Pressure vs. Power: What Really Breaks Managers with Sabina Nawaz

Welcome back to another episode of the Ally from Corporate Podcast. Today we are talking with a very special guest and author of the book youk're the Boss, Sabina Nawaz. And our episode topic today is how to make yourself pressure Proof as a manager. And a disclaimer before I tell you a little bit about Sabina, I am seven months pregnant and so I get out of breath very quickly and so you will notice that in this episode. But I want to tell you a little bit about Sabina. So she is an elite executive coach who advises C level executives and teams at Fortune 500 corporations, government agencies, nonprofits, and academic institutions all around the world. So Sabina gives dozens of keynotes, seminars and conferences every year and teaches faculty at Northeastern and Drexel University during her 14 year tenure at Microsoft. Wow. She, she went from managing software development teams to leading the company's executive development and succession planning efforts for over 11,000 managers and nearly 1,000 executives advising Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer directly. She has written for and been featured in Harvard Business Review, the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Fast Company, NBC, NASDAQ, and MarketWatch. She's the author of the book you're the Boss, Become the Manager your Want to Be and Others. And I'm so excited to have her as a guest. I just finished reading your book last night, you're the Boss. And I'm excited to talk about it. Welcome, Sabina.

Thank you, Ali. I'm so excited. And thanks for reading the book.

Yes, it was really good. And you and I, last time we spoke, we talked about how I am a manager. I just got a promotion at my job, I'm leading a new team. I've been there two weeks now and there's a lot of pressure that comes with that, a lot of insecurity, a lot of fears. And I have to tell you that reading your book, I finished it last night, it made me feel so much better. I realize I have a lot more work that I can do, but you really highlight the self awareness piece and how to become self aware and how to make yourself pressure proof as a manager. So let's start off with some of the myths that you talk about in your book. At the very beginning, a couple of them shocked me actually. So you talk about that there are good and bad bosses. That's a myth. So tell me a little bit about that. I feel like I've had bosses in the past where I'm like, you're a terrible boss. And I've had bosses where I'm like, you're a great boss. So tell me about that.

Yes. Yes. You know, when it comes to bosses, we like to think in binaries. And we all have that story of that boss, that boss who was. Insert expletive. And most people, maybe there's an exception somewhere. But most people, most bosses don't wake up in the morning going, let me make life miserable for everybody around me. They wake up going, I want to do a great job. I care about my people. I want to communicate well. And yet it shows up as a messy pile of something. So it's not that they're good or bad. Both good and bad reside within us. It is the pressure of a job that corrupts us. It's not power that corrupts us. It's pressure that corrupts us. And when we're corrupted by pressure, what do we do? We raise our voice. We maybe don't take time to provide as much detail and explanation. Or maybe we burrow down into the details and. And we micromanage. So pressure corrupts our actions, and then power comes into the equation which isolates us and insulates us from the effect that we're having on people and worse, the harm we might be creating. You know, take me, for example. Ali. For a long time in my 14 years at Microsoft, I was considered one of the best managers people had. And it's true, I cared about them, I coached them. I did a lot of things to support them and grow them and nurture them. And then I became worst boss ever. Happy to share that story, but both of those. It's not that. I had a personality transplant. What happened? Pressure transformed and morphed.

I want to hear the story because I can't believe you went from thinking you were a great boss to, oh, my gosh, I'm not so great. Tell me more.

Yeah, you know, I'm a little hesitant to share this with you because you mentioned you're seven months pregnant. But you'll know why in a moment. So for a long time, I got that positive feedback. Best boss ever. Then I am getting ready for work the first day after parental leave. So lipstick for the first time in five months. And my phone rings. My assistant, Lori, frantic. Where are you? Steve expects you in 30 minutes. So Laurie starts to read me the memo I'm supposed to discuss with Steve Ballmer, the CEO of Microsoft Corporation, as I hit warp speed somewhere along the on ramp. And Ali, that set the tone and pressure and pace of my return to work from parental leave. No calendar overflowing, Inbox overflowing. No sleep. No Peace, infant at home, no patience. And we've all been there. So overnight, I morphed from being caring and compassionate to snippy and short. Still 5 foot 3 short, but now also short tempered. Rushing to meet deadlines, I told myself I have no time to explain things to people, let alone repeat myself. And worried that we would look incompetent to high level executives, I started to micromanage. Whenever somebody came into my office, I would leave all ten fingers on the keyboard and look over my shoulder, you know, I'm really busy. You're less important than me. Spit it out, move on. And the scariest part of this is that I thought I was killing it. I was being really efficient. Until my colleague Joe stops by and here I am. Hi, Joe. You know, But I take one look at Joe and my fingers are off the keyboard. I'm like, oh, he's about to say something here that I'm not going to like. And my shoulders start to tighten. And Joe says, do you know that Zach is crying in his office because of something that you said?

No. Thank God for Joe.

Yes. And my entire body gets flooded with heat. I am just mortified. And I think, how did I get here? How did I go from being caring and nurturing to this someone people apparently fear and really don't like? So, you know, I knock on Zach's door and I ask to go for a walk and. And I say, I am so sorry for how I behaved in that meeting. There is no excuse for what I did. And Zach's eyes brimmed with tears. And that's the moment I realized this is what I want to treat people with, humanity. And that pressure hadn't just squeezed out my time, it had squeezed out my humanity. So that's why I wrote this book, because I have so much compassion for people under pressure. And the higher we go, the more we have to manage, the more pressure we're under. But unfortunately, the more that trickles down and is seen in really and experienced in really harmful ways.

And I want to commend this guy Joe for in your book, you talk about speaking truth to power. He had the courage and he felt safe enough to come to you, and he was honest with you, whereas other people may have just started job searching instead quietly.

Exactly.

So good for him. It sounds like you still, even though you were going through this, you still had a sense of psychological safety on your team, where somebody could come to you and say, hey, you need to tweak what you're doing a little bit, otherwise you might really harm some people.

Yeah, I mean, not everybody knows that. Many of my clients, when I interview their co workers to find out what it's like to work with them, just about everybody is shocked at the degree to which their actions have an impact on others. You know, we understand that intellectually that once the higher we go, the more, you know, there's a megaphone and people go, yeah, yeah, yeah, I get it. But they don't really get it until they read, in the words of their teams, exactly how much they are beholden to power.

And so you're talking about your 360 reviews, your famous 360 reviews. And I know a lot of companies do this, but the degree to which you do this and you talk about it in your book and managers experiences of reading this, I assume they're anonymous reviews. So it sounds like when you get a client, you invite them to have people that they work with closely give them honest feedback anonymously. And then you and your client look over this feedback and so you're saying it's shocking for most people.

Yeah, yeah. So I do this differently from an online360 where you're filling in numbers and ratings and then providing a few comments. I interview people. I just did five interviews yesterday, back to back, 90 minutes apiece. So I, and then I'm writing down everything the person says. The key here to that visceral reaction is reading, in the words of the co workers, how they're being perceived. Not my words. Because when they just see my words, the commentary on top, they're like, yeah, this is helpful. It's not that big of a surprise. Thank you. And if we stop there, it would just go on the shelf and be forgotten.

Right.

So really hearing the tenor, the timbre of the tone, the, the angst that people experience now, it's not all negative, obviously there's a lot of positive stuff as well, but unfortunately it's the negative stuff that catches people by surprise because, you know, power is like a broken volume knob. Everything that comes up is muted, it's cushioned in praise. So when an employee says everything's fine, what they really mean is, I've started a secret group chat about your management style, right? And at the same time, everything that's coming down is hugely amplified and it feels like it's directed at me personally. So manager says, can we chat? And it sounds to the employee like, well, hope you've taken said goodbye to your office plants because you're not going back in there anymore. So it's that effect that power has, that we're not even aware of.

Yeah. So this leads me into the. A couple more myths that you talk about. Yeah, but. And authenticity is singular. So I'm going to talk about my interpretation of those. So I had a manager a few jobs ago who praised themselves on being authentic and they would ask me for feedback and they would say, hey, I'd like some feedback. How was I in this meeting? Or is there anything I can do to improve? And I could, I would say, yes, these are the things that I've noticed, these are the behaviors I've noticed, these are patterns. Here's what I recommend. And they would say, well, that's just the way that I am and I'm not going to change who I am. And I'd go, then why did you ask for feedback? But when you talk about authenticity as singular being a myth, I think a lot of people probably use the fact that, oh, I'm just being myself. Be yourself, be authentic. It's a big buzzword nowadays.

Yes.

But I think people use it as kind of a, I wouldn't say a weapon, but almost like an excuse not to evolve. And it's dangerous.

Exactly. Right. You've nailed it. Because also, let's think about that for just a moment. If you really want to be your authentic self at all times, then you should lie down on the grocery store floor and have a hissy fit when your candy is out of stock.

Right.

Because you'd be authentic to your five year old self. Right. So that shield, using authenticity as a shield, as an armor to not growing, to not doing the difficult work of, of growing up, of, of evolving, of learning. Absolutely. So this manager, of course, without knowing the details, saying, that's just who I am, is shutting down that input. They're just going through the motions of getting that feedback.

Of course. And you think, do you think that I, next time they ask me for feedback, do that I wanted to waste even a second of my time giving them feedback?

No, not so much. Not so much. Right. You're going to say, oh, you were fine, boss, I did. Exactly. And that is actually, that's another piece that's really important as a manager. If you truly want feedback, not only how you react to it, but how you ask it. So the quality of feedback you're going to get is directly proportional to the quality of the question you ask for feedback. If you simply say, how did I do? People are going to, you did great, boss. Again. You know, starting that secret group chat in the background about how much you suck so what if you made it specific and small? What's one thing that worked well? What's one thing if I did more of or less of would improve it even more.

I like that.

So now it takes you. You don't have to. It releases you from, oh, all the things but one thing. And it gives you less room to wiggle out of it. However, even that might be hard for some people. So you could. Because they could say, oh, yeah, you did this one thing great. I honestly don't have anything corrective to give you. So you could say, hey, if my worst critic was in the room, what would they say? If my biggest fan was in the room, what would they say? So you could make it third person and you're more likely to get feedback.

And I have experienced exactly what you're talking about when I stepped into this new manager role. Well, I'll talk about the role that I was in about a year ago as a manager. I remember proposing an idea to my team that I didn't think was a great idea, but it was the only thing I could come up with. And I said, hey, how about this? And I remember looking around at the room, at my team, and they all said, yeah, great idea. And I went, it's not a great idea. You guys probably have something better. Don't, please be honest. And I realized, like, oh, I'm not creating enough of an environment of inviting honesty.

Yes. There are a couple of my clients who, on the eve of their promotion, have said, tomorrow I'm going to be a lot funnier. I'm like, what do you mean? Well, because I'm going to say the same things, but people are going to laugh a lot more at my choice because now I'm at that. That next level up. And the other thing you're talking about, Ali, makes me think about a tool that I have in the book, and I love to say this with the greatest affection to my clients, is that it's time to work on your shut up muscle.

Tell me about that.

So when you are the first one to bring up an idea or the first one to say something in a meeting, and I'm not talking about setting the stage for the meeting, but when it comes to the actual content of the meeting, you'll encounter what you encountered, which is there's no other ideas, because no idea could be better than the boss's idea, there's no debate or discussion about that idea. So even if it is a good idea, it's not fully thought through, because who wants to tell the person in a position of power that they're somewhat deficient. What if you were the third or the fourth person to speak? We're going to brainstorm. I'd love to hear people's thoughts now. If you're always the one who comes in and over functions and presents that idea first, it's going to be awkward in that first meeting. And you give yourself and them some grace and you say, you know, this might result in some awkward silence. And I have faith in this team and your creativity and your ideas. So we might have to hold silence for a little bit. But I'd love to hear what, what comes up.

Silence makes me so uncomfortable, it makes my skin crawl. But I. I've witnessed exactly what you're saying where if, even if I, if I don't have any ideas and I'm like, please, like, can we brainstorm together? And then it's silent for like 30 seconds. And I'm looking around the room, I'm looking at my star player like, please say something.

Yes.

And finally somebody speaks up and I'm like, whew. Okay, good.

Thank goodness.

Yeah. I have felt before, like, I will die of silence.

It is difficult. It is so difficult to hold. You could also give your team a heads up. Like, next time we get together, we're going to do this and I'm actually not going to be sharing my ideas upfront.

Oh, I like that.

I want to give you a heads up so you have some time to think about it. I can open the meeting with. Hope you've had time to think about it. What did you come up with?

I like that. So. And I would guess that some managers in these brainstorming sessions might be hard on other people's ideas. And you talk about that in chapter four, the Hidden Impact of Pressure. And you, you talk about the number one stated weakness of managers is a tendency to be hard on others. So are there instances in these brainstorming sessions where somebody can finally break the silence and say an idea, and the boss can go, nah, I don't like that one. And then it kind of shuts down the mood.

Exactly. So it's back to using that shut up muscle, not just in terms of not popping out your own idea, but also holding on your reactions. If it's a brainstorming session, that means no idea is a bad idea and you just take them all in. The mistake we make is we think that we have to make decisions right away or we have to pronounce judgment on each of these right away. Who says, what if you simply had brainstorming. This is great. Wow. Look at the yield of ideas. We've got a huge range. Obviously we're not going to be able to follow up on all of them. What do you all think? What are the ones that most stood out for you? Instead of you judging it, then let's have another meeting where we come back and decide how we incorporate the best of all perspectives and move forward.

That's smart. That sounds like a very mature manager, what you're describing. Yeah.

And Ali, one other thing. Two magic words. The minute you start to feel that impulse to judge, first, be curious. Because the opposite of judgment is curiosity. You could simply use two words. Say more.

Oh, I like that.

Right. And I use say more in two instances. One when I'm truly curious and the other when I'm truly judgmental. You'll hear me saying, say more. Because that. And. And guess what? 99% of the time when I'm all judgy and snippets snitty and feeling superior and I go say more, I'm humbled. I learned something new. It is completely different than what I was convinced was the reality.

I do the same thing with my husband. Sometimes he says something and I want to say, yeah, but you also talk about in your book. But sometimes I use some form of say more. I usually say, like, can you tell me more about that? Or like, what do you mean by that? Yes, 99% of the time I was wrong in my interpretation. And he had. He had a good intention.

Exactly. Exactly.

Yeah. So you. So another myth that you talk about is this way we start sentences in our mind sometimes. Yeah, but. Yeah, and I think a lot of the theme of your book that I got was self awareness. And so I've started noticing when I say in my head, yeah, but. So like, if my manager's giving me feedback and I am thinking, yeah, but come on. Like that's helpful, right? When I do that. So tell me about. Yeah, but. And what should we do when we catch ourselves defending our actions like that?

If you can. So there's a. There's a simple and a profound shift that can happen through language. If you can replace the word but with the word and it. It opens up more possibilities. But means you're wrong, I'm right, and means there's a possibility of you being right and the possibility of me being right. Both things can exist if you simply start constructing your sentences with an and. What my clients have found is that by using that as a practice, as a mechanical practice, it Starts to shift their mindset. Let's take a simple example. At home, let's say kids are. It's dinner time and the kids are playing outside. They don't want to come back in. And if the parent says but it's dinner time, it means because I said so. Get your, get your behinds here. Another kind of but. And sit down and eat. What if we said you want to play outside and it's dinner time? Instantly we can get more creative about how to solve this. We can have dinner in the sandbox, we can have dinner on a picnic bench outside. Both things becomes possible, become.

I like that. I have a friend, Chris, who is. He does improv.

Yes.

And one of the rules when you're doing improv for comedy or for whatever reason you get up on stage with a group of people, you're making improv means you don't have a script. You just have either a topic or a thing you're going to start with and keep going. But one of the rules with improv is yes. And so one person starts and they might set the scene. The next person says yes and. And they have to keep it going. They can't say, well no, I don't want to play that character. Actually, can we, can we have this scene instead? So I might, I'm now I'm thinking of some exercises or some fun. Some fun things I want to do with my new team maybe centered around. Yes. And where we brainstorm in that way and use that.

Oh, that's a great idea, Ali. Like just simply having a yes. And meeting and seeing what comes up. Wow, Talk about lack of silence. If you did it that way.

Yes. Oh, good.

Silence is kill two birds with one stone.

I know, I know. Okay, so switching topics here. I want to go back to the 360. So if somebody isn't in a position to hire you as a coach, but they want a360 themselves at the end of your book, you have the most amazing template. It's like a big table and it's got ratings one through five and you've got different categories. So tell, tell us how somebody can 360 themselves if they want to become more self aware, be a better manager, improve on the things maybe they have a blindness to that they don't even know they need to improve on.

Tell me how they can do that. Yeah. You know, one of the reasons I wrote the book, Ally, in addition to my mega moment when I realized I'd gone from best boss ever to worst boss ever, was that I really want to democratize leadership. It shouldn't just be the domain of people who can afford executive coaches or fancy 360s. I've tried to give away all the stuff that I do, my bag of tricks in the book. So at the end of this book, these 42 questions help give you a sense of where do you tend to go off course with pressure? Where do you tend to get isolated because of power? In other words, what are the pressure pitfalls you fall into? What are the power gaps you are most susceptible to? The questions are squarely designed to pinpoint which specific pressure pitfalls and which specific power gaps you will be most vulnerable to that have the potential of derailing you from best boss to worst boss. When you get to those specific sections. Now, there are chapters for each of those, so you don't even have to read the whole book. Start at the end, take the assessment, and then go to that specific chapter to address those issues or to understand them better. Now, some people might go, you know, I don't want to take the 10 minutes to answer 42 questions. Then here are two or three to get you started. First, one, nobody ever disagrees with you or comes up with an idea of their own. Kind of like what you were saying, Ali. That's a huge flag right there that you've opened up a big divide, a big power gap between you and them. Another would be, you're working harder than everybody else in terms of setting up a team agenda, getting people together, all of that. You can't stand the silence, you fill it in. That's another flag that you're putting more pressure on yourself. And there's a chapter called Unmet Hungers that might be at play over there. And another one would be if you are responding to most things with a ya, but that could also be an indicator that there's noise in the system, there's data in the system and you've been shutting it off because of this. Ya.

But stand, I have a question about one of these. So I think your first example, you said, nobody disagrees with me. Nobody comes up with better ideas than mine. Couldn't that be seen as a good thing? Because maybe the boss's ideas are truly the best ideas?

Absolutely. It could be.

Maybe, maybe not though.

Is it always the case though? So one, is it always the case? And two, if you're the only one who's coming up with ideas, what are you losing? How much pressure are you creating on yourself when you become the bottomless pit of ideas? And everybody else, you know, look it actually serves them in a way. Much as we love to hate our bosses, it also keeps us off the hook.

Yeah.

Like, yeah, you bought. You. You come up with the ideas. That's why you get paid the big bucks.

And if you come up with the idea and it happens to be the best one, maybe you're going to be voluntold to go lead that effort. So maybe people are scared of that, too.

Exactly.

Yeah. So pressure pitfalls and power gaps. I also, like, at the end of your book, you have a lot of scenarios that you say, if you are feeling this way or if you are experiencing this, go check out this chapter. One of them was interesting to me. It reminded me of my mom. I think you talked about somebody who's always coming up with the plan and being the, you know, executor of the big plan with its birthday party or whatever, and. And somebody not enjoying always doing that. And then you're saying, well, maybe you haven't enabled the rest of your family or the rest of your team to be empowered to come up with the plan. And some people might, you know, mom. I think of moms specifically. Moms are like, all right, I've planned everything. The diaper bag is ready. The Birthday party's at 4. Let's go. How come I'm always the one to plan everything? Maybe they haven't enabled their husband or the rest of their kids to lead in that way.

Yes, this. Yes, this. So reminds me of the story of one of my clients who had a big job actually, like you. Ali had gotten promoted. Lots of pressure in that job. And she said, you know, I cannot go to bed until midnight because I'm. I have dinner with my family, and then I get back to work, and then I have to load the dishwasher and clean the kitchen. And I went, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.

That's a lot.

You have four kids who are all in their teens, so they're perfectly capable of cleaning the kitchen and loading the dishwasher. And she said, well, they don't put the forks facing the right direction in the dishwasher. Yeah. So she had fallen into what I call the sole provider trap.

Yes.

Which is. Which is really understandable. No one's going to do it the way I want. So what's that? Is that also sort of a need to control, maybe over control certain things.

So.

And they're never going to learn. So what are you going to do when they are fully functioning adults? Are you going to go into each of their homes and load their forks? Exactly. Right. For them. Are we still pushing our teenagers on their tricycles because we're afraid that they're going to fall on a bike? You've got to have some skinned knees to grow that capacity in everyone else. But there is a huge draw. There's a slight siren call of the sole provider, because then we can also look quite shiny, can't we? And there's a. There's a sense of being needed, being wanted, if I'm the only one.

But I would love if my family could function without me. I would love if my team could function while I went on vacation.

Yes.

You're talking about a lot of parallels between parenting and management, which I'm really excited about because I'm about to become a parent in two months from now. Do you think that becoming a parent or being a parent makes people better managers?

I don't know. I don't know that I can give you a definitive answer on that, Ali. I have certainly learned a lot about management and how I coach executives based on what I've learned through parenting. Because a lot of times the first leadership we experience is through the people who raise us.

Yeah.

They are in charge of our care and feeding, and we're in charge of the care and feeding of our teams and our organizations.

Yeah. I had one parent. I don't think they'll listen to this, so I feel like I can, I can say this. I had one parent who was a little bit more of a dictator and one. One parent who really took a backseat. And I ask myself all the time, am I. Which kind of parent am I going to be? But I don't think it needs to be one or the other. I hope it's not either of those, actually.

Yeah.

But maybe. Maybe becoming parent gives you more opportunities to practice management and leadership, and it.

It, it affords you some more compassion for yourself. I hope that when you're under all that pressure with sleep deprivation and a baby crying all the time, or not knowing why they're crying because they cannot communicate anything else to you, Talk about a power gap where they cannot communicate other than crying.

Yeah.

And. And you. You're trying to figure out what's going on and how to address it. So when you realize, oh, my gosh, under this pressure now, here I am, and I still need to. Need to show up as my best self, but I'm not always going to be able to do that. I mean, guaranteed, there might be times you take a backseat or become a dictator. Let's hope it doesn't last for Very long, but those will happen. The more we can be mindful of how we're managing pressure, the closer we're going to get to being pressure proof. Because we're never going to be pressure free. We just have to learn how to become more pressure proof to that.

Yeah, you're absolutely right. I have an idea that I might do with artificial intelligence maybe in a couple of years from now. I feel like I could360 myself as a parent. And so I could do your chapter about 360 yourself, put it into AI and say, recreate this for me, but ask questions as if I'm a parent.

Not a manager completely.

That would be cool. I wonder. I bet I would uncover some hidden. Some hidden truths. And I love that you talk about a lot of these managers in your book. Some of them, you know, with the parenting example, with the forks. But I resonated so much with almost every anecdote that you talked about with your clients in your book. Each chapter, you start off with a couple stories of different clients you've had. And it's. First of all, it's very clear that you've worked with a ton of people in different industries, different capacities at different levels. But the theme that I saw throughout each one was you started to work with them, which means they probably recognized something could improve. Maybe they didn't know what, but a lot of them were like, in denial a little bit at the beginning. Like, well, yeah, but. Yeah, but that can't be true. Or like, did they really say that about me? Or I think one of your clients said, I know I'm like that, but I think it's a good thing. And he kind of changed his mind later. But I resonated so much with all of those stories, and it made me feel like the imposter syndrome was kind of just a temporary little dust on my shoulder I can wipe off. Not like a jacket that I have to wear all the time. So I loved that for sure.

I like to say, you're not special.

Good.

You know, we think about us, we compare our insides to other people's outsides and we think, oh my gosh, I really suck. I'm an imposter. When are they going to find out? Well, actually, guess what? Everybody else's insides is doing the exact same thing. So there's a lot of comfort in knowing I'm not special.

Yeah, that blows my mind because I look at some people in meetings and I just think, wow, you are so, so good at what you do. And you must know exactly. You must wake up and just look in the mirror and go, I know exactly how today's going to go and it's going to go great. And let me just, you know, I'm just, I know exactly what to say in these meetings. And I'm like, it must not be true though. Everybody must be kind of just fumbling around trying to learn, trying to improve or maybe stuck in denial and not trying to improve, which that is noticeable with people also, for sure.

And maybe that's they just have so much pressure that they cannot get out of denial at the moment because they would just completely fall apart. And there's a reason the term imposter syndrome exists. It wasn't made just for you.

Yeah, thank goodness. And it's refreshing to talk to other people about that too, because I realize, oh, I am doing a good job. I am self aware enough to receive feedback and modify my own behaviors so that I can improve. So I absolutely loved this reading your book. You're the boss. So tell me before we end this episode, tell me, how can people get ahold of you and are you taking on clients right now?

People can go. Best way is to go to my website, Sabina Nawaz.com and also if you bought the book, you can download a whole bunch of templates and tools and book discussion guides from the website. And I'm picky about taking on clients, but feel free to reach out to me through the website if you have an event where you need a keynote or a CEO who needs coaching.

I saw on your website that you take on clients that are high achievers and I like that you make that distinction because there are millions of managers out there that, sure, I want to get better, but are you going to put in the work to do what it takes and are you going to be one of my success stories at the end of the day? And can I help you? Maybe I can't. Yeah, love that. Okay, well, thank you so much for being a guest again. I loved your book. I'm going to recommend your book to anybody who is a manager who wants to lead a great team and empower their people and also rise up the ranks, maybe get promoted someday, be seen as a power player at work who doesn't have an ego but who's able to receive feedback. So I have a couple people in mind that I'm going to get your book for. So thank you so much for being a guest. This was awesome.

Thank you so much, Ali.

All right, bye everybody. Until next episode.