The Leadership Hacker Podcast

Business Leadership Under Fire with Pepyn Dinandt and Richard Westley

Our very special guests are global business guru Pepyn Dinandt and Military Cross holder, ex-army Colonel, Richard Westley OBE. They teamed up and wrote the book Business Leadership Under Fire. This is such a compelling show, packed full of hacks and lessons including:

• Why establishing leadership can stop your platform burning
• The “Who Dares Wins” approach to strategy and tactics
• Building and managing an excellent leadership team
• Team and organization structure to maximize business impact

Join our Tribe at https://leadership-hacker.com

Music: " Upbeat Party " by Scott Holmes courtesy of the Free Music Archive FMA

Transcript: Thanks to Jermaine Pinto at JRP Transcribing for being our Partner. Contact Jermaine via LinkedIn or via his site JRP Transcribing Services

Find out more about Pepyn and Richard below:

Website: https://businessleadershipunderfire.com

Pepyn on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pepyn-dinandt/

Richard on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/richard-westley-obe-mc-66875216/

 

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Build Teams with Fun and Play with Matt May

Matt May is Founder and CEO of Premier Team Building and Interactive experiences, he’s also a speaker and author of the Book, "Take the Fear out of Team Building." In this engaging and fun show, you can learn:

• Why “team building” is not a “bad word.”
• Why grown-ups have developed fear and anxiety around play and team building?
• How do you go about having fun/play yet keeping the learning real and authentic?
• How do you get folks to participate who just don’t want to get involved.

Join our Tribe at https://leadership-hacker.com

Music: " Upbeat Party " by Scott Holmes courtesy of the Free Music Archive FMA

Transcript: Thanks to Jermaine Pinto at JRP Transcribing for being our Partner. Contact Jermaine via LinkedIn or via his site JRP Transcribing Services

 

Find out more about Matt below:

Matt on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mattmayptb/

Matt on Twitter: https://twitter.com/PremierTeamBld

Matt on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/premierteambuilding/

Matt’s Website: https://premierteambuilding.com/

 

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It’s Go Time with Jill McAbe

Jill McAbe is a bestselling author of “It’s Go Time: Build the Business and Life You Really Want.” Jill’s recently been ranked #1 in Entrepreneur Magazine's inspiring education Entrepreneurs to watch in 2022. We dove into a bunch of topics in this awesome conversation, including:

• Jill’s involuntary life reset and how that shaped her future.
• What is a “hot goal” and how you don’t need willpower to achieve them.
• Learn about the MOMA method.
• What “all-in” really means.

Join our Tribe at https://leadership-hacker.com

Music: " Upbeat Party " by Scott Holmes courtesy of the Free Music Archive FMA

Transcript: Thanks to Jermaine Pinto at JRP Transcribing for being our Partner. Contact Jermaine via LinkedIn or via his site JRP Transcribing Services

 

Find out more about Jill below:

Jill on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/garydfrey/

Jill on Twitter: https://twitter.com/jillmcabe

Jill on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jillmcabe

Jill’s Website: https://www.jillmcabe.com/

 

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Hacking People Processes with Rhamy Alejeal

Rhamy Alejeal is the CEO of People Processes, he's also an author and an HR guru. In this fun and engaging show we talk about:

• What comes first people or processes?
• What the HR systems are that business can’t live without?
• The differentials between human and resources.
• What common changes occurred to people and processes since the pandemic?

 

Join our Tribe at https://leadership-hacker.com

 

Music: " Upbeat Party " by Scott Holmes courtesy of the Free Music Archive FMA

 

Transcript: Thanks to Jermaine Pinto at JRP Transcribing for being our Partner. Contact Jermaine via LinkedIn or via his site JRP Transcribing Services

 

Find out more about Rhamy below:

Rhamy on Twitter: https://twitter.com/RAlejeal

People Processes Twitter: https://twitter.com/people_process

Rhamy on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rhamy/

People Processes Website: https://peopleprocesses.com

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/peopleprocesses/

 

 

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Steve Rush: Some call me Steve, dad, husband, or friend. Others might call me boss, coach, or mentor. Today you can call me The Leadership Hacker.

 

Thanks for listening in. I really appreciate it. My job as The Leadership Hacker is to hack into the minds, experiences, habits and learning of great leaders, C-Suite executives, authors, and development experts so that I can assist you developing your understanding and awareness of leadership. I am Steve Rush, and I am your host today. I am the author of Leadership Cake. I am a transformation consultant and leadership coach. I cannot wait to start sharing all things leadership with you

 

Today's special guest is Rhamy Alejeal. He's the CEO of People Processes. He's an author, an HR guru, but before we get a chance to speak with Rhamy, it's The Leadership Hacker News.

The Leadership Hacker News

Steve Rush: One of the main reasons that keep business leaders awake at night, I ask that question to my network and reached out to over a hundred business leaders. And this is the top six things that they came back with that keep them awake at night. Number one is planning, planning around the short term, financial, their tactical, their team, and their strategy. Having a bad or an ill-informed plan keeps people awake at night, which is also strange. Because number two is long term strategy. So, it goes without saying, if you don't have a short-term plan, you're never going to have a long-term strategy. But long term to me is beyond five years. Beyond the linear.

The next thing on the list was dealing with market changes and in particular, how they've responded to COVID, but generally how supply chains are moving and changing around. Hybrid working wasn’t before on the list but how they can gain access to their team's insights and behaviors while being remote and distant from them. Number five was around staff retention. We've heard lots of discussion in the past about the great resignation but holding onto real talent has become a real challenge for many business leaders and a final one coming in number six was finding enough diversity in their workforce through either gender, race, or just deep thoughts, because thoughts is about differentiation too. And there of course is then the elephant in the room. So, for those who listening to this who sleep peacefully at night, there's also a reason for that. And that reason is that you've likely gone from an intention to an action. You've made something happen. You've made a decision; you've closed it off before the end of the day. And therefore, you can do what your brain's designed to do when you get to bed and that's repair and recover. That's been The Leadership Hacker News. Thanks to a number of you in the community who have raised us as a subject that you wanted us to feature on the show. So please also get in touch if there's something that you want to hear. Let's dive in.

Strat of Podcast

Steve Rush: Joining me on the show today is Rhamy Alejeal. He's a CEO of People Processes, or if you're in North America, of course it's Process and they provide the entire HR department for your business. He's also the author of the book People Processes, How Your People Can Be Your Organization's Competitive Advantage. Rhamy, welcome to the show.

Rhamy Alejeal: Thank you so much. I'm glad to be here.

Steve Rush: Me too. Now you have a really fascinating introduction to the world of business that started much earlier than many of us. In fact, you started out your first gig when you were 13 years old and actually made a bucket load of cash as a young man. I love for you to share the story with our listeners and how you got there?

Rhamy Alejeal: Yeah, well, I was a lucky kid. I had an amazing grandmother and I loved to spend time with her. She was in insurance sales, she sold what are called Medicare Supplements. So, for people internationally, when you turned 65 in the U.S., you get to go on the Government Health Insurance Plan. There's a nationalized healthcare plan for people over age 65 called Medicare. And my grandmother would call them you know, right around their birthdays. And she got a big, long list of them. And I wanted to spend more time with my grandmother, but she would never let me spend the night on weeknights in retrospect, probably because she sure didn't want to spend [laugh] needed a couple nights off, but she told me it was because, hey, those are my cold calling nights. I can't have you come.

So, at 13 I told my granddaughter, look, I could cold call. I can figure this out. Let me cold call for you so I can spend the night. And she somewhat, I think to humor me, gave me a copy of her, you know, 24 cassettes of call training and the big Medicare Supplement Guide and scripts and told me to read and listen to it all and she'd be happy to have me cold call. Well, I don't know that she really thought I'd do it, but I did. And I loved it. And I came in and said, hey gran, I'm ready. Let me cold call for you. And she, you know, this was back in the nineties and, you know, she said, well, let's give it a shot. She sat me down at her desk, handed me the big, you know, line printed green and white paper. Came in a big, long green, you had to tear the edges off.

Steve Rush: Yeah, I remember them well.

Rhamy Alejeal: Of everybody turning 65 and a zip code and said, get to calling. And it was, you know, first call, didn't go great. But on the second call, I said, hi, this is Rhamy. I know you're turning 65 soon. And my grandmother, she helps people who are turning 65, figure out Medicare, and she'd love to meet with you. And it turns out 13-year-olds calling people turning 65 and saying, my grandmother wants to meet with you was just the perfect, [laugh] the perfect phone script for a cold approach. And it started worked very well. I wound up setting a lot of appointments for my grandmother.

And then I wound up growing that into a little bit of a dance with a couple of other agents and setting appointments for them. And by the time I was 14, I was making, you know, $50-60,000 a year setting appointment for Medicare Supplements Agents in my hometown. So that was my introduction to the world of business. It lasted for a few years before we figured out that, hey, there are some compliance problems with this, but it all went great and really gave me a good basis for understanding that world of rough cold calling and learned a lot about insurance and dealing with clients and having systems to make sure you’re consistently performing. And it was a great start.

Steve Rush: And your journey into entrepreneurialism started that way. And I think from the last time we kicked this around, didn't you end up in insurance at some point?

Rhamy Alejeal: I did, yeah. So, I worked with my grandmother till I was 16. After that I launched a lawn mowing company for a few years that also, you know, turns out mowing lawn over the summer with three other guys and some trucks make some decent money. At 19, I bought my first investment property. My wife and I bought a foreclosure in 2007, the height of the market. Moved in, it had no floors, no walls. We learned how to renovate ourselves. And after graduating, I actually launched Poplar Insurance Agency. I got my bachelor's degree in finance and economics with minors in math and physics, you know, so I could sell insurance like you do. And totally made a lot of sense to me. And over the years that company, Poplar Insurance Agency. 13 years later has morphed into People Processes and really helped me find my niche and the people I love to work with.

Steve Rush: And you've done that through a series of acquisitions, and you've now got a really successful business, which is predominantly around helping organizations with their HR and their people processes, right?

Rhamy Alejeal: That's right. It started in the insurance space of dealing with employee benefits, right? So, making sure you had attractive reasonable benefits to make sure you can attract and retain good talent in your industry. And very quickly that morphed into also managing the payroll side of the business, because that was a big part of benefits at the time, you try trying to figure out how to keep all that stuff straight, get the bills paid, which led to compliance problems and understanding. In the U.S. Obamacare, the affordable care act came out in 2013. And that really changed a lot of how benefits as a regulatory environment needed to behave. And each time the market became more complex, we either acquired a company or launched our own internal so that we could provide those services broader and broader. And by 2015 or so, we were simply functioning as an entire HR department. Not just benefits, not just payroll, not just compliance, but also looking at things like recruit and retention and performance management, retirement plans, the whole piece of it.

Steve Rush: And of course, when people hear HR, it's human and resources and they're actually quite different things, aren't they?

Rhamy Alejeal: Yes, [laugh]. you have a lot of humans and no resources, and sometimes you have a few humans, but plenty of money to go around. It's an interesting world.

Steve Rush: And however, big, however, small you are, you need focus and attention on those humanistic things and the resources and processes that come with it. What's the reason when organizations scale, they might see HR as being a side gig rather than an integral part of their business.

Rhamy Alejeal: Ah, well, especially, you know, your smaller businesses when they start out, I like to break into three stages. Imagine you are, I don't know, a guy selling insurance, just to use a random example. You start off, you have a product, how you wound up in the industry may be relevant, may not be. Your product is likely very similar to that of your competitors. Your pricing is likely very similar. There's a stage in the early part where you have to focus on your product to make it unique or valuable, find your unique proposition. Another way I like to put, is you just have to start by not sucking at your job, right. You have to learn how to be a provider that doesn't suck. You've got to fulfill your promises. Those promises have to be unique or good in the market, and it's a tough journey. And a lot of small businesses fail there, right. Your average tire chain shop starts off with a completely homogenous product that doesn't differentiate, and they have to figure out how to make their product, their company special. From there, they scale their operations. They start realizing, hey, I've got a thing that people want to buy. I've got new clients coming in through the door and they realize I can't just change all the tires myself. I need other people. And they focus on what I call operations processes. This is the E-Myth Revisited, right. This is writing down your standard operating procedures and figuring out how to benefit from labor arbitrage, where you can have somebody else change the tire, but you can focus on the overall business and continue to grow. That step alone eliminates 90% of businesses. They have enough trouble figuring out how to scale their operations,

Steve Rush: Right.

Rhamy Alejeal: But once that's done, you now have a new problem. You may have standard operating procedures for the standard things. In my business for example, we realized, hey, we've got you know, when we were in one state, in really one city with 25 clients, we developed processes. We grew our staff to around 10, 15 people, and everything was going fine. But then we started to really grow. We entered 50 states. We had clients who were headquartered in LA and in New York and in Memphis and in Kansas City. And the thing that started happening is that new items came up. Not just every once in a while, but every day, things that couldn't be written down as a standard operating procedure. My wife and I worked together; we started the company together. All we really had to deal with was the new stuff. The new stuff happened three times a day. And we were dying. That's where people processes come in, people process. So, first product doesn't suck. Then your operations are standardized. Then you need processes to develop people who will make the same decision you would make.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Rhamy Alejeal: But without you, right.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Rhamy Alejeal: And that requires a lot. That requires they have guidance on behavior. They need to know how you think. And in a small business with four people, maybe the answer is they start off changing tires and then they drink a beer with you every afternoon and you hang out and they get to know your family. And eventually they just think like you would.

Steve Rush: Right.

Rhamy Alejeal: That can work. It may take a year and a half, but eventually you got somebody you can trust to make decisions. You've got a leader you can trust, but that not scalable. People processes is this operating system basically that allows us to take an enthusiastic new hire to someone you can trust to make decisions when you're not there.

Steve Rush: So, here's a chicken and egg kind of question for you. What comes first? Is it the people or the processes?

Rhamy Alejeal: It's a tough question, when I first thought about that question, my answer was actually people come first in that if, you know, if you have a process for requesting time off, but your top guy, you know, breaks his leg and needs to go to the hospital, and he doesn't fill out the form first. Well then obviously people come first, the process is secondary, and that is true. You have to be a human, right. You got to treat your people with respect and realize that processes can create a bureaucracy that can harm your relationship. So, you don't want that. On the other hand, I believe the development of those relationship so that you can trust people to not abuse systems so that you have the ability to say, hey, I know that Steve would never just not do a thing because he doesn't want to do it. It's because there's a good reason and I can trust him. The development of that trust has to be a process.

Steve Rush: And it's interesting, isn't it? When you start to think about how that they're not mutually exclusive at all, that they're entirely intertwined, aren't they?

Rhamy Alejeal: Absolutely, especially you were talking about, how do people start valuing this HR side of the business. When they start off, they're all external. They think all about how do I get new clients? How do I make my product better? How do I make it so that the promises I've made actually get delivered upon? They're thinking externally. And they're constantly looking at that framework. The internal process is what allows you to scale up your business. And those internal processes are around people. The only thing that does anything in your business, people. So, it's kind of like saying, if you look at it from an external focus and you think, well, what comes first? Client or product delivery processes or sales processes. And the answer is, the clients come first, but you're never going to talk to them or they're never going to stick around. You're not going to be able to do a good job for the client if you don't have those processes in place, it's the same for your employees. You have to have the processes in place, or you're not going to be a good employer. Doesn't matter how deeply you care about them. If you have to reinvent the wheel every single time for every little part of the employee process, you're not going to do a great job.

Steve Rush: Guess a lot of the systems as well that you are talking to are actually when you are small in scale often unconscious or at the back of, you know, the own operators mind. But as you grow, they need to be shared and people need to understand them.

Rhamy Alejeal: A system exists. Absolutely. It may just be that you know Steve makes a decision [laugh] every time and that's a system, but until they are standardized, public trained, some of the key pieces that are necessary to implement a process across an organization, it's very difficult for them to be improved. That's the genius of a system or a process. What I often train my small business clients to do is not try to invent whole cloth a better way to deal with an employee performance management, a performance management process. Maybe that's a bonus structure at the end of the year or an evaluation of their behavior or even a goal system. Don't start with that. Start with what you do now. Write that down, publish that, put that in front of the employees and say, this is what we do. And you will find within weeks, a lot of times. There are obvious, you don't need an HR expert to tell you, hey, that's kind of stupid we should do it different.

Steve Rush: mm-hmm.

Rhamy Alejeal: Right.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Rhamy Alejeal: And make a small improvement to it. Systems processes, the great genius of it is that you can make a change and see the result, make a change, and see the result. And until you actually make it a public system, as opposed to one that just exists in your head, those iterations are very difficult to actually stick. So, the advantage isn't that having a system, lets people know what to do. Though that's not a bad one. The advantage is, is that the system allows itself to improve over time.

Steve Rush: Yeah. So, I heard you talk about standard, standardization quite a bit Rhamy and I wondered how that sits alongside being agile and innovative and does one suppress the other?

Rhamy Alejeal: It can, I mean, bureaucracy can kill a business.

Steve Rush: Right?

Rhamy Alejeal: I would say, you know, there's a line between chaos and order and you want to straddle it, right. You want the flexibility so that people can rapidly make decisions and experiment, but you need the order to make sure that everyone's going in the same direction. The information is shared freely so that good decisions can be made. There's a balance to be had there. What I find in most small businesses before hierarchies are heavily developed is that they are more chaotic than orderly

Steve Rush: Right

Rhamy Alejeal: Now when you're talking, for me, a 1500 person or 2000-person organization, I'm sure in 10 and 30,000 person organizations, it has been processed to death, right. There's a process for everything. They just may not be very good ones. They may not provide the flexibility necessary for employees to be able to well exist and grow inside of them, but in small businesses anyway, I often find that they're too far in the chaotic sphere.

Steve Rush: Yeah, and it creates this discipline in the space, I guess, then to give that individual the opportunity to be innovative.

Rhamy Alejeal: Absolutely.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Rhamy Alejeal: Well, think of it. Think of it. Anything that has a process removes, significant mental load off those who need to figure it out, right. So, let's take a maternity leave as an example, right. I'm going to have a kid, I'm pregnant. It's three months in. I've got six months to figure out what's going to happen with my maternity leave. That is not the time for the business owner to be deciding what does maternity leave need to look like in our business.

Steve Rush: [Laugh] Yeah.

Rhamy Alejeal: That decision needed to be made while ago, right. And it may be that the decision they made a year ago and put in place and communicated and is easily accessible to the employee is not the optimal decision. It may very well be that. It's better to have made a decision in most cases so that the employee knows what to expect and knows how this is going to go then to have not made a decision and have to figure that out when you're staring down the barrel of a choice, a fun way to think about this is, perhaps you should think up the name of your child before the baby comes, right.

Or at least before the epidural and you're knocked out on drugs, sorry, I've got a four-month-old. So, I'm a little into this world, right. We had to at least narrow down the list a little bit. Because if Liz, my wife had to make that decision, you know, under the epidural with the baby there, like I don't know what we would've been named, but I know she really loved Godiva Chocolate during the last couple months there. And I'm pretty sure it would've been Godiva [laugh] even if, David was born, so we got to put some time in upfront to make those decisions better. And I think that having the decision, having been made, having it as a process allows you to remove a lot of uncertainty.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Rhamy Alejeal: And that uncertainty is a huge mental weight on your staff and you. Doesn't mean you can't improve it. You should improve it.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Rhamy Alejeal: See how it goes, run it through. If there's an immediate obvious, problem fix it, but allow it to be a process rather than the whims of how you're feeling that week or, oh my gosh, we can't let that employee go on maternity, she's too important. I tell you that kind of stuff comes up and you lose that employee. She's too important to go on maternity. Well guess what? She's way too important, not to, right?

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Rhamy Alejeal: So those are the kind of decisions we want to make upfront.

Steve Rush: Now Rhamy, you've had the opportunity of work with thousands of different people in businesses over the time and create and work with them around their systems. And I just wonder if there's a natural leveling or a pecking order on the systems particularly that businesses can't live without. And I just wondered if there was maybe one that sticks out above the others as being the most critical HR system or process that I might want to have in my business?

Rhamy Alejeal: Well, gosh, I think, you know, I love all my children. You need to pay your people on time. You need a payroll system. You know when they work, you need time and labor. You need to know when they're going to work, you need scheduling. You need to know how to recruit. You need a recruiting system onboarding, off boarding. God, you need a way to fire people. And what happens when they quit? All of them are important, but I will say the one that separate the big boys from the newbies, right. I can often tell how developed an organization is by the existence at least, or complexity and depth of their performance management system. Now if you're a small business, the truth is, if you have seven employees, you know what all of them do, [laugh], you know, if they're doing a good job. You may not need an in depth, performance management system outside of maybe setting expectations, right.

So that the employees know what to do, at least that, but you probably don't need an in-depth dashboard that connects and executives and HR and make sure that everything is connected. But what I often do is, one of the first things I try to deep dive in is, where are they in this performance management spectrum? On one hand, a small business where the owner provides nearly no expectations and nearly no review. And everyone is surprised when they're in trouble. That would be the bottom of the spectrum up to something like Google, where every single keystroke, metric, time spent, thought had, contribution made is analyzed by a machine learning algorithm to generate analytics and demographic data. And they know that you're going to quit before you do. Like, there's a whole other world all the way over there that honestly, I like to read about, but I don't get to play with much. If you are at marginal scale, say 20 to 50 employees, focusing on your management of your existing employees, your performance management can often have an outsized impact in both your turnover, your employee satisfaction, and your ability to deliver to your clients.

Steve Rush: And that's where you get your marginal gains, right?

Rhamy Alejeal: They come from everywhere. But absolutely it's much better to have a system in place that allows good employees to become great employees, right. And allows you to keep your great employees than not. And that's probably less work or less financial investment anyway, than a system that allows you to rapidly replace top performers with new people, right?

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Rhamy Alejeal: That's an important system too. Your top performers will leave eventually, and you need a way to do it, but for many businesses they could cut their turnover significantly just by really focusing in on that performance management piece.

Steve Rush: And I wonder as well, the whole notion of performance management can sit differently with different focus or can't they, so some will thrive in the opportunity of having clarity and guidance and the process that follows that where others might feel a little bit uncomfortable and uneasy as they start to evolve that as well. What's your experience about some of the psychology that sits alongside performance management?

Rhamy Alejeal: Well, that's a very good question. People creatives, which by the way, entrepreneurs and artists have the same brain, it's the same high risk, high reward drive a lot of times. So, you find that systems that constrain behavior are very important in a hierarchy. It's very important in a system, a business to give people places to go and know what to do. But you will often find that creatives and those who are more entrepreneurial, like a salesperson may find those constraints significantly more constraining [laugh] right. They may chafe under that pressure or the limited pieces there. For them you want to design performance management systems that are primarily around them setting their expectations, right. And then a method of making ensure that their expectations or goals align with the company's expectations and goals. It's a lot more a system of alignment than it is say, giving them a track to run on.

Whereas in an accounting organization, you can be significantly more focused on very specific, measurable pieces. There's actually a great story of a company that did customs management. So, every time someone would come in, every time a shipment would come in, they'd have to fill out all this customs paperwork. And they moved to measuring their primary KPI for their direct frontline agent was not number of cargos filled out because some cargos required hundreds of pieces of paper, some required two, and counting the pieces of paper, which were government forms that had to be filled out by hand or in a typewriter. These weren't even digital forms because it was a customs international thing. They did it by the ounces, by the weight, by the weight of paper, they moved, literally. They had their intake and outtake replaced with scales.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Rhamy Alejeal: And that was their primary metric every day and said, hey, are we improving or not? That sort of micro level of performance management may suit some, but likely would not do well with a group of aggressive salespeople, right?

Steve Rush: Yeah, absolutely right. Yeah, I can see that. So, you managed to gather all of this experience and you threw it into the book, People Processes. Tell us a little bit about how the book came about and what was in inspiration behind it?

Rhamy Alejeal: Well, People Processes the book came about because of a podcast that I did call Don't HR Alone. I did a daily podcast for about a year and a half, closer two years, really. Couple hundred episodes. They were daily 15 minutes, hey, we're going to dive in on this issue or there's a new compliance update, or gosh, Minnesota's changing their minimum wage. And what does this mean for you? Whatever I could find honestly, to fill a daily podcast but it did pretty dang well, and that actually led to the book deal. The book truthfully, I wrote almost 400 pages, single spaced in word over the course of six months. I'm effectively made an HR textbook. My editors took that and laughed at me and said, what are you trying to make around Rhamy?

Because this thing, ain't no one going to read. this. [Laugh] right. Are you trying to make a college textbook that people will assign, or are you trying to make a book that your clients or your target clients would like to read? And that really changed everything. People Processes is a broad guide that lays out the key sections of the employee life cycle from onboarding to offboarding, right through termination and even alumni management. It lays out what the key processes are, what a good process looks like, what a bad process looks like. And then the last quarter of the book is actually almost a workbook. It's exercises for you to actually lay all this out in your own organization. The first quarter is justification for small business owners and boards on why they should invest in the time and energy in necessary on these.

And the idea was, and again, I give credit to my publisher on this, was that this book would be an excellent book for all business owner to read, to get their head around or for an HR professional to read quickly. It's nothing earth shattering in there. There's some good fun insights and some great stories, but to read and then pass on to the executive or the boards that they have to work under because it will show them both why it's important, and how it can be accomplished in a reasonable manner.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Rhamy Alejeal: And that's where the book sits. If you're an HR professional, who's Sherm certified and done this for 10 years, you're going to find the book to be fun and entertaining and cover all the basics [Laugh].

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Rhamy Alejeal: But if you're a small business owner, who's looking at maybe be turning in inward for a little while, you've got the business growing, but you're realizing that the pieces inside your company, aren't up to the task of delivering on the promises and clients that you've been able to make and gather. This is the book for you, because it will give you the steps you need to get this well, moving inside your organization.

Steve Rush: Awesome. And if you think about the journey that we've all been on over the last couple of years through the pandemic, as we hopefully start to move beyond the pandemic, how have you seen people change their approach to processes and their people?

Rhamy Alejeal: Well, HR has been a hot topic over the last few years, of course. In the U.S., especially we had lots of diversity equity and inclusivity issues, and then the pandemic changed everything. And suddenly CEOs started realizing that their processes for keeping up with their people were heavily reliant on management by walking around, right. You had managers and they just kind of talked to their employees every day and sat next to them. That was a big part of management. That doesn't work very well in a remote world. It doesn't work in a global world where it may be 9:00 AM my time and 3:00 PM your time. Many companies were able to adapt very quickly to the pandemic and remote work and hybrid offices and the globalization of the marketplace very well, because they were already there. They already had the processes in place to manage remotely and not just rely on the gut of the manager, right. But the ones that didn't were hit very hard and they, I think over the last two years, three years have learned that they have to have processes in place to be able to scale that people's side of their operations.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Rhamy Alejeal: Both over a larger staff, but also over time at distance.

Steve Rush: Yeah. It's that moving from one place to another place, but if it's not there in the first place, then you're going to end up back in that chaotic basically you articulate earlier, right?

Rhamy Alejeal: Absolutely.

Steve Rush: Yeah. So, we're going to flip the lens a little bit now. You've been leading people and teams, since you were 16 years old from those grass cutting days, right the way through to now where you've got a really large organization. So, I'm really keen to hack into that leadership experience of yours. If you had to dive in and think about the top three things, the top three leadership hacks, what would they be?

Rhamy Alejeal: I think there are a few places where everyone can improve. Of course, one piece of leadership is to understand and embrace that you are on stage, that what you do matters. It is the price of leadership. And it's not really a hack. It has nothing to do with people processes to a large degree but know that your organization is a reflection of you. And I find that often my business does best when I think about improving parts of my life that are not relevant to my business, right. Being in better shape and having a closer family and having a better balance, it shows, and it matters. So, no matter what processes and what technology and where your industry's at. Know that by signing up to lead an organization, either through entrepreneurship or in an executive role, you are signing up for a public role, a role where you will be judged in a role where the things that are not necessarily exactly tied to your performance at work matter, it's a public role. So, some people just need to hear that and understand that is what it is.

Steve Rush: Like It.

Rhamy Alejeal: It's a tough thing. Next up would be that the genius of processes, as we mentioned earlier, is in their iteration and improvement. Many people, especially leaders are high performing individuals who have turned in perfect papers, their whole life, right. Who have been at the top of the pack, the fastest runner, the best player, the top academic, and they've done it through hard work and perseverance. Business is a little different. Business never has an in season. Well, most of them anyway, unless you're running a football team.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Rhamy Alejeal: But most, it's going to go on forever. And the great genius of systems is that you can put one in place and then improve it and improve it and use the scientific method. Change one thing, see what the effect is, change one thing, see what the effect is. It's so much more valuable for you to put something in place and then improve it than it is for you in your great leadership genius, to sit in a dark room with Brandy and think hard for hours and come up with the perfect answer because you won't, there's no chance of it. It's just too complicated. So, I try to pull back my clients from feeling like their unique genius has to be expressed through any system inside their organization, allow it to exist and then make sure that a part of the system is to improve itself. And it will over time become significantly better than anything you alone could have dreamed up.

Steve Rush: Great.

Rhamy Alejeal: The final piece of leadership hack that I would say is, just a random kind of piece of information is to always think at the front lines, many organizations and a lot of times in the smaller organizations, as well as the larger ones, the executives think about other executives. If you ask a small business owner, who do you want to hire? It's always me, right. I want someone who's going to read my email, reply to it as if it were me, make my decisions, handle my books, and talk to my clients and just do me. And that's unfortunately not going to happen.

Steve Rush: That's right.

Rhamy Alejeal: Instead, look at what you do on a day-to-day basis and break it into the smallest job possible. The most focused job possible. One of the exercises I have my client go through as a true hack is to design your org chart for what you envision the future of your company to be. Recognizing that there are only 12 of you now, or 20 of you now. In my organization, our org chart is about twice as large as we are currently. We actually review that org chart quarterly, and that org chart is about half empty. And we've done that since we had three employees [Laugh]

Steve Rush: That's great.

Rhamy Alejeal: We had six people on our org chart and that gives you a direction to go and recognize that you, as the executive in a small business are probably doing seven jobs and your top people are probably doing three or four and that's okay. But think about them as unique individual jobs that have different requirements, descriptions, metrics, goals, competencies, skills. Recognize that in a small business, you may be doing multiple jobs, but think about them as individual ones. And that will give you a path to growth significantly faster. It will help you understand where your next hire are going to be and what needs to be done. And then fill in from the bottom to the top, the number of seven-person, small businesses I've spoken with that have a CEO, a chief marketing officer, a director of finance, a COO, a receptionist and a bookkeeper, right. And I'm like, wait, hey, hang on, buddy. You got to always start. And especially if you're new to hiring and scaling a business, start with the smallest job, you're going to screw it up. Might as well be that rather than a partner,

Steve Rush: Next part of the show, we call it Hack to Attack. So, this is typically where something has not gone well, might have even screwed up, but as a result, you've learned from it. And it's now a force of good in your work or life. What would be your Hack to Attack Rhamy?

Rhamy Alejeal: I've screwed up so much. It's hard to pick. When I started my company at 22, I had $105,000 in the bank. I rent a quarter floor and a high rise because I needed a beautiful place for my clients to meet me. I was spending $5,000 a month on marketing and advertising, and I didn't know would be successful. Six months in I had $4,000 in the bank and a payroll due of five and a rent due of five in like three weeks. And it's only gone down from there. We did well. We survived that, but multiple times throughout my business, I have come to these points of near utter failure. I have sobbed in my office. When I first launched payroll eight or nine years for example, my sister who'd worked with me for years. Young college student, she really took it over. She took over payroll. She helped me find the company that we purchased, which she helped me with every client. She was the head of payroll. And after graduating and then getting her master's degree, well, I couldn't afford to pay her as much as a big accounting firm. And it was right for her to move on. But man, I sat in my office and cried [laugh], why are you leaving? I thought we were going to grow this together. And it was incredibly painful.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Rhamy Alejeal: Some of the lessons I've learned, every single one of those issues has forced me to find a better way. And they have been the points of the greatest growth in my organization.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Rhamy Alejeal: Every single time, every single time without fail, I have actually come to like when reality steps up and punches me in the face and says, you're doing it wrong. There's a major problem. So, try in that moment to take a deep breath and think. I'm so lucky that it happened now and not two years from now, two years of wasted work when I'm just building further into the structure that doesn't work. So, look out for those moments and consider them an opportunity.

Steve Rush: Super advice. Thank you, Rhamy. The last part of the show, we get to give you a chance to go and do some time travel now. Bump into Rhamy at 21, give him some advice. What would it be?

Rhamy Alejeal: I'm going to say 22, because that's when I started my company. 21-year-old Rhamy was going to be a physicist. He was pretty sure. So, that didn't work out. But 22, the day I opened my company. Some of the advice I would give me. Some of it I wouldn't need, but reading, learning every day is a huge value. I don't know that I need to tell myself that I've read and listened every day. So, it made a big difference. I think for most, it shocks me the number of successful businesses who don't just look at a library and salivate and go, oh my God, there's just so much success in there. I got to go look at it. I got to go read it. So that's my number one piece of advice for a younger person. For personally. It would be that this is going to be harder than you ever expected. And the spreadsheet you made, you know, everyone makes a spreadsheet a couple months before they start their business.

Steve Rush: That's right.

Rhamy Alejeal: And they project out and say, hey, five years, I'm going to be making money. And in 10 years, I would tell myself, that my spreadsheet is way optimistic for the first five to seven years of my business, that I was underestimating how incredibly difficult and hard this will be. But I would also say that my spreadsheet at 10 years has way underestimated how good it can be.

Steve Rush: That's nice. And that leads me to ask of you Rhamy, how we can get our listeners to connect with you? Find out a little bit more about the work that you and the firm do, but maybe you'll get a copy of the book?

Rhamy Alejeal: Oh yeah. Well, peopleprocesses.com is our website. You can search People Processes on Amazon to find in the book. It's also linked from our website. @peopleprocesses.com. We have some great free resources for subscribers, including things like overall templates to use, great onboarding checklists, ways of setting up a performance management system. Up at the top there's an academy where you can sign up for courses. That'll help you develop this in your own organization. And of course, right on the website, there's a contact us where you can reach out and schedule time with my staff or even me to figure out if we can work together. We work in the United States, but our academy is internationally focused and can help you with anywhere across the world.

Steve Rush: Excellent. And we'll make sure that's in our show notes so that as people finish listening, they can dive straight in.

Rhamy Alejeal: Wonderful.

Steve Rush: Rhamy I've really enjoyed chatting to you, and it's no surprise that you've made an enormous success in helping others build their business in the way that you've built yours. So, I just want to say thank you for taking the time out of your busy schedule, to be on our show and thanks for being part of our Leadership Hacker community.

Rhamy Alejeal: Thank you, Steve. I really appreciate it.

Steve Rush: Thank you Rhamy.

Closing

Steve Rush: I want to sign off by saying thank you to you for joining us on the show too. We recognize without you, there is no show. So please continue to share, subscribe, and like, and continue to get in touch with us with the great new stories that we share every week. And so that we can continue to bring you great stories. Please make sure you give us a five-star review where you can and share this podcast with your friends, your teams, and communities. You want to find us on social media. You can find us on Facebook and Twitter @leadershiphacker, Leadership Hacker on YouTube and on Instagram, the_leadership_hacker and if that wasn’t enough, you can also find us on our website https://leadership-hacker.com

Tune into next episode to find out what great hacks and stories are coming your way. That's me signing off. I'm Steve Rush, and I've been your Leadership Hacker.

 

 

Thrive or Wither with Gary Frey

Gary Frey has served as president of a number successful companies, including Bizjournals.com, a business news portal which he helped transform from a three-person organization to a $100 million company which he sold to Microsoft. In this show you can learn about:

• The most important attributes of successful leaders today
• The role gratitude plays in leading others
• The philosophy of just connecting with good people
• How to use the Thrive-Wither self-assessment.

 

Join our Tribe at https://leadership-hacker.com

 

Music: " Upbeat Party " by Scott Holmes courtesy of the Free Music Archive FMA

Transcript: Thanks to Jermaine Pinto at JRP Transcribing for being our Partner. Contact Jermaine via LinkedIn or via his site JRP Transcribing Services

Find out more about Gary below:

Gary on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/garydfrey/

Gary’s Blog Page: https://gfrey.wordpress.com

 

Full Transcript Below

Read the rest of this entry »

Anyone for the Enneagram? with Matt Schlegel

Matt Schlegel is the Principal of Schlegel Consulting and Evolutionary Teams, he’s an entrepreneur and ex Tech Executive and now author of Teamwork 9.0. In this show you can learn:

• How Matt evolved Teamwork 9.0 and why numbers and not letters?
• How Teamwork 9.0 plays to “Whole Brain” thinking
• Neuroscience and the Enneagram
• How to build problem solving muscles

Join our Tribe at https://leadership-hacker.com

 

Music: " Upbeat Party " by Scott Holmes courtesy of the Free Music Archive FMA

Transcript: Thanks to Jermaine Pinto at JRP Transcribing for being our Partner. Contact Jermaine via LinkedIn or via his site JRP Transcribing Services.

 

Find out more about Matt below:

Matt on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mattschlegel/

Matt on Twitter: https://twitter.com/MattSchlegel

Company Website: https://evolutionaryteams.com

 

Full Transcript Below

Read the rest of this entry »

Breaking Out of the Matrix with Michael and Audree Sahota

Michael Sahota is a thought leader, author, and speaker in the Agile industry. He's also the co-founder and CEO of SHIFT314, and he's joined by Audree Sahota, Chief Metaphysics Officer and also co-founder of SHIFT314, together they wrote the book Leading Beyond Change. In this amazing show we discover:

• The story behind SHIFT314
• What is emotional science and how that could that help me as a leader
• Why leaders find it so hard to unlock the right energy in our lives
• The SHIFT314 Evolutionary Leadership Framework (SELF)

Join our Tribe at https://leadership-hacker.com

 

Music: " Upbeat Party " by Scott Holmes courtesy of the Free Music Archive FMA

 

Transcript: Thanks to Jermaine Pinto at JRP Transcribing for being our Partner. Contact Jermaine via LinkedIn or via his site JRP Transcribing Services

 

Find out more about Michael and Audree below:

Michael on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelsahota/

Audree on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/audreetara/

Michael on Twitter: https://twitter.com/MichaelSahota

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/shift314_leadership/

Company  Website: https://shift314.com

 

 

Full Transcript Below

 

 

Steve Rush: Some call me Steve, dad, husband, or friend. Others might call me boss, coach, or mentor. Today you can call me The Leadership Hacker.

 

Our two special guests on today's show is Michael Sahota who's the founder and CEO of SHIFT314, he's a speaker, a thought leader. And the author of Leading Beyond Change. His co-author is Audree Sahota who's also the co-founder and Chief Metaphysics officer at SHIFT314. But before we get a chance to speak with Michael and Audree, it’s The Leadership Hacker News.

 

The Leadership Hacker News

 

Steve Rush: It turns out in times of crisis, that's a perfect opportunity for us to do some self-reflection and think about what's really important to us. According to some recent research completed by Microsoft, workers' sense of worth grew during the pandemic and during 2020 during terms to crisis, so did their expectations. For almost a year of publishing the first study, Microsoft shared results of another iteration of the Microsoft world index. And it's a study run across 31 countries, 31,000 people along with analysis of trillions of productivity signals in Microsoft, 365 trends on LinkedIn and labor trends.

Some findings found that flexible working is here to stay. And leaders seemed out of touch with employees while workers were highly productive, yet also exhausted. Gen Zed or Gen Zers if you're in the U.S. needed, re-energizing due to a lack of networking opportunities. And finally, talent availability grew with the hybrid work, but the word hybrid work means so much to so many. Organizations still grapple to get an understanding of what hybrid work really means to them. What comes out in research from Microsoft is that COVID changed our relationship with work forever. 53% of employees are more like to prioritize health and wellbeing over their work compared to that pre pandemic. And in addition, 47% of responders said that they're most likely to put family and personal life first ahead of any work commitments. Employers must be ready to accommodate the needs and trends that are playing out or risk losing their talent to competitors who might offer exactly what they're looking for.

The study shows that many hybrid employees, in fact, 51% say they'll consider a switch to remote working over the next 12 months. And even more remote employees, 57% said they would consider a switch to more hybrid. And while the two data points could be confusing, they clearly speak to the role of hybrid working is here to stay, providing the flexibility needed to lead a more blended life while offering opportunities to stay connected with coworkers. And it clearly shows that deciding what's best for your talent will not be a one size fits all affair either.

Needs will be different based on the seniority within the company, the type of job, how long somebody's been with the organization, their home circumstances. It's also critically to fully understand and embrace hybrid work so that it requires more than just offering working from home. It really does mean making sure the employees feel part of their work at home and are also being seen and communicated as if they were in the office. And the final data point I wanted to share with you is that 54% of leaders felt that productivity had been negatively affected since going to a more of a remote and hybrid working environment. Although 80% of the same employees said that there had been an improvement in their productivity since that shift.

Getting people back into the office must be driven by the employees and those who want to have a real desire to build connections. But particularly for those who were joining during the pandemic and may have not yet had the opportunity to form strong relationships. And the leadership hack here is, it's not just about flexible work location, flexible environment, but most importantly, flexible mindset and a flexible mindset from business leaders who understand their talent, know that it's not the same as it was two years ago. And they also know that their needs have changed. Understanding intrinsically what's driving each individual on your team could be the one thing that really unlocks true high performance. That's been The Leadership Hacker News. Looking forward as always to hearing your tweets and information about what you'd like to hear and see on the show.

Start of Podcast

Steve Rush: I'm joined on the show today by our first ever husband and wife duo, who are also business partners, Michael Sahota is a thought leader, author, and speaker in the Agile Industry. He's also the co-founder and CEO of SHIFT314. He's developed unique IP to unlock success with agile, digital, and lean, in other new ways of working. And he's joined by Audree Sahota. Chief Metaphysics Officer, and also co-founder of SHIFT314, and Audree has a mastery over many practices and techniques for rapidly shifting consciousness, which I can't wait to explo.re. Welcome both, to The Leadership Hacker Podcast.

Audree Sahota: Thank you.

Michael Sahota: Yeah, pleasure to be here.

Steve Rush: So, first husband and wife duo, first question. Who made the first move?

Michael Sahota: That would probably be me.

Audree Sahota: Well, yeah. Considering I didn't really like Michael, when I first met him,

Steve Rush: Which is often the case, isn't it with relationships?

Audree Sahota: Right, yeah. He was kind of a thorn on my side. We actually met in India in a really incredible personal growth and transformation course that we had both been involved in for many years. And they put our classes, no, you skipped, did you skip a grade?

Michael Sahota: Yeah, I did. I did two courses back-to-back.

Steve Rush: You, only just found out now, right Audree?

Audree Sahota: Normally you're supposed to wait six months and then join the next course. And I was in the course ahead of him. I think I was in the pilot program, and he was there, and we had some mutual friends and so eventually as I got to know, Michael, I was like, oh, this guy is kind of different on the inside than what he's projecting on the outside. So, you know, it's a longer story. But what I found was that when I needed help and I was working through a really, really deep block, that was probably the biggest block that I had that was blocking all of my success in my life. We were sitting around the dinner table with a bunch of people, and I was expressing what was going on with me.

And it was like 10 o'clock at night. We had all been processing and doing these like crazy, very intense, deep, personal growth and transformation processes that included a lot of breathing and dark spaces and stuff like that. So, we were all pretty crispy and everybody one by one just kind of left the table. And it's just Michael and I sitting there and Michael's like, well, do you want to work through this issue? And I said, yeah, I want to remove this block. And he said, well, I'll only work with you if you go all the way through, like, I don't want you to stop, I want you to opt in fully into this process. And I said, yes, I'm totally ready. And so, as he was working with me and kind of holding a space and facilitating my process, which was touching into some really, really deep, deep issues, I was like crying. And it was just like really intense. And at the same time, every time he would say something as a facilitator, I would be like, oh, that's what I would say. That's exactly how I would work. And at the end of the whole entire process, which was incredibly liberating for me, I went back to my room with my roommate, and I said, hey, you know, that Michael Sahota guy just helped me with a really deep issue that I had. And he works exactly how I work, how I facilitate. And I've never met anybody like that. And she's like, oh, he's your other half. And I was like, no, not Michael Sahota, there's no way, he's not my type. And she kept saying it. And I think that, that was the moment that I knew that there was something else deeper going on, and then it went from there. Then we started discussing like our kind of, like our dreams and our hopes and our life purpose and stuff. And turns out we had the same life purpose, which is, take it away Michael.

Michael Sahota: Yeah. So, it's really about helping people evolve from their current limitations. Like this deeper level of work that gets ignored, that isn't fully addressed by traditional means to allow us to show up as the partner we want, the parent we want to be, the leader we want to be, which ultimately is what we need to create, create high performance environment. So, it's really about creating a better world, a better workplace, starting with ourselves.

Steve Rush: In my experience, having spoke to hundreds of very successful business leaders and coached many, it often starts with ourselves.

Michael Sahota: Well, yeah, there's this funny saying, everybody's heard this, and everyone knows this true. You can't change anyone else. You can only change yourself. Everyone knows this, but 98% of leadership behavior acts as if this statement doesn't exist.

Steve Rush: What do you think the reason is for that?

Michael Sahota: Oh, there's a really simple reason. It's the ego, our default egoic conditioning causes to look outwards for the problems rather than look inwards.

Steve Rush: Hmm.

Audree Sahota: Right.

Michael Sahota: Basically, we're all tricked by the ego.

Audree Sahota: And we always say, you know, we're the problem and we're the solution. But I think that we don't really know where to go with all of that as well. So, part of it is the ego blocking and the other part is, if you don't have the tools, the techniques, mostly the knowledge or the education about what's actually really going on, it's very difficult to start to explore your inner world. And so, I mean, we found ways to do it through our own, I think our own evolutionary process and our own journey.

Michael Sahota: Our basic view is that everyone is innocent.

Audree Sahota: Yeah.

Michael Sahota: Like, so if someone is listening to this call and they, well, geez, I'm not doing that. I'm mostly focused on outward. And how do we make changes around me, blah, blah, blah. You're innocent, and the reason is because, you don't have the tools. You don't have the knowledge and awareness and understanding. Even if you discovered that there's some sort of inner block inside of yourself, actually work through it. And that's really what our work is about is, giving leaders, the evolutionary capabilities for not only the self-evolution, which is one part of it, but it's also how to put that into practice, right. There are lots of people who go to yoga classes, they go to a, you know, 10-day meditation retreat and they go back and it's the same thing all over again, like nothing's changed in their regular world, right. They have a little bit of stillness and then it fades off.

Steve Rush: Right.

Michael Sahota: As they go through their day. And so, it's really about how do we integrate that into our regular work? How do we do that in every single thing that we do at every single interaction as a leader, as collaborator, as a parent?

Audree Sahota: We even think about coaching and leadership. And we always say that it's a transmission, like transformation is a transmission. You're very being, who you are and what you've been through, and all of your experience is what is going to shift and change another person or another organization. And we find the clarity in that statement, you are the transmission, a very powerful perception to have when we're looking at organizational change, or we're looking at working with our clients who, you know, want to show up as better leaders or create high performance, or we, you know, for our own selves personally, in our relationships with our family and our friends and in our partnership as

Well.

Steve Rush: And the whole evolutionary framing that you have, and you talk about. How did that come together from your different work experiences to create what you do now? Because you both have very different backgrounds that have now come together as SHIFT₃₁₄.

Audree Sahota: Right. So, I have a little weirder background. I'm a professionally trained energetic healer. So, what that means is I didn't take a weekend workshop and I became a healer. I actually went to eight years of formal training. I worked on a medical team for five years. I worked with very, very ill people. But what that really means is I've studied the psychology of disease. So, I learned in my profession, thoughts, belief systems, behaviors, lifestyle, all these things contribute to a healthy body or an unhealthy body. And so, I believe that looking at the psychology of disease, you start to look at, what's going on in your mind? What's going on in your consciousness? What's going on in your perceptions? And so, that's where I take this weird thing of energy, kind of mixed with psychological background. And then I start to work with my clients in a way, not only to heal, but also then to transform their lives. But in order for me to do that, my training has always been you first.

Steve Rush: Right.

Audree Sahota: Always, I'm the transmission of the work. If I'm clear and clean in my perceptions, my glee systems, my psychological makeup, and my body, I'm able to transmit a very high vibrational frequency that will aid in the healing of somebody else. So that's kind of where my background is from. It's like the weird stuff.

Michael Sahota: Yeah, my background is the exact opposite. It's an engineering. I worked in research. I've published papers and artificial intelligence, robotics. I went professionally, started working as a software developer and had management roles and got involved with a thing called agile, bringing organizations to like a more people-centric way of working, a more evolved way of working. And that eventually led me to this realization. Well, wait a second. It's really hard to help companies make this shift because the leaders don't get it. The leaders are stuck in these traditional mindsets, these traditional patterns that are totally incompatible with these new ways of working, what they call agile, digital and so on. And then I looked at it, I said. Well, how do I help these leaders like transform? How do they help them show up as leaders that we can create these amazing work environments, we can actually get high performance? I said, well, the only way to help them to solve this is to help them grow. And I thought, well, am I equipped to do that? And the answer I got back was well, no Michael, you're a well-intentioned hassle. You can see everything that's going on, but you are not showing up in a revolved way. So that's what kicked off this realization that I'm the problem and I am the solution. That I am the limit for everything that I want to create around me. And so, kicked off this you know, really broad scoped search for, how do I grow myself? How do I evolve? And I had no idea. So, I just started doing random things. And eventually this is one path took me to India, right, and that's where I met Audree.

But really, I think this is true for me still today is, that I am the limit of everything that I want to create in the world. And I continue to invest in my own personal evolution. That's why I got a lot of humility around this. It's not like, well, oh, I'm better and blah, blah, blah. It's like, hey, we're all on our journey of evolution. All of us, every single one of us, the only question is, how much energy are we putting into our own evolution? Number one, and number two, what are the rate of progress we're making? And what we've seen here is a lot of leaders are at zero rate of progress and zero investment in their evolution. And as a result, they're continue to be the same leaders that they've always been

Audree Sahota: Because it's so hard.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Audree Sahota: The pressure to succeed, the pressure to get things done actually takes you backwards. So, you have to be very, very careful because that's where you get tripped up. It's like when something's happening and the organizations in a crisis or your teenager just, you know, crashed the car, it's either one.

Michael Sahota: And It’s kind of weird, right? Because I started as an engineer, right. And scientifically running experiments of like, what can we do to a system to improve performance? And I followed root cause, eventually it said, wait a second. The only way to do this is through inner evolution, integrated with, you know, external models, tools and so on. And that's what we've created is this technology, this co-creation of Audree and I, we didn't like wake up one day and say, here it is. It's been this evolution over like the last decade of both of our work.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Michael Sahota: It's called the self-framework.

Audree Sahota: Right.

Michael Sahota: And it's just really this beautiful tool kit,

Audree Sahota: And we didn't even know that we had a framework, we had no idea. We were just trying to explain to people what we did. And it was through writing the book. It was through that process of writing the book that it actually really homed in

Michael Sahota: What it is we're doing.

Audree Sahota: Yeah, what it is. First the intention that we had no idea what we were doing.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Audree Sahota: We were just doing it.

Michael Sahota: Be very successful.

Audree Sahota: Very successful.

Michael Sahota: Training thousands of leaders around the globe and giving them transformational experiences and like, this is the thing, is like, you know, on the outside, okay. It looks like we're leadership trainers, looks like we're organizational consultants. So, we help companies with agile. That's the external, right. That profile fits lots of organizations around the world, but there's some something special and deeper about what we do. That's very human where it's not just about the workplace. People who go through our trainings realize, oh, wait a second. This is actually more important to me with my family.

Steve Rush: And the reality, I guess, of what you've just described is that evolutionary journey that people take. But if you went to an organization and started with those energetic, emotional science-based conversations, most organizations would go, whoa, hang on a second. That's a bit too deep, but they could probably understand and contextualize the broader conversations around leadership development and organizational consultancy, right?

Audree Sahota: Right, and high performance.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Audree Sahota: Because everybody wants results. Everybody wants to do well. Even people sitting in a yoga class, why are they there? It's because they want to make their lives better. So, I think it's a natural occurrence in nature. Nature is always perfecting itself. And it's really, really beautiful, you know? We think of like having a disease or birth defect and transitioning or not living as something that's really, really terrible. And we look at the way nature functions. It is always trying to perfect itself and we're doing it everywhere. It's not just in nature, but we are nature, we're animals. It's the natural progression in the life cycles of an organization that we're looking at where things have to get destroyed in order to create something new and something better. So, we tend to forget the natural cycles that occur in life.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Audree Sahota: And when we start to look at, we're just wanting to create high performance and that's okay. It's okay. Michael said all the time, in our courses, he goes, I don't care if you're here because of financial success and you're worried about the bottom line or you're here because you want to make workplaces a better environment for people. We don't have any judgment of why you're here, but what is that there's this merging together of, oh yeah. I want both. And why can't we have both?

Steve Rush: Right.

Audree Sahota: Yeah, and it makes sense that if your workplace is healthy and people are happy and engaged and love what they do and they're supported, there's a benefit to the organization and it's a financial benefit.

Steve Rush: And there's loads of science about.

Audree Sahota: Yes.

Steve Rush: That happy workplaces create better productivity, better productivity creates better and happier environments and therefore more purposeful business. And it becomes self-fulfilling, doesn't it?

Audree Sahota: Yeah. But it's an old way of thinking in the traditional work environment, it's oppressive, it's slave like mentality and it's this old way of how humans existed in society. That is beginning to change because we realize, oh, oppressing people doesn't actually work. You know, having poverty and lack doesn't work.

Michael Sahota: I mean, no manager goes into work and thinks, oh, I'm going oppress people today, right. Nobody thinks that, but everyone is caught up and this is why I see people as very innocent. We're caught up in this industrial machinery, this structure's is a business as unusual and we're just like hamsters running around the hamster wheel. And so, it's about helping people wake up to say, wait a second, do you see what's going on? You're just following in this traditional pattern, traditional management path and these are the consequences. That's where we start. We don't talk about any of the personal shift, any of that stuff. Because like, hey, let's just have a conversation about what's going on in your organization and how's it working for you? And it's never working out well for organizations. Everybody is struggling out there.

Steve Rush: Yeah. Audree, you spend quite a lot of time with metaphysics, energy, you know, the root of kind of what drives people's behaviors. I'm keen to just understand a little bit about why it is that organizations and often individuals who lead those organizations and teams find it really difficult to peel the layers right back to where they need to be effective and explore some of that?

Audree Sahota: That's a great question. And I actually don't know the answer.

Michael Sahota: I know the answer. So, the answer is, we don't ever try to get anyone to do anything.

Audree Sahota: But he's saying like a general, like.

Michael Sahota: Why is it happening?

Audree Sahota: Why is it happening?

Steve Rush: Why is it so difficult?

Audree Sahota: It's a really deep conversation that I'm not going to go into right now. And a lot of it is that, oh, it's way too deep to go into. But I can't tell you that. We're raised from birth in a way that we're just in this command-and-control habit, we're in a habit of fear and anxiety. We're in a habit of thinking and believing. We're duped into believing that we deserve eternal punishment.

Michael Sahota: Yeah, and everyone listening to this. Well, that's not me. And it's like, well, if you don't know that's going on with you, you just don't know what's going on with you, but it's going on with everyone until you're actually enlightened. So, it's there and most people aren't aware, but we don't even start there. I just want to back up, this is not a good starting place. The starting place is what we actually do in our trainings, which is saying, well, okay, great. We're here to talk about how do you create business agility? How do you be high performance leaders? Right? So, the egos invested. People want the result. People want the outcome. And this is what our whole book Leading Beyond Change goes through. This is the anti-pattern of what you're doing in your traditional business. And this is the pattern for what is happening in healthy organizations that get really extraordinary performance. And we just take people through a series of patterns where they realize, wait a second. What I am choosing to do every day creates low performance.

Audree Sahota: Nobody wants to understand the fundamental fabric of why humans are in suffering.

Steve Rush: That's right, yeah.

Michael Sahota: Yeah.

Audree Sahota: Except for me.

Michael Sahota: So, what we get people to do is realize, wait a second. When I try to drive a change program, I'm actually create a lot of resistance. When I mandate things as a boss and use my power without listening to other people first, I'm creating damage.

Audree Sahota: And inner more advanced courses what we do is, once you can see that behavior, that I'm creating damage, then when you have the tools and the techniques and the understanding, then it's easier to look inside. And we always ask, what does it feel like in your body when you're trying to drive change?

Steve Rush: Because your body's a good barometer to tell you exactly what's going on, right.

Audree Sahota: It is the thing, that is the radio receiver. So, the body will tell you, it's like, oh, I feel tight. Oh, it's hard to breathe. Oh, there's a knot in my stomach. And then we have the tools to help to dissolve that because those are patterns from the subconscious part of the egoic system that are actually, it's like the root cause of why you're trying to drive change to begin with. It doesn't mean that you're not going to create change.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Audree Sahota: But an impact change, but it's going to come from a very different place where there's a release within your system and you're letting go. You're not attached to the outcome, which is very, very hard to do. But when not attached to the outcome anymore, you're no longer pressing onto the system and creating that resistance. And there's an opening that happens.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Audree Sahota: We always call it the secret to the universe.

Steve Rush: Wow. If only we could all tap into that, it sounds incredibly.

Audree Sahota: We all can, and we all deserve it.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Audree Sahota: Like every single one of us deserves to be successful and happy and productive

Michael Sahota: And having an amazing day at work every single day,

Audree Sahota: Every single day.

Steve Rush: And the reason why some do, and some don't is completely about how we are showing up, thinking about or how our mindset is driving, how we're thinking and showing up at work.

Audree Sahota: Oh yeah, and that's a choice.

Michael Sahota: Well, actually there's two factors. One is internal. What is our internal composition? And how are we choosing to perceive the reality that we're in. The other one is the external system because a really beautiful organization can help people uplift, to help people heal and help people grow. Whereas their traditional organizations are taking people down.

Steve Rush: Yeah. So, you both talk about a series of patterns, which are the series of patterns that you explored and bumped into as you started to write the book Leading Beyond Change, and you talked about this self-evolutionary framework. I'd love to get into a little bit about that and explore some of the elements of what that is and how I might use it?

Audree Sahota: Well, let's start off with the name. SHIFT₁₃₄ Evolutionary Leadership Framework.

Michael Sahota: The abbreviation is the S E L F or the SELF.

Audree Sahota: And then we went, oh my God, about the self, it is the self.

Michael Sahota: Think about it?

Audree Sahota: But it was an accident.

Michael Sahota: Yeah.

Audree Sahota: I just want to say that's how miraculous it is. It was an accident.

Steve Rush: So where does SHIFT₃₁₄ come from?

Michael Sahota: Ah, okay. So, everyone has heard of this number 3.1415, and you go, oh my gosh, it's Pi.

Steve Rush: Pi.

Michael Sahota: A Pi symbolizes the universal timeless principles of the universe through mathematics. With SHIFT₃₁₄ we give the universal principles, the timeless principles of human dynamics and organization dynamics. We're talking about how do things actually work. Not some, you know, popular, made-up theory, do these three things and you'll have success and blah, blah, blah, blah. It's actually worth the laws of cause and effects of human beings. And when human beings working together and creating change in organizations

Audree Sahota: And how to mitigate the damage.

Michael Sahota: Hey, so here are the patterns. Hey, do you notice when you do this, when you oppress people, here's how you're oppressing people. It actually disengages them, demotivates them so on. And when you create a space for people to contribute, they can, and they're happier and they perform better, like very simple, simple ideas. And we go through, I think about 40 patterns in the book to give people like a really clear sense of wait, when I'm stuck in this matrix, this mindset, trap of traditional business, or even slightly, some of these progressive things are actually, very weak sauce countermeasures, you know, oh, wait a second. I'm not getting high performance. What I'm doing today is not high performance, it’s the opposite.

Audree Sahota: And a lot of it is common sense. It's just that we don't set our intention to really think about it. And I believe we don't do that, and I'll go back to it is, we don't have the tools and the techniques to move through these patterns. So, like for one of them is, we talk about leaders speaking last. So, when you go into a meeting, you allow everybody else to speak first, before you give your opinion, give an answer to the problem, you know, give a solution.

Michael Sahota: Yeah. I show you the anti-pattern, hey everyone, you know, here's my idea for this. What do you guys think? Yeah right. Versus like, hey, you know we need to solve this problem. I've got some ideas, but we're all smarter together. Why doesn't everyone share their ideas and then we'll have a conversation.

Audree Sahota: And everybody goes around the table, gives 30 seconds or a minute. Shares their perspective, shares their opinion.

Michael Sahota: Then we get the deeper truth of well, okay, but this is not a trick. It's not a tactic. For a leader to do that they have to get their ego under control. They have to stop trying to be the smartest person in the room and create a space for others to be leaders and to want to build other people, to be leaders. That's the inner journey. That's why people need tools to make it.

Steve Rush: Is there a particular pattern that you've recognized through these different of patents? Is the stickiest, like people get stuck the most.

Michael Sahota: Command and control habit. Command and control habit. We don't understand that we're addictive.

Audree Sahota: Very different and we're exactly the same.

Michael Sahota: We don't understand. We're addict. Gender is the commanding control habits, is actually two different words to the same thing. We don't understand. Like right now, everyone listening to this probably said, I'm not addicted to command and control habit. That's what everyone's going to listen to, is going to say to themselves, I'm not addicted to it.

Audree Sahota: I give people their freedom, let them explore. I give them autonomy.

Michael Sahota: Guess what? Get into one of our trainees. And you'll see that you actually don’t, and you'll see the damage you are causing. And it's going to wake you up to an extraordinary journey. That's going to change, not just your workplace, but all of your relationships with your partner, with your kids, everything. That's what happens because we're stuck trying to use the same words that everyone else uses, you know, leadership and culture.

Audree Sahota: Mindset.

Michael Sahota: And blah, blah, blah. But we're doing something at a very different, very deeper, much more personal level, touching the core of our being.

Steve Rush: Which is where energy plays that vital role because you're dealing with then raw emotions, much of the time, aren't you?

Audree Sahota: Yes, my philosophy on healing has changed quite a lot. I mean, and I've been doing this since probably 1994. So, what I can say is that I no longer believe there's has to be a story. I no longer believe there has to be something that takes a very long time. I do believe in instantaneous healing, I believe up and out, up and out.

Michael Sahota: Not just believe, we live that with our own work on ourselves and the work we do with our partners, clients and those in our training programs is like the, you know, we tell people, if you get stuck, don't stay stuck, just reach out to us and we'll get you unstuck. We've got a lot of tools.

Steve Rush: Mm.

Audree Sahota: Right, and I think the biggest thing here is that it's a choice for everyone, no matter what you're doing, whether it's like our work or somebody else's work or your own work or whatever you are doing in your life. But we really believe that if you're having an issue or a problem that you don't have to, you have a choice. And when you understand that you have the choice, that becomes a very different perspective to live by. And when you make the choice not to have the issue or the problem, the solutions come, it just makes it easier if you have the tools and the techniques ahead of time, on purpose, you know, striving towards creating more success.

Steve Rush: That's the essence of metaphysics as well, isn't it? You know, it's the kind of the whole energy. Allowing the energy to feed your direction, so to speak.

Audree Sahota: Yes, and energy is moved by thoughts.

Michael Sahota: Yeah. So, this is where it all ties together. Like, you know, our oppressive behaviors, our anti patterns of traditional business, our low vibrational frequency, like it's actually like stuck trapped energy in our bodies. And we're walking around basically emitting all this like sort of toxic radiation. That's most traditional leaders right now are walking around emitting toxic radiation, acting as a beacon of a very destructive, oppressive culture, which is why so many people are disengaged. Now really effect leaders aren't doing that. They haven't evolved consciousness. They're pure in their being, they're operating in from a higher vibrational frequency. They're emitting positive energy around them, and people just feel good around them, right. It's not just what they're doing. So, what we're saying, it's a transmission. And, you know, taking it back to the energetic layer, they're actually admitting, you know, good vibes, right?

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Audree Sahota: But Michael, what if you're not the leader and you're just in an organization with those toxic leaders, then what do you do?

Steve Rush: That's a great question.

Audree Sahota: I will interview Michael.

Michael Sahota: Well, first of all, the first thing you need to see is that how those toxic leaders are taking you out and you are now part of the problem.

Audree Sahota: Exactly.

Michael Sahota: And so, what we see is that anyone and everyone can be a leader. Our approach or framework is about leaders at all levels that anyone at any place in the organization can create change starting with ourselves, because we can't control everyone else, but we can control ourselves. So, change, therefore, is 100% possible if we choose to do it.

Audree Sahota: And it's a moment-to-moment choice. You can, you either choose to be in resistance and negative, in anger, in frustration and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Or you can choose to be in peace in harmony and calm in not getting taken out by the drama and the chaos that's going on. So, you can actually just show up and function with your full intelligence.

Michael Sahota: Yeah, we're calling it almost like radical responsibility, like just taking full 100% responsibility for one's interstate of being, thoughts, actions, energetic stake, and taking responsibility in stewardship and taking action and looking after it, the way you look after, you know, a child that was in your care. So, we need to look after our interstate of functioning.

Audree Sahota: Yeah. I think as a society on a whole, we're generally in a low vibrational state, we're always in the state of fear, anxiety, worry, anger, blame, all these different aspects of who we are. And it becomes an addictive pattern. There's actually an addiction going on in your body. So, if you start to really slow down and feel like, just watch the news, that's a really great example. While you're watching the news, what's going on in your body? Oh, I'm feeling this searing burning sensation and this, you know, tightness in my chest, sit with that searing burning sensation in your chest for a while. You'll start to feel like, oh, that feels really good. And then start to notice how many times a day do you actually instigate that sense and that feeling in your body, there's a chemical release going on in your body. There's a biological reaction to whatever emotional state is happening. You know, that's caused by the environment and what happens is our bodies become addicted to those chemicals, the cortisol and all that stuff that's going on in the body. So, you really have to almost like take back control of this addictive patterns. That are not only, you know, psychological patterns, you know, with emotions, but it's also.

Michael Sahota: It's like energetic, it's physiological, its neuro chemical, it’s societal, it's in our environments and the conditioning. So that's what we're talking about, breaking out this matrix, we're trapped in, right. And that's where, you know, our work is very, very different because we're looking at, you know.

Audree Sahota: Everything.

Michael Sahota: Universal principles, what is really going on here? Oh, I'm in fear. So therefore, I'm not getting blood supply in my frontal cortex, therefore my brain can't operate. Ah, okay, no wonder, now I know what's going on, right.

Audree Sahota: And just taking it back to something really simple because you shouldn't believe anything that we're saying at all, it should be an actual personal experience to validate your own belief system. And so, this is what I always offer people. Find somebody that you can't stand, that you have a huge problem with. And let's just say, it's your boss okay. You could pick a lot of other people, but let's just say, it's your boss, because this is an easy one to work with. There's somebody in your organization that you have such a hard time with and spend a bunch of time, maybe 30 minutes just sitting and feeling positive about this person. Like what if everything I thought about this person was wrong? What if, and just start to calm the nervous system down, calm your body down, calm your mind down, open your heart and change your perception of this person. Just do it, make the choice and just do it. No matter what the external circumstances are. I guarantee everybody, if you do this, that relationship will automatically shift.

Steve Rush: Like it.

Michael Sahota: That's the advanced step. Most people aren't ready for. The first step.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Michael Sahota: The first step for that is just see how you don't want to do that. Just see how you not want to do what Audree just described. That's how you are the problem right now. You're not ready to let go of that anger.

Audree Sahota: Oh yeah. Because you're addicted to it.

Michael Sahota: Yeah.

Audree Sahota: It's an addiction.

Michael Sahota: It's not your fault. You just need to be aware of it. Step one.

Audree Sahota: It’s like drinking, smoking, doing drugs. It's the same thing, right. We love it. Oh, we love getting angry, oh my God.

Michael Sahota: At that person. We tell other people about it, yeah anyway.

Audree Sahota: Right, sometimes our identities are wrapped around, you know, certain situations that we're having. For me personally, when I started to look at, why do I want that? Why do I want the negativity? And then I was like, oh, wait a minute, I don’t. Why do I want too not be successful? Well, wait a minute. I want to be successful. Why would I create something that's you know where I'm going to fail?

Steve Rush: Addiction.

Audree Sahota: Why would I do that to myself?

Steve Rush: Yeah. So, this is where we turn the tables because I could spend all day talking to you by the way. You are in incredibly fascinating and I'm getting juiced up listening to you. But this is a show that we have thousands of people listening to all over the world and it'll be rude for me to not exploit the opportunity to hack into your years of experience and wonderful learnings. So, I'm going to now ask you to tap into your top leadership hacks. So, if you consider the things that you've experienced, things that you've done, and of course we know leadership's not hack, you've got to work at it, but what would it be if you were to distill top tips, ideas or tools?

Michael Sahota: Listen to other people's ideas before sharing your own.

Audree Sahota: I think for me, it would be. Asking what if I'm the problem? Just what if I’m the problem.

Steve Rush: That's a fabulous reframe, isn't it? To think of a different perspective.

Audree Sahota: And then the other one for me, this is my favorite question. How can I help you be successful? Turn the tables instead of it being about you, how can I help you be successful? And that might mean that you're on a team and the whole team is like, how can I help another team be successful?

Steve Rush: Really, really like that last one. So, the next of show, we affectionally called it Hack to Attack. So, this is typically where something in your lives or work has gone, particularly not well. It's been more catastrophic. It might have been a complete failure, but as a result of that experience, you now have that tool that is useful in your life and work. What would be your Hack to Attack?

Michael Sahota: You know, it’s really interesting, it’s really a great concept and our answer is, everything. That’s one of our teachings is, everything that’s going on around you is a gateway to learning.

Steve Rush: I like that.

Michael Sahota: And most of our lies, we ignore everything, all these gateways to learning and evolution, but it's every single moment, every single frustration, every single you know, thing we perceive as failure, everything we're resisting and we're not flowing with life is the gateway to evolution.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Audree Sahota: Oh, I would say my marriage, my first marriage.

Steve Rush: Well, without that serendipitous moment that you had in India, of course you wouldn't be where you are today either.

Audree Sahota: No.

Steve Rush: So, the last part of the show, we get to give you an opportunity to do some time travel, bump into yourselves at 21 and give yourselves some advice. Audree, you go first.

Audree Sahota: Oh my God. I would say stop partying so much. And, you know, I don't really know. I think for me it would be things are going to get better and you stop sabotaging your own self, yeah.

Steve Rush: Great.

Michael Sahota: Yeah, for me it would be Michael, you're not going to believe me because one of your problems is you think you have it all figured out and you don't need to listen to anyone. So, I'm not going to ask you to believe anything I'm saying now, but just keep in your back pocket when things are going to go wrong, because they're going to go wrong. And when they go wrong, I just want you to think about this.

Steve Rush: That's super.

Michael Sahota: You can't help anyone else until you stabilize yourself and your own healing and growth is the most important thing you can do. And I know it will not make any sense to you now. I understand that, but when things are going wrong, it's not about what's happening around you. It's what's happening inside you.

Audree Sahota: I think you told yourself at 21, you're going to go to India and meet some hot girl and to pay attention.

Steve Rush: Yeah, absolutely. If only we could have a crystal ball, right? So, I'm pretty certain that you've inspired people to want to learn more about what you're doing and maybe get a copy of Leading Beyond Change, diving into some of the communities that you work with and run, where is the best place for us to send them?

Michael Sahota: The best place is our website shift314.com.

Audree Sahota: Yeah, we also have another book, Emotional Science, and I think you can get through to both of those books, Leading Beyond Change and Emotional Science from shift314.com

Steve Rush: And we'll make sure that links to the website and how people can get hold of the copies of the books are all in our show notes as well.

Audree Sahota: Thank you so much.

Steve Rush: I've really enjoyed this conversation. I hope it's not our last. I'm pretty certain it won't be, and I'm really delighted that we have you both on the show to share some experiences and get us to think differently about a few things that you've really poised today. So, thanks for being part of our community on The Leadership Hacker Podcast.

Audree Sahota: Thank you so much for having us here. We really appreciate it.

Michael Sahota: Yeah, our pleasure.

Audree Sahota: Yeah.

Steve Rush: Thank you both.

Closing

Steve Rush: I want to sign off by saying thank you to you for joining us on the show too. We recognize without you, there is no show. So please continue to share, subscribe, and like, and continue to get in touch with us with the great new stories that we share every week. And so that we can continue to bring you great stories. Please make sure you give us a five-star review where you can and share this podcast with your friends, your teams, and communities. You want to find us on social media. You can find us on Facebook and Twitter @leadershiphacker, Leadership Hacker on YouTube and on Instagram, the_leadership_hacker and if that wasn’t enough, you can also find us on our website leadership-hacker.com Tune into next episode to find out what great hacks and stories are coming your way. That's me signing off. I'm Steve rush, and I've been your Leadership Hacker.

 

The Productivity Paradigm with Richard Medcalf

Richard Medcalf is Founder and CEO of Xquadrant and an executive coach to some of the world's most impressive and successful CEOs and their teams. He’s also the host of the Impact Multiplier CEO Podcast. In today’s show you can learn about:

• The productivity paradigm and the infinity trap.
• Why we don’t need a productivity hack, we just need a mindset shift.
• Why many struggle to focus on higher-value tasks and prioritization.
• How to kick start our strategic thinking.

Join our Tribe at https://leadership-hacker.com

Music: " Upbeat Party " by Scott Holmes courtesy of the Free Music Archive FMA

Transcript: Thanks to Jermaine Pinto at JRP Transcribing for being our Partner. Contact Jermaine via LinkedIn or via his site JRP Transcribing Services

 

Find out more about Richard below:

Special Link to resources: https://xquadrant.com/hacker

Richard on LinkedIn: https: https://www.linkedin.com/in/richardmedcalf/

Richard on Twitter: https://twitter.com/rmedcalf

Podcast: https://xquadrant.com/podcast/

Company  Website: https://xquadrant.com/

 

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Look Inside with Rasha Hasaneen

Rasha Hasaneen is the Vice President of Innovation and Product Excellence for Trane Technologies. A former executive with global businesses, Rasha also leads the Center for Healthy & Efficient Spaces as Executive Director. In this show learn about:

• Why, when the world is diving into ESG and Climate measures we are not normally drawn to consider inside spaces, – why is that?
• Why is how we live indoors so crucial to a sustainable future?
• What is the impact on productivity loss due to unhealthy indoor spaces?
• Covid 19 is not the first pandemic and not likely to be the last, learn about the “extra layer.”

Join our Tribe at https://leadership-hacker.com

Music: " Upbeat Party " by Scott Holmes courtesy of the Free Music Archive FMA

Transcript: Thanks to Jermaine Pinto at JRP Transcribing for being our Partner. Contact Jermaine via LinkedIn or via his site JRP Transcribing Services

 

Find out more about Rasha below:

Rasha on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rashahasaneen/

Rasha on Twitter: https://twitter.com/rhasaneen

Company Website: https://www.tranetechnologies.com

 

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The Six Flavors of Success with Shannon Russo

Shannon Russo is the Chief Executive Officer for Kinetix, After a successful career as a finance executive Shannon founded Kinetix with the goal of creating a firm that could help growing companies get the talent they need to compete. In this special show, learn about:

• How to pivot in a pandemic.
• The six flavors or “potential factors” for success.
• How has the workforce changed and how you need to change in it.
• The Great Resignation, is it just a moment in time or a change to how we work for good?

 

Join our Tribe at https://leadership-hacker.com

 

Music: " Upbeat Party " by Scott Holmes courtesy of the Free Music Archive FMA

 

Transcript: Thanks to Jermaine Pinto at JRP Transcribing for being our Partner. Contact Jermaine via LinkedIn or via his site JRP Transcribing Services

 

Find out more about Shannon below:

Shannon on LinkedIn: https: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shannonwrusso

Shannon on Twitter: https://twitter.com/kinetixhr

Shannon on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kinetixhr/

Company  Website: https://www.kinetixhr.com

 

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