Speaking and Communicating Podcast

When an organization challenges me and say, you know, they're doing well financially, I'll ask them to look at their churn rate.

Are people staying there?

Or are they expending a lot of energy and a lot of capital resources, replacing and retraining people?

And why are they leaving?

Again, the research now, I'm glad the researchers are embracing it, and they're showing a lot of times people leave because of bad leadership.

People perform at their best when and only when they know their leaders care, their work has meaning, and they have the chance to learn, grow, and develop.

Welcome back to the Speaking and Communicating Podcast.

I am your host, Robert Angela.

If you are looking to improve your communication skills, both professionally and personally, this is the podcast you should be tuning into.

Communication and soft skills are crucial for your career growth and leadership development.

And by the end of this episode, please log on to Apple and Spotify and leave us a rating and a review.

Now, let's get communicating.

Now, let's get communicating with Jim Bouchard all the way from Maine.

Are you close to Canada?

We are pretty close to Canada, yeah.

Yes.

Jim is a leadership activist.

He's an author, speaker, and founder of the human-centric leadership movement.

He is here obviously to talk to us about leadership, but more so how to make it more human.

And before I go any further, please help me welcome him to the show.

Hi, Jim.

Thank you so much for your hospitality.

I really appreciate it.

My absolute pleasure.

Welcome.

Please tell the listeners about yourself.

Well, this whole adventure was an accident, to be quite honest with you.

The origination of this was my adventure as a drug addict and a dropout.

And as part of my recovery, I got involved in martial arts.

Eventually, became a black belt and then later a sensei, and had my own organization with.

We grew it up to about five schools at one point.

And along the way, people started asking me to talk about the philosophy of the martial arts as it applies to real life, outside the dojo and in business.

And one thing led to another.

People started asking me to speak more and more and more.

And here we are today.

How about that?

Nice and short, exactly.

You say your journey is from loser to leader.

Is it because of the former drug addiction and being a dropout that you titled yourself a loser at the time?

Oh, absolutely.

And in fact, I'll embrace that label.

You know, it's not easy to look in the mirror and say, wow, I'm not the person I want to be.

But I think that's an essential first step.

If somebody's going to transform.

In fact, I sometimes felt that it was a pretty lousy resume for someone training leaders to have started this way.

But it's a very useful one.

And it's because of that process of transformation.

I mean, I had to learn it in order to survive, right?

Aren't leaders in the transformation business?

They're supposed to transform themselves, their organizations, the people around them.

If you're not embracing that process of transformation and change, what's happening to you?

You just can't survive in today's world without embracing that.

I mean, the only constant in life is change.

We better wake up to that, right?

Exactly.

No, the reason I ask you, because some of us, no matter which part of the journey we're in, because sometimes when people feel defeated and they feel the substance, or whatever the vice is, it seems like it's taking control of me.

How did you make the shift?

Like you said, you looked in the mirror, but how did you make the shift of saying, enough is enough?

I'm looking in the mirror now and saying something has to change.

And then that's when you join martial arts.

The best way to share that is to talk about, not my last days as a drug addict, but when I decided to quit drugs.

And I was living in an old trailer, and we were just talking about how cold it is where we each live, right?

I was living in an old trailer out in Maine, and one of those 1950s vintage ones with the louvered glass windows and all that stuff.

And that only becomes important because there was a lot of different types of drugs that I was doing at the time.

But no matter how high I was, I was usually pretty mellow.

I wasn't out of control.

But this one particular time, something kicked in, and I started running around the trailer.

I was trying to dive out through the louvered glass window.

You can imagine what would have happened to me if I had done that.

I would have been cut to ribbons.

But some friends of mine got me tackled and settled down.

And long story short, I woke up in the morning, looked in the mirror, and it looked like I had gone three rounds with Mike Tyson.

I had really bashed myself pretty good through that whole episode.

And that's the day I decided to quit.

So luck has a huge part to play in that, right?

Because other friends of mine, I was around at that time, weren't so lucky.

Some of them ended up in jail.

Some of them are dead.

And certainly, by rights, that's probably what should have happened to me.

But a series of happy accidents, good people around me, once I made that decision and started moving forward, that's when the rest of the process could start.

That's the hard work.

Quitting drugs is easy.

I say that all the time to people.

Most of us who did it, we got a lot of practice at it.

We had a few attempts, right?

It's staying off the drugs that's the difficult part and finding something in your life to substitute for those feelings, for whatever reason you're addicted, because there are a lot of different reasons.

There's no single profile of a drug addict.

People make that mistake a lot.

And yeah, then just embracing that process of transformation.

Martial arts, again, a happy accident that led me to that.

And again, making a very long story, very short.

One of the greatest pieces of philosophy I was able to learn in the martial arts was that perfection is not a destination.

It's a never ending process, a never ending journey.

And when we get on board with that process, then good things can happen, right?

That's a very big one, especially, you know how these days you find people say, I'm a perfectionist.

What exactly does that mean?

Yeah, that's a different thing, isn't it?

Yeah, people look at it a lot of times as a static place.

And I was blessed with many, many good teachers in the martial arts.

You know, the philosophy of it and the psychology of it meant a lot more to me than the physicality, because that's what helped me change my life.

But yes, blessed with very good teachers who embraced that process of change as something that's dynamic, that's something that's never ending.

I mean, how dull would it be if we just reached a point in life where everything was the same?

When you stop growing, then what?

Right.

I'd rather be a work in progress all the time.

That's fine.

Much, much better.

So what other disciplines did martial arts teach you that then led you to become the leadership activist that you are?

Well, you hit a big one.

The word that you just used, discipline, right?

And a lot of times, some of the characteristics, if you want to call them that, are traits or assets of a leader.

We call it disciplines and the three most important being to be able to inspire, empower, and guide.

And that's what leaders do.

And so I'll make the argument that leadership has nothing to do with a rank or a title or a position.

It has to do with your ability to inspire the people around you, touch their hearts, not just their heads, right?

To empower them, simple to say, not simple to execute sometimes, making sure they have what they need to succeed.

And then guiding, we could call it mentoring in business, right?

To be willing to share your knowledge, your experience, your wisdom, face to face, person to person.

So those three disciplines, and we call them disciplines because to a martial artist, a discipline is the development practice of a meaningful and positive action or habit, right?

And that's what we have to do.

We have to develop these things and embed them.

I hate to-do lists.

It's not about that.

It's about embedding them in our life and in our daily practice.

The more you can grab those three things, and I hate it when people put those in the soft skill bucket.

You know, these things are not soft at all.

These are the most essential.

What could you possibly do unless you're touching people's hearts, unless you're giving them the tools they need to succeed, unless you're willing to roll up your sleeves and be with them.

What are you going to accomplish?

Certainly not your best.

It's funny when you made that comment.

That's why I guessed, because this show, we talk about soft skills, and I've had so many guests where we've had to debate the term.

Are they really soft?

It's the hardest thing to learn.

What are you talking about?

They're soft.

It's weird.

I'd rather we use the words tangible and intangibles, even though that's kind of incomplete too, because in martial arts, since one of the teachers that I was so blessed to be with, Dr.

Yang Zhuangming, who arguably teaches what in martial arts we would call some of the soft arts, like Tai Chi and Qi Gong and things like that.

Now, his brand of Tai Chi, he could teach you how to turn someone into a human pretzel pretty easily.

So again, that term soft, but it's about leverage and it's about utilizing the other person's energy as well as yours.

And so that requires a much higher degree of skill than what we call a hard arts.

And there's nothing wrong with the hard arts.

Sometimes you need that.

You punch.

You need to apply force.

You need to do something quickly, decisively, and packfully.

You know, the best leaders understand both, right?

They understand how to employ the softer sides of things.

But there's more power in the soft, I would argue that.

More power in the soft.

In the hard arts as far as business and technology and communication goes, those are the things.

They're important.

They're certainly important.

But what can you possibly accomplish without making genuine human connection, right?

And of course, that's your world, right?

How to help people connect and communicate effectively and hopefully transform me into we, get something productive done.

Because the term soft skills is what then creates an environment in the workplace that's more human centered.

And that's literally what you do.

Yes.

Please walk us through that more.

And there's nothing wrong with applying the term that way, right?

The only argument I have with the term soft skills is it tends to get regulated to the back burner, and people will prioritize things that are more technical.

Well, here's the best way I could summarize it.

Admiral Grace Hopper, who is one of the most brilliant and intelligent leaders we've ever had, she said a lot of cool things that you can quote.

But one of the best, as far as I'm concerned, is management is about things, leadership is about people.

For too long, we've tried to solve too many leadership issues with management solutions, and that just doesn't work.

Don't get me wrong, the management side is important.

You got to cross the T's, dot the I's, and take care of the bottom line.

But ultimately, what is an organization made out of?

What's a community or a society made up of?

People.

And if we don't put people first, if we don't prioritize that, there's lots of times when that's a challenge.

And that's right too.

I'm not saying it's easy to do the things we're talking about, but if you take care of your people, you'll be more productive, you'll realize higher goals.

You know, it's easy to get away with treating people badly when things are good.

But when there's challenges, when the poop hits the fan, then, you know, right, and that happened a lot.

Just had an episode not too long ago when COVID hit, then you saw it.

The organizations that survived and thrived, those are the organizations that took care of their people.

And the ones that didn't, people left, and they're still leaving.

Well, statistics, research, numbers, everything points to that fact.

Thank goodness, I know it.

HBR is finally coming around to it.

And every issue of HBR now, how important it is to treat your people well.

That's how you retain and attract good people.

Well, Lao Tzu said that about 2,000 years ago, too.

We're slow, but we'll get there, hopefully.

Because here's my next question.

Do you think that the business world in America is becoming cognizant of that, or it's still about the bottom line first?

Well, again, not to diminish that, because if we don't take care of the bottom line, our organization doesn't survive either, right?

So I hope people understand I'm not denigrating that.

I'm trying to prioritize.

You can't prioritize the mechanical parts, the technical parts of management above people.

It just doesn't work.

You won't survive that way.

Now, it can take an organization a while, even generations, to die off.

But when an organization challenges me and say, you know, they're doing well financially, I'll ask them to look at their churn rate.

Are people staying there?

Or are they expending a lot of energy and a lot of capital resources, replacing and retraining people?

And why are they leaving?

Again, the research now, I'm glad the researchers are embracing it, and they're showing a lot of times people leave because of bad leadership.

People perform at their best when and only when they know their leaders care, their work has meaning, and they have the chance to learn, grow, and develop.

Now, I've been preaching that for a long time, and I learned it from Lao Tzu and from my experience in the martial arts.

I was so happy a couple of months ago.

I was on the plane and opened up Harvard Business Review, and these people had just completed a very expensive study, and there was a paragraph that was so close that I actually wrote an article.

I said, Why I'm not suing HBR for plagiarism?

Is it because it's a good idea and it's universal?

I wasn't the first one to come up with it either.

Right.

I see a very positive movement in organizations embracing that ideal, and I think the younger generations are inspiring that to a large degree.

We can give the younger generations a bad rap.

A few of the things that they've done very well and have helped teach us as old dogs is that we have to put people first.

We have to address people's needs.

If we want them to stay productive and happy in the workplace, which is where we spend, what, two-thirds of our life, right?

Yes, that's the majority of our day for sure.

Oh, no, no, we will never underestimate the importance of getting the work done, making sure we're productive.

That's why we always say make sure that the skills are in place because we want to be productive, make the company grow because we all benefit.

The research is so clear.

I mean, we just reached a point to where 70% of our workforce, this is not just in the United States, this is globally now, 70% of our workforce is disengaged.

More than half actively disengaged.

I mean, they intentionally checking out while they're sitting at the desk or while they're at their post, right?

And why?

The reasons behind it, nine times out of 10, they're related to exactly what we're talking about, that they don't feel that their organization and their leaders care about them.

They don't have the opportunity to learn, to grow and develop, you see.

So there it is.

It's a ripple effect.

Yeah.

And how much does it cost you to replace somebody who's checking out or disgruntled, right?

I mean, what's the average?

1.5 times the person's annual salary to replace somebody, and it moves up the higher up the chain you go, right?

Exactly.

Yes.

Now, let's talk about a very sensitive subject right now.

I don't know if you heard in the news, the United Healthcare CEO's murder.

We're not going to talk about how we both feel or which side of the coin we're in.

That's not what this question is about.

But I don't know if you've seen just the general response.

People feel very disempowered, defeated, despondent about not just the healthcare system, but just the economic way of doing business as a whole right now.

Then the question becomes, is the business world listening?

Or do we have these conversations as regular people, but they just don't see the need for this change, this we need to do better by our people philosophy?

No matter how we feel about it, we've reached this point, this boiling point of hatred in our culture.

And that was exacerbated politically over the last couple of cycles too, right?

I don't care what t-shirt you wear, red, blue, I don't care, you know?

We have to work together.

We have to live together.

And there's much more important things for people to hate over than politics, okay?

But having said that, yeah, our business is listening, I'd have to say yes overall.

And that's the thing.

I just had this conversation with another host on another show.

We hear about the bad ones all the time.

And a lot of the issues that we face are just an issue of scale.

Particularly, you talk to, we do quite a bit of work with health care professionals.

The scale of that industry is immense.

And the regulatory complexity of that is just mind-boggling.

So emotionally, sure, and I've been there too, where I've been angry because insurance wasn't handled the way I thought it was, or it wasn't handled fairly from where I was sitting.

I understand the emotion.

I understand that.

Now, are industries responding to it?

I think overall, yeah, I see more good people, I see more good business leaders, people who are really involved in their communities and care and care about their people, than I see the bad ones.

Now, are the bad ones out there?

Yeah, they sure are.

We'd have to look at it case by case to determine whether somebody is positive or negative in the context of what we're talking about.

But overall, no, I'm very optimistic about it, and part of it is because of what you brought up earlier.

Is there a turn, a reawakening to this human-centric philosophy and business leadership?

I believe there is.

It seems to be keeping me pretty busy, and I think that's a positive sign.

I don't know how to really address that.

I get caught with this sometime because I'll say, I can't fix bad.

When a culture is so bad and imbedded so bad, usually the problem is at the top.

Are you willing to clean out your C-suite and start again?

I bring much more value when I'm supporting positive leadership culture.

I don't know if that's a cop-out or not, but...

No, it sounds to me like you're saying, we can make the change we want to see if we do the best we can within our sphere of influence.

I mean, like you said, the leaders you work with, that's where you're going to make a difference.

And hopefully, anybody within their sphere of influence they will start to realize that, wait a minute, it can't be business as usual.

Yeah, yeah.

And a lot of people will say that, especially in leadership, that negative is contagious.

And it is, but the positive is too.

I mean, I think the most inspirational thing we can do for one another is to be a good example, to model the behavior and the actions we expect from others or would like from others.

So when I meet somebody like you that has such a positive energy and you're out there, you're doing it, you're growing that, that's contagious.

Your positivity is affecting me right now.

You know, it's inspiring me.

And when we do that, that's how things grow and expand.

But it's not easy.

I mean, this has been a struggle with mankind for the first time.

We saw another human being and said, Oh, geez, I want this.

You want that?

And there's we're at odds.

A lot of the life.

Yeah.

Yeah.

At the end of the day, as I was saying, as long as corporations still remember that everything is about people, their customers are people, their employees are people, everything centers around humans, no matter which angle you look at it, no matter which angle they look at their business, just for them to just constantly remember that in the way that they do business.

Right.

Right.

And like I said, to answer your question very directly, I meet many more leaders who understand and appreciate that and appreciate the people they serve.

So yeah, I see a positive trend.

We hear a lot of noise from the negative side.

And for instance, social media outrage that we just talked about, that's an example of it.

Unfortunately, sometimes a negative voice will be louder or more persistent than the positive one.

So we need you.

We need your positive voice.

Like I said, let's do our best we can and ask for your influence.

What are some of the leadership mistakes or lessons that you've learned in you being a leader?

Mistakes, I think.

If you don't mind sharing.

I don't mind sharing.

And again, I don't think your program is long enough to cover up.

We'll be here for a while.

I'll take it back to the dojo, because again, I was just sharing this story with somebody else.

The dojo is not a place for success.

The dojo is a place for failure.

In fact, if you walk into a dojo, most dojos, you'll see a wall full of mirrors.

And it's certainly not to check out how pretty we are.

It's so that your mistakes are reflected back to you, so that you can correct course, right?

That's the whole process.

I mean, we have to embrace adversity.

We have to embrace failure and our faults.

I don't like it when people try to eradicate the word failure from their vocabulary.

It's a very useful tool.

We shouldn't allow ourselves to be crippled by it, certainly.

When I was a boxer, I had a great trainer.

He was like an old Yoda guy.

He'd usually say this to us when our face was mashed in and he'd say, Jim, sometimes you just learn more when you lose.

Yeah, thanks, Dave, a lot.

And then he'd start to walk away.

He'd turn around and shoot back.

But some days you don't feel like learning anything, right?

That is true, yes.

Yeah.

We want to embrace our successes, but we want to embrace our failures too.

So a couple of the biggest ones that I've made.

And I think like a lot of people who are teachers, sometimes we're not preaching from the mountain, we're preaching from the gully.

And one of the things that I did, made mistake very often as a leader, when I was first starting out running my own organization, was I thought I was the one who had to bring all the ideas to the table.

I thought people were relying on me to have the answers to things, right?

Well, I learned over time that the best leaders are not the people with all the answers.

We have a term for people who have all the answers all the time, right?

And it's not very flattering.

I know what you're talking about, yes.

The best leaders and the best leaders that I meet today are the people who know how to ask the right questions and are willing to do that.

You know, your specialty communication, right?

That goes up and down the chain.

When we're asking questions and we're seeking guidance from people, no matter what their rank or position is, then we get a lot more done.

We get a lot more done on that.

Those communication lines are open and sincere.

So I had to learn how to do that.

And I had to learn how to ask people, you know, what do you think?

That doesn't mean you don't share your own ideas.

Of course you do.

But to be open from input from all levels, that was a big one.

And not to yell at people.

It doesn't work.

There's one thing yelling at people out on the dojo floor.

It's quite another when you're in a business meeting.

Yeah.

Right.

Yes.

I'm glad you brought up the idea of not thinking you need to have all the answers and all the ideas, because we call it one of the leadership myths that because you're a leader, that position comes with, I need to have all the answers.

Like I said, ask the right questions.

Ask your team, what do they think this could look like in order for it to be the best?

Yes.

I understand why people feel that way too, though.

And it's interesting because a few years ago had the blessing to do a presentation in Cuba of all places.

We do a lot of work with credit union associations, and this was the Caribbean Confederation of Credit Unions.

And they hosted the event in Cuba because they wanted to introduce that type of financing to the Cuban people.

So it is fascinating on a number of levels.

But anyway, we were talking about this very thing in one of the breakout sessions.

And one is a young man from Jamaica.

And he said, but Jim, I can't do that.

I can't go to my people.

Because we were talking about seeking leadership from people on the front lines, right?

Because that's where a lot of your experiential capital is.

So anyway, he said, I can't do that.

I said, why not?

He said, because they'll think I don't know what I'm doing.

I said, but you don't know what you're doing.

This particular young man had just admitted, he had just told his story, right?

Right out of college into management, which happens a lot these days.

And he had no idea what these people were doing on the front line.

Now, that didn't mean he wasn't a good leader, and I think he was, he was very sincere.

So anyway, long story short, he agreed he would try to reach out to people on the front lines and expose himself.

And he also expressed that in that environment that he was working in, he was also cognizant of the fact that his supervisors might think less of him if he were reaching out and asking for help below him, right?

A couple of years later, I was speaking in Las Vegas, and guess who comes up the hallway is this young man.

He said, hey, Sensei, do you remember me, Jamaica?

I said, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

No, I remember.

So we talked for a while and I said, well, how's it working out?

Did you try some of those?

He said, yes, I did.

I said, how's it working?

He said, it's working very well.

He said, people are now coming to me and sharing their concerns and their ideas and their interests, right?

He said, my boss is still quite out, they're not on board with it quite yet.

But I said, that's okay because guess what?

You're going to be in their office in a couple of years.

I said, so you're back to what you said earlier, right?

You're the person that's making the change.

It doesn't happen fast.

So that was a cool story.

I mean, what are the chances I would run into him again that way?

It was really nice.

Yes, that was amazing indeed.

And let's talk about the cultural and the generational divide.

So one of the main generational differences in the workplace is the communication styles.

I started working in the mid-90s, there was no texting, there was no texting language, everything was formal, and now we have all these abbreviations.

So when somebody who's young enters the professional world, and their leaders are in their 50s, and they still speak formally, how do they bridge that gap?

That's an ongoing issue, and there are a lot of challenges to this idea of human-centric leadership.

You brought up a big one that you mentioned a little bit, the cultural divide too.

Yes, the cultural divide, the generational divide, ethnic divides, ages, all kinds of things that are going on right now, political certainly was huge over the last few years.

So how do we bridge all of these things?

And again, this is your world, right?

Communication is the key.

We spend a lot of time and workshops on communication.

Maybe this is a place of intersection, but you and I will be working together sometime soon.

But at any rate, there are two sides to it.

Should I, as an old guy now, should I be learning the new lingo and trying to talk like a young person?

Well, that can be pretty disingenuous, can't it?

Do you have grandchildren?

No, I don't have children at all.

I used to have a hundred or so every day in the Morphine Center.

Because I was about to say, usually parents or even grandparents, they ask the young ones, because the young ones are way better with tech than we are.

Right?

This is what WYB stands for.

I do that all the time.

It's funny because a lot of this adventure started.

I was in music full time too when I was younger, and now I still do that for fun.

Well, not long ago I was on my Apple watch.

I still play in a band, and the thing kept going off and telling me it was too loud.

I didn't know what to do.

So I handed my watch to a young lady who was, I said, do you know how to?

She said, yeah, she helped me out.

Of course.

And there's nothing wrong with that.

And now back to your point, there's nothing wrong with reaching out.

Certainly, communication is not a two-way process.

A lot of people will say it's a three-way process.

It's a dynamic cycle, and there's lots of in and out points there.

And so, there's nothing wrong with asking for clarity.

If I don't understand what somebody's saying, it's on me to say, look, can you rephrase that?

Can you help me understand you?

I think that's the part where it gets difficult.

Sometimes people won't take the time to just sit back and say, I need some help here.

I need you to help me understand what you're saying.

And then listen sincerely.

It's easier.

It's a shortcut sometimes to presume or assume what the other person's intentions are, what they're trying to communicate.

And that happens the other way, too.

When we're doing workshops, especially when we have a workshop that includes now, for the first time ever, right?

HBR just reported this, four generations working in the same workplace, in the same work environment.

That's never happened before.

So there's going to be a lot of these communication issues.

For the younger people, when we're in the room too, I say, you know, sometimes it's on you too, right?

You need, first of all, to show some deference and respect to the people who have been there for a while.

And not just because it's the right thing to do, but because it's practical for you.

These are the people who are going to be your guides and your mentors, and sometimes they're the people who make the decisions about where your career is going to go, at least here, right?

So there has to be a mutual respect across all the divides, whether we're talking about cultural or generational.

And that may be the key, I think, is that single word respect.

If we can find that, if we can support that and cultivate it and help people discover it for the first time, maybe, unfortunately, in our time, then that's the key to everything.

Can I share a quick story with you?

Please.

Yeah, we love stories.

Yeah.

One of the first times I was asked to speak in public was because the kids in my program were acting very respectfully in their schools, their respective school, and they were performing a little bit better academically on par or improving themselves.

And so one of the other schools, it was a school in my area, they were having a lot of problems with respect in the classroom.

So they asked, they said, well, let's get Sensei Jim to come and straighten out these little creeps.

Unfortunately, it doesn't work quite that fast, but I said, I'd give it a shot.

And I was asked to speak on respect and responsibility.

So I show up and I've got my dictionary definition, and I asked the kids, I said, what does respect mean?

Well, this one little guy stood up, they had prepped that Sensei was coming, so he knew what to do.

He made our symbol, made a fist, covered it, and he bowed.

And I'm sorry, I always get emotional when I tell this story, and I tell it a lot, but I can see him as I'm telling you this story.

And he bowed, he says, Sensei, respect means taking care of one another.

Wow.

Man, I felt like I got punched in the stomach, honestly.

You know as a presenter, right?

I sat down.

I actually sat down.

It felt like five minutes.

It was actually probably about five seconds.

He blew my dictionary definition out.

He ruined my whole presentation.

So I stood up, and all I could think of to do is I bowed back to him, and I said, kid, I think you got it.

And I didn't know it at the time, but that was the moment that changed the whole trajectory of where I was going to go.

That's the moment that all of this got started.

Although I didn't know that till quite a long time later.

I keep hoping when I'm presenting that he'll be in the audience so I can thank him, because I have no idea who this kid was.

But that's it.

Taking care of one another.

Now, let's imprint that in everything you just talked about.

No matter what the divide is, if we can put that first and foremost, if I can reach out to try to show caring to you, then that's a really, I think, constructive place to start any sort of communication.

There it is.

Didn't mean to get that deep into it, but...

No, I absolutely love the story.

Just a quick question.

What's his heritage?

Where is he from?

Maine.

Just a kid from Maine, yeah.

Wow.

No, because when he said that it's taking care of one another.

So I'm Zulu.

I'm a South African.

I'm from the Zulu kingdom, right?

And one of the first tenets, I remember first grade cultural class, the ones you have once a week.

So one of the first tenets of our culture is they say in Zulu, Zuluni, Paugu, Zuluni, you should respect others so that you can be respected to it.

It's the first sentence before chapter one, because it's the foundation of everything.

And then I don't know if you've heard the word Ubuntu.

You be you.

I have, but I'm not sure.

You're going to have to refresh me because I'm sorry.

Pardon my ignorance, but I don't remember what it means.

I've heard the term.

Perfectly fine.

So it comes from my language.

It means humanity.

I am because you are.

If I do good to you, I'm literally doing it to myself.

If I hurt you, I'm literally hurting myself.

We are fully connected.

There's no separation between us.

Quick story to illustrate that if a Zulu person back then, there were no airplanes and no horses, whatever, would travel from New York, Maine to California, they would walk.

And then when the sun sets, whatever house they see, they walk in, never seen those people before, introduce yourself, which village you're from, your people, your clan, whatever it is, they give you dinner, a place to sleep, lunch for the next part of the trip until you see the next house.

And you do the repeat, repeat until you get to California.

Because, like I said, we literally are not separated.

And that's what Ubuntu, that's what humanity is.

And back to, it's because we respect each other.

That's why we treat each other that way.

That's what it reminded me of.

No, that's a beautiful story.

And it's puzzling to me because it is universal.

I mean, we evolved to be cooperative species.

Now, I'm not naive either.

We also evolved to a level of tribalism.

It's interesting because before COVID hit, we were supposed to do a tour in Africa.

And Kenya was the jump off point.

We have some partners in Kenya.

And they shared a similar story, but they also said Kenya right now is very divided tribally.

We got talking about that's what makes their politics very difficult.

And yet, when I met people from the separate tribal divisions, they share a similar story, right?

So it is kind of natural for us to seek out people who are like us and to be suspicious of other, whatever that means.

That's an evolutionist survival process too.

And how do we overcome it?

It's with that philosophy you just talked about.

Can we reach out and can we discipline ourselves to be open outside of our own?

But it's not, don't believe me, because current psychology really dials into the fact that we are still kind of evolved to work with groups of somewhere between 60 and 150 people.

I heard it described so beautifully.

It's about the number of people we'd be comfortably sharing what we did before breakfast with.

Okay.

We have a conversation.

That's kind of neat.

Yet we work in cultures and organizations and societies of thousands, tens of thousands, millions of people.

But if you see that, no matter how big our organization or our society or our culture is, watch how it divides itself naturally, right?

Smaller and smaller groups until finally you're a neighborhood.

Now, how do we transcend that and help people cooperate and collaborate and work together across global scales?

Because that's pretty new, isn't it?

I mean, you're a lot younger than I am, but I've been around long enough to remember.

I'm 48.

See, I told you, you were much younger than I am.

Oh, okay.

It's interesting, right?

Not too long ago.

I mean, how long ago was the telephone invented?

Just a couple of generations.

Now, we can do this, and we do these meetings and calls with people all over the world.

Instantly.

Let's not take that for granted.

For sure.

No, no, no.

Right?

Yeah.

But it also means that we have to learn to express and receive respect from people whose traditions and cultural norms and whatnot can be much different than ours.

So but there's a universal to it.

And I like what you shared, because I do believe most of the time that that universal is the respect.

Or what was it in your language?

Say that again.

It was so beautiful.

Ubuntu?

Ubuntu.

The word Ubuntu.

Yes.

I believe there's a coach, former Boston Celtics coach who studied the philosophy.

He applied it to his team at the time.

And that's when the Boston Celtics won the NBA.

His name will come to me.

But yes, he taught them Ubuntu as a principal whenever they went to training.

Because here's the thing, like I said, we're fully connected.

Even if we're in a team sport, even though you know you're working as a team towards winning as a team, but there's sometimes ego, there's sometimes wanting to be the Michael Jordan of the team.

So all of that had to be dismantled so that they knew that we are fully connected.

And that's the word.

His name will come to me.

But yeah, former Boston Celtics coach, he used the Ubuntu principle to coach his team and they won the championship.

No, that's beautiful.

And speaking as someone who, I am very comfortable being alone.

I'm very comfortable operating on my own.

Not usual for folks, but having said that, it's the realization that you're right, that it's an illusion that we can exist completely isolated and on our own.

Human beings don't survive very well that way.

And if they are able to survive physically that way, no, emotionally and mentally, that's not very fulfilling.

The truth is that we're connected, right?

Yes.

The illusion is that we're separate.

And again, thank you very much for the wonderful masters and teachers I had in martial arts who shared that philosophy.

They're from Asia, but isn't it universal?

I mean, you study the fundamental philosophies all over the world and they're the same.

It's only when we look out and find, when we consciously find differences to negotiate, then we get into trouble.

And that's why the workplace has to remember that as well, the more universal concepts, because the workplace has become very global, especially since COVID.

You have people in different parts of the world logging in onto a Zoom call, different cultures, different languages, whatnot.

So just remembering that.

I think fear plays into it sometimes, doesn't it?

I mean, sometimes people fear if I'm being open to someone else's expression that somehow I'm compromising my values.

You never have to compromise your core values and your core beliefs.

You don't.

And tolerance doesn't necessarily mean acceptance, right?

I may, and I quite often do, debate people who, particularly politically, might be very different than me.

Sometimes ethically very different than I am.

But can I be taller?

Can I listen sincerely and genuinely?

I might not agree at the end.

And frankly, I think the agreement thing is way overrated.

When people are in lockstep, it's counterproductive.

You and I could be on opposite sides of a particular issue or a particular problem.

Don't get me wrong, debate is healthy as long as it's respectful.

But as we're debating and we respect each other, then that's where cool things are going to happen.

Because it's likely if our sole objective is just to defend our own position, we're really not going to move forward.

No.

Okay.

In that debate, probably the best solution or the greatest leap forward is not going to be your idea or my idea.

It's going to be another idea that comes out of our healthy debate, right?

And I heard a speaker a couple of years ago talk about it, and he did workshops for political folks.

He did workshops for Congress for years, where he did a retreat with Democrats and Republicans together.

Sadly, they stopped doing this, which is a tragedy.

But he talked about the boil.

And he said, when you're debating, when you have this and our political system was created purposely to be adversarial, right?

Because the best ideas come out of that.

But he said, you got to be careful.

You want to turn the heat up because if there's no heat at all, nothing gets done.

There's no motion, right?

You want a little boil, but you don't want it to boil over, you see?

And burst.

So you're moderating the temperature.

Yeah.

And I think that's a really constructive way to look at that.

Absolutely.

Here's the thing.

I mean, I have brothers that I love to the moon, but it doesn't mean we agree all the time.

And we were brought up in the same household.

We were brought up by the same rules, but we don't always agree, so that nobody should expect that at least it's not realistic.

Well, there's the biggest challenges, right?

In family.

We're not going to get into that, Jim.

Any last words of wisdom for leaders who are doing their best to try and make their teams or their workplaces more human centric?

Put your people first.

Keep it human.

I'm deadly serious about that.

I don't remember if we touched on this, but people perform at their best when and only when they know their leaders care, their work has meaning, and have the chance to learn, grow and develop.

So if you pay attention to those, and that leads us to the three essential disciplines of leadership.

Inspire, empower, guide.

If you focus on that, then that's a much stronger foundation.

If you don't focus on those things, or you relegate them to that soft skills bucket we talked about, don't prioritize it, well, then you're going to be part of what HBR and Gallup are reporting on now.

You're going to be one of those organizations that can't attract good talent, can't keep good talent, and is in a constant state of churn and retraining, and that's no place to be.

Absolutely not.

Words of Wisdom from Jim Bouchard, the leadership activist, author, speaker, and founder of the Human Centric Leadership Movement.

This has been such a pleasure.

Thank you so much, Jim, for being here today.

Oh, Roberta, thank you for your hospitality.

It's wonderful.

The pleasure is all mine.

Thank you.

My absolute pleasure.

Before you go, would you like our listeners to reach out to you, and where can they find you?

Oh, absolutely.

Thank you for asking.

thehumancentricleader.org.org.

That's kind of the nexus.

And please join our network.

Keep the Keep It Human Network.

It's been a dream I've had for a long time.

So now we've got a platform where leaders at all levels can communicate with each other, share ideas, share interests, share concerns, challenges, opportunities, everything, and lots of good resources there.

Absolutely.

We will put that on the show notes.

thehumancentricleader.org and Keep It Human Network.

Thank you, Jim Bouchard.

Thank you so much.

My pleasure.

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