This episode features an interview with Hamza Khan, Future of Work and Leadership Expert. He is the best-selling author of Leadership Reinvented and The Burnout Gamble and is a two-time TEDx Speaker. Hamza challenges organizations to rehumanize their workplaces to achieve inclusive and sustainable growth. His clients include Microsoft, Deloitte, and TikTok. In this episode, Shawn sits down with Hamza to discuss why work is not working, how to make employees owners, and the no day work week.
This episode features an interview with Hamza Khan, Future of Work and Leadership Expert. He is the best-selling author of Leadership Reinvented and The Burnout Gamble and is a two-time TEDx Speaker. Hamza challenges organizations to rehumanize their workplaces to achieve inclusive and sustainable growth. His clients include Microsoft, Deloitte, and TikTok.
In this episode, Shawn sits down with Hamza to discuss why work is not working, how to make employees owners, and the no day work week.
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“If you invest in employee engagement and well-being, then it turns all the other priorities into guaranteed outcomes. That's where the work needs to be done. We actually need to do this work, at the individual level with every single leader in the world. We have to just overhaul our education system to produce more human-centric, values-driven, change-friendly, self-disrupting leaders. But, we also have to make connecting with other human beings an organizational imperative. That should be the only priority that leaders pursue at every level. The welfare, the well-being, the engagement, and actually, just summarize all that into the thriving of their employees.” – Hamza Khan
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Episode Timestamps:
*(05:09): Rapid fire questions
*(11:48): Hamza discusses his 2016 TEDx Talk and if it holds up today
*(21:43): The history and influence of The Haymarket Affair on work today
*(26:57): Giving employees more say over their work
*(38:48): Will AI increase the amount of work for employees
*(45:14): What Hamza is hopeful about
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Links:
Connect with Hamza on LinkedIn
Connect with Shawn on LinkedIn
Shawn Pfunder: Everyone, welcome back to the Cohesion Podcast. My guest today is Hamza Khan. He's a future of work, leadership expert, and he's authored two books.
Shawn Pfunder: Leadership Reinvented, The Burnout Gamble. And he's a two time TEDx speaker. Hamsa challenges organizations to re humanize their workplace in order to achieve inclusive and sustainable growth. That's the official bio that I've got on a personal note. Looking over his work, I'm really excited to talk today because of the, that humanized aspect.
Shawn Pfunder: Power to the people, just champion workers all over the world. So, super excited, super blessed to be able to talk to him today. Welcome to the show, Hamza. Shawn, thank you so much for having me, man. I appreciate it. And thank you for the very generous introduction. You forgot one, one descriptor of me in there.
Hamza Khan: One that I share with you, I imagine. Yeah. Fellow dirtbag.
Shawn Pfunder: Fellow dirtbag. That's a whole, that's a, that's a philosophy of life. That's the philosophy of life.
Hamza Khan: Truly shared by many luminary CEOs, creatives, leaders, people in general, this idea of transcendence, this idea of reconnecting with nature and going beyond the self.
Hamza Khan: It's something that I know that you and I subscribe to. It's something that we connected with during the lead up to this podcast. And I know that this is part of a book that I'm reading right now. The creative act, a way of being, very similar to a book written by my boy Herbert Louis called Creative Doing.
Shawn Pfunder: You know what? I'll read any book about creativity. There's The Creative Habit by Twyla Tharp as well. It's just all that stuff that really champions just to create like the creative act. I, you know, there's a letter. See, already we're off to the races on a side tangent instead of me talking to you about your TED Talks.
Shawn Pfunder: There's a letter that Kurt Vonnegut wrote to a group of high school students that talks about this as well, where he tells them to write a poem, six word, six line poem, has to rhyme, and then to tear it up into little pieces and put it in different garbage cans. And he says, I promise if you do this, so don't write for fame.
Shawn Pfunder: Like, don't write to make money, he says, just do the act and already you'll learn more about yourself.
Hamza Khan: Absolutely, you know, in the preparation for this podcast, I like to be super prepared and so Alexa sent me some questions and I wrote out responses and I made it halfway through and I'm like, no, no, this is not the right way to prepare for this.
Hamza Khan: I actually have to show up here and just speak from the heart because I learned this early in my career. In a former life, I was a graphic designer and I learned from one of my mentors that Design is what you do for others, but art is what you do for yourself. And I'm finding in this journey of leadership that I'm on and thought leadership that I'm on, that the more I try to tell personal stories, the more I actually tell personal stories and excavate from my life experiences, the better it is for everybody.
Hamza Khan: The better it is for me. It's cathartic, but it's also authentic. And it's the most respectful thing that you can do for another human being. You know, audience, if you will. And I don't like to think of audiences as this gaggle of people. I like to think of them as individuals gathered in one place. And so in attempt to connect with them the way that I'm hoping to connect with you, I just gotta, I just gotta keep it real, man.
Shawn Pfunder: Just keep it real. Yeah. I love what you said. Cause like the best person to plagiarize from is yourself. And so do you like, you said, you said excavate, so like digging, discovering yourself, you know, creating in order to do that. And I love that. Well, thinking about sort of personal aspect, we do a rapid fire at the beginning where now listen, we're not going to know everything about you because of.
Shawn Pfunder: You know, just I asked you five questions, but some of these like less about, you know, our work or what we work on a little bit more, a little bit more personal in these. So the first one is, what's an insult you've received that you're proud of?
Hamza Khan: Dude, these questions are crazy. Ah, man, an insult that I received that I'm proud of.
Hamza Khan: Okay, so before this iteration of Dirtbaggery. I was an actual dirtbag back in the day. No way. I went through a skeevy club rat phase, yeah man, like most things in my life, hip hop made me do it. And we're talking about, we're talking about deep V's and three buttons open on a shiny shirt, bottle service, the works, right?
Hamza Khan: And the crew that I was rolling with around that time, there was one dude over there, We started moving in different paths and I outgrew that phase pretty quickly. It was like a hot two summers. And as a pejorative, he said to me, so I know this is rapid fire. I promise I'll keep it. This is great. But he said to me as a pejorative, he said that you've changed.
Hamza Khan: And I don't know why that, that hurt me at the time. I felt like I was doing something wrong. There's probably something about, you know, survivor's remorse and all that, that we could psychoanalyze another time. But if I could talk to him now, and what's really interesting is I just met his dad recently, and it was all love, and I asked him how he's doing, like, we lost touch, it was a friend breakup.
Hamza Khan: Yeah. And the
Hamza Khan: last thing he said to me was, you know, you've changed. And I would want to offer to him, I would say, you know, Justin, that's his name, Justin, if you're watching this, to quote our boy Jay Z, as if I worked this hard to stay the same. Let's leave it at that.
Shawn Pfunder: No, I love that. I, the same, worst thing in the world to hear from an old, you've changed, man.
Shawn Pfunder: You're like, no, no, no, no. I'm still cool. The change is human. I agree. I agree. All right. Second question that we've got on here. What are the top five most opened apps on your phone?
Hamza Khan: Okay. Chrome, Gmail, YouTube, Asana. And uh, it's a tie these days between Spotify and Apple podcasts.
Shawn Pfunder: All right. I got you.
Hamza Khan: I like the Apple UI better just putting that out there.
Shawn Pfunder: Yeah. What do you, what are you listening on Spotify these days?
Hamza Khan: Uh, we'd have, we'd have to go down the list. I'm really loving the sports show slash podcast by Cameron and Mace called It Is What It Is. Okay. I'm enjoying that. And also Mike Tyson's Hot Boxing. Those are the two podcasts that get the most, I know man, it's bizarre.
Hamza Khan: But actually this past week I have just been binging this podcast, Cohesion. I have listened to at least 17 episodes. I stopped counting after 10.
Shawn Pfunder: Yeah. And did you listen to it and think, Oh, wow. Yeah. I'm perfect for cohesion.
Hamza Khan: Dude. I had the exact opposite reaction. I was like, Oh my goodness. I have wholly underestimated the gravity of this podcast.
Hamza Khan: I was like, this is just a chance for me and Shawn to kick it. I'm like, no, no, I got to bring my A plus game here. The last episode I listened to was, uh, I believe her last name was Leatherman. And I was like, Oh, some really, really freaking smart people on this podcast. I had to meditate this morning. I had to, you know, Read chapters of my own book in preparation for this, so I'm as prepared as can be.
Shawn Pfunder: Well, that answers my next question, but hopefully there's another one. What's the last book that you read?
Hamza Khan: Okay, since I already talked about this one over here, The Creative Act, A Way of Being. Yeah. Right, for the YouTube audience. Another one that I've been enjoying is actually The Pivot Year by Brianna Weist.
Hamza Khan: I'm not sure how to pronounce her last name. Okay. Fascinating book. It's just a series of small essays, almost like poems. That are really helping me to understand how to change this year, how to break free from limiting behaviors, limiting thought patterns, and truly embrace the change that I feel is bubbling up inside me.
Shawn Pfunder: I love that, I love that. Okay, now what's a common myth about what you do? You know, in your friends, family. Reminds me of the meme of like, what I do, what my friends think I do, what my mom thinks I do.
Hamza Khan: Yeah, so interesting. My dad still thinks I work in advertising. I was like, I never worked in advertising.
Hamza Khan: It was marketing communications back in the day, but God bless. These days, in this permutation of my career, I'm focused on leadership. I'm focused on leadership at all levels and a common myth, a misunderstanding about leadership is that there's no accepted definition of it. I was recently in Washington and I visited the Library of Congress.
Hamza Khan: Shawn, have you been? I haven't been to the Library of Congress. Dude, you got to check it out, hallowed space, you know, Greco Roman architecture and, you know, statues. It just feels very serious and it's like, oh my goodness, who, who are the, the curators of the space? Because every book here is supposed to represent the paragon of that topic, right?
Hamza Khan: And so I went there and I kind of felt like Oppenheimer in that, can you hear the music montage in the movie where I'm just looking all around in pure awe and I gravitate towards the leadership section. And there I find this massive book. I'm not sure if you can see it behind me. Maybe you can, but it's called the Bass Handbook of Leadership.
Hamza Khan: It's like a thousand pages. It's considered the tome of leadership. And sure enough, the first, the page that I crack open, the first thing that I read in this book, which is supposed to be the Bible of leadership, it says that an argument could be made that leadership is an optical illusion. And I was just like, what?
Hamza Khan: No. How? Explain this one to me. And then it reminded me of a quote from Pulitzer Prize winning author James McGregor Burns, considered one of the fathers, forefathers of modern leadership and management thinking. He said that, Leadership is one of the most observed Yet the least understood phenomenon on earth, but with all due respect to Bass and McGregor Burns, a lot has changed since these ideas have been published.
Hamza Khan: Leadership is now measurable. It's observable. There was a study published in the Journal of Current Biology that laid out perhaps the most elegant, clear definition of leadership. Leadership is the propensity to act first, determined by morphological, physiological, and behavioral traits, like external, internal, and behavioral traits that make somebody more likely to act first in group coordination problems, specifically with regards to resource acquisition.
Hamza Khan: Long story short, summarize that for the audience, first mover advantage. And so in every situation, whether we're talking about art, whether we're talking about organizational leadership, whether we're talking about sports, whoever wants it more. Whoever, to borrow a phrase from the world of basketball and football, whoever's got the dog in them, that is essentially leadership.
Hamza Khan: There's no difference to me between creativity, leadership, art, sports. It's all about the propensity to act first. Who's willing to venture beyond the hill and say, I found something, come with me.
Shawn Pfunder: Yeah, you know, one of the things that I love already and from talking to you is that there's not a, I guess, expiration date on good ideas, you know, in looking at your first or listening to your first TED talk, I even had the, that feeling right at the beginning.
Shawn Pfunder: I was like, Oh, this is old. You know, because we're so used to things just moving, moving, moving, moving, and then you see it and go, Oh, yeah, is this still applicable? But I would argue that this TED talk, this is the stop managing, start leading, that that's even more. Relevant today. So walk us through what you were doing.
Shawn Pfunder: What led to that tech talk? What did that history look like? And why that? Why did you address that?
Hamza Khan: And you are, uh, to quote Tyler Durden from Fight Club, you are meeting me at a very interesting point in my life. Where, truly man, I, I just delivered. The third keynote in a row for the Conference Board of Canada, and every time I've done a keynote for them, they've asked me to just be a little bit more unhinged and stretch the audience's thinking.
Hamza Khan: This is a group of human resource and culture decision makers across the country. And this last keynote that I did for them two weeks ago was an extension of this TED Talk. So let me just take you back to the years preceding 2015. You know, that saying that people don't quit jobs, they quit bosses. And I can assure you that I never wanted to leave any of the companies I was in.
Hamza Khan: I was all too happy to be there. When I was engaged, I was all in. But I quit bosses. I quit the feeling of being disengaged, a feeling like my voice didn't matter. I quit feeling burnt out. I quit feeling resentful. I quit feeling like I didn't belong. And At least 70 percent of the variance in employee engagement scores, according to Gallup, rests within the purview of leadership.
Hamza Khan: So leaders actually have the biggest role to play when it comes to attracting, retaining, and engaging employees. But unfortunately, most leaders suck. And I'm saying this as a fellow leader. I think Gallup Did a study where they found that only 1 in 10 people possess the requisite physiological, morphological, and behavioral traits necessary to be a leader.
Hamza Khan: Now, if you're a fellow A type listening to this and watching this, you're thinking, yeah, I was definitely born with it. Man, Shawn, let me tell you, dude, I was not born with the traits that, that confer leadership. Fortunately, people can be taught how to be leaders, except 60%, according to CareerBuilder, of leaders never receive any leadership training in their entire life.
Hamza Khan: Oh, wow. Which is bizarre. And the average age. I mean, let me ask you this, Shawn, if you had to guess, what is the average age of a leader's first leadership training?
Shawn Pfunder: First, first leadership training?
Hamza Khan: First leadership training. The first time a leader in the workplace receives leadership training.
Shawn Pfunder: Are they in the military?
Hamza Khan: You had to guess.
Shawn Pfunder: No, I'm kidding. Um, I don't, uh, 27.
Hamza Khan: Dude, 42. What? According to Forbes. I know, man. It is a miracle society has made it as far as it has given these numbers. Wow. So, most leaders suck, unfortunately, to put it bluntly, or let me just, I understand that this is the Cohesion podcast and, you know, we attract a more sophisticated audience.
Hamza Khan: How about this? Most leaders succumb to the Peter Principle, which demonstrates how leaders rise to their relative level of incompetence. You are gifted at one point in your career in technical skills and then somebody whisks you to the upper echelons of management and says, now. Manage people just like yourself, except you don't have those skills.
Hamza Khan: Anyways, what happened to me is I noticed a pattern across my career where I wanted to stay, but I was being disengaged by the leadership that was avoidant, aggressive, authoritarian, whatever the case may be. And so I decided to change things for my team when I entered into a leadership position, when I broke free from the catch 22 of new leaders must have leadership experience.
Hamza Khan: And I first managed my team. What was really interesting was that I was the youngest person on my team. I was the least experienced. And I was super under resourced, so I was already starting from a massive deficit, and all I had to do was just follow the pattern of leadership that I had received from my mentors.
Hamza Khan: Specifically, it started with Alan Grant. The first leader that I ever had sat me down, and he said on my first day, in my first ever leadership role, he said, your job, Hamza, is by the end of the year to make yourself obsolete. And Shawn, I was like, what? Dude, I didn't even draw a paycheck yet, my paperwork is still being filed, and you're telling me you want me out of this job in a year, and he said, yeah, I mean, if you do this correctly, it presupposes that you've hired effectively, you've trained effectively, you've created succession plans, you've documented processes, blah, blah, blah, and in the end, when you succeed, not if, you'll become hands off, and I said, okay, that sounds great for me.
Hamza Khan: Everyone else except me, because I'm going to be out of a job, and he says, no, quite the opposite, you are going to be promoted, you're going to be moved into another project, into another division to lead and create more leaders there. And so that philosophy then led to me actually doing the work. Before you deliver the talk, before you write the book, you have to become the talk, you have to become the book, and I became the talk.
Hamza Khan: I actually led a team using those human centric principles. And you know, once as an occurrence, twice as a coincidence, three times as a pattern, dude, we won like double digit awards. Our work was being replicated across the country, around the world. You know, we were just absolutely crushing it. And I didn't want to deliver that TEDx talk, but the community demanded that I deliver that one.
Hamza Khan: It was a purely inbound. Opportunity to go up on stage and state what it is that I did, but not only that, what my hope would be for the future of leadership. And that would be that we just cast aside the shadow of scientific management that we're all living in. We're all living in Frederick Winslow Taylor's world where in terms of scientific management, he said, there's only one best way to achieve something, but that quickly falls apart in our volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous modern work environment.
Hamza Khan: What we truly need is what I advocate for back in 2016, which is a much more adaptable, flexible, Change friendly, human centric approach to leadership that embraces creativity, complexity, and relying on the insights and energy of the people that we serve. It really, it really reiterates this idea of the employee customer profit chain, which is how you take care of your employees determines how they'll take care of the customers.
Hamza Khan: And the customers will ultimately take care of the things that are important as leaders. But we often get that ass backwards. Yeah. And so, yes, I delivered that TEDx talk and dude. It was phenomenal. Like, it changed my life for better and for worse because it ushered in a paradigm that you and I are living in right now.
Hamza Khan: And I know that I wasn't the sole contributor, but I think that my voice definitely maybe, you know, added a little bit, a little bit of spice to this dialogue that was building up, which, you know, it's ultimately about liberation from paradigms that would seek to disengage and dehumanize. But what's really interesting is the day after I did that TEDx talk, my boss called me into his office and a whole other story began.
Hamza Khan: I think in some Promethean fashion, I was pilloried and punished for that, dude. I swear to God. And I have not told that story for 10 years. And I told it two weeks ago for the first time. And I could do just an hour with you on that story alone, but you know, we're going to exchange information at the end.
Hamza Khan: And hopefully we can do another episode where I can unpack that for you in a more succinct way. But I actually, you know, paid the price in the most dehumanizing way possible for advocating an idea which at that point was seditious to the status quo. Because it was a new imagination, it was a new way of imagining how work could be done.
Hamza Khan: And the ideas back then, like you said Shawn, and I appreciate the compliment, they're timeless. Even though in the beginning there were some dated references and I used millennial, by the end of that talk I was talking about next generation, I actually divorced it. from Gen Y and Millennials, and the idea is more salient than ever.
Hamza Khan: In fact, like the, the views on the talk are only increasing with the passage of time. Almost exponentially now, we're about, we're on our path to three million views. Anyways, all this to say, it was something that I did that I'm very proud of, but was also very painful, and I've learned to keep the faith and to reconnect with the nucleus of that talk, which was Stop Managing, Start Leading.
Shawn Pfunder: Yeah. Well, it is really humanizing, but I could understand how, from a leadership point of view, or sort of the classical leader, I'm measuring, I'm measuring time instead of measuring productivity, or just do what I say. This is my vision executed, how that could be an ego hit. And especially, I don't remember where this quote comes from.
Shawn Pfunder: I think this might've been from your talk, but it might've been something that you wrote as well, but it's really provocative and really simple. We said, no bad employees, only bad leaders. Dude, yes, that's, that's, I mean, any leader that can see that would immediately be like, oh yeah, I'm having a lot of success.
Shawn Pfunder: I'm a great, like, I'm a great leader. My employees are really happy. And oftentimes I don't even know or a leader that's got a whole swarm of employees are like, yeah, they're not doing anything. I need to fire them. I need to get somebody else to hear something like that. It's awesome. It's, it's your fault.
Hamza Khan: It truly is, man. And the data supports this. What's that one quote from George Bernard Shaw said, um, the single biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has taken place. And there was a couple of episodes that I was listening to back to back and there was one I can't remember the name, but she was talking about three dimensions like me, we and the world, I believe, uh, previous episode of the podcast, which are the foundations of transcendental leadership.
Hamza Khan: So in his later writings, Abraham Maslow. Talked about this idea called the concept of Theory Z. So in my TEDx talk I talked about the Theory X style of management, which is top down. Theory Y is bottom up. Theory Z is transcendence. I mean, it is dirtbaggery distilled. It is basically like, get out of yourself.
Hamza Khan: You don't matter. True service is about the world and about systems. And man, I'm losing my train of thought because I want to go in so many different directions here. But let's bring it back. Because I just went all the way. I went to like the Haymarket Affair and all that.
Shawn Pfunder: Well, that's actually, that's actually what I want to, what I want to mention.
Shawn Pfunder: You and I previously had talked, talked about this and you posted about this book that you were reading on social media, the Haymarket Affair. Now, first, can you describe what it was and what happened? And then second, how is that relevant now? We're talking about things that are timeless for sure, but how is that relevant now?
Shawn Pfunder: Because that At the time was related to still being a cog in the machine, but eight hour workday type of thing. We're in a different place now. So what was it? And how does that apply to where we are now in your mind?
Hamza Khan: Yeah, yeah, I, I'm such a sucker. Like, uh, I'm a sucker for conspiracy theories. I, I truly like I, it's one of my, one of my hobbies, one of my pastimes is just going deep and just exploring the, the deep end.
Hamza Khan: Depth of each of these rabbit holes. When we're talking about flat earth or talking about how Kubrick died and, you know, all of that. And most of them are just, are, are just purely for comedic purposes for me, but there's always like a kernel of truth in all of them. But there's something that appeared to me at first to be a conspiracy theory, which as you go further down and unravel this, it culminates into, I think the onus is on people to prove that it's not a conspiracy theory.
Hamza Khan: Other way around, sorry, the onus is on people is to, the onus on people would be to prove that this is a conspiracy theory, when in fact it's very well documented. I've got books behind me called Gangsters of Capitalism, Death in the Haymarket, I mean there was even a movie that they made about this recently that starred Robert De Niro, I can't remember it.
Hamza Khan: But it was about him as General Smedley Butler. Anyways, I don't want to get too distracted in the weeds over there. What the Haymarket Affair was, was a protest that took place in I think 1886 or 1887, in which workers were protesting for better working conditions. So 1886, that's like two human beings ago.
Hamza Khan: And what they were advocating for was a 12 hour workday. Can you believe that? 12 hours. They were protesting, dude, I know, they were protesting the reduction of the workday from 16 hours to 12 hours. Wow. They were advocating for more consistent work, they were advocating for overtime pay, they were advocating for safer work, and what happened?
Hamza Khan: Nobody knows, but a bomb was set off in Chicago in the Haymarket area. Now, You could look at this one of two ways. You could say, did the protesters set off the bomb? Okay, that's a possibility. Or did the government, working with police, media, and the status quo establishment set off the bomb? That is immaterial.
Hamza Khan: We don't have enough data to support that. My, you know, gun to my head, I would probably say that likely came from the protesters. But either way, even if that was the case, the punishment that was meted out was Radically disproportionate. They actually ended up hanging people for this. And May Day was supposed to take place on May 1st, and they actually divorced it from the historical context and put it all the way in September.
Hamza Khan: I don't even know when they put it. Oh, Labor Day. Yeah, yeah, yeah. May Day used to be Labor Day. Yeah, yeah, on May 1st. And the rationale, if you dig this up, you will find that the President did this specifically to not incite the people to remember this past. And a past in which the government, the police The military, the media, all worked in tandem to suppress workers.
Hamza Khan: It has been a shadow war on workers for a very long time. So whatever tension you're experiencing right now with your boss, with your union, you know, 10x that. That is what was happening during the very precarious labor conditions that preceded the Haymarket Affair. And what the result of the Haymarket Affair was the 1938 Fair Labor Act, which was the most radical protections for workers introduced in the United States, which, you know, introduced overtime, mandatory overtime pay.
Hamza Khan: It reduced the work hours of the day. It outlawed child slavery. So up until that point, you know, you could have kids. As young as six working in mines, I mean, it was just a mess back in the day. So anyways, if anybody wants to look at a very real conspiracy theory that's actually not a conspiracy theory and understand the evolution of labor to the present day, look no further than the milestone known as the Haymarket Affair.
Hamza Khan: That to me is fair game to say that all of the rules that exist today in the workplace are up for debate. There's nothing set in stone because we came, that was our premise. We are living in the shadow of that. And anybody who tells you that you can't imagine a better way of working, I would encourage you to read the writings of Ursula Le Guin, feminist sci fi writer, who said that the exercise of imagination, right, absolute banger, the exercise of imagination is dangerous to those who profit.
Hamza Khan: from the status quo because it shows them that the way things are not universal and are not necessary.
Shawn Pfunder: Yeah, fantastic writer and great quote. You know what this that comes to mind and arguably you could tie this to employee experience, employee satisfaction, a lot of things that people are continually looking at trying to figure out trying to get better and there's a part of it it feels That leaders may say, they sort of do it from a hippie approach.
Shawn Pfunder: Like, oh yeah, like we, we want to attract talent. We want them to come and we want them to stay. And that's it. There's this feeling from your work and what we've been talking about is that workers, your employees, they don't need you. You need them. And it's when people are able to sort of understand that, because moving forward, I think that employees are going to have, workers are going to have, I don't want to say more rights.
Shawn Pfunder: But more say and what their life is, what their work looks like. Are you seeing trends that direction? I don't mean full revolution. Let's take over. Let's like, let's give up what we're doing right now. I think that kind of morphs. But what are you seeing?
Hamza Khan: Absolutely, man. And I realize I have to be a little bit more, Concise with my answers here because you're getting me fired up Shawn.
Hamza Khan: You have me wanting to. Hey listen, dirtbag, punk rock There's a whole like grunge Neil Young thing going on, but it's perfect. This is it. Okay, this is exactly right Look, I will, I will synthesize my answer and say that we have only been moving in the direction of more worker rights, more freedom, more ownership, more well being.
Hamza Khan: I would go as far as saying that the way work is playing out today is fundamentally broken. The modern workplace is broken. Employees are miserable, company longevity is shrinking. The public has lost faith in its leaders and all institutions to address society's pressing problems. And we've been moving in this direction for a very long time, since at least the beginning of the first industrial revolution, which insisted on the mechanization of work, bringing everyone into a factory context to get One thing done to be cogs in a machine.
Hamza Khan: And this was the genesis of scientific management. This is when Henry Ford worked with Frederick Winslow Taylor to advance the idea of one best way. But like I said at the beginning of the podcast, that quickly falls apart in this modern VUCA world work environment. So we went from. I mean, let's not even go past the first industrial revolution, because that will take us all the way back to slavery.
Hamza Khan: You know, that's, that's a whole other podcast. But in the beginning, we were talking about 16 hour work days, precarious working conditions, people were unsafe, people were dying at work. It was just a nightmare. And what has been happening gradually is we've moved from 16 to 14 to 12 to 8. Now we're talking about the four day work weekend.
Hamza Khan: I think if you were to extrapolate this conversation to its logical conclusion, you would end up with a post work. Vision. Imagine a world without work. The no day work week. The no day work week. I, I think so too, man. One, one can wish, no pun intended, right, Shawn? I think the future of work is going to look like you and I sitting down on, you know, a Monday afternoon and recording a podcast.
Hamza Khan: And getting, you know, intellectually stimulated, feeling creative, and then doing work that matters to us, that also happens to synchronize with an organization's objectives. But we'll be doing this divorced from the fear that is currently inherent in the world of work, that would have people make decisions against their best interests, that would put them in situations where they're likely to burn out and likely to experience disengagement.
Hamza Khan: That could, uh, be fatal in some cases.
Shawn Pfunder: Yeah, yeah.
Hamza Khan: So yes, we are moving in this direction, but there is a very clear obstacle that I see. And this actually reminds me of the, the, the train of thought that I veered off from a couple of questions ago. The fundamental problem seems to be the disconnect that exists between the leader experience in the workplace and the employee experience in the workplace.
Hamza Khan: And this seems to have been a consistent theme in all of the preceding episodes leading up to this one of the Cohesion podcast, which I really appreciate the dialogue that, that, uh, the team is curating here. The fundamental tension seems to be that leaders tend to overvalue, over index how effective and well they're feeling in the workplace compared to the people that are doing the work that are actually in their employ.
Hamza Khan: And there's one stat that is coming to mind by McKinsey. I think they found like a measurable 22 point gap between dimensions In the workplace associated with well being, so we're talking about workload, fairness, control, values, reward, community. On average, leaders tended to rate those workplace dimensions associated with well being 22 percent higher than their peers.
Hamza Khan: And this data is also substantiated by Microsoft and Edelman. They do this work trend index every single year and they find that this disconnect is growing between employees. The most stark one actually came this year. I think the numbers I'm going to get wrong, but I think I'm in the general ballpark.
Hamza Khan: I think that 85 percent of employees believe that they're more productive working from home. I think it's even higher than that. And only 15 or 20 percent of their leaders actually agree with that. That to me is just showing a very stark
Hamza Khan: chasm
Hamza Khan: that exists between, you know, the leaders and their employees.
Hamza Khan: And, you know, you can use that Dichotomy and extrapolate that to other relationships that, if you were to say them out loud, would actually make your blood boil. So, we actually have to just close this gap that exists between people. Uh, that's really it. We have, we actually have to synchronize.
Shawn Pfunder: How do we close it?
Shawn Pfunder: So, me thinking about it, based off of everything we've been doing, we've got a lot of TED Talks, a lot of books, a lot of Brene Browns that are out there and trying to help this and close this gap. And we've been investing so much of it. as a, I don't even want to say one company, but just at least throughout the Western world, you've got diversity and inclusion initiatives.
Shawn Pfunder: You've got people looking at wellbeing. You've got people talking about work life balance. Let's do meditation. We're going to do yoga on zoom. We've got all these things, but the gap has gotten bigger and what we're seeing. So how do we How do we close that gap? How do we begin to narrow that gap if obviously throwing money at it or being hilarious about things isn't doing it?
Hamza Khan: Right. Okay. Yes. Let's look at the very specific data, right? So Gardner publishes the survey, a survey of CEOs every year. And the last one that they did was the Approximately 3, 200 CEOs across 28 countries, and they asked them to rank their priorities, to rank order their priorities. And there was nine priorities, or nine themes that emerged, and the first one was driving growth.
Hamza Khan: The second one was something like greater operational efficiencies, the third one was like productivity, the digitization, anyways, you go 1, and at the sixth one is when you finally see the first instance of anything that is explicitly about employee engagement and well being. So therein lies the rub.
Hamza Khan: That, to me, is the problem. That shows that at the highest levels of the organization, when the first movers, the people that are trying to run over the hill and take the organization with them, they're not even thinking about human beings as the first priority. They're an afterthought. When we know, when people like Shawn and myself and all the guests that have preceded this episode know that, If you invest in employee engagement and wellbeing, then that turns all of the other outcomes.
Hamza Khan: It turns all the other priorities into guaranteed outcomes. That's where the work needs to be done. We actually have to change the hearts and the minds of the most senior leaders in the organization. And I actually wanna go back to a couple of episodes. I remember the name now. Her name was Nella, I believe.
Hamza Khan: Okay. And Nella talked about. Leadership of self, leadership of others, and leadership of organizations. We actually need to do this work at the individual level with every single leader in the world. We have to just overhaul our education system to produce more human centric, values driven, change friendly, self disrupting leaders.
Hamza Khan: But we also have to make connecting with other human beings an organizational imperative. That should be the only priority that leaders pursue at every level. The welfare, the well being, the engagement, and the Actually just summarize all that into the thriving of their employees. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It can't be a talking point or something you put in your job description.
Hamza Khan: No, you just have to do it, man.
Shawn Pfunder: Yeah. Yeah. And it takes work. It takes work.
Hamza Khan: So much so that I'm actually, I'm in the process right now of launching a new company. And I haven't started yet because I need to crack this code, which is what does true belonging and ownership In a work environment look like.
Hamza Khan: Yeah.
Hamza Khan: Yeah.
Hamza Khan: Right. And so I've been studying 100 percent employee stock ownership programs. I've been studying, you know, flat decentralized organizations. I've been studying holocracies and actually there's no other way around it. I keep on running into a, to a dead end where you can actually say this is an organization where everyone feels like they belong.
Hamza Khan: But if you really want to go punk with it, if you really want to stretch this, if you really want to do a bag, this to the nth degree, you just have to make employees owners.
Hamza Khan: Yeah.
Hamza Khan: You have to actually invest them and actually break them off and give them a piece of the company. You can't simulate that. So this is the change that I see happening in the zeitgeist where more and more people are embracing the changed equation, the equation that has changed for them as a result of the pandemic, which was a breaking point for them.
Hamza Khan: They realized that the way things were are no longer applicable, that there are better ways. It inspired new ways of thinking and working and many people adopted side hustles and entrepreneurial ventures. And they're realizing that if I do want to go back into a organization, I can't subscribe to the same rules that disengaged me.
Hamza Khan: I didn't realize how disengaged I was until I had that two week, that two months, that two year break from the traditional. way of working the status quo. For me to go back into the office Monday to Friday, nine to five, it's a non starter.
Shawn Pfunder: Imagine that, Google co op, Microsoft co op, Tesla co op, like then.
Hamza Khan: I think it's going to happen, man.
Shawn Pfunder: Well, and I think that when you've got everybody focused on that, then it's profitable for everybody. I think they only see profit, shareholders, everybody just wins on something like that. And moving forward, because you've got an army behind you.
Hamza Khan: What's going to happen is, it's so interesting. BCG talks about this quickening, right?
Hamza Khan: They say that changes that were planned over the next five years need to be compressed down to the next two. And I think the reason undergirding that is the force multiplier that is AI. Another, I think it was actually Leatherman who talked about this in a previous episode, a very practical use case for AI would be to provide people with an agenda in advance, and then Have them respond at scale.
Hamza Khan: So let's say you have an organization of 1000 people. You can't individually read all the thousand things that all of them want, but you can use AI to synthesize what their needs are, to identify themes, to identify sentiment, and then use that to make more efficient decision making. We can actually now transcend Dunbar's number.
Hamza Khan: We can actually transcend the limitations that we have as humans to only care for maybe 7 to 15 direct reports. So this gives us an opportunity. This gives forward thinking. Leaders and organizations and opportunity to truly harness the diversity of backgrounds, perspectives, experiences of their teams compared to organizations that aren't embracing this type of human centricity and deep listening.
Hamza Khan: Yeah.
Hamza Khan: They're going to have single points of failure. They're going to have these. Emperor CEOs like Elon Musk who are just at the head of the organization and they say my way or the highway.
Shawn Pfunder: When they can move, they'll move. Your employees, I think moving into the next two years, they will be able to just say, Hey, this is really great.
Shawn Pfunder: I've got an offer from another place or this is really great. I can just go do this. And so when they can, they'll leave the kingdom and go someplace else.
Hamza Khan: Truly. Yeah, yeah, I see that happening for sure. And look no further than, you know, anybody listening to this who thinks that anything that we've been talking about so far is far fetched.
Hamza Khan: Look no further than my favorite case study for single point of failure in an organization related to an avoidant, aggressive, authoritarian CEO. With all due respect to Microsoft, look at the lost decade at Microsoft under Steve Ballmer. I mean, if you ever feel like you made a bad decision in your life, just consider the fact that at one under Steve Ballmer, Microsoft threw a mock funeral.
Hamza Khan: For the iPhone, you got to look at those pictures, man. They are just A grade cringe material.
Shawn Pfunder: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I'm glad that we're moving this direction. You, and one of the things I love about your work, and what you're talking about is this legitimate humanizing, human to human connection. And that happens with honesty, with transparency, but actually just getting to know who your employees are.
Shawn Pfunder: That coupled with, I know a lot of people have this on their mind with AI, generative AI, and the first instinct is, all right, robots versus humans, because that's what we've seen growing up, of course, right? I've seen Terminator, I've seen iRobot, like, I see that kind of stuff.
Hamza Khan: We've rehearsed the scenario.
Shawn Pfunder: Yeah. Now, if AI, and I think you mentioned this, If AI is going to help us fill the gap, because I think there's going to be this worker shortage, and so we're going to have to have people kind of be super human, use AI to do these types of things, will we not see The CEOs, the emperors, people like that say, well, this is great.
Shawn Pfunder: You're now doing twice the amount of work using AI. I want you to do four times the amount of work. Like, will we just fall back into that trap where I won't be able to go trail running at 2 p. m. in the afternoon? Because my boss will be like, wow, you're really, you're really killing it. Can you do quadruple the amount of work now?
Hamza Khan: Dude, Shawn, I love that you used emperor. Let's hope that our clients and our bosses don't hear this episode and realize we are like dirtbag. Hey, listen, I love my emperor. Yeah, I'm gonna head out to Yosemite and just rock climb for the rest of my life and eat cat food. I love it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I love it, dude.
Hamza Khan: And by the way, for the listeners and viewers, Shawn just got married, by the way. Yeah, this is amazing, man. What a contrast of life experiences to go from just this beautiful celebration of love and coming together with your partner to now just like trying to incite the masses here.
Shawn Pfunder: That's right.
Hamza Khan: Very cool.
Shawn Pfunder: Let's organize.
Hamza Khan: Let's organize. I often think of this, you know, conundrum, this dilemma, if you will, that, you know, we exist Here in the USA in a representative democracy, but for most of our lives, especially if we're engaged in productive labor, we likely are operating within mini monarchies. And so I think that the analogy of an emperor is apt here.
Hamza Khan: So the question is, What is likely to be the CEO response to gains in efficiency caused by AI? Is that the question? Am I understanding that correctly?
Shawn Pfunder: It's almost like I'm trying to make you more pessimistic. You are so optimistic about the future, which I love, and faith in humanity, faith in the direction we're going, even in our leaders.
Shawn Pfunder: I guess what I'm doing is just, Like what's the other side of that and are you worried about that side of it?
Hamza Khan: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm not optimistic that the current crop of leaders will make the most human centric decision. And this is evidenced by the fact that, you know, just as recently as a year ago, two years ago, you had Amazon drivers that were complaining about Being micromanaged by AI, micromanaged by Amazon systems to the extent where they had to urinate and defecate in their cars to make their timelines work.
Hamza Khan: And the same is true for Uber drivers and whatnot too. And so I think that there are some leaders out there and, you know, I, Look, I truly believe that Amazon has the right intentions and Uber has the right intentions. Most leaders are actually just trying to do the right thing. They're trying to serve their people.
Hamza Khan: That's right. They're trying to create better work environments. But what happens is that that perception gap increases over time. And so what happens in that perception gap is you have these margins and you have these cracks and people are falling through them. Now, of the mustache twirling Machiavellian, narcissistic, psychopathic leaders that are out there right now.
Hamza Khan: They're probably looking at humans as resources and they're thinking, man, you know, it'd be so great if we could just replace them with machines. And I truly believe that there are some divisions, some departments within organizations like Amazon, like Uber that just can't wait. I mean, people for them are placeholders for these tireless, cheap alternatives.
Hamza Khan: Machines, robots, algorithms, so on and so forth. What needs to happen though is conversations like the one that you and I are having right now, Shawn, where we're talking about the, the common good. We're talking about serving humanity. We're talking about ushering in a pro social, regenerative, inclusive post work world, utopia, if you will.
Hamza Khan: And let's, let's strive for that. I mean, we're going to fall short of it. I think total utopia is just a mask over dystopia, but where we're at right now, I would say it's closer to dystopia than utopia. And you know, we can back up these numbers, six, I was going to say six ways to Sunday, seven ways to Sunday, seven ways to Sunday, five and a half, seven ways to Sunday.
Hamza Khan: I'm getting caught up in the semantics right now. What needs to happen is. A conversation about how to offset the gains in efficiency through things like UBI and better social support that would minimize suffering. That's all I'm asking for. I'm not asking for utopia here, I'm asking to just help people in the margins, falling through the cracks, to transcend poverty, to transcend ignorance, and to transcend vulnerability.
Hamza Khan: Lord knows there's enough resources and goodwill to pull this off, but it's going to require this consciousness elevation that I think you and I are contributing to in our small way. And I think now is the time. It's not going to happen tomorrow. It's not going to happen a year from now. It has to happen right now.
Hamza Khan: We just can't, we can't play small ball anymore. We just have to say the thing out loud. And the thing that needs to be said out loud is, Hey, leaders. Please put your people first.
Shawn Pfunder: Yeah, yeah. Well, I think that, you know, if, fingers crossed, that happens, like, over time on its own, I think a lot of them, their, their hands are going to be forced just based off of the people that are available in the labor market.
Shawn Pfunder: Like, we're going to see, you know, when servant leadership was talked about a lot more, it's sort of turning, turning leadership on its head, creating a, not a top down or a bottom up, but sort of you're managing your employees like they're volunteers. Yeah. They could walk at any time. It looks like we may be heading into that type of a reality where these ideas become really important, that it's not just a talking point, that I need to engage, that I need to be transparent, that I need to listen.
Shawn Pfunder: And all of those types of things give dignity and worth and remind people, or leaders, that people are in ends. Right? Not a means. So I'd like I, I, well, and I'm quoting you. I love it. You're like, wow, that's absolutely right. But, but that's what I love about your work and what you've been talking about. So I guess in kind of wrapping up, I know you said you're pessimistic about where we are right now.
Shawn Pfunder: There's not a lot of hope in the existing. That sounds horrible. There's not a lot of hope in the existing leaders out there, but I bet they do want to do the right thing. And we may see this evolution over time. But I I find in a lot of your work, and I mentioned this previously, a lot of hope and faith in humanity and sort of where we're going.
Shawn Pfunder: What makes you hopeful? I mean, I know a lot of like white collar workers, especially we've got a lot of people worried about AI. We've got a lot of people worried just about the world in general. We've got wars and rumors of wars and the environments being not happy about what's going on. What gives you hope and faith in humanity moving forward.
Hamza Khan: I wish I could drop this mic, but like it's actually fixed to an arm over here. I've been waiting to answer this question for a very long time. I am actually not pessimistic when it comes to the future of work in the future of humanity. I'm just pessimistic about the current crop of senior leaders. I'm specifically talking about VPs and above, the kind that contributed to the Gartner survey that clearly said to us as employees, as workers, that we are an afterthought.
Hamza Khan: Number four, them. Yeah. Number six, man. Number six. Yeah, dude, it's disgusting to them. I want to say, and to borrow from what you were sharing earlier, Shawn, there is a better way and you don't have to uphold the status quo. And I understand why you're upholding the status quo. It has to do with fear. There's a whole other podcast we can do about the dichotomy between love and fear.
Hamza Khan: We'll save that for another time, but just put people first. And the model that you need to embrace is called the light triad of leadership. It's the inverse of the. Strategy du jour. It's an inverse of the model du jour, which is the dark triad that is, you know, subclinical levels of narcissism that, to a certain degree, can be effective in a modern work environment that attracts rewards and incentivizes that kind of behavior.
Hamza Khan: But we know that that ultimately disengages people. And so the thing that makes me really hopeful and optimistic is the freedom with which you and I can talk about this now. These ideas are accessible, They belong to you, they belong to me, they're not my ideas, they're not your ideas, they're not the audience's ideas, they are the common ideas.
Hamza Khan: We all know that a better way is possible. We've been gifted this with the system shock that was COVID 19 and the forced introversion and the thinking and the reflection that it provoked, and we're now seeing the case studies unravel in the aftermath of this entering into a new portal, a new way of being, a new way of thinking, a new way of doing.
Hamza Khan: The thing that seems to be beckoning us is the inverse of the dark triad called the light triad. The light triad model, it sees people as ends unto themselves and not mere means. It regards people as worthy of dignity and it assumes that people are fundamentally good. Is this not how we treat our friends?
Hamza Khan: Is not how we treat our family members, our loved ones? I think I'm hopeful that humanity can extend the same level of unconditional positive regard and love, if you will, to the people that they work with and spend most of their time with. I think a better version of work is possible and it's happening as we speak.
Shawn Pfunder: I couldn't ask for a better mic drop than that. Thank you so much. It's been a pleasure. I hope we get to chat again about Dirtbaggery and Jay Z moving forward. Yeah, thanks. Thanks for being on the show.
Hamza Khan: Likewise, sir. And thank you for your thoughtfulness. Thank you for your genuine interest in these subjects.
Hamza Khan: I was nervous before I logged on here. I'm not going to lie again, given the gravity of this podcast and the guests that have preceded me, but what I had to embrace. is this old adage that when the student is ready, the teacher shall appear. Not saying that you're the student here, but the audience that is willing to learn.
Hamza Khan: They have been primed by Simpler and primed by Cohesion to receive these ideas as unhinged as they were. It might not make sense right now. A lot of my ideas didn't make sense when I did, when I delivered the TEDx talk back in 2016, but I promise you there's nothing I believe in more than the ideas that we exchanged in this podcast.
Hamza Khan: So thank you for being an excellent host, sir, and for uh, excavating these insights and ideas for me. Much appreciated.
Shawn Pfunder: Thanks, Hamza.