Dr. Christie Smith
Appearances
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Christie Smith on How to Embrace Human-Powered Leadership | EP 594
coming up next on passion struck we are living in unprecedented times and have been living in this for the last five years really since the pandemic and maybe a little bit before that and what makes it unprecedented well
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Christie Smith on How to Embrace Human-Powered Leadership | EP 594
That says to us, well, what do employees require of us? If these are our realities, what do they require of us? So we examined and did research around what are the most prevalent things employees are talking about that they need from their leaders?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Christie Smith on How to Embrace Human-Powered Leadership | EP 594
The four are purpose, that companies live up to their rhetoric, that your insides match your outsides, that the work that those employees are doing is tied to the purpose of the organization, and it is made purposeful. and it lives up to its values. The second is agency. Employees want the ability to work where, when, and how they want to.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Christie Smith on How to Embrace Human-Powered Leadership | EP 594
That means a fundamental shift in designing work, in leaders needing to design work to meet that need. Now, it's not going to always happen for everyone. There are certainly parts of our workforce that need to be frontline. But how do you build predictability and flexibility into that?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Christie Smith on How to Embrace Human-Powered Leadership | EP 594
To our earlier discussion of DEI, people actually want the ability and the agency to define themselves in their own words, not be defined by several factors which we do in organizations. Title, color of skin, gender, sexual orientation, where you work within the organization. People want the agency to define themselves in their own words and do the work that they feel is purposeful.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Christie Smith on How to Embrace Human-Powered Leadership | EP 594
The last two areas that employees talk about are wellness, And we spent a little bit of time talking about that as well. And also connection. And now connection has become really popular in the press of late with return to office kinds of mandates. Here's where I think there is a failure of imagination in leadership. And certainly we found this in that leaders who are requiring leadership
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Christie Smith on How to Embrace Human-Powered Leadership | EP 594
return to office are hoping, and I get it, it so makes sense to my generation of leaders why somebody would do this, is that's where culture gets built. That's where productivity happens. Well, the evidence suggests something completely different. One in five employees in the globe are report feeling lonely. One in six feel highly connected at work. One in five feel psychologically safe at work.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Christie Smith on How to Embrace Human-Powered Leadership | EP 594
So the reality that the rhetoric of I've returned to the office and this is where I get a sense of connection couldn't be farther than the evidence of the research we've done.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Christie Smith on How to Embrace Human-Powered Leadership | EP 594
This is where I think the great hope lies with our book, is that these realities in this perfect storm of forces against or creating chaos in the workplace, in our society overall, can be healed. And it can be, there is hope. for the promises of fulfillment at work and the village as you talk about and community and connection with the right skills of leadership.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Christie Smith on How to Embrace Human-Powered Leadership | EP 594
Now, what we talk about is building a blueprint of what we call the emotionally mature leader. Now, where did we come at this kind of conclusion? Well, we looked very closely at the other leadership models that have been prevalent in certainly my lifetime and for generations. If you think about servant leadership in the 70s, and then you look at emotional intelligence and
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Christie Smith on How to Embrace Human-Powered Leadership | EP 594
in the late 80s and 90s, these were great frameworks for leaders trying to understand themselves, right? Especially emotional intelligence. Emotional intelligence is a great tool for me as a leader to understand what my proclivities are in terms of my own emotional intelligence. capabilities, right?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Christie Smith on How to Embrace Human-Powered Leadership | EP 594
But I can take an emotional intelligence test or course or what have you, and I can put those results in a drawer. It's not that I am being held account to them. We believe really strongly that we need to build on this idea of emotional intelligence, but move dramatically from that inward looking self-diagnosis to an outward focused which we call emotional maturity.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Christie Smith on How to Embrace Human-Powered Leadership | EP 594
Now, emotional maturity is built on a couple of key elements. The first being suspension of self-interest. In order for us to lead the complexity in the workplace today, to connect with our employees, to connect purpose to the work that is being done, we must suspend our own self-interest in getting that work done, right? It's not about us anymore.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Christie Smith on How to Embrace Human-Powered Leadership | EP 594
And that is a key element we have found to great leadership. The second element is this notion of insatiable curiosity. In order for me to suspend self-interest, my interest has to lie on you. And that is understanding our employees By asking lots of questions, by taking time.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Christie Smith on How to Embrace Human-Powered Leadership | EP 594
Listen, I'm sure your schedule is like mine had been, which was get up, check my smart device and my email, and then meeting after meeting. And all of those meetings are about productivity and outcome. Very few of those meetings are set up to spend time with employees to really understand what makes them tick, what motivates them, what kind of work that they want to do.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Christie Smith on How to Embrace Human-Powered Leadership | EP 594
If the conversation allows and the employee has to allow it, what is going on with their life that is hindering any aspect of the work that they can get done? We need to be more curious as leaders. Interestingly, after we had submitted the final manuscript on the book, Jamie Dimon came out and started talking about curiosity as the number one leadership skill. Well, I think it's maybe not one.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Christie Smith on How to Embrace Human-Powered Leadership | EP 594
I think suspension of self-interest is one, but two is, okay, curiosity. The third thing is focusing on creating cultures of excellence. Now, creating cultures of excellence is really looking at how do you construct the work that needs to be done? And how do you take the team that you're responsible for
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Christie Smith on How to Embrace Human-Powered Leadership | EP 594
We are seeing a super cycle of change happening in the market, happening in our socio-political and economic conditions around the world, which really challenge leaders to fundamentally have to lead differently.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Christie Smith on How to Embrace Human-Powered Leadership | EP 594
and architect the work such that each individual feels that they are fulfilled, but know that their success is dependent on the rest of the team. And that there's this notion of, if you go back in the day with the Chicago Bulls, when they were a championship team, I know what my role is on the team. Dennis Rodman's role on that team was to get rebounds, right? That's all he was supposed to do.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Christie Smith on How to Embrace Human-Powered Leadership | EP 594
The minute he started taking three-point shots is when he got benched because that wasn't his role, right? That was Jordan's role. And so the understanding of how do I architect this team and its culture to create that sense that we are a team and that everybody is contributing equally to that team.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Christie Smith on How to Embrace Human-Powered Leadership | EP 594
I appreciate your words. And I do think it's interesting when we look at, you probably know this as well as I do. I've talked to hundreds, if not thousands of leaders who are in and still doing this today in transition from about five years out, maybe shorter period of time from retirement. And inevitably, to a leader, they say to me, well, I really want to focus on my legacy.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Christie Smith on How to Embrace Human-Powered Leadership | EP 594
I want my legacy to be how much I cared about people and the culture I created and blah, blah, blah. It's never about I created billions for the company and created the best widget in the world, whatever. I have not. heard that at all, right? What I've heard is I want my legacy to be about the people and the culture and the commitment and love I had for the brand, right?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Christie Smith on How to Embrace Human-Powered Leadership | EP 594
What we're suggesting with an emotionally mature leader is don't wait for that five years out. Don't wait until you start thinking about retirement. This is something you must do from day one.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Christie Smith on How to Embrace Human-Powered Leadership | EP 594
It's cultivating those attributes of suspension of self-interest, curiosity, thinking about architecting teams and constructing the way work gets done, moving from a focus primarily on productivity and financial metrics to the consideration of, yes, financials, but environmental, societal, your people, and what matters there.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Christie Smith on How to Embrace Human-Powered Leadership | EP 594
One thousand percent. I think we need more leaders like the two of them in terms of that kind of mission that of the B Corp. Right. Or the team rather. That is that we would term as a great example of an emotionally mature leader.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Christie Smith on How to Embrace Human-Powered Leadership | EP 594
Well, there's a great example in the book that we talked about later from the CEO of Unilever, who actually said, we're going to stop the madness around quarterly earnings and talking about that. We are actually going to focus on our longer term goals. And that shift, incredibly courageous, right? That shifted the entire culture of the organization to not be in this kind of fear, kind of chaos.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Christie Smith on How to Embrace Human-Powered Leadership | EP 594
You and I both work for public companies. And as soon as you close one quarter, you are like already gunning and planning for the second quarterly update. And that is a distraction to the work that actually needs to be done to connection to our customers and our clients. It's a distraction in terms of how we think about the demands that we make on our employees.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Christie Smith on How to Embrace Human-Powered Leadership | EP 594
How many times have you experienced in the workplace in these kind of quarterly rushes. I certainly did. About two weeks out, several demands from a CEO on, I need this deck. No, I need this deck. I need that deck. And just the chaos that it created and distraction from the actual purpose of the organization, which was to serve clients.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Christie Smith on How to Embrace Human-Powered Leadership | EP 594
So I think that this example of Unilever saying, we're going to shelve that allowed them to come together as a team and frankly, focus on the things that mattered, which then had confidence that it would result in better earnings, which in fact it did. So I really think this need for a leader to think very differently about culture, architecting the work, architecting the teams,
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Christie Smith on How to Embrace Human-Powered Leadership | EP 594
will result, and all evidence points to this, will result in higher earnings. Greater productivity of your, greater engagement of your employees leads to something like, not something like, six times better sales and revenue goals. Six times.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Christie Smith on How to Embrace Human-Powered Leadership | EP 594
So the evidence suggests that this is the best thing for the performance of your company, yet we are still stuck in these old models of quarterly short-term thinking.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Christie Smith on How to Embrace Human-Powered Leadership | EP 594
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Christie Smith on How to Embrace Human-Powered Leadership | EP 594
Hi, it's great to be with you, John. Thanks.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Christie Smith on How to Embrace Human-Powered Leadership | EP 594
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Christie Smith on How to Embrace Human-Powered Leadership | EP 594
It's kind of surprising our paths have not crossed before this.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Christie Smith on How to Embrace Human-Powered Leadership | EP 594
Thank you.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Christie Smith on How to Embrace Human-Powered Leadership | EP 594
I think we are in really a tumultuous time right now. If you saw the news today, McDonald's just announced that it was pulling back on some of their DEI efforts. And many companies, I think, unfortunately, are doing that. And in some cases, obviously, they feel necessary to code switch and go to things like belonging and culture and to talk about those things.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Christie Smith on How to Embrace Human-Powered Leadership | EP 594
Yeah. What we're talking about, and we devote a whole chapter to the skills scarcity issue, which is the half-life of skills is shortening and shortening. And candidly, your son asked a really good question because skills are outpacing our educational systems, our traditional learning and development models within organizations, and they simply can't adapt at the pace of change.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Christie Smith on How to Embrace Human-Powered Leadership | EP 594
So I think that to address this, listen, I think technology is fantastic, but we have to begin, we have to always think about technology as an enabler to the work and the performance context of an organization. And when you think about a performance context of an organization, you begin Anyone begins with, okay, what's our purpose as an organization? Purpose drives strategy.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Christie Smith on How to Embrace Human-Powered Leadership | EP 594
What is the strategy of the organization? What's the strategy of the groups within the organization that will create that reality for the company in the marketplace. Strategy leads to culture. Culture leads to structure. Structure leads to design. Design leads to then our op model. And that leads to what are the skills that I need. Now, that
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Christie Smith on How to Embrace Human-Powered Leadership | EP 594
won't go away it may be made faster with some data given to us from technology but the reality for performance will remain the same and we will need to go through those steps to define how our companies are structured and who runs them right so in terms of what i think i'll get to the obligation of the individual but the obligation of leaders
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Christie Smith on How to Embrace Human-Powered Leadership | EP 594
is to keep pace with what skill development their people needs and to provide the outlets to get that done, the time and the outlets to get that done. Again, if we don't do that, we are going to be at a deficit of skilled workers in the millions by 2032. Six million in the United States, right? If you think, just extrapolate that, we're talking about close to billions. worldwide.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Christie Smith on How to Embrace Human-Powered Leadership | EP 594
So the onus is on both the company and on the leader to provide those opportunities for continuous learning and the time and the resources to do. Now, for your son, for my kids, they need to keep pace as well with defining what is their interest, what do they want to learn, and then the tools are available to them, right?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Christie Smith on How to Embrace Human-Powered Leadership | EP 594
And to begin to play with those tools, to begin to understand what are those tools that they need to develop their craft, right? To talk to other leaders in how do they use technology as a means to getting a project done. Now, kids in colleges are learning this, and I think some of our educational systems are beginning to create these opportunities for more experimentation around technology.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Christie Smith on How to Embrace Human-Powered Leadership | EP 594
But frankly, it's happening at the high school level, right? And you don't need to go to college anymore. So I think the resources are available. The individual themselves has to create their own curiosity and their own learning path, if you will, to keep pace if the organization is not creating them that for themselves or if they're not in the workplace.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Christie Smith on How to Embrace Human-Powered Leadership | EP 594
Now, I think that there's a really good outcome as a result of that, and I think there's a negative outcome as a result of that. The display by leaders of pulling back on DEI and calling it that, I think, engenders further disengagement of an employee base and on the attraction of talent that they will need and skills that they will need.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Christie Smith on How to Embrace Human-Powered Leadership | EP 594
It's a great question. The thing that your listeners can do right away is create themselves as an emotionally mature leader. Create emotional agility and connection. Create curiosity, insatiable curiosity about your people and the environment. Focus on creating those cultures. Understand the context in which your employees are coming to work and what they may be dealing with.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Christie Smith on How to Embrace Human-Powered Leadership | EP 594
Those four things, if we begin to shift our mindset to this suspension of self-interest, our behavior to being insatiably curious and understanding the context in which people are coming to work, and then focusing on creating and architecting those cultures of excellence that we want, that creates a flywheel effect.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Christie Smith on How to Embrace Human-Powered Leadership | EP 594
that addresses human requirements and invests in learning and development for your people. And so those are the steps. Become an emotionally mature leader.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Christie Smith on How to Embrace Human-Powered Leadership | EP 594
Sure. People can go to our book website to learn more about the book, which is smith-monaghan.com. In terms of myself, you can go to christysmith.phd and you will find the kind of work that I do, more about me and my company called The Humanity Studio.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Christie Smith on How to Embrace Human-Powered Leadership | EP 594
Well, I feel very fortunate to be here and it's been so much fun talking to you, John. Thank you.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Christie Smith on How to Embrace Human-Powered Leadership | EP 594
Now, the bright side, I think, is that we've been doing the same things generally in our DEI efforts in corporations for 50 years, and the promise of more representation at the top, and equity has not come to fruition. So we fundamentally must do something different.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Christie Smith on How to Embrace Human-Powered Leadership | EP 594
So given the place that we find, the crossroads that we find ourselves in today, I do think it is an opportunity for leaders to fundamentally rethink and recommit to the ideals of inclusion and diversity and not walk away from them and focus more broadly in the organization on things like engagement and culture and what leadership and skills are needed. So it's a double-edged sword for sure.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Christie Smith on How to Embrace Human-Powered Leadership | EP 594
You got that right. But so far, all interviews are a good reception.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Christie Smith on How to Embrace Human-Powered Leadership | EP 594
I think they certainly do intersect, but let me give you some background as to why we wrote this book. We are living in unprecedented times and have been living in this for the last five years really since the pandemic and maybe a little bit before that. And what makes it unprecedented?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Christie Smith on How to Embrace Human-Powered Leadership | EP 594
Well, we are seeing a super cycle of change happening in the market, happening in our socio-political and economic conditions around the world, which really challenge leaders to fundamentally have to lead differently. When you look at the culmination of two wars going on in the world, most predominantly in the Middle East and in Europe, you look at the acceleration of technology, AI, automation.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Christie Smith on How to Embrace Human-Powered Leadership | EP 594
all of the learning systems, and you look at how they are impacting the way work gets done. You look at employee disengagement, which is the lowest that it's ever been, frankly, 54%. of managers themselves say they feel burnt out, and employee engagement and the lack thereof is costing us $322 billion globally a year.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Christie Smith on How to Embrace Human-Powered Leadership | EP 594
And then you add on to that certainly the pandemic and health issues, but the silent pandemic that we're not talking very much about, which is mental health. and then add on to that continued supply chain issues. So there is a culmination of issues that are facing our leaders today in the private and public sector that we've never seen before in the kind of extreme that we're seeing it today.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Christie Smith on How to Embrace Human-Powered Leadership | EP 594
So we felt it was really important to write a book that provided a new roadmap for leadership. And that new roadmap has the need for leaders to lead the humans that they're leading, not necessarily always the outcomes or the technology and so on and so forth.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Christie Smith on How to Embrace Human-Powered Leadership | EP 594
It's 100% consistent. We start out in the book very intentionally with what you've just articulated. What has been our history? What is repeating itself? What's not repeating itself? And again, what we have found, which I'm sure you found in your book, is that in the world we live in today with all of these headwinds that I just articulated,
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Christie Smith on How to Embrace Human-Powered Leadership | EP 594
The kind of leadership that has existed in our organizations, meaning we have rewarded technical expertise and put technical experts in roles of leadership. Now, that doesn't fully go away, but it is not the kind of skills we need to lead people. Because people are no longer coming to work and checking their humanity at the door.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Christie Smith on How to Embrace Human-Powered Leadership | EP 594
They're coming to work with all sorts of pressures that are related to the things that I just talked about. And because engagement is so low in organizations, and because there are so many distractions, and because that people are not being trained and new skills are needed and new technology is needed. All of these things require a different kind of leadership. And that's the premise of the book.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Christie Smith on How to Embrace Human-Powered Leadership | EP 594
100% right. You also have to learn how to lead a distributed workforce. You also have to learn new technologies and how they should be used and what is the capacity of your current employees to learn and develop the skills to use those. You've got to give that time to those employees and not make it a side of the desk demand to learn new technologies in their roles.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Christie Smith on How to Embrace Human-Powered Leadership | EP 594
I think that the other thing that you mentioned before, which is something you articulate in your book, is this rise of the fractional worker. And this is the fastest growing part of our economy, is those individuals who've decided, no, I'm not going to go into a traditional job.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Christie Smith on How to Embrace Human-Powered Leadership | EP 594
I'm going to go into the work that I feel passionate about, that I want to be engaged in, and I'll do it as a contractor. And many of the startups, you look at this phenomenal startup called A-Team, which is all about fractional technical workers. And these are technicians and technologists that have come from the brightest companies out there, from Google to Apple.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Christie Smith on How to Embrace Human-Powered Leadership | EP 594
They're now deciding, I don't want to work for those big companies, but I want to work on really interesting projects that matter. And so the fact that this part of our economy is growing rapidly is, I think, a commentary on the conditions that we have in our organizations today of low engagement.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Christie Smith on How to Embrace Human-Powered Leadership | EP 594
And, you know, what the New York Times or rather CNBC talked about last week is the great detachment of employees.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Christie Smith on How to Embrace Human-Powered Leadership | EP 594
Let me start with some facts because this is not fluff, right? What we articulate and examine in our book is the notion of skills scarcity and that this is an economic crisis that we're in. If you think about the US economy alone, and I'll talk about the global economy, but the US economy alone
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Christie Smith on How to Embrace Human-Powered Leadership | EP 594
needs to have 4.6 million workers enter into the workforce with the right skills just to maintain status quo. And it is predicted by 2032 that we will be in a 6 million person deficit of workers in our economy. If you couple that with global numbers like we are losing $8.8 trillion globally a year and lost productivity of employees and companies. Now, put that in perspective.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Christie Smith on How to Embrace Human-Powered Leadership | EP 594
$8.8 trillion a year is Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon combined. That's staggering. On an annual basis, we're losing that much to productivity. So this notion of employees and how leaders lead their employees is really leading to a crisis point, I think, in our economy. Added to that is $322 billion of people who feel burnt out at work. That's an annual cost globally. Now, take all of that.