Why you need empathy to fuel growth

Ryan Barry:

Hi everybody. Welcome to this episode of Inside Insights, a podcast powered by Zappi. My name is Ryan. I'm joined as always by my host, Patricia and my producer, Kelsey. What's up ladies?

Patricia Montesdeoca:

Hey Ryan, how's it going?

Ryan:

Good. I also am supposed to tell you every time we do a podcast, that we won the MR Podcast of the Year award, in case you forgot. We're really excited about that. I'm actually still using the wonderful high quality microphone that Priscilla bought for the winner, which I appreciate. 

This is an episode that we actually recorded at IIEX Austin. One of two, the last episode was also one of them with Michelle Gansle. And it's the second to last episode of this season, which is crazy.

Patricia:

Unbelievable.

Ryan:

We got a little break coming up, and then we're going to be back in action for season five. We're coming back with force. So, this episode is with Shazia Ali. Shazia Ali is actually a colleague of ours. She joins Zappi after being an entrepreneur for many, many years, to drive our customer advocacy and our community. We have a program at Zappi, which this will be the first time I publicly talk about, which is called the Insights Alliance. It's a group of brands and insights leaders who've come together to shape the future of insights, build tools that are predictive of sales, that are connected. Candidly, it's really propelled our company and I have a lot of love for those people. So a specific shout out to McDonald's, Colgate, Pepsi, Clorox, Colgate, Reckitt, Verizon, for all the great work that you folks do day in and day out to push this industry forward.

Shazia has just a great story. She's an entrepreneur, she's extremely empathetic. She's extremely culturally plugged in, and we're going to talk about a bunch of things today. So I'm really excited. I do want to say, sometimes I get riffing and say things that are incorrect. This is one of those moments. In this episode, you will hear me reference a quote about “The Man in the Arena.”  The quote was actually authored by Theodore Roosevelt. So I wanted to correct that. And Theodore Roosevelt made a great point about “the man in the arena.” At a time when there wasn't a lot of women's rights, he should have said “the person in the arena.” But anyways, it's a quote that I subscribe to because, when you're doing things that nobody else has done, when you're doing things that are hard, when you're making bold decisions, it's very, very, very, very easy for people to sit on the sidelines and judge everything that you do.

And it's important to listen to critics, I think. But it's equally important to have confidence in what you're doing, whether you're a leader, whether you're an individual contributor or not. So you'll hear me say this again during the episode, but I did want to give Teddy Roosevelt the credit for the quote. I wish Teddy called it, “the person in the arena,” but what are you going to do? We lived in a different time. So shout out to all the ladies in the arena who were being bold and taking big decisions and making moves, appreciate you. And for all the men in the arena, don't listen to the haters. Don't let them impact you. Keep going. You're doing great things. Without further ado, ladies, shall we get to the interview with Shazia?

Patricia: 

Let's do it.

Ryan:

Let's roll.

Ryan:

Hi everybody. Welcome to this episode of Inside Insights, a podcast powered by Zappi. It is a great joy to greet everybody today from the beautiful Austin, Texas, where I've had brisket three days in a row. We are podcasting live from IIEX Austin, super fun conference, a lot of great innovation happening in this space, but that's not what we're here to talk about today. Are we, Shazia? I'm joined by my colleague, Shazia Ali. Hi, Shazi. How you doing?

Shazia Ali:

Hey Ryan. I'm well, thank you. How are you?

Ryan:

I'm doing very well. Thanks. I'm really excited to talk to you about this. So we're going to talk about a few elements of modern workplace today. A few topics that have our attention and our passion and our goal for this episode is to give you some things to noodle on about how you can make yourself a little bit better and a little bit more productive, whether you're a leader or whether you're driving innovation in your business. 

But first I want to give everybody an opportunity to meet Shazia. So Shazia, you are an entrepreneur, you've successfully run your own company for a really long time, and you decided to join us at Zappi to lead our community efforts. Why? Why'd you do that?

Shazia:

Interesting question. But firstly, thank you for having me.

Ryan:

It's my pleasure.

Shazia:

And thank you to everyone for welcoming me to the business. It's a really interesting question. I've been asked that by a few people when we've been having conversations and I've been telling people, guys, look, I'm actually working with another organization and people are like, God, why do you want to do that? Working for yourself, isn't that what everyone wants to do? And for me, it's not a case of just going and working for somebody else. With Zappi, what I see is actually a great organization with amazing culture and people and being part of something where people are actually working together. 

And thank you for calling me an entrepreneur. I love that word.

Ryan:

It's a great word. 

Shazia:

But in terms of obviously what I've been doing for quite a few years, the thing about working for yourself is that you have this passion that drives you and there's certain values that drive what you are doing. And there's a certain way of working. And one of the things for me, was that if I ever worked with another organization, there were certain values that were really important for me to actually see and live and breathe within the organization and the culture. And I see that in Zappi. I saw that before I joined and since I joined, I'm what week five in now? So yeah.

Ryan:

It feels like you've been around for a while. I think it is only five.

Shazia:

Yeah. It's the gray hairs.

Ryan:

Oh, I don't see any.

Shazia:

But yeah, no, it's what I feel with the people and what I see in terms of the teams that I've been working with and the people that I've met is that passion and that drive that's there and it's something you don't see in every organization. It's something you definitely don't see across all teams, across all the people you're working with. And I see that a lot and people are doing it with passion. They're really enjoying what they do. And it's great to be part of something like that. So the values of an organization are really important for me. So that passion that I saw. 

And there's a few other values that are really important for me in terms of being aligned to what I'm doing and where I'm working. And they revolve around trust and honesty and respect. And again, those were things that were really important for me in terms of whatever I was doing in my career and next steps and what I do, day to day in life. And I'm really pleased to say that's something that I've seen in Zappi and experienced so far as well. So...

Ryan:

We're just getting started. I want to talk to you a little bit about purpose, because I think you've got a really interesting point of view about purpose, but I'm of the worldview that people's purposes need to align with the purpose of their organization. And so it's interesting, your point about trust and truth are actually two words that I think any modern business needs to exemplify in their work. And just to explain them from my perspective for a minute, first one, trust.

Shazia:

Yeah.

Ryan:

You don't hire people who are wonderful and unique and eclectic and intellectual and passionate about what they're doing and then tell them what to do. Doesn't really make a lot of sense. You have to trust people to make decisions. I think you have to trust people to fail. You have to trust people to learn from their failure and give them the tooling to do that.

And then truth is an interesting one. So I imagine you said it from the vantage point of getting told the truth, which I agree with. Companies need to be transparent with their employees. Number one reason being the more context somebody has, the better decisions they can make. But it has another meaning to me, which is worth sharing, which is let's get to the truth. Let's get to the root cause of the problem, not the surface problem. Let's make sure we understand each other. We're at a conference right now. How many times have we heard the word AI in the last two days? A lot. But if we ask everybody what that means to them, we'll probably get 30 different definitions and so I think it's important to really get to that understanding with people. So I'm glad that our purposes align. Talk to me about purpose alignment from your perspective. There's a framework that you use, I think it'd be really useful for everybody to be knowledgeable about.

Shazia:

Yeah. It's something I came across a few years ago just in terms of as a qualitative researcher in terms of my background and what I do and what have been doing as a day job. I always find it really valuable to also just question yourself as well, in terms of where you're going, what you want in terms of your career and so on. And there's something that I came across, which is, it's a Japanese concept. I don't know if some people may have heard of it already or not, but I found it really fascinating. And it's something that I share with people who I meet or who might be sort of going on this journey and trying to sort of unpack purpose and so forth. But it's called ikigai.

Ryan:

Ikigai?

Shazia:

Ikigai. I don't know if I'm pronouncing it right.

Ryan:

So I'm going to spell it for everybody. I-K-I-G-A-I. Did I get it right?

Shazia:

I think so. Yeah.

Ryan:

So you can Google it.

Shazia:

Ikigai.

Ryan:

But all right, now tell us what it is.

Shazia:

Well, I'm no expert. But it's a great framework and I'm quite a visual thinker. So I love my sort of diagrams and-

Ryan:

Love a framework.

Shazia:

Things sort of like visual, looking at sort of things visually, and the concept refers to actually giving a person a sense of purpose and it looks at four different areas of your life. It's identifying the things that matter to you and are important to you. And just making sure that you've got that sense of fulfillment across each of those. And depending on, I don't know, if people are Googling it now, there might be lots of different things that come up, but it's essentially a Venn diagram, which overlaps, but there's four key areas and it's the things that you do that you love. So it's your passion, that's driving sort of one of those. So it might be a hobby. So yeah, everyone should have a hobby, something that they really love doing and enjoy doing, but we all have to pay for a roof over our heads, have food on our table.

So profession and work or actually doing something which is allowing us to earn a living. That's another area as well. So just having a job and working, but there's two other areas as well. It's doing something that you're good at. So it might be a vocation and also doing something that's actually helping other people. So this framework is not just about people's own personal journeys or professional journeys, but it's sort of the whole of you and it gives you, again, I've sort of read it… some people talk about is the thing that sort of keeps you going and motivated and gets you out of bed in the morning.

Ryan:

Yeah.

Shazia:

But it's stuff that would also benefit the world and not just you. So yeah. I love the framework and model, and it's just the idea of getting joy from across all these different spaces, because yeah, hobbies are important, doing something for charity or supporting somebody and obviously working.

Ryan:

I like the macro intention, Shazia, that you have with it, because it helps govern what you do. And I think the only challenge that I see is if you have macro principles, but your actions on Wednesday don't live up to them. And so I think it's very easy in life to say, this is what I want to be. So for me, I want to be the best father, husband, friend, leader that I can be and do it with kindness. But my actions today dictate that.

Shazia:

Yeah.

Ryan:

So it doesn't mean if I step in shit once, it doesn't mean that I'm not a kind person. It just means like, oh, I stepped in it today. I've got to learn from that.

Shazia:

Yeah.

Ryan:

So I think the habit, I was talking to somebody earlier about…. we make big statements and then our habit forming process is really difficult. We'll talk a little bit about change later, but little things can get you towards that. Right. But I like that you're intentional about what those principles are.

Shazia:

Well, yeah. It's sort of just helpful to have an idea of what are the values that are driving what you want to get out of life generally and all that year ahead, or the next six months and all certain parts of your life.

But I think you use a really interesting word there. And I think it's so important in terms of being kind and we have to be kind to ourselves as well. So-

Ryan:

Good point.

Shazia:

We do, as you said, step in shit sometimes, now and again, or. Sorry.

Ryan:

Just once a day or so.

Shazia:

But it's okay. Allow yourself that flexibility and just be kind to yourself and just keep moving forward.

Ryan:

I love that message. I think we're going to talk about other people and empathy in a minute, but you got to love yourself. Right. You got to be able to appreciate your beauty and your superpowers, otherwise, how are you going to do it for anybody else? Right.

Shazia:

Yeah.

Ryan:

But I think your framework is useful because if you're at odds with yourself, then that purpose is probably out of whack somewhere.

Shazia:

Yeah.

Ryan:

Maybe you're overcompensated on the work side, not enough on the hobby side or personal life side.

Shazia:

Yeah.

Ryan:

But what I like about the Venn diagram is it intentionally blurs them together.

Shazia:

Yeah.

Ryan:

Because this isn't like nine to five, we leave our jobs at home. I unfortunately think about work in my subconscious probably more than I don't, if I don't like my job. Fortunately for me, I do. And so it's no problem.

Shazia:

Yeah. Yeah.

Ryan:

All right. I want to talk to you about two big words. I think they're important in life, across all of your pillars in insights to generate good insights. They're big words though. I want to know what they mean to you. It's funny. They're not that big. They mean a lot of things to a lot of people. The first one is empathy.

Shazia:

Yeah.

Ryan:

What does empathy mean to you and why is it important?

Shazia:

Goodness, empathy. It's like, isn't that what the insight world's built on? We're all about understanding people, seeing the world from different perspectives and feeling those emotions. But what does it mean to me? Yeah. It's about understanding, listening to other perspectives. And I think that says, it's about actually listening.

Ryan:

Yes.

Shazia:

When it comes to actual communication and skill sets that you need, it's about being able to listen, comprehend, translate. And if it doesn't register, ask the question, but really making that effort engaging to get to that point where you can really understand. And that's what we do. Isn't it? Ask questions.

Ryan:

It is funny. Anybody who's in insights, depending on what you do, you are listening for a living and synthesizing for a living. But I love that you define empathy with listening. How often are you in a conversation with somebody and you can tell all they're thinking about is what they're going to say next?

Shazia:

Yeah.

Ryan:

Instead of just being present in that moment. And it's like a really anxious thing that I think we naturally do and it takes time to learn how to listen.

Shazia:

Yeah.

Ryan:

There's a book that I would recommend everybody reads called Time to Think, it's written by this woman named Nancy Kline. Have you ever read it?

Shazia:

No.

Ryan:

And she offers some really great tooling.

Shazia:

Okay.

Ryan:

To help you actively listen. One of the best listeners I know is a gentleman named Nick Graham. He runs global insights at Mondelez. And one of his techniques that I've stolen from him shamelessly is when you're explaining something complex to him, he'll say it back to you in his own words.

And it's a really good way of showing the other person you see them, but also you might have misinterpreted what they said.

Shazia:

Yeah.

Ryan:

And it does slow down conversations, but I'd rather do that than, "Yeah, yeah, yeah. I agree." And then we move on. 

But I think empathy is important for a lot of reasons. And so obviously in insights, it's sort of table stakes, but we have a lot of unique societal tensions. We're here in the USA. You live in London, different but similar societal tensions. And I think some of the algorithms that perpetuate around us, reinforces our own self-belief. And there's some really wonderful breakthrough innovation that happens when you hear somebody else's perspective or you walk a day in their shoes.

I remember talking to people who got quite defensive about Black Lives Matter, when that came out.

Shazia:

Okay.

Ryan:

And it was only when you go and sit and have a coffee with them where you're like, have you ever had to feel really uncomfortable when you walk outside of your door? And they go, well, no. Okay. And then the penny drops, it's like, oh, I get it. This isn't about me. So it's a defensive thing.

Shazia:

Yeah.

Ryan:

But sometimes it's hard in business, you have a lot of pressure, you put pressure on yourself, your boss might put pressure. The numbers are big. And whether you're publicly traded or privately traded, short-termism is a thing.

Shazia:

Yeah.

Ryan:

You have to hit quarterly numbers. And so sometimes you can, in a rush, lose empathy for the other people you're dealing with.

Shazia:

Yeah.

Ryan:

But what we're seeing here in our industry is immense change because technology is taking over, but we have to remember that it's people, process and technology.

Shazia:

Absolutely.

Ryan:

And without the understanding of people, you'll never get any of these innovations to land in your business. Really, really important.

Shazia:

Yeah. No, that is so important. And yep, as a qualitative researcher, just being aware of people's emotions, feelings, and opinions, it's so important. And getting advantage in running businesses as well, it's just the value in knowing how the teams feel.

Ryan:

Yeah.

Shazia:

What they think, just having those conversations. Well, I appreciate from your perspective, like you said, you've got pressures of business and time and so on. So sometimes it just doesn't always happen, but it's great that you are aware of that.

Ryan:

Yeah.

Shazia:

You are talking about it.

Ryan:

Somebody who used to work for me taught me this, response versus reaction are very different things, and we're all entitled to our reactions.

Shazia:

Yeah.

Ryan:

So I'm a pretty emotional person, as you've probably gathered in five weeks. I've learned to go for a walk and think about what I'm going to say in some instances because it's usually a better response than the emergent thing.

Shazia:

Yeah.

Ryan:

But a story I want to share and it segues us to the next word is if you're vulnerable about things that you're going through (the next word's vulnerability, Shazia's going to unpack it) you open yourself up differently. So I really love the quote about “the man in the arena.” Have you ever heard about that quote?

Shazia:

No.

Ryan:

I don't know the quote verbatim, but basically it's really easy to look at the person in the arena and throw stones and judge them, but they don't know what the person in the arena's going through.

Shazia:

Yeah. Yeah.

Ryan:

And leadership, particularly senior leadership has a lot of benefits, but boy is it lonely? And I was in London a few weeks ago and this woman named Maria walks up to me and she must have sensed my energy was tired and she just wrapped arm around me and said, "How you doing, Ryan? You look tired. I just want to let you know, you're doing a great job."

Shazia:

Yeah.

Ryan:

And it was super cool of her. And that was one of the most empathetic things ever, because she just kind of captured me in that moment. And I love that she was vulnerable enough to be like, I don't care that this is my boss's boss's boss. Who gives a crap? She came over to see if I was all right.

Shazia:

Yeah.

Ryan:

So talk to me about vulnerability, another buzzword. I believe it's table stakes to lead business today, to be vulnerable and break down all this work persona, armor bullshit that's gotten in the way for a long time, but what does it mean to you and how do you become vulnerable at work?

Shazia:

God, that is a big word. It is a big word. And there's so many sort of aspects to it as well, but your story's great that you just shared. And I think it's important to remember that we're all humans.

Ryan:

Yeah.

Shazia:

And whatever the title, level, I don't know, role, background, person, whatever, we're all humans at the end of the day, mistakes can be made. People are going through stuff. And just to acknowledge that now and again, and just pause. So I think that's really important and that vulnerability is all about being okay with exposing that and sharing that, I think exposing is a strange word, but yeah, just being okay with actually sort of being open about it as well. And I think we need to be doing more of that.

Ryan:

Agreed.

Shazia:

Some communities and societies it's easier to do that. For others… We were having that conversation, when we were chatting about this before. I loved the latest Spider-Man movie, which I watched with my daughter. And I think I was saying to you, the best bit in that movie… actually I have realized, maybe not everybody's watched it, so I don't want to spoil it, but there was a moment-

Ryan:

You can skip the next 20 seconds, if you haven't watched the new Spider-Man yet. I thought it was a unique concept that they did. Go ahead and spoil it.

Shazia:

Well, I won't-

Ryan:

I feel like Kelsey, when she produces this, should take this as an opportunity to do a really tacky “spoiler alert, spoiler alert” type of sound, but go ahead and spoil it.

Shazia:

Well, I won't give too much away, but I think there was a great moment in there, which I call a bro moment where you've got three guys just really openly talking about their feelings and sharing and the language that each is using is very different. But you can see there's that openness. And it's not something that they'd usually do. There's a little bit of uncomfortableness as well, but how much value it's adding and how much of a difference it's making to each one of them. So I think being able to have conversations, which maybe people might find awkward and difficult at times are quite helpful. We need to be having more of them. And yeah. And going back to vulnerability, I've realized I've gone off on a tangent. I do that.

Ryan:

I like tangents.

Shazia:

I do that. My head goes off and it's like, oh, that dot's gone off the-

Ryan:

By the way, everybody, she didn't plan this vulnerable moment. It just happened naturally.

Shazia:

Oh yeah. Those of you who can't see me, I'm waving my arms in the air. I talk with my hands. Sorry. One of the other things to talk about, or I wanted to point out was in whatever role you're in, is to be able to learn from failure as well.

Ryan:

Yeah, for sure.

Shazia:

Again, failure is such a strange word. I have this thing about language and words and what we should and shouldn't be using, but if something doesn't quite go the way we plan it, then it's okay. Hopefully, there's something that's learned from that. And again, being comfortable with talking about that and saying, well, we're moving on and it happened for a reason.

Ryan:

Right.

Shazia:

I think is really, really valuable. And I'm going to come back actually, because there's so many different concepts that I like in Japanese culture, but there's something called kintsugi. Again, I don't know if I'm pronouncing it right. But kintsugi is a Japanese art form and it's the idea of putting broken pottery back together.

Ryan:

Okay.

Shazia:

But using gold and there's a few options-

Ryan:

Using gold?

Shazia:

Using gold.

Ryan:

Cool.

Shazia:

And the idea behind it is that we're all unique and that those sort of imperfections or flaws actually make something that's even more beautiful and unique. So, with things like vulnerability or things not quite going the way you might plan or that journey or path you're taking just takes a detour or goes off on a tangent to whatever else, it's actually okay to embrace it. And it's all a part of who you are or who you're going to become. So yeah.

Ryan:

I think the pottery example resonates with me because... So I think vulnerability is important because there's a truth here. We're all not perfect. We're all flawed. We all have issues and emotions and things that trigger us and things that we don't like to do. So the thing that needs to be in place, in my opinion, for vulnerability is you need to not have repercussions for being vulnerable. You need to be psychologically safe. So it doesn't mean that it's business is not going to be a therapy den, but you need to be able to say something without fear of repercussions, unless you're saying something that's completely rude and insensitive, but admitting defeat, admitting a failure, admitting a learning, I think all it does is help somebody connect.

We had a colleague today at this conference. He did a wonderful job. He did a live presentation and Google Chrome crashed in the middle of it. Him making a joke out of it and being vulnerable then had the entire audience rooting for him because we all know that we're not perfect.

Shazia:

Yes.

Ryan:

So I think we have to recognize that because to talk about something that we're going to go to next, things are unpredictable. We have to innovate, we have to change. We have to disrupt the old game to win the new game, which means there's no playbook for it. When COVID hit, it's not like there was a book you could buy that said how to lead a company through a pandemic. Didn't exist. Right. So who led Zappi through the pandemic? All 200 employees, because we figured it out together and I think that's really important, but there's a concept of ownership that I really like, of owning failure in learning because failure...

Maybe there's just a better word that needs to be used.

Shazia:

Yeah. Yeah.

Ryan:

Because I don't think you can really change the world without stubbing your toe. The only thing that I guess would be triggered by is not learning from it. So I was on a call today where we had learned a lesson twice.

Shazia:

Okay.

Ryan:

Those people who work with me know that pipeline Ryan is a different type of persona. We can talk about that some other time, but I don't like learning the same lesson twice. And so I sort of stopped the meeting and was like, here's the lesson, everybody, because we need to learn. So I often talk about stepping in new potholes versus the ones that somebody else created. So a woman who is at this conference who just won the innovation exchange award, Dana Kim, she's wonderful. She pulled me aside last night at the bar and was like, could you tell me some of the potholes y'all stepped in so I can avoid them? And I love that, I'd make so much time for her because I'd rather her step in new ones and then tell me those and so that I can avoid them. All right. So what-

Shazia:

It's about shared learning?

Ryan:

It's important.

Shazia:

It's so important. And it goes back to that, importance of engaging in that conversation. Not being afraid to sort of say "Actually, yeah, I messed up there," so others can learn from that as well. And yeah. Going back to the fact that we're humans and we need to be having more of those conversations.

Ryan:

Stop trying to be robots, everybody. You're wonderfully imperfect. Okay. So you're a career qualitative researcher.

Shazia:

Yeah.

Ryan:

Who's just taken a senior job on a marketing team to run a community, which is very brave. But also, to me, just shows that you have a growth mindset. How do you go about learning and getting inspired and improving Shazia, Shazia the business woman, Shazia the mother, Shazia the friend, Shazia the wife.

Shazia:

Yeah.

Ryan:

How do you improve and grow yourself every day?

Shazia:

Yeah. Big question.

Ryan:

It's a very big question.

Shazia:

I called my 10 year old earlier, obviously there's a six hour time difference. So I called her up.

Ryan:

She was having her dinner.

Shazia:

I called her up. She was actually eating ice cream.

Ryan:

Oh.

Shazia:

She was trying to hide it from me and I spotted it and I was like, just eat it. It's going to melt.

Ryan:

Mom's away rules.

Shazia:

Don't worry. Just eat it. It's going to melt. But yeah, I asked her and I said, look, I'm going to be talking about growth mindset. What does it mean to you? And it is great, hearing a 10 year old give me her definition of it. And her definition was if I remember, not word for word, but it was like, mummy, it's when you know you do something which you don't know how to do it and you might not get it right the first time around, but then you keep trying and you keep doing it. And then there's this thing that in your mind that creates this and she talks like this, then there's this thing in your mind that creates this neural pathway. That's what it's called. And yeah. And then it sticks in your brain. So then you just get really good at it and whatever it is that you are doing and yeah, that's a growth mindset. You should say that mummy, you should say that. I was like, yeah, yep. I'm going to say that.

Ryan:

Wise young lady.

Shazia:

She is, she is, but for anyone who hasn't come across it, Matthew Syed's book. I have to thank him for that. But he's written a great book for kids, which is called You Are Awesome. Which just helps them with building confidence and yeah. Growing their mindset, creating neural pathways. And she read that and she used that to actually improve her cycling. She used to be really scared of riding her bike. 

Ryan:

Does your daughter want a job?

Shazia:

She'd love that. Do you know what she's-

Ryan:

We'll get her an internship. I'm sure there's no labor laws against a paid internship for a 10 year old. Right. I can feel them telling me that I'm breaking some rule here.

Shazia:

But going back to growth mindset. Yeah. It's about that continual learning and just trying out new things. And for me, it's about pushing yourself out of your comfort zone.

Ryan:

Yes.

Shazia:

So what I'm doing now, yes. It's not the world of qualitative research and yes, it's not my comfort zone in terms of me working with my usual clients and so on. But it's a great adventure. A great adventure where I'm able to actually tap into my skill sets that I've built over the years with the various things that I've been doing, things that really drive me in terms of things that I'm passionate about. I love something that I know you love doing as well is just talking to strangers.

Ryan:

I love talking to strangers.

Shazia:

It's great. You learn so many different things from them.

Ryan:

Isn't it weird as strangers are naturally way more... You'll hear someone's entire life story because they don't know you.

Shazia:

Yeah.

Ryan:

Is that quite interesting?

Shazia:

How much they open up and tell you, but actually just reaching out to people who you think actually, do you know what I think? What you do sounds really interesting. I have no idea what it means, but tell me and learning from that and then just connecting different people together. But see, I go off on another tangent again.

Ryan:

It's all right. This segues into our community topic, which I want to talk to you about.

Shazia:

Yeah, so just pushing yourself out of your comfort zone. And I think that's really important for growth mindset and having an open mind, being curious and not being afraid of where that journey's going to take you.

Ryan:

I'm going to tell a story about you that you didn't know I was going to tell.

Shazia:

No. My God.

Ryan:

I always have a couple curve balls thrown in. I just don't warn my guests about them.

Shazia:

Oh.

Ryan:

So you and I had a coffee together on your first or second week at Zappi.

Shazia:

Oh my God, what did I say?

Ryan:

I really admired what you said, which is, "I'm really excited to try this."

Shazia:

Yeah.

Ryan:

"To see if my skills will translate into make this work. I like the opportunity, but if it doesn't, that's okay too." And I respected the shit out of that because that's actually the worst case scenario. And the reason I share the story is most things we do in life are, to steal a Jeff Bezos quote, two-way doors. You could just walk right back through the damn thing. So knowing that, is sure it's a big decision, but let's be real. In six months, if you don't like it, if you've learned all you want to learn, it's a two-way door. And I don't want that to be true, but I left that call and admiration of you be for that reason because you're like, I'm going to go for it. I'm out of my comfort zone. But who knows?

Shazia:

Yeah.

Ryan:

I might fall flat and that's okay and the learning is there.

Shazia:

Yeah, absolutely. But also, in some ways, it's very easy to just think, okay, do you know what? If it's not going to work, I'm just going to go back to whatever or take a different direction. Which is why, again, going back to growth mindset, it's about sort of identifying new challenges and learning from those and not being afraid. And that's what sort of, it builds those muscles that aren't being used as much and grows you and develops you. And it's a continual learning. It's not about getting to an end point. It's about that journey.

Ryan:

Yeah. You got to enjoy the ride.

Shazia:

And it's not, you sort of mentioned you learn what you learn, but it's also about everyone else around you getting value from that as well. So this new adventure, this journey for me, isn't just about me. It needs to work out for everybody and it goes back to the respect, going back to sort of the core values that we started off talking about at the beginning. It's about being respectful for the fact that yes, I'm part of a business, part of a team and it's not just about me. It's adding value and making sure everyone else gets something out of this as well. So yeah. That's really-

Ryan:

It's beautiful thing. All right. So I want to switch gears a little bit. I want to talk to you about change.

Shazia:

Yeah.

Ryan:

There's an interesting paradox with change. It's never going to not happen and people don't like it naturally. You said something to me this morning when we were having breakfast about making the... Don't worry, you knew this one was coming. Making the uncomfortable comfortable. What the heck does that mean? How do you do that? Because I like it.

Shazia:

Yeah.

Ryan:

And I'm personally comfortable being uncomfortable, but so talk to me about it. How do you make others who are uncomfortable, feel comfortable as they're changing, being asked to form a new habit, do their job differently, think differently. How do you go about doing that?

Shazia:

I think you've been doing it in the conversation, you've touched on it a couple of times, it's about sort of just allowing and creating that space for people to be able to speak the truth in terms of how they're feeling and going back to, again, that core skill of listening, thinking about empathy, creating that space, where people can feel vulnerable and respecting that. So it's just really sort of being mindful of that and just allowing everybody in that room, permission, including yourself, to be able to just sort of say what you think and make sure... It's something that I've sort of talked about quite a lot over the last year where I think, unless you ask the question, you're not going to know the answer. And I think you touched on the fact that sometimes it can be miscommunication.

Ryan:

Yeah.

Shazia:

And we need to avoid that. So, being able to have conversations that might seem uncomfortable is actually something we need to be doing more of, to make sure that we create and make sure that there's a space that is comfortable.

Ryan:

Yes.

Shazia:

And it sounds like it's easy to do, but yeah, there's lots of things that need to happen. We need to think about the language we're using, the tone, creating, listening as well. And yeah. So we need to be having more of those uncomfortable conversations to create that comfortable space.

Ryan:

I liked the uncomfortable conversations thing. I was talking to a woman earlier today who has butting heads, some other company, nothing to do with us. Butting heads with somebody and her team called her out for it.

Shazia:

Okay.

Ryan:

And said, you need to go out and have a coffee with Sally. Let's pretend her name is Sally.

Shazia:

Yeah.

Ryan:

And they did. And the conversation was awkward as hell, but guess what on the other side happened?

Shazia:

Yep.

Ryan:

Their working relationship was 10X better. And they solved a bunch of hard problems together.

Shazia:

Yeah.

Ryan:

But I noticed it happened a lot where people call me to escalate. What they're really doing is saying, I want you to talk to so-and-so on my behalf, and 100% of the times, all I say is the exact same thing. Have you spoken to so-and-so yet? Have you heard their perspective? Let me give you some advice on how to go talk to them and never once am I willing to go and talk to them on their behalf.

Shazia:

Yeah.

Ryan:

Because you have to work through those things and face the elephants in the room.

Shazia:

Yeah. Absolutely.

Ryan:

We've talked about empathy. We've talked about vulnerability. We've talked about growth. We've talked about managing change. But what we haven't talked about is doing that when people are all over the world, managing life and kids in a Zoom box, some people will never be in person. Some people will. It's a unique time. Personally, as a father of three kids, I love that I now work from home. I haven't missed a dinner when I've not been on a business trip in three years. I cook breakfast. I cook dinner. It's beautiful. But it's really hard to lead with empathy and vulnerability from a Zoom box when everybody's fatigued from the screen and everything else. So, let's talk about it for couple of minutes. We got time for two more topics. So let's talk about it for a couple minutes.

Shazia:

I've realized I haven't asked you any questions, but yeah.

Ryan:

That's okay. We're vibing, Shazia. We're vibing. I'm really passionate about asynchronous working and balancing asynchronous working with synchronous working. But I learned something this week, that it isn't natural to everybody which makes this problem even harder. So I would prefer personally, to consume information, think about it and have a five minute conversation or comment in a document and never have a need for a meeting. Whereas some other people actually, they learn by talking it out. So that's a bit of a masterclass, but some of the things that I think we've done in pockets successfully is giving time in meetings to do the reading, going around the room and letting everybody speak with undivided attention. And then using solutions like Miro to have people write their ideas and their thinking to then theme them and then decide.

And so one of the things I'm combating against, frankly, myself, is loudest person in the room syndrome. Right? So if you're assertive and domineering or whatever, you can tend to make anything sound compelling. And the quiet voices might not be heard. And so this was something we picked up years ago, but it works even more importantly now that, even in a world where people are getting back together in person.

Shazia:

Yeah.

Ryan:

Somebody's mother may have immuno-compromisation, so they can't go, they can't risk it. And so we're all going to have to make our own decisions of what's best for our family, which means work is never going to be we're in an office as much as I think some big companies are very naively forcing their employees back in.

Shazia:

Yeah.

Ryan:

They're not going to get them back in five days a week. So I'm pretty passionate about managing live time to be as effective as possible. I'm going to say something. Why do we not use the phone anymore though? It seems like it's either Zoom or in person. So this is segues to another thing that I like to do, which is get headphones in with somebody and go for a walk.

Shazia:

Yeah.

Ryan:

Because you get more creative when you're sort of outside.

Shazia:

Yeah.

Ryan:

So anyways, I think it's a challenge for everybody. Again, no playbooks for this.

Shazia:

No.

Ryan:

So for anybody listening, if you're doing cool stuff to balance live in person work and asynchronous work, I want to know about it. I'm trying to share as much as I can on LinkedIn because it's difficult.

Shazia:

Yeah.

Ryan:

If you put your empathy hat on, it's even more difficult.

Shazia:

Yeah, absolutely.

Ryan:

So everybody learns differently. Everybody shows up differently and there isn't a one size fits all approach.

Shazia:

No, no, not at all. I think what you said there is really important because not everybody's the same and everyone's learning differently. So for some people, I know with me, it's like, yeah, I'd rather have a chat and it'll be a long chat and I might go on tangents, but yeah. For other people, it needs to just be written down, quick, snappy. And it's a really important question, which I've actually been having conversations about with some of our clients as well. It's like, how best do you share those insights?

Ryan:

Yeah, exactly.

Shazia:

And particularly with data, what's the best way to share it so that it's digested and optimized and everyone gets the most out of it. So, yeah. It'll be great to sort of learn more around that.

Ryan:

I want to talk to you about community and it's a perfect transition to community, but I think there's a job to do for leaders to meet their people where they need to be, not force them to come to your terms. And so that was actually my insight this week is let me not project what works best for me to you. How do you want to learn? And I'll show up in that way.

Shazia:

Yeah. Yeah.

Ryan:

But when it's on my terms, I want to be engaged in a certain way. 

So your job is to build community.

Shazia:

Yeah.

Ryan:

You naturally do that anyway. What does building community mean? And what are some of the things you're doing at Zappi in a couple of minutes?

Shazia:

Yeah. Couple of minutes.

Ryan:

Yeah.

Shazia:

That's hard.

Ryan:

This podcast is being shot at a conference. And so we have an actual time limit. Normally at Inside insights, we go long every time.

Shazia:

So yeah. What does community mean? So for me, it's about bringing different perspectives and minds together. So again, just thinking about interesting, passionate, intelligent, different people and bringing those great minds together. And this idea of, again, I'm going to refer back to Matthew Syed because I just love his book, Rebel Ideas, if you haven't read it. Great read. I actually struggle to read it because every couple of pages, my head would go off and-

Ryan:

I love books like that.

Shazia:

Oh my God. Yeah but you never get to the end. It's like, oh.

Ryan:

But as long as you're getting ideas, as you go, who cares?

Shazia:

Yeah.

Ryan:

It's perfect.

Shazia:

You have loads of ideas because you'll be like, oh my God. Yes. Yeah. That's spot on. But the idea of the collective brain and it sort of links back to the fact that when we're talking about growth mindset, one thing that we didn't really sort of talk hugely about, but it's about innovation, where do we get those ideas from? How are we inspired? And the linking it back to the collective brain is actually sort of bringing different perspectives together that will spark ideas. And again, just pushing ourselves beyond the frameworks that we've all been taught to learn within.

Ryan:

Yeah.

Shazia:

Whether they're societal, cultural, educational, those frameworks that were all sort of programmed to sort of fit within. And one word that I've been hearing a lot of and I've been doing a bit of as well is unlearning.

You have to unlearn a lot of the way that you've been thinking, because we need to be thinking beyond those frameworks. And when you bring different perspectives and minds together, which is the community, it just sparks conversation, sparks ideas.

And also just thinking about actually bringing outside perspectives in. And it's not necessarily somebody who sits on the outside, but it's the outsider mindset, so somebody who thinks beyond the paradigm that people within that room, virtual room, whatever it might be, are thinking. So again, just going back to us, talking to strangers, it's just connecting those dots and different people who may not naturally meet, but you think actually it would be great just to put them in our room together and have that conversation. So community, to me, is bringing different heads together, different voices, different opinions and perspectives and sparking conversation. And which also would spark innovation as well and different types of innovation. The innovation that I really like is recombination. The idea is that it's bringing two different ideas together.

Ryan:

Love it.

Shazia:

That would never meet, but you're cross pollinating to create something completely different and completely new. And which wouldn't naturally have happened otherwise. So I've gone over a couple of minutes, so I'm going to-

Ryan:

No, no, I love it. And communities, they exist in all trades. There's Pavilion, there's Young Executives Group, there's Women in Research, there's Chief, there's all these kind of pay to play communities and you'll get out of them what you take it.

Shazia:

Yeah.

Ryan:

We happen to manage a community of brands that we connect on ideas and build products together. But if you're not part of a community, I would say, just be vulnerable and ask people. Reach out to them on LinkedIn.

Shazia:

Yeah.

Ryan:

Get them talking. Shazia, I can't thank you enough for joining me today.

Shazia:

Oh no, it's been great. 

Ryan: 

Thanks everybody.

Shazia:

Thank you. Thanks Ryan.

Ryan:

Shazia is a wonderful person. And I really enjoyed the conversation with her. I also dragged her... So obviously we recorded this episode in Austin, Texas. And I dragged her to Franklin Barbecue, Shazia doesn't eat meat. So poor thing, she’s a great sport. For those of you who don't know, Franklin Barbecue's probably one of the more famous Texas barbecue places. And you literally have to wait in line for like three hours, if you show up on the day. And they cook a certain amount of food, and then when the food's gone, they close. We had so much fun.

They let you bring beer and you can sit in lawn chairs. And ladies and listeners, it's rare in life, that things that are hyped live up to the hype. But isn't it wonderful when they do?

Patricia:

Oh yes.

Ryan:

It's wonderful when they do. And Franklin Barbecue is one of the places that lived up to the hype. So Shazia, thank you for coming with me. As well as Mark Resnick and Ariel, who actually ate a lot of brisket with me. I think Ariel and Mark might have eaten more brisket than me, but we'll see.

Patricia:

Well, that was your fourth day eating brisket. You said you had eaten three brisket things three days in a row, that was your fourth day. So you get a pass.

Ryan:

I culminated, and I did try a bunch of brisket in Austin, Texas, because Texas barbecue, and North Carolina barbecue, are probably 1 and 1A for me, in terms of barbecue joints or barbecue genres. Franklin Barbecue lives up to the hype. Definitely the best brisket I've ever had. However, Terry Black’s, which is a place I went to with Michael Lancor from Proctor & Gamble, is delicious and was pretty close to Franklin Barbecue. Real cool, rustic. Anyways, love Austin, Texas. Stay weird Austin, Texas, I appreciate you. 

Patricia, you have nine takeaways I here, plus a bonus goodie.

Patricia:

I do have a little itty bitty bonus for you guys. The conversation between the two of you was a pleasure, because you had a macro theme. But at the end of the day, what you guys gave us, maybe even unbeknownst to you. But you gave us elements, terms that are used in the modern day workplace, but defined in context. Which I found amazing because at the end of the day, we have to bring our whole selves to the table at work. We can't just leave parts of ourselves at home. So the lines blur between the personal and the emotional. So the terms that you guys used were fantastic, that you brought them to light in a professional environment, without removing the human aspect. 

The first one you guys talked about was purpose. And you spoke of ikigai. I actually went online to see how I pronounced that ikigai. Ikigai is a Japanese concept to unpack purpose, which means the reason for being. Now “iki” means life, and “gai” is value or worth. So your ikigai is your life purpose or your bliss. Now you guys turned it around and brought it into work, because it's important to have aligned your purpose. So that you're working it towards something that benefits you and benefits the world. Now what ikigai does is, it looks at four different areas of your life. What you love, what you're good at, what the world needs and what you can get paid for.

When all those things merge, that saying, that if you love your job, you don't work a day in your life. This is the definition of it. Because if you're able to do that and get paid for it, which is what I'm doing now, then you are a happy camper. Now, the questions you're supposed to ask yourself to get to this point is, where are you going? Where do you want to go? What do you want to do in your career, in your life? What matters to you? What's important? And all those things build this beautiful Venn diagram. It's actually really beautiful, which at the center has your purpose. We have talked about purpose a couple of times in our podcast, but seeing a visual representation was really lovely for me.

Number two, trust. Now trust is something that we talk about every day, but when you think about defining trust, defining trust is hard under the best circumstances. You guys defined it so clearly. You said, you hire them, let them do what you hired them for. So trust your people to make decisions, to fail, to learn from their failure, to use the tools available, and to grow, just trust them. 

Onto another really easy one, truth. Truth again is a huge concept, but you guys boiled it down to being transparent with your team, give them context so they can make better decisions. Give them as much information as you have, so that they know that you're being clean with them. And make sure everybody's speaking the same language.

You had a great example of using the same words for different meanings. And I was reminded when I first came to Zappi, about four years back. Where I was using words that were also used at Zappi, but meant something different. So it was really important to be transparent, to tell the truth, but not just to tell the truth, to make sure the truth is understood. So, that was great. 

Now, Shazia embodies empathy. Number four is empathy. And it's basically in a nutshell, seeing the world from different perspectives. How does that work at the office, or in your profession? Or wherever you go to work and make money. Listening, comprehending, translating into your own language, and asking questions so you can get there, engaging in general. Breaking down defensiveness, because that enables innovation.

Nick Graham, you gave a great example. He paraphrases the message back. And I thought that's a great idea. I love that. Because at the end of the day, that's what my takeaways are. At the end of the day, empathy is a building block for insights. And in today's world, today's hybrid world, empathy's harder because some people are present, some people are virtual, some people learn fast, some people learn slow. So it's difficult to do that. But what you're going to have to do, is you have to make sure that everybody's learning and interacting, even if they show up differently. And although this affects how insights are shared, and digested, and applied, you've got to find different ways You gave a couple of examples with Miro, and Zoom, and everything. But understanding the differences and accounting for them, that's how you leverage the differences and allow everybody to engage. Well, you both spoke about a book by Nancy Klein called Time to Think, that's a must read. 

Number five-

Ryan:

Great book.

Patricia:

Yeah. I'm looking forward to it. Actually, this is the one where Tom Holliss from Zappi recommended, and I bought the wrong one. I bought More Time to Think. So I read the number two, before I read the number one. Oh well, but they're both fantastic. 

So number five, vulnerability, we've spoken about vulnerability before. It's opening yourself up so that you can live differently. It's table stakes in leadership today, you both talked about this, and how it's important to use it in leadership to break down, not only your own personal armor, but also other people's armor. We spoke about that with Michelle as well, but how do you become vulnerable at work? Provide and enable psychological safety.

People will not be vulnerable or open, if they're not safe. Learn to be okay with exposing and sharing your own humanity, and also learn to be okay when others open, because some people get uncomfortable when other people open up. They get embarrassed. But you should embrace the moments to talk about feelings, whether it's your feelings or somebody else's. And all of you learn from failure, just because one person has an experience, doesn't mean all of us can't learn from it.

Ryan:

I want to say something about psychological safety, if you don't mind.

Patricia:

Go for it.

Ryan:

Psychological safety does not mean, work becomes passive, not ambitious, fast paced, or not adaptive to change. It means the environment enables people to have difficult conversations without fear of repercussions with each other. I think it oftentimes gets a misnomer as businesses becoming, and I'm using other people's words not my own, "Soft." You two know me well. I drive harder than most people you'll meet, but I do believe anybody should be able to tell me you're full of shit. And that's what I really mean by psychological safety, that it's okay to challenge assumptions. It doesn't matter that I'm more "senior” than somebody. I don't really care about that. But I do think that there's a balance on this topic. So thank you for listening to my Ted talk.

Patricia:

But to add to your Ted talk with my soapbox, it's both ways. It's having the space of anybody saying to the president of the company, "I think you're wrong.” Whether you feel comfortable saying you're full of shit or not, you're wrong. At the same time as turning the tables and saying, "I am the director of X, Y, and Z, and I don't know what to do next. Can you help me?" Both of those require a very specific psychological safety, because if I don't feel safe enough to say, "I need help" then I'm not going to ask for help, and I'm going to fail. When you don't have to fail, you can just ask for help.

Ryan:

Totally great point.

Patricia:

Great Ted talk. Number six, kintsugi. 

Now this one was said underneath vulnerability, but I decided it was beautiful enough and special enough to deserve its own number. It's the Japanese art of putting broken pottery pieces back together, with gold dust or gold liquid. It's a metaphor for embracing your flaws and imperfections. And the only way you could embrace your flaws and imperfections, is by being truthful, by being honest, by being vulnerable, by being empathetic, not only with others, but with yourself. And it takes work and awareness in order for true healing, AKA learning to happen. And it turns out to be something beautiful, when you look at the actual visual representation of kintsugi, you see that each artwork is a little bit different than the one before. It's just absolutely beautiful. 

Now this all goes to number seven, growth mindset. We've spoken about this in different ways, but it never gets old because, a growth mindset is having continual learning on your mind. Which means trying new things, pushing yourself outside of your comfort zone, and not being afraid of following where the journey leads. Every single time I've made a change in my life, I've been afraid. But I've been more afraid of being bored and of not growing, than of pushing ahead and trying it. And I was so impressed with Shazia, when you shared with us that she said, "If it doesn't work, we'll see what happens." When she's talking about her new job, as she's talking to the president. So that number one implies, that she's incredibly confident. Number two, that you've given her the psychological safety to say that. And number three, that she's just badass. Just saying, just putting it out there, right?

Ryan:

Totally.

Patricia:

When you are in a growth mindset, you do things that you don't know how to do. Her daughter gave her the best definition, I was so pleased when she gave us her daughter's definition of a growth mindset. The book, You Are Awesome by Matthew Syed gave a lot of information to her daughter, but it's all about, let your mind create neural pathways which stick in your brain and help you learn. Her daughter said it much better. She said, "Do things that you don't know how to do. And keep doing them until you figure it out." And then your brain says, "Oh, look. This is how you figure it out." So it was a fantastic way to identify challenges and learn without fear, build new muscles. And this is when you both talked about Jeff Bezos, talking about the two way door, is that called...

In Spanish, it translates into something different. 

Ryan:

One way in two way doors.

Patricia:

Right. I always think of the bars in the old westerns, where people come in and then the drunk people fall out. I love that one. But anyway, that's all about the growth mindset and building new muscles. 

Number eight, change. Because everything we've talked about leads to change. The thing is change is ever present, but not loved by everybody. It makes people uncomfortable. So how do we at work make the uncomfortable, comfortable? Allow it, let it be present. You know how we were talking about psychological safety? That expands into, let change happen, be okay with change. Some companies are really bad at change. Some companies are crazy with change. But if you create a space to have a dialogue about change and the repercussions have changed, and the repercussions of not changing, that's really important. Because it's a space to listen and be empathetic, when others are vulnerable about the change. So you have to walk through this and have the discussion, and talk about the elephants in the room. 

Number nine, which is Shazia's reason for being, community. What is a community? It's a unified body of individuals. It's pretty simple. So what does building a community actually mean? Does that mean like having a party and inviting everybody? Not only that, you can do that, but it means bringing together different perspectives, bringing together different minds. So they can have the conversations, difficult and easy. And sometimes it means unlearning together, so you can learn together, so you can grow. It means cross pollinating opinions and perspectives, so that you can create, innovate, something completely different. Something that's going to be, maybe not earth shattering. And we're not... curing cancer or splitting the atom, but something that's going to make people sit up and take notice.

And it's creating collective brain, which I love that definition. Creating a collective brain. You spoke to the book, Rebel Ideas by Matthew Syed. Again, she likes Matthew Syed. He's the same one who wrote, You Are Awesome, that her daughter read. So I am looking forward to getting to know Matthew Syed. 

Now ready for the bonus one, takes two seconds.

Ryan:

I like it.

Patricia:

Recombinant innovation. I'd never heard that in my life, neither had you. Bringing together two different ideas, recombinant innovation. I was like, "Well, hot damn. Learned something new." And there you go.

Ryan:

There you go. Well done as always, Patricia. 

So my friends, this is the end of today's episode. Our final episode is with Natalia Lumpkin. In fact, I'm recording this outro on the day I'm interviewing Natalia. So I get that interview in a couple hours, I'm fired out about it. Natalia is the global head of Insights, from Central Pet and Garden. She worked for Mars Pet, and Proctor & Gamble. She's an absolute boss, and has been digitally transforming insights before it was cool. So I think you got a lot to learn from her. She shoots real straight, maybe even straighter than me, and I'm pretty blunt. I appreciate you all listening. I appreciate you listening to my tangent about how useless our government seems to be. And for Patricia's amazing takeaways, and Shazia for sharing in such a vulnerable way with us. I hope you all have a wonderful day. Talk to you soon.

Patricia:

You too. Chowder!

• Time to Think: Listening to Ignite the Human Mind by Nancy Kline

• You are Awesome by Matthew Syed

• Rebel ideas by Matthew Syed

• Listening like a leader podcast episode with Nick Graham