S1E5 Corey-osity Unleashed with Kul Mahay

Welcome to Curiosity Unleashed, where we turn bold ideas into action and help businesses and leaders step it up.

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So, welcome back to another episode of Curiosity Unleashed. Today, you're really in for a treat. We're diving into a topic that is close to our hearts and it's central to the future of work. And that is human-centered leadership. Ken, you need to have sound effects. Boom, ba-doom. There we go, everyone. Sound effects. Human-centered leadership.

Yay!

It's also something that our guest, Mahay today talks about and knows so much about, not just through the consulting that you're doing and the speaking, but also a little plug here. You are organizing an absolute brilliant event, the Human-Centered Leadership Conference, and it's on the 28th of May in Derby. So, anybody wants to learn more about that, we'll put that in the speaker notes. But before we welcome you, Cole, let me just tell everybody a little bit about you. If people have never met you before, the pleasure of meeting you. You bring over 4 decades of leadership experience. You were in the police for 32 years. Amazing! Where you spent more than half of your service as a senior commander in major and critical scenarios. You've seen your fair share of leadership challenges, I'm sure, through that and your work. And then, for the past 10 years, you've worked with many organizations helping them develop and nurture what you call human-centered leadership. And you've worked with large multinationals as well as SMEs, executive teams. You've worked with them all. So welcome. Welcome so much, Cole.

It's an absolute pleasure being here. Thank you very much for the invite, guys.

Fantastic. It's gonna be a great conversation. So why don't we start from the beginning, okay? Tell us just a little bit about you. I gave a very quick synopsis, but tell us a little bit about your professional journey and What really got you from policing to this?

Well, that's a question I always struggle to answer in its full because when you have sort of been around for a while, you often wonder, well, where do I start? Where's the starting point? And I always go back to the age of 10 because it was at the age of 10, Deborah, where I really sort of clarified my thinking My dad was a typical British Indian dad. He wanted all of us to be doctors and lawyers and nurses and so forth and so on. And every Sunday he would give this lecture. He'd put his shirt and tie on, he'd sit us all down, there were 7 of us, and he'd give us this lecture about what his expectations of us were. He himself was a factory worker, so he wanted his children to do so much better than him. In his eyes. And of course, when he was talking about everyone becoming doctors and lawyers, everyone would be nodding their heads. But me, I was thinking about being a police officer. And at the bottom of our street was a little wall that I used to sit on every other Saturday because we lived about 3 streets away from the football ground. And I used to watch all these big, tall police officers and everything that they stood for in society going to the football match. And I guess then I realized that's all I ever wanted to be. I wanted to be a police officer. And what I learned in my journey when I eventually got in, because I had to apply to 26 different police forces, in fact, I applied to all 43 police forces in England as well and a few more in Scotland, but the 27th one was the one that accepted me. What I learned was service is all about people, policing, nursing, whatever it is that you're doing, fundamentally always comes down to the human being. Whatever industry you're in, whatever role you play, it fundamentally comes down to the human being. So I learned very, very early on the power of building relationships, whether it was as a neighborhood policing officer, whether it was as a frontline leader when I became a sergeant and an inspector, or whether I was at those senior political levels, working at strategic partnership levels, strategizing for the future, leading major operations. It was all about how do I get the very best out to the people around me, partners, stakeholders, and those people that worked with me and for me. And one thing I was really frustrated with policing was, and I see this in so many organizations, this is not about policing, is some leadership models are really stuck in that hierarchical structure. It's that top-down. It's about the symbolism around leadership. And I just felt that that style of leadership doesn't get the very best out of people. So every department I ever led on, I adopted a human-centric approach, an emotional intelligent approach. And then when I started thinking about emotional intelligence and I started thinking about, you know, what is emotional intelligence, I want to learn it to this nth degree. That's when I became a member of the Institute for Social Emotional Intelligence. And we work now with 26 granular, measurable competencies to really allow emotional intelligence to to grow and embed itself in organizations and leadership mindset. And that is what I now call human-centered leadership. And I get to work with incredible organizations. I work with a number of executive teams that often describe themselves as dysfunctional. And we've seen them turn around, we've seen organizations turn around, we've helped organizations through their transformation journey, through their DEI processes. And when you simplify everything in life, it really comes down to people. Hence human centricism.

I love that because a lot of times if you'd ask somebody, you know, what is policing or whatever business you're in, what is it all about? So many people would not come back and say that it is all about the people. I was going to get really quiet for a minute because you were talking about like hierarchy about policing. And I thought for sure Ken was going to come in and start talking about the Army. And then the two of you are going to start talking about all the lessons that you've learned through for those types of businesses.

Like, I brag about my time in the Army all the time.

No, you don't. But I could see you nodding your head when he was talking about, like, hierarchy and things like that.

So, yeah, you see, I mean, I have a really strong affiliation to the military because the mindset in the military and the mindset in the police service is not dissimilar. And I've done quite a bit of work with the British Army and the British military. And I was visiting. I had this incredible honor of being invited to Sandhurst, which is like the epitome for leadership training in the British Army. It's a beautiful place. And actually, one of the people that invited me, Major Manish Chauhan, who's also a royal surgeon in the NHS and a major in the British Army, is one of our speakers at the conference. And as he and I were chatting away during that one day, and I got to have an incredible conversation with some very senior British Army people, I started realizing that there's a shift in mindset in the Army. See, traditionally, people look at uniformed organizations like the police service, like the Army, and they think command and control leadership. They think it's about shouting at people, telling people what to do and where to go. And that's the style of leadership. Well, actually, no, it's not. Because I think these organizations are beginning to realize that to get the very best out of people, you have to build trust. You have to build relationships. You have to build communication. You have to build everything that we call soft skills. They are hardcore skills in these organizations. And now the British Army, then one of their number one drives in terms of building leadership quality is embedding emotional intelligence.

Yeah, I love that. And you know very well that we, Ken and I did a workshop for the police force in Iceland, the country, not the store. And we came to you for some advice. And I have to say, their focus on all of those emotional intelligence aspects was amazing. They just embraced it. You know, they were just like, what can we learn more. They are absolutely brilliant.

That's brilliant. I mean, we need to catch up on that because I need to know.

Absolutely.

What an exciting opportunity that must have been.

It's really encouraging that all these organizations are starting to understand the importance of emotional intelligence. It is fundamental to success going forward. We just can't exploit our users the way we have, our workers the way we have been in the past. Now, let's go back to the basics. How do you define what human-centered leadership is and just as importantly, what it isn't.

So here's what I don't think it is. I think this is an easier question to answer than what it is, because in its explanation, I always say it's very simplistic. It's in its application where it gets a bit more convoluted. But what isn't it? Well, it's not box ticking. It's not chasing some award for investors in people just to tick off some criteria that you have to meet. And I've seen many, many organizations organizations in the past and sometimes in the present that just go after chasing a cartload of criteria that they can tick off in order for them to get some kind of recognition, some kind of charter mark, some kind of award or recognition or label. But then when you look at their culture, it hasn't changed. When you look at their outcomes, they haven't changed, which means they're not being creative and innovative. Human-centered leadership is about creativity and innovation. And let me just explain what I mean by that. If you look at every single human being, we are defined by our individuality. We are defined by our ability to think independently, think for ourselves, as well as think as part of a group. Human-centered leadership is about creating an environment where we welcome individualism, welcome individual thinking, understand that everybody, when they show up to the workplace, will show from a whole range of potential situations that they might be in, and they affect people differently. And therefore, understanding that human beings are very complex. But when you master that, when you create an environment where there is such trust at the foundation of your organization that people feel it's okay to show up vulnerable, it's okay to talk about stuff that they're going through, it's okay to share ideas that nobody else in the organization is talking to and know that they will get equal amount of airspace. To know that we are able to inform the debate and the conversations going on in the boardroom environment, that there's no groupthink mentality. That for me is what human-centered leadership is, where we embrace the human beings inside of our organization and understand that everybody has something to offer. A couple of weeks ago, I was delivering a workshop on emotional intelligence to a group of leaders in a university. And I said, before we start, what I want for you to do is do what you normally do. You tell me what your name is, tell me what your expectations are, tell me why you're here. But also, I want you to tell the whole room something that they don't know about you. Now, after a bit of head scratching, what actually happened was nothing short of miraculous. There were people that were coming out and said, you know, I love fixing old old cars. There were people coming out and saying, my dog is really, really ill at the moment. This dog has been in my life for 12 years and they're really struggling at the moment. So, you know, if I feel like I'm a bit tender, that's why, that's what's going on in my life right now. So all of this was coming out. After 10 minutes, I asked them the question, do you feel that you know each other better than you did 10 minutes ago? And of course the answer was yes. Do you feel that you could be more cohesive with each other, have better conversations now 'Let you know what you know about each other?' The answer was yes. And sometimes it is as simple as that, allowing people to be human, allowing people to have the confidence to show up as their individual selves into their organizations, including their vulnerabilities.

Now, that's a really good answer. I feel like I have a grasp of where you're aiming. If I put my business hat on, though, I've got time pressures, I've got schedules, I've got products to ship and all this. How do I square worrying about the human-centered aspect of things and still being able to deliver on time? How do I make sure that's not a time sink?

So that's a great question, Ken. And I think this is what puts so many organizations off and say, well, why should we spend so much time on this when actually, A, it might not affect my bottom line, or B, it does affect my bottom line because it's taking energy away away from my, my focus on the bottom line? Well, my answer is this. Firstly, if you want to grow anything in life, whether it's your bank account, whether it's your fitness, you have to put some effort into it. And it has to be consistent and constant effort, right? And what I'm not saying with human-centered leadership is, in fact, what I'm saying is that you shouldn't do is big, bold moves. You don't take big, bold moves to say, I've now embedded human-centered leadership because you will never embed human-centric thinking. It is a journey, and what I want is to create the space where we can have these conversations. Now, by the mere fact that we are having these conversations, and sometimes it's very hard to see the outcomes, but over a period of time, I want you to then check back on your KPIs, your bottom line performance. Is it going up? Is it sustained improvement? I'm not looking for Peaks and troughs here, but I am looking for a sustainable growth and upward trend eventually, you know, within the space of a few months. So what I want to do is embed this culture where there's a trust being grown in your organizations where we're having better quality conversations. And there's a piece of work done by a chap called Patrick Lencioni in his book, Five Dysfunctions of a Team. And whatever Patrick Lencioni talks about executive team functions, actually, this is applicable to organizations We just stretch it out. And I've worked with organizations and I've said to them, let's just embed as a starting point, let's create more trust as a foundation in your organization and everything else will build on top of that. So what Patrick Lencioni says is, if you build trust as your foundation, as a result of the trust, you'll have better conversations, you'll have much more healthy conflict and debate, which we need in a fast-evolving world in which we're in. And on top of that, then you'll have better commitment. On top of that, you'll have better accountability. And on top of that, you'll have better performance out there. Now, I think this is even more important now than it's ever been before. We live in a world now where things can change within 24 hours. Donald Trump can make a decision, and we've seen this. Donald Trump can make a decision on tariffs in America today, and it will affect us right here, or wherever you are in the world, the next day. And that's the power of the world, the globalized world, the global economy. The global community is so much more connected and smaller than it's ever been before, and therefore the pace of change, I believe, is accelerated. And so we as organizations that thrive and leaders who thrive need to become extremely agile in the way that we do things.

Yeah, and picking up on one of the aspects that you talked about was one of the benefits of human-centered leadership is the whole aspect. You used the word innovation before. And if you think about a benefit of innovation when the world is changing so quickly and you're facing so many challenges, if you don't have everybody jumping in with new ideas, and I'll give you a perfect example. I was in a company once and it was in one of the many financial crises that we've had. I can't even keep track of all of them.. And as a business, we went to our employees and said, we need to save X amount of money. And we threw it out to everyone in the company. And we're like, okay, you share your ideas. And it was amazing. We all rallied around it. We all brought our individual ideas. It was all those types of things. We went to the humans and together we did it. But I mean, what's your thoughts on why more companies don't do that? I know Ken said, you know, that question about time. People don't see it's a good use of time. Don't they see the benefit of, you know, really respecting and embracing this individuality aspect of it?

Um, I, I think it's something to do with what I call leadership courage. And leadership courage is about having— you create the foundation of trust, but it's leadership courage is about having faith that the ideas coming from the ground floor, if you like, are ideas worth considering. And actually taking that big leap of faith can be really, really powerful. So when we get to— and I work with a lot of organizations that are going through budget deficits, changing the size and shape of their organization. I wrote the 5-year plan for reducing millions of pounds in our budget when I was in the police service during austerity measures. And what I've learned is this. You get two types of organizations and leaders when it comes to making significant transformation and cuts, where you are forced to make these cuts. You get those type of leaders and organizations that have this very sort of linear mindset. They'll think, okay, we need to make £10 million savings out of a budget of £100 million. Okay, that means 10% savings. What we'll do is do a very sterile 10% cut across the board. What I call cut and slash. So they'll bring about this cut and slash and they'll achieve their £10 million. But what they don't see is the collateral damage that that leaves behind. What happens with that collateral damage is it is going to affect the performance going forward. You lose confidence of the people, you lose the trust with the people, your communication is not going to be any better. People may not be as committed to your organization as they used to be because they feel that They, they have become just a number as opposed to a person, all of these kinds of things. Then you have the organizations, and Ken, this sort of answers your previous point. You have those organizations that take the longer-term view and they say, okay, this is going to take longer. It's going to take more energy, but it is actually the right thing to do. And for long-term sustainability, to drive longer-term performance, it is the best thing to do. And that is, let's involve the people. Let's be democratic in our leadership style. Let's look for answers because, do you know what, we may still make that 10% saving that we need to make, but the ideas have come from the people and they are the best equipped to know what the impact of the frontline looks like whenever we make any kind of savings. So they're making the best decisions even though they know that it's like turkeys voting for Christmas. It's that kind of mentality.

And the added benefit is you get buy-in from them. So, you get buy-in. So, instead of standing behind the scenes complaining, they're rallying behind.

They're vested into it.

Yeah. Absolutely. And like you said about, you know, you get different ideas. One of my favorite ideas when we went through this cost-cutting exercises, this one person in IT, such a simple thing. He said, "I'm going to reprogram all of our printers to automatically double-side print." I would have never thought of something like that. I mean, that saved us alone like a million pounds just by doing that. So yeah, big, big believer in that.

I mean, I had— and sometimes it's the little things that really do matter. I remember I went around and I said, look, I've got to— we've got to make all these millions of pounds of savings. I'm looking for any ideas, any ideas that you might have. And some of them said, look, how many meeting rooms do you think we've got in the organization? I said, I don't know, ballpark, let's say 20, 20 boardroom, you know, large meeting rooms that we've got in the organization. He says, in every single one of those 20 meeting rooms, we have a coffee machine. That coffee machine is costing us X amount of thousands over the year. He says, I can do the sums for you. Why don't we just get rid of all the coffee machines and just put a hot water kettle in there with some instant coffee, etc., etc., paper cups? We're still looking after people. They still feel like they're getting something, but we're not going to the expense of it all. So he said, it's about creating that balance.

Although, a die-hard coffee lover would not see that as taking care of people.

Yeah, but if you start with— this is why you need to rally the troops. If you start with, "We as a business need to save money," people will embrace it. If you just, as you know, Cole said before, you just slash it. Because I've been in both of those situations in human resources. I can tell you the queue outside my office when you just get rid of the coffee machine is huge. You're right, Ken. But if you get the buy-in, I don't have that problem.

I mean, I, I, I've, I, I've done this exact same thing when it comes to writing business plans. So in, in the police service, I was head of strategic planning, then I took over various departments. And one thing that you had, like in any other organization, you'd have the, the overarching strategic plan. Underneath the strategic plan, you have your 4, 5, 6 key priorities, strategic priorities that the organization is trying to reach and to make sure that you're meeting those. Every single department would have its departmental business plans. Now, I took over this one department from somebody who'd been there for 9 years and he just left the organization. And when I walked in, I said, where's our business plan? Oh, I don't know. He wrote this business plan. It's on his computer. Da da da da da. I said, well, you must have been involved in the business plan. Oh, no, no, no. He was very strategic. He used to sit in his office and write the strategic business plan. For the whole department. It made no sense whatsoever. So he's had no buy-in from the people, he's had no involvement from the people. I said, okay, we're scrapping that business plan. We're going to rewrite the business plan. Here are the 6 priorities. I want you to go away to your individual business areas, have focus groups, and come up with what you think that your business area could do to achieve that business plan. Guess what? We met every single target in our business plan for that year and made £1 million savings. That is what happens when you involve people. That's what happens when you have human-centric thinking in your culture.

Do you know, I do a lot of work with companies in coming up with their values, discovering their company values. And the same thing is absolutely true. If you just throw a bunch of words at a company for their values, oh, and wonder why no one's living it. But if you involve your people and you get their thoughts and their input, but all of a sudden, they start living them.

I mean, values—

sorry. I was just going to say I think of it in terms of number of brains. If you have a top-down leadership structure, you have one brain running a whole organization. Whereas if you're talking to all of your people and you're getting their input and you're getting their buy-in and you're getting their involvement, then you have however many people, however many brains there are in your organization working on a problem, it's bound to have a more positive, a more complete effect.

But as leaders, we're told, and I can remember this like it was yesterday, I wanted to go out to my people and ask them their input and their questions. And my boss said to me, now this was 20 years ago, "Isn't that what I hire you for? Aren't you the one who's supposed to have all the ideas?" And I don't know what you think about it, Cole, but I just think that there are too many leaders out there that unfortunately were raised with that type of mindset. And they don't see it as a superpower. They see it as a weakness to go out and have this human-centered conversation and approach.

100%. And I think that is something to do with the mask that we wear as leaders. And I think where you see this is in those organizations that lack trust. Going back to Patrick Lencioni's work and when he said, you know, when there's no trust, it is because there's no relationships and there's no relationships because there's no sharing of vulnerabilities. Being vulnerable is a superpower. There is no doubt about that. You know, one of my favorite sayings, people still remind me, I would sit at a table and I'd say something like, I don't hold a monopoly on good ideas just because of where I sit. And that opened up the conversation to allow people to bring in their ideas. And that created innovation, creativity, agility, adaptability, all of these important things that we talk about nowadays. Place. But those leaders who, um, feel that they need to be seen as being stalwart, they need to be seen to be strong, they need to be seen to be at the helm of everything, are leading, um, I think they are now, um, on a decline. I think they are now sort of almost sort of becoming a bit prehistoric, if I'm honest, because I think the modern understanding of what leadership is. It is about the ability to influence and inspire people to go in a certain direction. I mean, if you look at the dictionary definition of the word leadership, you'll get something like it's the ability to lead an organization or leading a group of people. And I always say, well, that's not a very good definition, if I'm honest. Leading for me, I've come up with my own definition. I think leadership is about influencing people and influencing outcomes. And the higher up you get into an organization, the less doing you do, but the better you should get at influencing people because the actual doers don't sit in those executive seats. They actually sit further down the line in leadership positions. And if we don't build relationships with them, then we're not going to bring anything that's some executive decision. We're not going to see it filter all the way through to the frontline in exactly the way that we want it to. To filter. And that's where there's a lot of frustration when it comes to transformation in large organizations in particular. I speak to a lot of executive teams and say, oh, do you know what, we had this great idea, we wanted to move the organization in this direction, but we're getting blockages at this level or blockages at that level. And my answer is always the same. Well, what work have you done to bring them into the fold, to allow them to be a part of the solution and a part of this whole idea that you're bringing about? Or have you just told them? And very often, it's that they've been communicated to. They've been told. That's it. That's not good enough.

Communicated at.

Absolutely.

Yes. Now, one of the criticisms of this sort of new age management is that human-centered leadership is nice and fluffy. Yeah. You said you called it the soft skills earlier. Now, I personally, I really don't like that phrase. I much prefer personal skills. They are key. They're important or whatever. But there are other areas that fall under human-centered leadership, such as DEI. And especially now with the political bombshell that's happened in the States. What's your take on the traditional thinking? And how does human How does human-centered leadership play a part in this?

Okay, so I sense there's like two questions in one and they're both linked. I think that's very powerful. First and foremost, let's just talk about this whole idea of soft skills. Human-centered leadership is not soft skills. Human-centered leadership is actually core, hardcore business skills. It drives your bottom line. It drives the quality of the service that you provide. It drives the performance in your organization. Get your people right and everything else will flow from that. Happy people work harder. It's not rocket science at all. So I really do want to push back on this whole idea of soft skills because I don't think there is such a thing as hard or soft skills. These are just fundamental skills that every organization needs to embed.

I was just gonna, I was just, sorry, just gonna jump in and just let you know in the model that we have, we actually call it foundational or because we have 6, we call it the 6-pack. Because it holds it up. So I absolutely, absolutely agree with that.

Whatever you want to call it has to have something a bit stronger to be fundamental. It is fundamental to the success of your team, your business, your organization. So I think I really do want to— part of the whole movement of human-centered leadership is pushing back on this rhetoric around soft skills. And I was also talking to a chap the other day who's a leader in an organization. He said, well, I'm your typical alpha male. I said, well, hang on a minute. What is a typical alpha male? I said, he said, well, you know, I just tell them as it is. I just count some beans with people. I grip people when they need to be gripped. I said, okay, so if you and I were to measure performance and experiences together, who would be the alpha male? I said, I have seen more death than you will ever see in your life. I have invested. I've been in the middle of riots, but I choose not to treat people that way. Does that make me a beta male or an alpha male? You know, these are nonsensical sort of nonsensical language that we often hear on the issue of DEI. That for me is also nonsensical in a sense that I've lived in the world of DEI for now 4 decades and— excuse me, I'm just kind of tickling my throat— I've lived in the world of DEI for now 4 decades. When I was a a police officer, I was a brown speck in a sea of white. Suddenly I was the DEI expert, so I've been involved in DEI an awful lot in that space of time. And what I found about DEI is that often there's rhetoric and focus around representation and recruitment and all of this kind of stuff, which is all well and good, but just having demographic representation in your organisation doesn't change for two reasons. Often what organizations do, just to tick some boxes, they will look for a percentage of representation in their organization, and when these people come into the organization, they'll expect them to behave like everybody else. What is the point of that? What is the point in bringing in difference if you're looking for similarities all the time? And the second thing is, what we don't measure is the disparity, the disparity in terms of talent leakage, the poor state of retention, the amount of complaints investigations on people from minority communities to people from majority communities, all of this kind of stuff. The point I make is this: DEI, or the traditional approach to DEI, in my view, serves to— has a language that serves to divide rather than bring together. The most demonized sector of communities that I have found in my experience, and everyone feels it's okay to say these things, are the white heterosexual men. Why do we feel it's okay to demonize white heterosexual men when it's not okay to say something similar for a black man or a brown man, for instance? You know, so some phraseology, some language has become acceptable, whereas others haven't. And this is another problem with DEI that often we tread around on eggshells around language rather than getting to the root cause. DEI for me, or the traditional approach to DEI, and I've seen the names change so many times from diversity awareness to DEI, from EDI through to whatever else is the flavor of the month. And whilst the fundamentals of DEI are absolutely right, it's about inclusion, it's about creating equity in your environment, I think DEI can get confused by some people, and I think the agenda can also get hijacked by others. And whatever all of that is going on, it means that we're not striving or achieving what the fundamental goal of DEI is. DEI should be about creating an environment where everybody, everybody feels included, everybody feels they belong, everybody feels part of the conversation. So I, rather than talk about DEI, I talk about human-centered leadership because I want every single person in the organization to feel that they really belong, whether it's based on values, whether it's based on demographics, whether it's based on socioeconomic experience, all of that. They belong because it's rich and it's meaningful and it adds to the conversation of the organization.

And I think that's where the intersection is so strong. And again, I don't like getting hung up on all the different terminology, but at some point in time, people are adding the B at the end of it with belonging. And to me, the belonging is the human-centered aspect. And I'll give you a perfect example. I interviewed somebody from this lovely company called John's Crazy Socks. And it's this man and his son with Down syndrome founded this company where they make socks. And they hire all these people with different disabilities and different backgrounds and such. And he said, we do things differently. We don't tick boxes like what you said by just hiring certain numbers. He said, we create an environment where we look at people's strengths, we look at their— what's holding them back, and we treat them as individuals. And, you know, that's why we thrive. And I think to your point, that's the problem with, with DEI. People just bring people in, as you said, but then you don't respect that, you know, that individual. What do they need differently? How do they act differently? And that's why I love that intersection. I love that you're, you're doing that.

Yeah, but again, I just don't think it's rocket science. I I just genuinely don't. You know, how right can it be to chase demographics and say, and make the assumption, or have a language that makes the assumption that all women have the same needs, all Black people have the same needs, all gay people have the same needs? I mean, how nonsensical is that at its very basic level? And how wrong is that to make that assumption? So for me, human-centered leadership is about individuality, going right back to the full circle. Every single person is different. Everyone has had different experiences in life. And that's the richness of the individuality or the individual that you're hiring into your organization. And you'll only retain that individual in your organization while you have an environment that they feel they belong to. And it's that.

I love that you said it's not rocket science. When I wrote a book with my CEO, it was on employee engagement and we had this model and everything. And we sent it to his mother before it got published. And she goes, "Isn't that what I taught you as a child? Aren't these all the ways that we taught you to treat people and kindness and all the whole list?" And I thought exactly what you said. I don't know if we've overcomplicated it or what.

Sorry, Craig. I think we do though, don't we? I think we overcomplicate. Things that we feel that we can't do much about, what we then do is overcomplicate them, or we bring out new terminology for them to give us a sense that we're moving forward, but we're not actually moving forward. We've just changed the name of something, or we've made it feel and sound more scientific, or that there's been a whole load of research done on some area. And sometimes we create over-research. There are academics running out there who, you know, hundreds and hundreds of academics who probably have researched a very similar area but will disagree with each other based on academia, you know. And for me, we're losing all the humanness in all of this. And the police service, I know the police service were terrible at this. They would listen to academics, Professor So-and-so and Dr. So-and-so. But these were like very clinical pieces of research based on very little other than statistics, research, etc., etc. And I think by doing that, you lose a humanness, but it makes you feel like like, you know what, we're doing something, we're moving in a direction. And I think that's why you see so many title changes for things like DEI.

It's more theater rather than actual change.

I say it's rhetoric, not reality.

Yeah, I like that. Yeah, I know, let me rephrase. I recognize that phrase. I appreciate that phrase. I don't like what that phrase represents. Now, let's be honest, though. It's not easy to be a human-centered leader. Not always. What are some of the most common challenges you've seen leaders or companies face when trying to lead this way? And how can they overcome them?

Just a simple question.

No, no, it's a great— honestly, it's a great question. Let me answer that question by telling you a story. I love telling stories. You've probably gathered that. But I remember that I in my old organization, I was moved around departments an awful lot. I was probably one of the most moved-around senior officers because any department that might be failing or was new or was having some performance issues, I would be dropped into that department. And my style has always been very emotionally intelligent, very connective, very human-centric in its approach. And I'd turn that department around, I'd build trust, I'd get people to feel like they belong to something quite special and move that department forward. Towards the end of my time before I was leaving, I remember I sat down with one of the very senior executive leaders and he says, "Col, I really don't understand you. You're not like my other senior officers." I don't see you gripping people, you know, I don't see you gripping people. Okay, I said, well, look, let me ask you some questions. Every department that I've ever managed has— have you ever heard anything bad about me? No, no, no negative feedback. I said, has grievances gone up or down? Grievances have gone down. Performance, has that gone up or down? Performance has gone up. I said, well, look, let me answer your question by leaving you a very simple question. Do you think it's me that's I'm the one that's the weirdo, or maybe your other senior officers need to be more like me to create the performance that you desire in your organization. And I think therein lies part of the challenge. Being a human-centered leader is not easy. It's not just simply showing up to work every single day and just being a nice, nice person. It's not that at all, because you have to make tough decisions, right? I have been in some major critical dramatic situations in my time where I've had to make tough decisions. I've had to let people go to make huge budgetary decisions. I've had to discipline people for poor performance or from unsatisfactory conduct. And all of these, I've had to do all the things that leaders do, but I did it in a human-centric way. And that means showing up every single day, making the effort to get over whatever biases, whatever feelings, whatever whatever's going on inside my head to be the very best leader I could be. And for me, leadership has always been about serving, and I've always thought of myself as being in a very privileged situation where I am leading other people, therefore I'm serving the people that I'm leading. So in a very roundabout kind of way, what can organizations do? Well, get rid of this nonsense idea that tough leaders, strong leaders are those that grip people Simple as that. Great leaders are the people that inspire. Great leaders will have a sense of depth and breadth about where you're going, but be able to communicate that in such a simple way that everybody else gets it. And I want to paraphrase a quote of Einstein where he said something like, and it is a paraphrasing because I literally can't remember this quote. It seems so complex. But the irony is it's all about simplicity. And he says it takes a great genius to take something very complex and explain it simply, but not too simple that it loses its meaning. And I just thought, you know what, hitting that middle ground is not easy, but when you hit it, it's like hitting the bullseye on a dartboard. It's that.

No, it makes complete sense. Now, I do have to ask, gripping people is not a phrase that I'm familiar with. You know, in Texas, we didn't— we whooped people, but we didn't grip them.

What did you do?

We whooped them.

I don't know either of the phrases of what either of you are talking about.

But I just, I just, can you explain gripping people in something that someone as simple as me could understand?

Well, I think it's very similar to your whooping by the sounds of it. I think the idea of gripping people is the ability to have tough conversations. Well, that's in the mindset of the person saying they're gripping. But human-centric leaders should be able to have tough conversations, right? But where gripping people comes in, I think gripping people is about being able to point a finger at someone and count. Another phrase I'm going to say to you is counting some beans with them, i.e., how many beans make 5, which is a real British term. I want to count some beans. I want to count how many beans make 5 with you. I.e., it's that simple. 5 beans make 5, and whatever you're saying, if it's outside of that, it matters not. It's that kind of mentality.

I've never heard that before. I wasn't sure if it was good or bad. So counting beans is— so whooping is bad, counting beans is bad. No, no, ripping is bad. Okay, I'm learning new words.

So like, counting beans, I guess I guess another way of saying that is like you're being a very pragmatic person. You're very pragmatic, very down the line. You're very black and white, counting beans.

But it also, the way you're saying it, it sounds like when you're counting beans, you're imposing. You're like, look, this is the way it is, deal with it.

Exactly. That's exactly what it is. But so in the context of leadership, might not be a good thing.

No, because you're missing out the empathy. In my time of being a manager, I could count many times where I've come in and I've said, look guys, this is not good enough. We cannot do it like this. We can't. We have to do this. And now let's just buckle ourselves down. Let's just do this. And somebody turns to me and says, Ken, we can't do that because of this other thing.

And all of a sudden, and then suddenly you're embarrassed.

Oh, I've completely put my foot in it because I didn't understand. I didn't appreciate, you know, I just wasn't clear.

Here's the thing, Ken. I think also with being a highly emotionally intelligent and human-centric leader, it is also about understanding what leadership style do I need to adopt. So I talk about 6 leadership styles. I talk about a spectrum on leadership styles. At one end, you have command and control leadership where you are counting beans, you are saying what needs to be done, you are ordering people to do things. And at the other end, you might be a very sort of affiliative leader where you are all about the people, and connectivity and connecting. But it depends on what situation you're in. So if I'm in the middle of a riot, as I have been in the time, and, you know, I remember going to the Bradford riots in 2001 and we drove all the way to Bradford to support West Yorkshire Police. And when we got there, there was no briefing. We were just told to go to this car showroom that had been set on fire and the fire service were trying to put the fire out, but they were being pelted with rocks and petrol bombs. I had 30 guys with me or 30 men and women with me, highly trained. But when we got there, we're faced by 2,000 people. We haven't got time to say, okay, so what do you think is the best idea here? Who thinks we should— you're not going to do that. You are going to be very, very command and control. So it's like shouting at people and say, okay, you go there, you go there. Let's form a line. Let's hold the line. Let's move forward. Large shields at the front. Let's keep moving. All of this kind of stuff is what you're going to be doing.

Doing.

But a human-centric leader understands that you switch that leadership style on for only as long as it's absolutely necessary. At some point, I would have said, okay, so let's just take a breath. Is everybody okay? Anybody hurt? Everybody okay? Is there anything else that we need to be doing? So you would be moving into a much more affiliative style or a democratic style. So I don't think there's anything wrong with going to a meeting and saying, okay, look, our backs are up against the wall. We've got a very tight deadline. We need to move things forward, right? I want I want you to go there, I want you to go there. That's still human-centric, providing you are able to fluctuate your leadership style in accordance with the situation that you're facing. And that's social awareness. That's situational leadership.

Yeah, that really speaks to me because so many times I've seen people, especially those guys who claim that alpha male label, that's the only tool they've got in their toolbox. 100% is to come in and shout, you know, everything to them is that's the way you're going to solve all problems. There is no one way to solve all problems. There just isn't. You have to be able to, to pull out many different tools out of that toolbox.

You know, 21 years ago, I was told 21 years ago that I'd lost my alpha male status. And you know what happened 21 years ago? I stopped drinking, stopped smoking, stopped eating meat. And apparently that made me a lesser man.

Oh, you're pansy.

And that is the nonsense behind terminology like alpha male, right? So now when I hear this, this term alpha male, I just look at people and I sort of quietly shake my head because those people that claim to be alpha, they've probably never, if anywhere, haven't come anywhere close to some of the experiences that real alpha men and women have had.

Yeah, I was going to say, we women shout some quite often also.

So yeah, yeah. And, and I think alpha men and women are those people who, they're only really tested and they shine when it comes to showing resilience, challenging situations. Those self-proclaimed alphas, they sort of tweet away, but the, the, the people that we don't realize are alphas the quiet ones, the human-centric ones, the highly emotionally intelligent ones. They're the people that have the resilience to see a challenge through.

Yeah. So I'm gonna sadly have to bring this all together. So if you had one phrase, one thing that people could go back and start doing, one tip, and well, I guess my one tip is to come to the conference. There you go. Because you'll have more than one tip. But what would you say at this point?

Well, really, I think you're right. I think come to the conference because what the conference will show is we've got people from the Army, we've got people from missile defense companies, we've got people from some of the biggest logistic companies in the UK, we've got people from HR in different industries. We have got a gathering and a meeting and a collating of senior leaders from all sorts of industries, all of whom are demonstrating human-centered, fragments of human-centered leadership in practice. And you'll get to see what it means, what it looks like in practice, and more importantly, that it is something that you can do in your organization. But what can you take away as an individual moving forward right now, or as an organization? I would say, put your focus squarely on this idea of building trust and do that, whatever that means to you. However you do that is completely up to you because it's a very complex situation to discuss. But look to everything that what you do. Am I building trust in this situation? Am I building trust in my organization?

Absolutely.

And trust is actually— remember I mentioned before the foundation and the six-pack is absolutely one of the six-pack, a core one. Yeah, perfect. Thank you for that.

I am gutted that we're running out of time here because I've got so many more questions that we just can't squeeze in.

But we're going to be at the conference. So, we'll ask you at the conference.

I'll definitely be buying you a beer or a or water or whatever.

Not a beer.

Yeah, not a beer.

Okay. And by the way, not, not a coffee either, because I stopped drinking coffee and tea 10 years ago.

Oh my goodness.

So buy me a green tea. So water.

Water. Green tea.

There we go. So for anybody who wants to find out more about your work, your event, or how to be more of a human-centered leader in their own world, how can they contact Well, obviously I'm on LinkedIn, so find me on LinkedIn as Colm Mahay.

But if you go to the website www.humancenteredleadership.co.uk, you'll find out more about the event, but also more about some of the speakers at the event and some ideas on how to become a more human-centric leader.

Fantastic. Thank you very much, Colm.

Thank you so much for joining us. I think that what you said has been so inspirational and it It's so basic in that we all need to go and do it. So, that is my challenge to everyone who's listening is to go out and think about how you can be a more human-centered leader. Thank you very much, Cole.

Thank you.

And that's a wrap on this episode of Curiosity Unleashed. Huge thanks to our amazing guests and of course, to you for tuning in.

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