that I ever did. It was one of the worst things that I did because it began a long process of falling out of favor with my boss and the in crowd in the organization.
I became a pariah and I was gradually how do I say this nicely? Resources and opportunities were taken away from me because I wasn't playing by the rules. Yeah, I was so disruptive, so innovative that I became a threat. And I would say that the other downside for me, and when we talk about like the dehumanizing workplace, it led to a lot of personal loss for me in terms of mental and emotional wellbeing even physical wellbeing.
At some time I fell into a spell of depression. It affected my self consciousness. It affected my self-esteem in a really big way in ways that I'm still processing all of these years later. But it was also the best thing that happened for me because even though I lost confidence in my message, even though I strayed from a path that I was on.
I was able to come back to it in a really big way, and it happened just before the pandemic end. So what's interesting is I did the talk six years ago. It is received very well by younger generations. Yeah. And then there's a lull in which I lost confidence as I mentioned. And then just before the pandemic, I get a request to speak in all places Australia to speak about the same topic.
And I say, wow, I mean, they're resonating with this idea down under. This is really interesting. All these years later, let's see what happens. I go down there, I deliver a version of that talk, and it's received very well. And people are so excited by the message. They're like, wow, this is an idea whose time has come to paraphrase Voltaire.
Then boom, March 11th, 2020, the world shuts down. Everybody's forced to now work in new and inventive ways, and to be remote and to have decentralized systems and to have a focus on outcomes instead of outputs. It's everything that's in my talk suddenly became activated and people started to resonate to these ideas in very new and exciting ways.
And the talk got a second life almost. It actually became more popular during the pandemic. So I love how you started this by saying Jens, that even though I delivered it six years ago, it still feels contemporary and I feel like it's only gonna continue to age well. Sure. I'm talking about millennials and gen X and Gen Y, but if you can read between the lines, the same talk can be delivered year over year in between every transition from one generation to the next.
The idea at the heart of it, if I had to distill it down into one sentence for the listeners, it's stop managing, start leading. That's it. There's very big difference. You lead people and you manage things.
Jens Heitland: Yeah. And for me it's of course, I didn't know the story with your manager that you needed to come in and he tried to ask you to apologize.
But it's quite interesting that when you are in a system like a larger organization, and I think that's still the case today, you are pressed into a way of acting, a way of being that is obedient to the manager who is one level above to you and even more important when you have different levels between them.
So what did this make to you and how did you as well afterwards think about these topics and what did you get as feedback from people who have seen how people are interacting with you inside of that organization to that topic?
Hamza Kahn: I've rarely had a chance to unpack this and speak about it, and I think a lot of it is because of fear.
I'm afraid of the consequences of me sharing honestly, what happened in the aftermath of this talk. I wrote about it very briefly in the opening for my new book, leadership Reinvented. But I think this is the most I've ever spoken to any other human being about this experience. And so I appreciate you putting deeper into this.
I wanna say this and preface it by saying that when it was good with this manager, it was good. It was really good. It was great, but when it was bad, it was terrible. It was debilitating to me. And like I said, in ways that I'm still processing today, I mean, I fell into deep spell of depression.
I experienced occupational burnout. I lost my confidence in the message. I didn't believe that I was a good leader. I think I languished as a professional until I got that call to speak about the essentially same idea in Australia years later. So what happened in the immediate aftermath was a lot of confusion and disorder, a lot of chaos.
I was like, whoa, what did I do? On the one hand, you're telling me that I'm running my team very well. You're happy with all of the results. You're passing off my work as a roe, which I understand some leaders do. We're winning awards all over the country internationally. Our blueprints for the team that we've built are being replicated.
So by all market objective measures, this is clearly working well. And the reason why it's working well, I believe a lot of it has to do with me adopting a servant leader disposition to my leadership style. I lead from behind. I support everybody. I remove obstacles from their path. I'm engaged in their personal, professional and academic wellbeing.
I'm obsessed with that. I'm putting the needs of the organization, specifically the needs of the employees before any other needs, before any other profit, motives or whatever the case may be. And part of that comes with treating these people like adults, perfectly capable of managing themselves.
And I think that's the distinction I have to respect them. Cuz in many cases, they were actually older than me, much more experienced than me. Mm-hmm. Much more adept professionally than me. And these are things that scare some leaders, but for me, they're causes for celebration. Because if you're able to do the work that I would've done individually at a higher degree than I can with a higher degree of quality, faster than I am, better than I can.
This is perfect. And I had to remind myself through this process that a leader's job is to create more leaders. I can't be selfish about this. My job is to create an environment where people thrive and they're able to do what I do better than I can do it so that I don't have to do it. Then I can move on and solve other problems.
So there was two pieces of feedback. Jens, to answer your question more succinctly, the first was, wow, it's clearly working. My contemporaries were saying, how do we do what you're doing in this department? Hmm. Give us the blueprints, give us the documents, run some workshops. Teach us how to recreate this.
Clearly functional team and team dynamic and team structure so that we can achieve similar results. But then what I was getting from some of the more closed-minded members of the organization, some of the resistors, some of the traditionalists was, well this isn't in line with union rules. And if you're doing this, then it becomes hard for us to explain to other leaders and other managers and other employees why they're being treated differently.
And so I don't think anybody disagreed with the fundamental premise of treating people well and respecting them like adults and helping them to achieve self-actualization. I don't think there's any disagreement there, but I think the tension was around the optics of it. Jens. Yeah, that was the tension.
Giving power. Well, sir, therein lies the rub, right? I think we're getting to the root of all problems in the modern workforce. And I would even take it a step further and say any workforce in the past, government, nonprofit, military corporation, whether startup or s and p 500 foot C 100, it all comes back to that, doesn't it?
It all comes back to people unwilling to relinquish power, or I should take it a step further. If we're looking specifically at the decor of personality traits, which seems to be at the heart of any sort of tension in terms of counterproductive workplace behavior. It's the relentless pursuit of maximizing one's individual value while accepting, neglecting, or provoking this utility for others.
Jens Heitland: Yeah. And. I think one of the things we need to figure out in this world is obviously what you said is all the human interaction, the skill sets and how do we get better leaders and how do we interact better? But on top of that or, and on top of that is finding out how do we change the incentive structures of organizations and specifically talking about the big ones because if we are not changing the incentive structures, Let's say the wrong people will get promoted for the wrong reasons, and it's going to repeat and repeat and repeat again.
So as they have, that's something I'm really interested in figuring out of one of the bigger topics in this world.
Hamza Kahn: Yeah. And, and the evolution, or at least a chaos in the evolution of the modern workplace is deterministic. And we're repeating mistakes that we've made time and time again. We're falling into spirals of active inertia, repeating, established patterns of behavior, linear thinking, even in response to these dramatic, clearly dramatic environmental shifts that have happened all around us.
Covid 19, just being one of them. And in many ways, I say that Covid 19 was simply a catalyst. It wasn't novel by any means because these trends were in motion well before Covid. I mean, in 2019, the World Economic Forum. And I know, I understand there's criticisms with that organization, but you can substitute that with any other think tank.
McKinsey, Deloitte, Bain, and Company B c G, they all predicted more or less the same thing. The gulf between those embracing change and those falling behind is growing. Disruption is intensifying, and we're moving towards a more inclusive society. So like I said, the pandemic, if anything, was a catalyst for these changes.
Yeah. And if we don't prepare for the sort of changes that are being talked about in this podcast and in other episodes as well, then they're likely gonna present themselves as one crisis after another tomorrow. And what happens during times of change, especially during times of crisis, human beings become stressed and they act more conservatively, more defensively.
But that's the worst possible thing that you can do during a moment of change. The thing you have to do during a moment of change, Jens, we know this, is you have to look at change in the eye and say, how am I going to change in response to this? Yeah. Because staying the same, if you do what you've always done, I guess historically, you've get, you'll get what you've always gotten.
But that's not the case anymore in this volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous world. By insisting on staying the same, the world around you will change. And the rate at which it's changing will spell, unfortunately, organizational failure.
Jens Heitland: Yeah. Before we go deeper into change, let's look as well into what was the feedback from the young people.
You mentioned it already a little bit, that you got a lot of response and positive response from young people. What did they say specifically?
Hamza Kahn: Paradigm shifting for them. They couldn't believe that this was possible. They had heard rumblings about this. They've seen that these sorts of practices were being pioneered in Silicon Valley unlimited vacation.
They were like, whoa, I don't have to, I don't have to plan my whole vacation and fit it into two weeks over there. Yeah, I can just take as many vacation days as I like. Yeah. Another one was you don't have to run sick days by me. You can take mental health days if you need it. And that was uncommon as well, because all of these people, myself included, were conditioned to ask a superior for permission to deal with our.
Grief to deal with mental health issues, to go see a doctor, to go to a bank appointment. And to me, I was I was in my twenties and I thought to myself, this is ridiculous. Another adult asking me for permission to go see a dentist. Don't, don't ask me about that. Just make sure your work is done. Make sure someone's coming for you.
You go deal with the dentist. We don't need to know that. That's perfectly fine. And then also our work was knowledge work. There was no need for us to physically be in the same place to do this work of, for example, graphic design or web design. As long as you had a fast internet connection and you were able to participate in meetings during designated overlap time, I didn't care if you were based in Toronto, in Hawaii, in Australia, in the Netherlands.
It didn't really matter to us. Why should that matter? Because I'm not gonna hug you or touch you anyways. So, well, I mean, there, there's nothing that we have to physically collaborate on. So the response was surprise, it was awe. It was also trepidation because these people were like, okay, so.
You're one example, Hamza and this team of it working. I wanna see how long you can make this last, because if this lasts long enough, then maybe we'll have a case that we can point to and implement over here. And sure enough, actually Jens, check this out. After I left the organization, within a year, the HR for the entire institution was forced to have the conversation about creating a work from home policy.
Because after I left, I don't think I was the reason for it, but I think I was enough of a success story to reverberate across the institution where younger generations were saying to themselves, Hmm, this doesn't make sense why I can't do this work from home. And so conversations were had at scale to the degree that they could no longer be ignored by hr.
And HR was forced to implement a policy. And it happened slowly, surely, and I'm glad that it did. And now every organization in the world has to reckon with, with you know, changes that we, we saw happening many years ago. Yeah,
Jens Heitland: and it's quite interesting that when you get forced to change from a pandemic in this case that, hey, now we work all from home and we start figuring it out, it works.
It's maybe not perfect from day one and not everything is working, but it works. We have shown now over a three year period that you can work in a different way than nine to five in the same desk, in the same office. And for me, it's just fascinating to see that some of the organizations are trying to wind back the clock.
So now we are going back to the office and everyone has to be famous example is Elon Musky at Twitter. He said everyone back to the office and nobody's allowed to work remote anymore. What is your perspective on that and what are your experiences with other companies
and organizations?
Hamza Kahn: I gotta be careful, but at the same time, I don't really have to be careful because I think there's a list, it's a small list of organizations that I've openly on other podcasts and in written articles talk shit about. Pardon my language. I know, I know that I can sh swear on this podcast because you can, I think it was Shanna who asked that question a couple of times before dropping some hard F bombs.
But I think the list of organizations that are never gonna bring me in to do consulting speaking because I've openly talked trash about them and all of them, you look at the through line you have a cult of personality formed around their leader.
And their leader says, well, this is the way we've always done things. Which if you read between the lines, I think it's a lot of control issues, narcissism and sunk cost fallacy. But this is just a layman's assumption. I don't know. And for all I know, these people might be really good people. I have no doubts that they're great with to their families and to their friends, but for some reason they take these very dehumanizing, I would say, anti-human approaches to, I don't wanna call it leadership, it's management, forcing people to come back into the office.
I mean, telling another adult that I know what's better for you. That, you know, rather than spending the best hours of your day in sunlight with your kids, dropping them to school, eating home cooked meals, I need you to commute, put your life at risk be stuck in traffic, and then appear to this office depleted, just so that I can have the satisfaction of seeing you tether to your desk.
Which then again, you know, is a whole other trust issue because if I don't see you at your desk, is the assumption that you're not working when you're at home, that you're committing time theft? I mean, Elon Musk said that quite clearly. He said, pretend to work somewhere else, which I thought was completely disrespectful to people who have been working effectively, remotely.
Yeah, I mean, just imagine that slap in the face. Yeah. So, and I know, I know this ends, like revolutions never go backwards. So in 2023, we're talking about whether or not you should work from home. And you used the timeframe nine to five, right? But if you rewind the clock to 1883, there were protests happening in the United States to reduce the 18 hour workday to 12 hours.
Take that in, right. To reduce the 16 hour workday of 14 hours. And so now we're talking about nine to five. Now we're talking about hybrid and flexible, but I believe that revolutions never go backwards where this is going. Putting my future is hat on. I know that we're eventually going to arrive at a place where there's no one size fits all approach to leadership.
It's gonna be a one size fits one, and that's gonna be very difficult for leaders in the short term to unlearn the Old Playbook Management Playbook, the 20th Century Management Playbook, a remnant of the first and second industrial revolution, and understand that the world of work has changed. You can't put the Genie back in the bottle.
People know better and the thing that they're incentivized by in the workplace is no longer as Jem Spit in the last podcast episode. It's no longer carried and stick. That's no longer the incentive, and that hasn't been the case for at least 10 years. Gallup State of the Workplace Report has found consistently that.
Salary is actually falling down the list of the top 10 things that people value in the workplace. Above all it's purpose. And I know this as an entrepreneur, I have not been able to historically pay my employees very well, but I've been able to attract, retain, and engage some of the best employees in the world.
People who have gone on to do amazing things, not just within my organization, but to start other organizations. And that's because there was an alignment of their individual purpose with a larger transcendent organizational purpose.
Jens Heitland: And it's fascinating for me specifically, I don't know what is your perspective on that, but I see a shift between generations, at least in my experience, day to day.
So there are people, I don't want to say an exact age, but let's say the older generation with a fixed mindset of saying, Hey, this is the way how it was, and we need to get back into the safety mode where I know, and I feel well because I have done it like this the last 40 years. And that's where I feel well.
And then there are people like myself where somewhere in the middle, I have experienced the old world where it was that way and I was always interested as well into the new world and finding out how does that work, the four hour work week, what are the different things? And then there are studies out there, which I think was just announced last week that there was a test of a four hour work week instead of a five day work week.
And it was dramatically increase of productivity, or at least not mm-hmm. A decrease in productivity. So I think that's the way we think about work needs to change fundamentally. Rather than, Hey, that's the amount of time you put in. It's more about what you get out. That's a conversation we need to figure out how we have that in the old organizational setup. And that's a hard way because a base, at least for Europe, I can say a contract is based on work hours, is based on work, work days. And is basically giving you then the content of you need to sit there and work eight hours per day to be able to get paid the
full amount.
Hamza Kahn: I was just talking to my barber about this earlier today. He was saying that sometimes people invent busy work when they have these outdated structures where they just stretch out projects to be able to fill the time, create the illusion of productivity. And I know this, I used to be in the Canadian Armed Forces.
I used to be a reservist, and we would just talk about this all the time openly. It was an open secret. We'd be like, just look like you're busy, man. We have to kill this next 12 hours. You know, don't finish everything all at once. Stretch it out. Go to the armory, grab one box at a time, even though you can probably pick up three, bring one box at a time.
And you know, I, I get this, this happens all the time I talked about this openly in my TEDx talk where I said you know, my boss at the time valued optics. And he would reward people in the organization who showed up early and stayed late. There was no conversation about the actual work itself and the deliverables as long as you appeared to be doing work.
So I tried a really seditious experiment for I think two weeks before I decided I was gonna quit. I just would show up to work early and I would watch movies all day. And I swear to God, my bosses disposition towards me changed in those two weeks. He was like, oh, Hamza, great job. You know, I was stunned. I was like, you have no idea what I did, sir.
We don't have any one-on-ones. There's no opportunity for you to receive and review feedback. Sure, I'll sit in meetings, I'll nod, I'll pretend like I'm taking notes. But it was just so easy for me to pretend to work in that environment where optics were valued and outputs were valued more than actual outcomes.
Now, what's interesting is I wanna offer grace to different generations here, and I'm saying this to somebody that's hyper aware that I'm on the out as a generation. I'm a millennial. I'm born in 1987 and I'm no longer the IT generation. I think I'm being phased out and Gen Z. Is now in in the spotlight.
And, you know, understandably, gen Z is leveling complaints on Gen Y, the same way that we leveled complaints with Gen X. Yeah. They're making fun of us. You know, they're, they're, they're commenting about how hustle culture was so asinine and how, you know, the girl boss movement was just so stupid at the time.
And, you know, their, their criticisms are fair and and warranted. I understand that. But I think it would also be a mistake to dismiss the strengths that each generation has, especially when they work together. And there's a couple of things I'd like to unpack over here. Number one I would say that assume ignorance before you assume malevolence.
I think that every, everybody that I've met is well-intentioned for the most part. 99.9% of people that I've met Yens are well-intentioned. And if they're behaving in counterproductive ways, if they're behaving in ways that appear to be malicious or evil, it's usually from a place of fear. And the Steven a Hoal Conservation of resources theory does a great job of explaining what this looks like.
Human beings experience psychological stress in one of three ways, sometimes all three at the same time. Number one, a net loss of resources. So let's think about this, give practical examples with regards to the early days of Covid. I was working at a marketing communications firm, and during the first few weeks of Covid, we were pulled into these emergency meetings and we were discussing what the future of the company might look like.
And I saw this psychological stress play out in a big way. So, number one net loss of resources. What happened immediately is that some of our clients got cold feet and said, we need to pause advertising and we're gonna cancel our contracts. So right away, our monthly billables decreased, and I could see around the table, the owners, the leaders, myself included, were like, oh, shoot, this is really happening.
Like, we're losing money. That's number one. Number two is, Threat of a loss of resources, so possibility of losing resources in the future. So we started to behave more defensively. We're like, okay, we need to call all of our clients right now and make sure that they are on board with us and nobody else is gonna cancel their contracts because if they do, we're totally screwed.
That was it. And the number three is the most interesting one to me. It's insufficient reward following an investment of resources. So, you know, we hired all of these people that we thought were gonna produce X, Y, and Z results, but they're not working out exactly as we thought. So all three of these things are pointing to the same thing that human beings are inherently afraid of.
Loss, loss of resources. And if you would take that to its nth degree, I think it's loss of life. We're actually afraid of death, but that's another conversation for another time. But in the context of work, we're afraid of losing the resources that we equate with success. Now, different generations during the pandemic have reacted very differently.
And I think if we're talking about. The return to the office. This is my assumption here. The people who want employees to come back to the office, they have good intentions. They have an idea of what that connection looks like between being in the office doing work that we can see and productivity, which is good for everybody.
But what they're missing in that entire process is that everybody else has arrived at a different conclusion. The employees are in a different paradigm where they understand better than their bosses because their bosses haven't bothered to check in with them in any meaningful way that they're just as productive, if not more productive working from home.
And this isn't conjecture, this isn't me Hamza just saying this off the top of my head. Yeah. I have a very unique perspective of consulting with organizations on a daily basis around the world of all shapes and sizes. And I'm happy to provide you with all of the reports that were. Produced during the pandemic, which support this notion, Jens, and we can put them in the show notes, but there's undeniable evidence that people are just as productive, if not more productive, working from home, working remotely, or having the ability to choose, like adults, where they work from.
And so insisting on the return to office is a very dangerous game. And it's within the leader's prerogative to insist on that. But I think that there, they will be hard pressed to attract and retain top talent unless they can clearly explain why they're returning to the office, not what I saw happen recently.
There because recently their C E O wrote an O open letter to the staff about why they're returning to the office. Jens, if you have a chance to find that, add to the show notes, it's remarkable. Not a single stat was included in there. No stats no objective measure of how productivity would improve if people came back into the office. But you know what, that was, that was Hippo decision making, highest important, paid person's opinion. And that's what it is to me. I think it's highly problematic, it's disrespectful. And you know, I've got a couple of bones to pick with an organization where people have complained, and you can see this online and Glassdoor, there's news reports about this, about feeling so pressure to perform for this organization that you know, they're literally urinating and defecating in their car to make deliveries on time.
That's somebody's dad, that's somebody's mom, that's somebody's brother, that's somebody's sister. How you do one thing is how you do all things. If that's the approach that you take to managing employees on the frontline, I can only imagine what other areas of the organization people are being dehumanized.
And I think that that letter is a reflection of that. Unfortunately, yeah, the human is not in the center of that decision. I don't know why. I just felt really dirty by saying all of that out loud, but it was also very cathartic.
Jens Heitland: It's okay. It's like two, three listeners,
Hamza Kahn: There we go.
Jens Heitland: The interesting part for me is as well, how do we get the, I call it leadershift in different conversation, but how do we get from that to the future?
One part, I believe in, we need to build better companies with better leaders to be able to tackle the real challenges in this life or in this world as well. The tricky thing is we just need to have a couple of very good examples who are crushing it business-wise. That's at least my idea about it.
What is your perspective on that?
Hamza Kahn: I'm wholeheartedly agreed with you on that. I think we need a couple of organizations that are crushing it, and we need to simultaneously reward those organizations and make them desirable. Adam Smith, the founder of Modern Economics, said it best. He said, the secret of education is directing people's vanities towards the right causes.
And I think the right cause over here is getting people to value not the hoarding of wealth as we valued in decades past. You know, the Forbes list to me is this disgusting thing. It's like we're valuing the hoarders in society, people who have the most amount of money, who've been able to accrue a disproportionate amount of wealth and cause asymmetry in society.
That I think is just not producing the positive sum benefits that we need desperately. So if we see organizations that are doing it well, for example, Patagonia Fascinating, right here you have Yvonne Shard relinquishing a hundred percent of a stake in the company to fight. A challenge that affects us all remarkable.
You see organizations, for example, like Salesforce with Mark Benioff taking a very human-centric approach to the layoffs. Unfortunately, like many other tech companies, they had to let people go. Airbnb had to do that as well. But rather than doing so in a cold calculated way, you do so in a very human-centric way.
I mean, in the case of Airbnb, beautiful, you saw Brian Chesky is the CEO's name, write heartfelt letters to all of the employees being let go, explaining in great detail why they were let go, building a platform to showcase their work to future employees so that they can land on their feet sooner.
So these sorts of examples are things that we need to put the spotlight on and say that's the way we do it. Such Nadella. Another example. Microsoft was able to turn the company around after it was being run into the ground by his predecessor Steve Bomber, during what they call the lost decade at Microsoft.
Here comes an leader who says we're gonna recenter this organization on the needs of the customer. I think it was the first. Leadership meeting retreat that they had where people were surprised. You go to these leadership retreats, you expect to be in a ballroom in a hotel all the time.
Yeah. Instead, what happens is a bunch of buses show up and here you have such saying, all the leaders get into the buses, we're gonna drive to malls, we're gonna drive to stores all across America, all across the region and talk to customers. I mean, that's the way we do things. These are the things that need to be celebrated here.
And I know that IKEA has a long history and Jens you have quite a history with ikea. IKEA has a history of being very human-centric in their approach to the customer experience, which I think, if I had to guess, is a direct reflection of how the leadership treats their employees. And so I would love to hear about what that employee.
Customer profit chain looked like at Ikea and what lessons you've learned. Because I think therein lies is the solution. If we understand that there is a chain between how you treat your employees and how they treat their customers and how those customers then treat the success metrics of the business.
And if we can reward that, I think that's how we turn the tide.
Jens Heitland: Agree. I think there's a big, well I have worked with a lot of organization, but I always say it and say it as well loud on the podcast, that IKEA is the best company in the whole world to work for. Mm-hmm. At least of the companies I have worked with and worked in and
Hamza Kahn: that you were the head of innovation over there.
I mean, like, that, that is just novel. I mean, many, most organizations don't have a dedicated innovation role, let alone a hierarchy within it. Yeah.
Jens Heitland: I think it starts in that case with the founder. Who was very much about people every day. Yeah. I gave the story the other day when he was going into the stores, he was way retired.
I think he was in the seventies. He was still doing store tours going into Ikea stores, and he started at five o'clock in the morning, boom. And he went to the truck drivers and asked them if they got their coffee. And he, he's, I don't know because it's not public, but he was one of the richest people on earth.
Hamza Kahn: Wow. I'm not surprised. And yet, you know that, that I have a new vocabulary. Through your podcast, Jem actually described something similar. He said that it'll take five minutes for a c e o to call a frontline employee and say, you did a great job. And he called it like a leadership shortcut.
And I'm like, wow, that's really good. Yeah. Something like the c e o asking the truck drivers. Did you get your coffee? It's such a seemingly inconsequential decision or use of time as far as the CEO's calendar is concerned, but for that one truck driver, they're gonna be talking about it for the rest of their career.
Exactly, and we're talking about it right now. Like, and the
Jens Heitland: fun thing about that is if you know a little bit the structure of an IKEA store, there is a specific room for the truck drivers where they have a toilet, a shower, and, and kind of a small kitchen with a stove where they can make their
Hamza Kahn: coffee.
That's not, I have no idea existing. Next time I go to Ikea store, I'm gonna have to check this out. Where can I find where is it usually hidden in the stores? No, it's,
Jens Heitland: it's on the backside where you unload all the trucks.
Hamza Kahn: That makes me so happy. It makes me so happy because, you know, so often as with generations, right?
A generation enters into the spotlight and they become centered and sort of society responds or tries to target that generation. I think that that also happens with careers. And I think right now, this conversation about remote work, hybrid work, flexible work, it's really only for you and I that are in knowledge worker roles.
But I think the people that are being left out of this conversation, unfortunately, are the very same people that we said were essential at the beginning of the pandemic, you know, our heroes. But then as we got further and further into the pandemic, we seem to have forgotten about them. And I truly believe that the conversation's being had right now about whether to return to the office and what hybrid and flexible work looks like.
I think that there is a through line there that can be applied to all workers, which is how do we reengage. Employees, how do we make work meaningful? Again? How do we connect the needs of the organization with the needs of the individual? And as capitalism has evolved, there's been like four distinct spirits of capitalism.
I think what is missing and what the next spirit of capitalism really needs to focus on is at the heart of this podcast, of this discussion, human innovation. How do we solve for humans? How do we ultimately improve the living conditions of human beings around the world? And I love what Shana said in a couple of episodes ago.
She said that, sit with this idea, your actions impact every other living being. And I took some time to meditate on that because it's absolutely true. It, it's true when you think about chaos theory, it's true when, when you get into the realm of psychedelics if you wanna go there. But what Covid illuminated for me, Jens, is how brittle.
Anxious, non-linear, incomprehensible, but interconnected our world is you know, one event that happened in a lab as is now being discussed right now. I don't, I don't wanna get as black blacklisted over here. So I'm gonna resist sharing some of my theories about the origins of this, but how an event that happened in one part of the world resulted in this three year capitalistic event that resulted in shutdowns, loss of life, economic anxiety shifts in paradigms, all of that.
And so I truly believe that we need to transcend the engine of economic development. It needs to go beyond profit motive towards something that is greater than that. And I believe there's no greater I suppose goal objective than harmony with the planet. And I think that presupposes engaging human beings, creating product services and events that serve their human beings and I think have done very well.
The profit follows.
Jens Heitland: Agree. The whole profit focus, I get it from an entrepreneurial perspective because I'm entrepreneur as well. Same without profit, you can too much. But if you do this well, like you started as well inside of your TED talk. If you focus on empowering people and helping them to have a great time, helping them to develop and grow over time, the profit will come.
It's a matter of time and I am a true believer in that as well. Let's use this a little bit to, to go into your book. You wrote the book. If I have seen right inside of the pandemic
Hamza Kahn: I did within the first four weeks of the pandemic, I was so inspired. It's so surreal because the first book that I wrote, the Bern Animal, I wrote over the course of three years, and then this book I cranked out in four weeks.
And I think it's because this book wrote itself. I was just the vessel. This was a book, the ideas of which we're going to emerge in one way or another. And they have other writers have written about this. But I happen to be one of the first to really sit down and understand how our world is going to change and specifically how leadership is going to change.
And it was interesting because in the first few months, March, April, may of the pandemic did I say four weeks? I meant four months. Four, four weeks. Four weeks would've been Im weeks time, four weeks. I was like, wow, okay. Yeah, yeah. Sorry, sorry. I'm myself. Way too much credit there. Four months, four months, April, may, and I think I submitted my manuscript in June, but what I saw happen very early in the pandemic was leaders fumble.
And that was fascinating for me to see during times of stress because the first book that I wrote was about stress, resilience, and burnout specifically. And one of the models that I talked about was the amygdala hijack, how during times of stress, human beings, we either fight, we go into states of flight, freeze, or fawning.
Our stress response is activate something primal, survival instinct, and how we behave while the prefrontal cortex is being hijacked by the amygdala. That's, in my opinion, a reflection of our values, our training, our preparation. And what I saw was very disturbing how leaders in the corporate sector and the government were fumbling their reaction to the pandemic and how so much of it was just not focused on the needs of the human beings.
And that to me is reflecting a larger problem that I'm trying to unpack and unravel and might make his way into my next book, which is how much of society is shaped in a way where human beings, you and I. Our values are being shaped by the organizations and the institutions, not the other way around. I believe that our institutions, our governments, our schools, our businesses should be informed by human values.
And so I think that the pandemic is now making that change. But the way that that change happens is through leadership, leaders need to be spiritually coordinated to work towards the correct aims, as I suggested earlier, using that Adam Smith quote. So I wrote the book with the belief that, wow, we are entering into a portal.
Our world is going to change, a new paradigm is going to be unleashed. And I truly believe. That it's going to be moving in a more human-centric direction, even though there might be bumps in the way, there's gonna be a lot of turbulence. We're gonna see the examples rear their head and put on this full scale attempt to harken back to an old way of being.
But like I said earlier, revolutions never go backwards. These are just bumps in the road. And if you look at the law of averages, where we're gonna end up eventually is something that's much more human-centric. And so my book is hopefully a call to action for leaders who are on the fence, leaders who are eager to change their perspective, whether they're new leaders, leaders on the track to promotion or senior leaders keen on shifting their perspective.
You can't go wrong betting on what's right for humans. If you choose a solution that is human-centric, it'll always pay off in the long run.
Yeah,
Jens Heitland: beautiful. And quite interesting a story to that. I lived in Denmark when the pandemic started, and no way in Denmark you, there's still the queen.
She has no real authority or power, take her hand out. But what was quite interesting to, to see it from a very small country perspective, living inside of a small country, the leadership did an amazing job in Denmark because I was comparing it to my home country, which is Germany. And I lived in Sweden before, which is also around the corner, so it's like 20 kilometers apart.
So I was just seeing how they took the decisions on a human perspective with humans front and center. So the Prime Minister, she was taking decisions based on the approach that it is important for us as humans to stay together and we will figure it out together.
Instead of her, of course, she needed to take decisions. It's her role, but she did that in explaining it why and how it is important to us. And then fascinating the Danish queen. She's normally only speaking on New Year's Day or something like Christmas things. Ne never, ever, because she's not in any power.
She did her first speech out of that ever. Wow. So she called and the whole country was empty. Every person in Denmark was in front of the television. Wow. Listening to the Queen and she asked them, be human, stay at home. We are staring together, we are getting through this. It's going to be hard, but we need to take care of ourselves.
Hamza Kahn: That's the way to do it. And you look at, for example, how the s a did the exact opposite. They just fumbled it. I mean, our president was in denial that this was even happening. Right. And then when it did happen, the lockdowns happened and then people were deprived financially. They were choked out. They received two stimulus checks.
I mean, I talked to people here in New York that had to skip meals. Yeah, because of, I, I mean, it just breaks my heart. I could start crying when I think about just, yeah, the ways in which ultimately people had to pay the price for leadership failure. And I use the word leadership in air quotes. I think it's management failure because a leader wouldn't have made those decisions.
A leader would've done exactly what you suggested, would've been present, would've checked in, would've ensured that the needs of the people who were being met. I mean, we saw this happen in Canada. My, my dad, my mom, they were deemed non-essential. And their income stopped actually during the early days of the pandemic.
And I was very concerned for them. But our government stepped up and made money available to cover their basic needs. You know, there was explicit promises that they would never go hungry, that they would never fall behind on their rent, whatever the case may be. Their rent will be forgiven.
They'd receive loans, all of the above. So that's the approach that needs to be taken because that sort of behavior engenders loyalty. It engenders engagement cohesiveness. And I think what we're seeing now in terms of disharmony And discord in the United States has certainly been accelerated by leadership failure and loss in leadership trust and institutions specifically demonstrated within the Covid 19 pandemic.
So the lessons are vast they're simple, but they sp far back enough in time where we don't need to. Let's just put it this way. The innovation can be formed by wisdom. Yeah.
Jens Heitland: I could do two hours with you easily.
Want to get us towards the end, which is Okay. Asking you two questions I ask
Hamza Kahn: every guest.
Okay.
Jens Heitland: If you could work with a project that is impacting every human being on earth, what project would you choose to work with and why?
Hamza Kahn: An existing project or a hypothetical project. Jens,
Jens Heitland: as you want. Want all open?
Hamza Kahn: Okay. I would like to create one big union that unifies every single employee on the planet. The idea that everybody belongs to a union that is pro-employee, pro worker, pro-human, and advocates on their behalf is something that. Interests me, and I don't know what that looks like.
I think it would be impossible to organize. It feels impossible to organize because unions are being shut down all the time. But it doesn't necessarily have to be something that you pay into, that you have a card with. It could just be a spiritual connection between all employees who just know in their hearts that, Hey, we need more, that the world of work isn't working for us and that 80% of us in any organization are disengaged or actively disengaged.
Something's gotta change here. And I'm trying my best to have that conversation both ways I'm having it. I would say mostly with leaders, but I would also like to, on the same side, prime the next generation of leaders and employees to also meet us halfway. So that would be it. Any, any attempt to unify the the advocacy for the needs of employees?
Jens Heitland: Great. One. What advice would you give to a young innovator that's just getting started?
Hamza Kahn: Hmm. So much I wanna say, but if I had to distill it down to one piece of advice, I would say this. You're not playing the game that you think you're playing. There's no rules in this new game. We're in a brand new paradigm. The, the old world, by all measures, has ended. There are some vestiges of power and influence that exist but for all intents and purposes, feel free to create something brand new, completely bold, completely innovative, not beholden to any expectations of what success would've looked like.
Pre pandemic. This is a new game we're playing. Just cut
Jens Heitland: goosebumps.
Hamza Kahn: Very cool. Yeah. Wow. Thank you, sir. Thank you for the opportunity to wax poetic and to share some insights and stories that I've never shared before.
Jens Heitland: So where can people find you and how can people reach out to you?
Hamza Kahn: I've compiled all of my links and stories and you know, insights on Hamza Kah. Do ca my website, that's h a m z a k h a n.ca. You can find everything there. And I'm on social media. I'm most active on Instagram and Twitter and LinkedIn. My handle is H A M Z A K, Hamza.
K. Yeah. Now we'll
Jens Heitland: put that into the show notes and of course, as well the TED Talk, which I think is also on your website. And, and yes. Way more. But Hamza, thank you very much for your time. It was a pleasure having you on the show.
Hamza Kahn: Thank you, sir. Pleasure. It was all mine.