Lift: Fostering the Leader in You

And, if you talk about those observations (and I kind of looked at it from the perspective of pandemic and the technological changes), that was already happening. But the pandemic forced [it], to a certain extent, because we’d been kind of dealing with being cooped up and needing to work and communicate, but, also, in the medical science field, as well as in other areas.

And then you look at some of the things that have been happening with climate: global climate and the forced migration because of climate change. And then you look at the political randomness – both left side and the right side – and misinformation and social behavioral patterns: those are a lot to take on.

And so, I think that those four changes have been exponential, the last few years, and I think it will continue to happen as we try to get back into some sort of a normal work routine and otherwise.

Rachel Salaman: Right, so just to summarize those four changes, they are: the “fourth industrial revolution,” which is digital and technological change; COVID-19; climate change; and misinformation.

Which of those four drivers of change is the most serious challenge, do you think?

Faisal Hoque: I think they’re equally serious and one could argue that climate change and misinformation could be even more serious than the pandemic, but I think they’re kind of equal and kind of interrelated and one drove the other.

Rachel Salaman: Well, I mentioned the book’s focus on transformational leadership, in the introduction. Could you give us a brief definition of what that is, from your perspective, and maybe a potted history of it?

Faisal Hoque: Sure. The concept of transformational leadership – which is really defined by leaders who are driven by empathy, inspiration and influence – has been around forever: from the early '70s.

But what has happened is that, we’d gone through this trend – especially in the business world – in the ‘80s and ‘90s and even 2000 and beyond – whereby we have been very much performance driven. And it’s been all about the bottom line and command-control to drive the best out of the maximum return with minimal investments.

People really didn't focus on this monumental impact of transformational leadership requirement, that’s driven by the empathy and influence and inspiration. But, if you don’t focus on that, as things have changed and we have more technological advancement, people have more choices. So, you really have to be collaborating with others and that doesn’t happen without those fundamental elements.

So, I kind of hang how we move forward as individuals as well as organizations from that perspective. It applies in personal lives, but it also applies in organizations.

So, for example, if you want to do something, you kind of have to think about what else is going on outside of you: how other people are.

And we’d kind of seen this during the pandemic, right? I think, since we were all kind of going through the same sort of a thing, we’ve kind of had an empathy for, “Oh, it’s just not me alone: it’s everybody else, going through the same sort of a thing.”

So, how we lead ourselves on a day-to-day basis requires that kind of empathy and inspiration and influence to move us forward as individuals. And then, if you want to move mass, as a leader of mass, even if it is an organization, then you have to absolutely apply that at organizational level.

Rachel Salaman: What about day-to-day in the workplace? Could you tell us what this looks like, compared to the old style, transactional leadership?

Faisal Hoque: Sure. So, let’s unpack it from the point-of-view that… Well, if you want to inspire people, then you have to really understand where they’re coming from, right? So that’s where the empathy comes in.

If you don’t consciously practice empathy, then you can’t really relate to where people are coming from. And, if you can’t relate to where people are coming from, it’s hard to inspire them and influence them to the ideas that you may have, for them to rally behind it to execute whatever that you’re trying to execute as an organization. Right?

So, it’s that conscious practice of empathy to listen and to understand where people are coming from and, as a result, designing your work environment and your way forward. It becomes monumental if you want to succeed.

Rachel Salaman: So, what are the changes, do you think, that some leaders may need to make in the workplace to move towards the transformational and away from the transactional?

Faisal Hoque: You know, it’s a multifactor approach and multifactor practice. So, first, that conscious practice of empathy to really ground yourself to put others first is Number One.

Number Two: how you communicate, interact, and lay out your “go forward” plan and rally people behind it. That’s Number Two.

And the third is how you reward people, and how you [don’t] punish them for their mistakes and their failures is another factor. Right?

So, communication, reward system, organizational structure, and have a baseline understanding of humanity and emotional intelligence that’s required to bring people together.

And those are very much of a cult reaction these days but none of those things, by the way, are that easy to practice: that’s much harder to practice than it seems on the surface.

Rachel Salaman: Yes. Because, I think, for a lot of old-style leaders, it might be counterintuitive. They might be suspicious about whether it’s actually going to work or not. Do you see these new ideas coming into workplaces now?

Faisal Hoque: I think we have a long way to go but I see this more and more often.

So, for example… I mean, I wrote about mindfulness – and how it impacts innovation and creativity and everything – seven years ago. When I wrote that, I thought that industry was kind of moving towards this kind of thought process and how that impacts leadership as a whole. But – you know – seven/eight years later, I’m just seeing just the starting point of that. So, I think we’ve a long way to go.

And it’s not just that it’s harder for the previous generation of leaders to practice: I think it’s also harder for new leaders to practice, because these are not some of the things that you learn when you go to MBA schools or when you go to business schools or when you take leadership classes.

You are very much taught about "How do you set goals?" "How do you track performance?" “How do you put together strategy?" “How do you do particular KPIs?" But these fundamental emotional-intelligence-related techniques and tools are still not really practiced widely.

But there’s more conversation, for sure, all over the place, about these things.

And the last three/four years… You asked "What has changed? Has it changed exponentially?" Most leaders were forced to deal with [a] remote workforce, and that requires a whole different kind of expertise and empathy than it would if everybody were in the same place and you’re talking to people on a regular basis – on a face-to-face basis.

Rachel Salaman: Yes, massive, massive shifts for a lot of leaders.

One of the things that sets your book apart is that it’s grounded in management science, despite the emphasis on soft skills that we’re talking about. And you talk a lot about “systemic thinking” in the book. What is systemic thinking and how does it fit into this discussion?

Faisal Hoque: Sure. My background is process improvement and innovation and technology. So, system thinking is kind of engrained because of my engineering mindset.

I’ve always been a believer that you may have a great vision, you may be able to inspire people, but that inspiration and the vision needs to then get executed with the repeatable approach and repeatable way of doing things.

So systemic thinking is where you design particular goals and initiative and then, how you establish the process to make it engrained and track that progress so that you can actually execute what you set out to do.

So, if you think about transformational leadership, it’s kind of your cultural element and your guiding post to get people rallied behind you. Then you have to kind of give people the exact path… or it may not be the exact path, but a roadmap. What and how they’re going to execute in a pragmatic manner.

Because, change doesn’t happen overnight: it takes time. So, you have to have a pragmatic approach to make that execution happen.

That’s where systemic thinking and systemic execution comes in play: it’s a combination of process, tracking and management matrix and measurement, that makes sure that things are actually getting done.

Rachel Salaman: So, could you give us an example of that?

Faisal Hoque: You can look at any product development or service development and taking it to market.

So, for example, if you say, "Look, the world has changed and we have to deal with our customers differently. We have to understand where they’re coming from,” that’s all, very much, maybe, driven by the transformational leadership practices.

Then you have to design the offering and say, "OK. How does that offering need to go to market and how do we roll that priority service offering in an incremental way, so that the consumer can take it on? But, also, [so that] the organization can support that process of the customer, the adaption of customer needs and customer demand?”

All that is an example of how you establish both procedure and tracking mechanisms for execution of that: taking an idea and then rolling it out in a successful market launch and a product adoption by your customer and your audience.

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Rachel Salaman: So we’ve talked about transactional leadership and systemic thinking. A third term that runs like a thread through your book is “experiential learning.” Can you define that for us and maybe give us an example?

Faisal Hoque: Sure. I mean, it stems from... we can learn in many ways. Like, we can read a book; we can go to school; we can have a mentor (those are all learning techniques) and case studies and examples and whatnot.

Experiential learning is when you actually experience whatever that you have… trying to learn or trying to do in a real, hands-on basis. So, we kind of faced this.

So, for example, if you look at during the pandemic, we never thought that we would get so used to just ordering food online and food will come and we’ll get used to eating food by leveraging some app. Right? But that’s a learned behavior. Going to a restaurant is [another] example: scanning your QR code and the menu pops up on your mobile phone and ordering from that, right?

So, these are forced circumstances that force you to learn, against our normal behavioral pattern.

And a lot of these changes that we talk about in the book (meaning the pandemic and climate change and the Fourth Industrial Revolution – meaning the technological changes – and misinformation) are these learning from real life that forces us [into] doing things very differently than we are otherwise used to.

And those are monumental because it gets ingrained in us in a very different way than, [for example when] you say, “Oh, I can learn something from a book or from a class or something else – or from my mentor or from my manager – and I’m going to apply that in real life.”

Rachel Salaman: And how does experiential learning relate to transformational leadership?

Faisal Hoque: Well, it’s very much interrelated. Right? Because those behavioral patterns force us to think differently [about] how we interact with other people and, also, how we lead ourselves to do different things.

So, if you’re not going to be able to interact with people on a face-to-face basis, obviously, you have to learn different ways to motivate them and collaborate with them to do whatever that you want to do or need to do, right?

So... experiential learning kind of forces us to think differently: how we are going to become a different kind of leader in a changing environment.

Sometimes, though, changes, by the way, are by force – you don’t have any control over it – but, sometimes you force yourself: you disrupt yourself to change, to go to the next chapter or next station of your career or your organization.

So, either way, your leadership pattern and leadership practices are very much driven by your experience as a whole.

Rachel Salaman: And how has your own experiential learning shaped the ideas in this book?

Faisal Hoque: [Laughs] So, in my case, those four drivers that I’ve identified and the practices that I have rolled out, it comes from real life, right?

So, I always had remote workforce; I’ve always collaborated with people that are not within my organization. I’ve always collaborated with partners and customers. And, because I’m in the tech industry, I have been part of forced elevation by other people, but I’ve also elevated to influence other people and my own execution of my businesses and otherwise.

And, obviously, pandemic forced us to think about things very differently. And, even on the climate change point-of-view, I was born in Bangladesh.

Bangladesh is a delta that constantly faces major natural calamities: anything from drought – massive drought – to flooding – because it’s a delta that kind of sits between the various parts of the Himalayas. I’ve seen massive migration from the country and migration within the country.

So, all of those kind of manifested my thinking process.

And, early on in my career – late ‘90s, right at the beginning of the internet, when I was talking about these things – I was really looking at these things from, very much, a hard-core, prescriptive, management science point-of-view. All this stuff that I talk about now, and learn: it’s really grounded into this emotional intelligence that I didn't have in my earlier career.

But it’s, perhaps, equally important – if not more important – to do some of the things that we want to do in a changing world [now] than it was even five years ago.

Rachel Salaman: It’s interesting that you say that, early in your career, you didn't have such a big emphasis on emotional intelligence. Did something convert you?

Faisal Hoque: Yes. I mean, it’s really… I think adversity is a great teacher of emotional intelligence. And adversity comes both on a personal level and a professional level.

I was trained, very early on: I had the opportunity to work for Pitney Bowes and GE and, if you’ve read anything about Jack Welch, he was very much of a command-control kind of a leadership pattern. And the organization should only survive by A and B players: very much the early ‘80s and early ‘70s thinking.

So that’s what kind of established my baseline but, as I started my own companies and I tried to lead other people and collaborate with other people and lost customers or lost…

I got fired from my own company because I had different ideas than my investors, and then a family member got ill: I’ve been dealing with my son’s struggle with his health...

All these things have had an impact in terms of my thinking around mindfulness and resiliency and how that shapes your transformational leadership capabilities to interact with other people to not just… to move other people forward but, also, move yourself forward.

Because, as I say in “Lift,” in order to move other folks, first you have to move yourself: you have to lift yourself to lift other people.

So, that’s kind of a learning process over the last 30 years of various successes, failures and leadership roles, and management roles.

Rachel Salaman: And the title of your book, “Lift,” as you just mentioned – it is quite a positive word. And your book does have quite a strong positive message, focusing on what we can do to seize opportunities created by the turmoil. What do you think are some of the opportunities for individuals?

Faisal Hoque: I think there is enormous opportunity for learning, enormous opportunity to create new businesses, enormous opportunity [to] innovate a new product and services; there’s enormous opportunity to serve the public and be a servant to public services. And I’ve kind of experienced it all.

So, my positive tone comes from that perspective. So, I’ll just give you an example.

I got more motivated to finish “Lift” as well as [to] bring out the second edition of “Everything Connects.” And I’d just finished a new book that will come out next year called “Reinvent,” around digital transformation. And I’ve been working with the U.S. federal government for the last five years, after exiting my last company (which was permanently focused on the private sector) in the hopes of bringing my expertise to improve our public sector and our government services.

And these are, to me, tremendous positive opportunities, and I wrote and thought about “Lift” from that point-of-view.

It’s the lens of not just disaster but also... What this disaster allows us to [do] is to come up with new thoughts and ideas and inventions that could impact others but that can also impact your meaningful contribution and your fulfillment.

Rachel Salaman: How does transformational leadership help us seize those opportunities?

Faisal Hoque: Well, in order to see the opportunity, you have to be very empathetic to what’s going on outside of your world. Because whatever you have to offer comes from knowing yourself but it also has to connect and have value to somebody else, meaning the audience you are trying to reach.

So, because empathy and inspiration and influence [are] the cornerstone of transformational leadership, you cannot come up with those value propositions and opportunities without understanding what’s going on outside of your world and, kind of, thinking about that first, and then saying, “OK. What can I do for those outside worlds?”

So, for example, we talked about food: food is another passion of mine.

You’ve seen how some of the restaurants reinvented themselves during pandemic with the hope of serving people – not just from a commercial need point-of-view but, also, people who needed the food and needed to eat, which is very so fundamental. You can’t live without having food in place.

So you’ve seen how these people reinvented themselves and, as a result, helped others but, also, thrived in that kind of tight economic condition. Right? But others have kind of… on the wayside because they couldn’t reinvent.

So, there’s opportunity to serve people while you are being successful as an individual and it comes from having the lens of other people’s needs first, and then “How can I add value in that ecosystem?” more than anything else.

Rachel Salaman: And, in fact, your book is somewhat of a manual in a way that part of it is about how to develop emotional intelligence. What are some of the most doable tips that you give people in the book about developing that side of their leadership?

Faisal Hoque: A very simple daily practice is when you are interacting with somebody – like you and I are talking... It’s really grounding yourself in that present moment and thinking about what is it that the other people are looking [for] from you and to you, and then kind of guiding yourself in every single interaction. That’s a daily practice.

It really requires a conscious effort because our minds have chatters and our minds drift in a thousand different directions. But we cannot really connect with people and cannot really be empathetical if we cannot put ourselves in that present moment and just focus ourselves with the need of that particular person – which is very tactical but it’s very difficult to do!

So, it kind of starts with that and then, obviously, how you carry your conversation, how you carry your interaction, and how you influence and inspire your audience. Maybe the audience is an audience of one [or an] audience of thousands: it doesn’t matter.

All that is a kind of a daily practice. And [laughing] I’ve been trying to practice it for a long time! But I struggle with it because it’s monk-like behavior, but even monks struggle with that kind of selfish point-of-view, right? So it’s not easy.

Rachel Salaman: So, your book focuses on the intersection of transformational leadership, systemic thinking and experiential learning. What do you hope readers will take away from this?

Faisal Hoque: I think that what I tried to say in the book and what I try to do on a daily basis is the fact that you can’t survive without community and the people around you, whether that’s your family or whether that’s your co-worker or whether that’s your company or society in general. So transformational leadership practices help you to connect with that audience.

Second is that, once you connect, you have to execute something if you want to create value. That’s where the systemic thinking and systemic execution comes in play.

And the third thing is that there is no better learning than experiential learning. You can’t get that from a book; you can’t get that from having just a mentor.

So, try to force yourself to learn something [from] everything you’re experiencing on a daily basis. And that will give you an idea how you can fit into the ecosystem that’s around you.

And, if you practice all those things, you will make an impact.

And, by "impact" by the way... you don’t have to change the world: if you just can make an impact in your neighborhood and your personal life, or in your school or in your little company or large company... Those, collectively... that’s what is going to ensure the collective view in future.

Rachel Salaman: How optimistic are you for the future?

Faisal Hoque: I have to be optimistic because there’s no other way to live!

And, given what I’ve seen and given what I struggle with, just like millions of others (I’m actually a very fortunate one, compared to a lot of people)...

But I think it’s the optimistic mindset that allows us to be open to possibilities. And, when you are open to possibilities, that’s when you can lift yourself and, as a result, you can lift other folks around you.

Rachel Salaman: Faisal Hoque, thanks very much for joining us today.

Faisal Hoque: Thank you for having me. Thoroughly enjoyed this.

Rachel Salaman: The name of Faisal’s book again is “Lift: Fostering the Leader in You Amid Revolutionary Global Change.”

I’ll be back in a few weeks with another Expert Interview. Until then, goodbye.