Interview with Jim Bouchard: THE SENSEI LEADER

I've been seeing your articles, you know, here in the Star, uh, Sacco Star, the Kenya National Chamber of Commerce, you're writing for them, uh, Kenya Institute of Management, and they, you know, you've been received very well in terms of on your topic on leadership. But I have a few questions for you because a few people I've interacted with have asked me a little bit, um, about you. There's a lot of interest and curiosity, so I thought this might help us clarify a few things. Um, we have your book in Nairobi, Kenya, I am happy to say. The Sensei Leader.

Oh, I'm honored to see that. That's beautiful.

Yes, it is in the— in Nairobi now, in the market. So the first question is, what is the sensei? You know, your book is The Sensei Leader. So what is the sensei? What is sensei leadership?

Well, traditionally, of course, sensei is a Japanese term, and it's used to talk about a martial arts instructor, basically, a martial arts master. And it's really interesting because the job of a sensei is relatively simple. It's to inspire, empower, and guide people to their very best. Now, in the dojo, of course, that means helping people get to black belt and beyond. But you know what's important is in leadership, you know, I always ask when I'm doing presentations, you know, what does that mean in your life? What does that mean in your role as a leader? And of course, the best leaders, that's exactly what they do. When we bring it down to its most fundamental terms, leaders inspire, empower, and guide others to their very best. Now, fortunately, I get to preach to the choir a lot. You know, I love to work In fact, I think I bring more value to good organizations, right, to good companies. You see a better return, you see more value when you're supporting and developing this type of leader in a good organization. It's very difficult to fix bad without— well, without firing people and starting from scratch, right, which sometimes needs to be done. But that's what it's all about. So basically what I do is I teach leaders how to be the sensei, how to be a good teacher, coach, and mentor, how to inspire, empower, and guide others.

Mm-hmm. Oh, so that is a sensei leadership. And leadership as we know it is hierarchical. We usually look up for leadership.

Oh yeah.

But you come from a different perspective.

You know, one of my masters, Master Yong Xuanming, who I quote all the time, I think he's one of the world's greatest living philosophers and had the pleasure to study with him, I think about 10 years off and on. And he explained, in fact, that the symbolism of a bow, right? When we bow to one another as martial artists, and of course they do that a lot in Asia as well as a greeting, and he talked about that as elevating the other person, right? So I lower my head, I lower myself to you, see, and I'm elevating you. Now that speaks really well to our philosophy of leadership at all levels, right? What is a leader? Now in order to really talk about this sensibly, we have to make sure we agree on the terms, and these terms are very badly used and very badly misinterpreted. You know, what is a leader? What is leadership specifically? Admiral Grace Hopper— it's interesting that we're talking, you know, at the end of International Women's Week, right? Admiral Grace Hopper was one of the— well, she was the first woman to gain the highest title, the highest rank in the United States Navy. And several years ago, she said, management is about things, leadership is about people. And for too long, we went overboard on the management and forgot about leadership. I've never heard anybody say that better, right? That idea of leadership is it's an action that has nothing to do with rank, title, or position of authority. It means— well, first of all, it goes back to those three words we used: inspire, empower, guide. You don't need, right, you don't need rank or title or even permission to do that. We can all do that. We can all do that at any level. We can do that for other people, right? And then, uh, you know, the idea of leader, that word itself, that gets, I think, misused too much. In fact, a lot of people challenge me and they say there are too many leaders in the world. I say no, they— we can't have enough, but we have to know that we're talking about the right kind of leader. Again, that person that leads by example, that inspires others, guides others. But also, too many people confuse leader with, well, with the right title or position of authority. But too many confuse leader also just with someone who's charismatic or attractive or popular, right? Or they confuse leader with a high performer, and that gets very dangerous. You know, all over the world we hear, you know, one of the key issues in leadership today is that too many people are promoted solely on performance and don't have the skill sets that we're talking about to really, you know, to really lead people effectively, to inspire them, to empower them, guide them. I hate to keep coming back to those words. I don't want to sound redundant. No, actually, I'm going to change my— I don't hate to come back to those words, but I do apologize for sounding redundant. We have to keep revisiting these things. We have to keep reinforcing these fundamentals, right? Yeah. So that's what it's all about. Once we understand what leader and leadership means, then we can go forward constructively and support and develop this type of leader.

So what you're saying in a nutshell is since leadership is not about title or your position in the office, anybody can be a leader. Or anybody ought to be.

Oh yeah, you know, I strongly believe there are only two types of people in the world today. There are leaders and those who refuse to be. That's it. Again, it has nothing to do with rank, title, or position of authority. Now it would be nice if all managers or all people in position of authority were also effective leaders, but we know that's not true. I mean, you know, you have tremendous leaders right on the front lines of every organization because they are people who inspire others. They lead by example. They share their knowledge, their wisdom, their experience with others. So they guide them and they empower them to do a good job. They encourage one another. You see all these things that we're talking about. And that can happen at any level. And of course, on the flip side of that, right, I think we can all agree that there are plenty of people with a lot of power and authority who are just plain lousy leaders.

Jim, you also talk about human-centric leadership. Mm-hmm. What is that? Expound on that.

Yeah, thank you for asking that question because it ties everything we've been talking about together. Okay, first of all, you know, human-centric leadership leader is someone who puts people first, right? Makes sense? Now, don't get me wrong. Management is important. It's just not leadership. It's equally important in running a business. It's just not leadership. So, human-centric leadership has some key qualities. First of all, it goes back to those words we keep talking about. It is someone who can inspire, empower, and guide. This is critically important because the research is absolutely crystal clear on this. People perform at their best when, and only when, they know their leaders care about them, right? When they know their work has meaning, and when they have a reasonable expectation that they can learn, grow, and develop, that they can advance their own lives. Now, to accomplish this, leaders need emotional intelligence, strong interpersonal skills, and they need, you know, a strong— and I'd say even more important— an accurate sense of self-awareness. Of how they feel about themselves, but also how other people perceive them. And we call this type of leader a human-centric leader. In the dojo, we call that person a sensei. It's the same thing. So again, it's nice to be able to say this. Most of what I teach about leadership draws from my experience as an actual sensei. That's what I spent most of my life doing. And basically what I'm doing is helping, like I said, helping leaders become the sensei too. So that they can inspire, empower, and guide others. But that's what it takes. A human-centric leader is a leader who puts people first.

And we are back to inspire, empower, and guide.

Always, right? Always. Yeah, yeah. I hate to say we stumbled on those three words because we stumbled on them after, you know, some 20 years, 30 years of research, right? But those are the most fundamental roles of a leader or purposes of a leader: inspire, empower, and guide. It's interesting too, you know, how do you achieve that? You have to lead with courage, compassion, and wisdom, which again points back to the human-centric aspects of leadership. And when you do that, you earn the respect, the trust, and the loyalty of the people you serve. And that's critical because those— I say those are the three most essential assets that a leader can develop, right? And the question I always ask is, what could you possibly accomplish without them? If you don't have the respect, trust, and loyalty of the people you serve, then you're not getting the best out of the people that are around you, right? And let's face it, as leaders, none of us are doing it alone. That's why we're leaders, right? Because we're trying to rally other people to a common cause. It's all, you know, it's about transforming me into we. Isn't that what the leader of a great organization does?

One of my clients asked me, or rather, this was their comment. She said, you know, one of the top CEOs in organizations in Nairobi here, she said, I want to eliminate the word just from my staff's vocabulary. I am just an employee. I am just a middle manager, I am just an assistant, I am just this. She says it seems to cripple them and keep them in a certain little box where they cannot, they are not proactive in anything. What would you say to a leader who desperately wants to eliminate this just? And probably, where does that just come from?

Well, the first thing I'd say is I admire this person. Because that's an important thing to work on. That's an important thing to identify, to eliminate that word "just." So, I definitely admire this person and her perspective. That was terrific. Now, how do you go about accomplishing that? One of the things we finally arrived at is this: there's differences between someone who identifies solely as a manager and someone who identifies as a leader. And here's 3 key areas. For example, a manager will try to motivate, where a leader inspires. We're back to our keywords again, but here's the differentiation, right? A manager will delegate where a leader empowers, and a manager will drive or push where the leader guides, you see. So you can only really lead the willing, right? Our definition of a genuine leader is someone with the ability to attract and serve willing followers, an emphasis on the word willing, right? So if someone's unwilling, well, then we have another decision to make, and sometimes it means we're going to let them go, right? We're going to fire them because they may be negatively impacting the people around them as well. Nobody likes a negative attitude, negative mindset. So to eliminate that word "just," it's to focus on those people who will— you have to provide the genuine opportunities, everything we just talked about, right? Opportunities for advancement, opportunities for, you know, for growth. I think it was Dan Pink who did a global study to identify what were the 3 key motivators, and he came up with autonomy, mastery, and purpose, right? So people want some control over their lives, there's the autonomy. They want Mastery. They want to be able to grow, learn, and develop. And that's beautiful because that's a perfect imprint to our martial arts definition of that word, right? And then that sense of purpose, that sense of purpose. So once we can identify people who really want to embrace those opportunities, then we can bring them along. Now specifically, it goes right to what we talked about when we talked about leadership at all levels. There is no just, right? All our roles are important and valuable. I don't care if you're sweeping the floors or you're sitting in the corner office running the company. We can't run an effective organization without everybody really embracing the common cause and purpose, and without everybody, you know, really working in harmony, right? So it's a matter of that. That's one thing we can do as leaders is make sure people know they're valued at all levels. Now there's a little caution with this, and we just ran into it at a workshop this past week. Very interesting. Somebody brought me a challenge, and she said, I have somebody that I'm mentoring, and and this person, I want this person to take over my job because she wanted to advance and do another project, right? He said, but I can't get her to do it. She doesn't want to promote. And my question to her was, how good is that person in the role she's at right now? She said, wonderful. She's the best we've ever had. I said, and she's happy. She's satisfied. She said, yeah, she doesn't want more money. She doesn't want the title.

No.

I said, then why are you trying to force her to promote? Right? She is a leader exactly where she is. She's inspiring other people. She's influencing other people to do their best job. She serves without question, right? She serves people up and down the hierarchy you talked about. And so she's a very, very valuable person in that position. Again, we're not confusing rank, title, position of authority with leadership. So why promote this person, right? So I love the fact that this person, this leader, is eliminating the word just. And I'd say lead by example, right? The less you use the word, the less other people are gonna use it, right? You're not just the janitor, you are the janitor. And we really appreciate, in fact, that's a funny little sideline because I was, you know, you fly a lot too. And I was in an airport as we were traveling last week. And this man was in the airport restroom doing a wonderful job. The restrooms were so clean, which is rare in airports these days, right? And I thanked him. I said, you know, I said, you don't know how much it means to us as travelers to be able to come into a restroom and know that it's clean and it's safe. I really appreciate the work you did. And that man smiled. Oh my God, you would have thought I handed him $1,000, right? And that's the type of thing that we can do as leaders to make sure that people know that they're valued no matter what their job is.

Jim, we are planning for a CEO Leadership Forum at the end of this year. Looking forward to having you in Nairobi. Um, one of the CEOs— one of the HR directors told me that the CEOs do not see the return on investment on human-centric leadership or training. I think in a nutshell, Jim, show me the money. How is human leadership tying directly to the bottom line profits of any organization?

That's a very common problem. And it, you know, it's hard to get into all the specific data. We've done a couple of white papers and a couple of blog posts, blog articles for this. So we'll, we'll make sure that those folks get those links, right? And, but I can tell, I can summarize it. I can summarize it very neatly. First of all, too many people look for a strong ROI improvement, right? They want a big uptick in profit, and you're not going to get it with this. And I'm deadly serious about that. For one thing, it's because we tend to work with good organizations, right? They're already doing a lot of things right. Now they need to keep doing it. That's the trick. It's a discipline. These fundamentals need to be reinforced. They need to be taught all the time. They need to be taught to the next generation of people coming into the organization. That's how you preserve and keep that culture strong. The best companies know that. The best companies that we work with, they don't hire us to fix things. They hire us to keep them strong, to help good companies be great or better than they are, and to keep that upward trajectory going. Now, as far as ROI though, there are some interesting studies that have been done now. There's a book called Return on Character, and that's a terrific book to look to for this data. They show that companies that have this type of mindset, that embrace this human-centric, character-based leadership, will outperform competitors who don't by as much as 500 to 700%. Now that's an impressive return, you see. Wow. You're not going to see it quarterly though. That's the other factor. I think too many people today are looking short-term all the time, right? They want that quick turnaround, they want the quick return.

Yeah.

But you know, you look at companies, any greatly successful company, right? And I'm probably preaching to the choir. Over time, those companies have ups and downs. They have drops, they have troughs, but they've weathered those. They've weathered them, and a lot of times, they've come out stronger than before, as opposed to some companies. We've seen this a lot with the tech boom over the last 10 or 20 years. There are a lot of companies that have very quick upward trajectory. Then what happened? They imploded, or they didn't embrace this type of leadership, so they weren't ready to adapt. They weren't ready to counter and move with changing conditions. They weren't able to respond to the different needs of different people coming into their organization. So that's it. So let's look at it from the other side as well. You can definitely see it in the negative. And one of the big examples we use is, you know, it was a global company, one of the biggest companies in the world, and almost destroyed the American economy and heavily impacted the global economy when they went under. And that was Enron. Now when we look at Enron, and it's interesting because one of the principals who created that disaster was just released from prison just a few days ago. Most of the others actually have killed themselves over this whole debacle. But anyway, that's an example of what happens when you don't pay attention to human-centric leadership, right? This company, we can trace it to specific offices where individuals got greedy and they created a culture that that was focused on only short-term and very selfish returns with no regard to the people around them. And like I said, the impact— not only did they destroy their own company, which was a wonderful company for years and years, but they also impacted people across the United States and across the world with their bad behavior. So that's probably the most extreme example. We also talk a lot about the Wall Street fraud things, Volkswagen fraud, Wells Fargo, another global bank that has a lot of issues in that area right now, and you can always trace it back to that lack of human-centric leadership, the lack of caring, of compassion, of that long-range vision of caring for people. And, you know, they focused instead on the mechanicals, which are important, but you can see when you do that, you're headed for disaster. So you have to— and again, to imprint— so nice to be able to borrow from my martial arts life, right? If you are not disciplined, as an individual or as an organization. If you don't constantly reinforce these fundamentals, right, and support the people who live these fundamentals, then your ROI is going to go straight down. And it happens quickly when it does, doesn't it?

It does, definitely does. Because you will be in Nairobi, November 2019, to engage with corporate trainings in various capacities. There is something called TPS, Training Partner Cooperatives. How can smaller organizations with smaller budgets still benefit from your training under this umbrella you're calling Training Partner Cooperatives?

We're so excited about that because, yeah, the TPC program really evolved organically. It came from smaller organizations who were approaching us to access our workshop training and whatnot and ongoing training programs. We wanted smaller organizations to get the entire package, right, that a larger organization would. So a couple of them came to us and it was through an association. Interesting, again, we're talking on Women International Women's Week, right? National Association of Women in Construction here in the States, which is a fantastic organization. Fantastic. In fact, we're going to try to get you more involved with them. We had, we had several good discussions about that this week. But the, uh, they just came to us and said, can we partner with a couple of other companies and, uh, and bring you in for the workshop? And we said, why not, right? And not only is it a cost saving, which is, you know, which is helpful, I— that's, that's really good. I don't think that's the biggest benefit though. The biggest benefit of the TPC is that you're working with people outside your own, your own organization, right? So you get a different perspective, and we're creating a support network so that you can share your ideas, your thoughts, your strategies, to discuss leadership with people that are in a little bit different environment than you are. Because one of the dangers in leadership is that we become kind of siloed, right? We become kind of myopic. It's very difficult. You know, the cliché goes, what, it's lonely at the top? Well, it shouldn't be.

It's lonely at the top.

Right, it shouldn't be. It shouldn't be. We're really trying to break that myth apart because when we reach out and we engage with leaders that are in different environments different organizations and different cultures, you know, then it strengthens us. It gives us different perspectives. And that's so important because again, all over the world— and you know, it's happening greatly in Kenya right now, as well as every place on earth— even small organizations are really operating with and serving a very diverse group of people, right? We've got people moving to our locations from everywhere in the world, and we're connected globally, so we're doing business all over the world. So those different perspectives are really, really useful. And, you know, one of the benefits to us as individuals— let's be constructively selfish for a second— to prevent it being lonely at the top. Hey, sometimes, you know, we need to just vent and talk to one another and share our problems and share our challenges, right? And have somebody just pat us on the shoulder and say, you know, you're not alone, I've been through that too. You know, that's hugely helpful to us as leaders for our, for our mental health, right? And our physical health as well. So, so we're, yeah, we're very excited about the TPC programs and I know you've got a couple of those prospects happening in Kenya and we're so excited about that. I really think that's, that's going to be a great program going forward.

I want to, you know, to share with you the feedback I've had so far that locally we are looking forward to getting a global perspective on leadership. On human-centric leadership. Uh, and I say global perspective, uh, deliberately because we don't do business as Kenya alone, right? Trade with the globe. So most, or rather let me just say all, 100% of the organizations I've talked to here, uh, are very open and hungry for a global perspective, a global injection of what you've put over on leadership, specifically human-centric leadership. So we are looking forward to actually, uh, learning a lot from that angle.

and incorporate, right, the different perspectives, different skills, different ideas that we have. But it can also drive us apart if we allow it to. So the important thing, like I said, is to engage in a meaningful conversation with leaders all over the world at all levels, at all levels, right? There's no just We can't put anybody in that bucket. And when we do that, like I said, we're finding that we're really tapping into our basic human desires, ambitions, and needs. And that doesn't change. I haven't been— you know, we worked in Cuba last year, getting to know more about Kenya from you and from some of our other friends there, you know, all over Europe. I'm not seeing— with these fundamentals, I'm not seeing any differences. The rest of the differences, like I said, make us interesting and bring a lot of different perspectives, and that can be powerful. But it takes discipline for us to be able to work with people across those differences. And that's why we have to— right, that can't be accomplished with a management process. That needs a human-centric leadership approach. So we look at each other, appreciate each other, and respect each other as people, as human beings. And that's when we're going to do our best work together.

One of our clients here is very big on emerging leaders. They are developing leaders internally, and I know you're very passionate about young people and bringing them into leadership. Tell— you can, you know, say something about why we need to train and work with emerging leaders.

Yet again, that's the problem we hear all over the world, right? I'll flip the question over to you. What's going to happen if we don't? Right? Who's going to be there? And it's interesting.

Who's going to be there after we're gone?

Who's going to be there, right? And that's something that needs to be paid attention to.