Christie Smith on How to Embrace Human-Powered Leadership | EP 594

0:00Coming up next on PassionStruck. We are living in unprecedented times and have been living in this for the last five years, really, since the pandemic and maybe a little bit before that. And what makes it unprecedented? Well, we are seeing a super cycle of change happening in the market, happening in our sociopolitical and economic conditions around the world, which really challenge leaders to fundamentally have to lead differently. Welcome to PassionStruck. Hi, I'm your host, John R. Miles, and on the show, we decipher the secrets, tips, and guidance of the world's most inspiring people and turn their wisdom into practical advice for you and those around you.

0:47Our mission is to help you unlock the power of intentionality so that you can become the best version of yourself. If you're new to the show, I offer advice and answer listener questions on Fridays. We have long-form interviews the rest of the week with guests ranging from astronauts to authors, CEOs, creators, innovators, scientists, military leaders, visionaries, and athletes. Now, let's go out there and become PassionStruck. Hey, PassionStruck fam. Welcome to episode 594. Whether you've been with us for a while or you're tuning in for the first time, I am absolutely thrilled you're here. You're now part of a global movement dedicated to igniting purpose, unlocking potential, and creating a more intentional human-powered future.

1:32So let me ask you this. What if the greatest disruption in business isn't AI? It's a crisis of human connection. What if the leadership skills we once dismissed as soft are now the most essential powers for thriving in a fractured, fast-changing world? That's exactly what today's guest, Dr. Christy Smith unpacks in her groundbreaking new book, Essential, how distributed teams generate of AI and global shifts are creating a new human powered leadership. Christy is a globally respected leadership advisor, former managing principal at Deloitte, and has worked with iconic companies like Apple, Accenture, and more.

2:08Her insights have been featured in Harvard Business Review, the New York Times and Forbes. And today she brings her powerful perspective to PassionStruck. In this conversation, we explore how to lead with intentionality, empathy, and authentic power, even in a world that feels increasingly disconnected. We dig into why soft skills are actually power skills and how to develop them, how distributed teams and AI are challenging everything we know about leadership. We go into the new pillars of human-centered organizations, trust, well-being, and psychological safety, and how to create environments where people truly matter and thrive because of it.

2:43Christy doesn't just talk about theory. She brings real-world strategies for building purpose-driven cultures that adapt, inspire, and endure. But before we dive in, let's reflect on the interviews from earlier this week here on PassionStruck. On Tuesday, I was joined by Dr. Tasha Yorick to explore her brand new book, Shatterproof, a deeply insightful roadmap on how to move beyond grit and build true resilience. Then on Thursday, Dr. Gregory Walton shared the science of belonging, ordinary magic, and how small acts can create seismic change in our lives, classrooms, and communities. And if you're new to the podcast, we've created episode starter packs to help you dive deeper, exploring curated themes like emotional resilience, personal mastery, and intentional leadership.

3:27You can find those on Spotify or at passionstruck.com slash starter packs. Want more tools to grow intentionally? Be sure to sign up for my Live Intentionally newsletter at passionstruck.com. And if you'd rather watch today's conversation, check out our growing community on YouTube. Now, let's dive into this powerful conversation on what it means to lead and live with humanity at the core. Here's my discussion with Dr. Christy Smith. Thank you for choosing PassionStruck and choosing me to be your host and guide on your journey to creating an intentional life. Now, let that journey begin.

4:03I am so excited today to have Dr. Christy Smith on PassionStruck. Welcome, Christy. Hi. Right. It's great to be with you, John. Thanks. Well, as you and I were getting to know each other a little bit before the episode, I think we felt like kindred spirits. We both spent time in management consulting and in big four accounting firms and in tech companies. So we have an overlap in our backgrounds. It's kind of surprising our paths have not crossed before this. It is very surprising, in fact. I know you do a ton of work in DEI, and you have seen the transformation that's occurred over the past decade.

4:45What do you think are some of the brightest spots on the horizon? I think we are in really a tumultuous time right now. If you saw the news today. McDonald's just announced that it was pulling back on some of their DEI efforts. And many companies, I think, unfortunately, are doing that. And in some cases, obviously, they feel necessary to code switch and go to things like belonging and culture and to talk about those things. Now, I think that there's a really good outcome as a result of that. And I think there's a negative outcome as a result of that. The display by leaders of pulling back on DEI and calling it that, I think, engenders further disengagement of an employee base and on the attraction of talent that they will need and skills that they will need.

5:45Now, the bright side, I think, is that we've been doing the same things generally in our DEI efforts in corporations for 50 years, and the promise of more representation at the top and equity has not come to fruition. So we fundamentally must do something different. So given the place that we find, the crossroads that we find ourselves in today, I do think it is an opportunity for leaders to fundamentally rethink and recommit to the ideals of inclusion and diversity and not walk away from them and focus more broadly in the organization on things like engagement and culture and what leadership and skills are needed.

6:40So it's a double-edged sword for sure. So today we are going to be discussing your book, Essential, which congratulations on its release. I know what it's like to put one of these in the world. You must at this point be a little bit nervous and in full relief. You got that right. But so far, all interviews are a good reception. Well, it's fantastic. You got endorsements from Adam Grant and many other leaders, lots of great names associated with it to help bolster its success. Congratulations on that as well. So your book is really exploring this whole idea of human powered leadership. And I asked you that question on DEI to start out on purpose, because I think the two intersect and I wanted to get your ideas on that.

7:30I think they certainly do intersect, but let me give you some background as to why we wrote this book. We are living in unprecedented times and have been living in this for the last five years, really, since the pandemic and maybe a little bit before that. And what makes it unprecedented? Well, we are seeing a super cycle of change happening in the market, happening in our sociopolitical and economic conditions around the world, which really challenge leaders to fundamentally have to lead differently. When you look at the culmination of two wars going on in the world, most predominantly in the Middle East and in Europe, you look at the acceleration of technology, AI, automation, all of the learning systems, and you look at how they are impacting the way work gets done.

8:33You look at employee disengagement, which is the lowest that it's ever been, frankly. 54 % of managers themselves say they feel burnt out. And employee engagement and the lack thereof is costing us$322 billion globally a year. And then you add on to that, certainly the pandemic and health issues, but the silent pandemic that we're not talking very much about, which is mental health. And then add on to that continued supply chain issues. So there is a culmination of issues that are facing our leaders today in the private and public sector that we've never seen before in the kind of extreme that we're seeing it today.

9:26So we felt it was really important to write a book that provided a new roadmap for leadership. And that new roadmap has the need for leaders to lead the humans that they're leading, not necessarily always the outcomes or the technology and so on and so forth. It's interesting. I came out with a book last year myself, and I opened it up in many of the same ways. I was talking about this thing that I found called social cycle theory, where history tends to repeat itself. And I feel we are doing this major change where for a long time, people have worked in these big companies, but now people are waking up to the fact of how disposable they are and AI and other things are only making that come about in a quicker way.

10:21And so I projected that more and more people were going to become independent operators akin to what a blacksmith was or a printer back in the day, but now they're going to be using digital skills to do the same thing. And I don't think companies or governments are prepared for this onslaught of change that's coming. And so I completely agree with you that leadership is going to take on a completely different dimension. Is that pretty consistent to what you're seeing? It's 100 % consistent. We start out in the book very intentionally with what you've just articulated, what has been our history, what is repeating itself, what's not repeating itself.

11:04And again, what we have found, which I'm sure you found in your book, is that in the world we live in today with all of these headwinds that I just articulated, the kind of leadership that has existed in our organizations, meaning we have rewarded technical expertise and put technical experts in roles of leadership. Now, that doesn't fully go away, but it is not the kind of skills we need to lead people because people are no longer coming to work and checking their humanity at the door. They're coming to work with all sorts of pressures that are related to the things that I just talked about. And because engagement is so low in organizations and because there are so many distractions and because the people are not being trained and new skills are needed and new technology is needed, all of these things require a different kind of leadership.

12:10And that's the premise of the book. Not only does it require a different type of leadership, but it requires us as individuals to maximize the one gift that I think that separates us from everyone else. And that is we were built to become the ultimate learning machine. And I think it is important, regardless of what age you are, but especially for the younger generations, like my son, who's 26, and my daughter, who's soon to be 21, coming into the workforce to realize they're going to have to reinvent themselves countless time. And the only way to stay ahead of this onslaught is to learn to become someone who is capable of learning new things all the time and staying ahead of the curve.

12:58which means if you're a leader, you've got to do that and then learn how to lead those people. A hundred percent right. You also have to learn how to lead a distributed workforce. You also have to learn new technologies and how they should be used and what is the capacity of your current employees to learn and develop the skills to use those. You've got to give that time to those employees and not make it a side of the desk demand to learn new technologies in their roles. I think that the other thing that you mentioned before, which is something you articulate in your book, is this rise of the fractional worker.

13:40And this is the fastest growing part of our economy is those individuals who've decided, no, I'm not going to go into a traditional job. I'm going to go into the work that I feel passionate about, that I want to be engaged in, and I'll do it as a contractor. And many of the startups, you look at this phenomenal startup called A-Team, which is all about fractional technical workers. And these are technicians and technologists that have come from the brightest companies out there, from Google to Apple. They're now deciding, I don't want to work for those big companies, but I want to work on really interesting projects that matter.

14:25And so the fact that this part of our economy is growing rapidly is, I think, a commentary on the conditions that we have in our organizations today of low engagement. And, you know, what the New York Times or rather CNBC talked about last week as the great detachment of employees. I think that is a great setup for this deeper discussion in humanity and leadership, because what you're arguing is that it's essential to save the workplace. So I think where we need to begin this discussion is what does humanity and leadership look like and how is it different from leadership in the past? Let me start with some facts because this is not fluff, right?

15:14What we articulate and examine in our book is the notion of skills scarcity and that this is an economic crisis that we're in. If you think about the U.S. economy alone, and I'll talk about the global economy, but the U.S. economy alone needs to have 4.6 million workers enter into the workforce with the right skills just to maintain status quo. And it is predicted by 2032 that we will be in a 6 million person deficit of workers in our economy. If you couple that with global numbers like we are losing$8.8 trillion globally a year and lost productivity of employees and companies. Now, put that in perspective.

16:13$8.8 trillion a year is Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon combined. That's staggering. On an annual basis, we're losing that much to productivity. So this notion of employees and how leaders lead their employees is really leading to a crisis point, I think, in our economy. added to that is$322 billion of people who feel burnt out at work. That's an annual cost globally. Now take all of that. That says to us, well, what do employees require of us? If these are our realities, what do they require of us? So we examined and did research around what are the most prevalent things employees are talking about that they need from their leaders.

17:09The four are purpose, that companies live up to their rhetoric, that your insides match your outsides, that the work that those employees are doing is tied to the purpose of the organization, and it is made purposeful, and it lives up to its values. The second is agency. Employees want the ability to work where, when, and how they want to. And so that means a fundamental shift in designing work, in leaders needing to design work to meet that need. Now, it's not going to always happen for everyone. There are certainly parts of our workforce that need to be frontline. But how do you build predictability and flexibility into that?

17:57To our earlier discussion of DEI, people actually want the ability and the agency to define themselves in their own words, not be defined by several factors, which we do in organizations, title, color of skin, gender, sexual orientation, where you work within the organization. People want the agency to define themselves in their own words and do the work that they feel is purposeful. The last two areas that employees talk about are wellness. And we spent a little bit of time talking about that as well. And also connection. And now connection has become really popular in the press of late with return to office kinds of mandates.

18:46Here's where I think there is a failure of imagination in leadership. And certainly we found this in that leaders who are requiring return to office are hoping, and I get it, it so makes sense to my generation of leaders why somebody would do this, is that's where culture gets built. That's where productivity happens. Well, the evidence suggests something completely different. One in five employees in the globe report feeling lonely. One in six feel highly connected at work. One in five feel psychologically safe at work. So the reality that the rhetoric of I've returned to the office and this is where I get a sense of connection couldn't be farther than the evidence of the research we've done.

19:39It gets even worse than that. The belonging barometer, which is created by the American Immigration Council, recently published that 64 % of workers in the United States don't feel like they are seen or they belong in the workplace. And the studies on loneliness are showing that 54 % of people feel lonely at some point. These to me are symptomatic of a bigger issue that's going on. and the world right now is facing division. As you brought up, it's facing a whole shift in how we're working, how we're communicating with people. And a lot of what your book speaks to ties very closely with the work of Edward D.C.

20:24and Richard Ryan's self-determination theory, where they found that intrinsic motivation really was dependent on autonomy, mastery, and connection. So very much coincides with the four things in your book. But I think we are overbalancing on agency at the expense of connection in some ways. And where I'm going with this is, if you think about work for the past hundreds of years, many people found their best friends at work. Many people got married because of a work environment. There was like a family. So work in many ways, people would stay like my grandfather was at craft for 40 years. He worked with the same people for decades and decades.

21:17And if you think about how humans grew up, they really, we really started in small groups or villages. And for many, the work environment was another extension of that village. And people in your work environment, because they stayed in the same company for so many years, cared about you. There was this feeling that you belonged. And now it's almost like being a professional athlete where people are just leaving jobs at the highest bidder. And we've lost this connection. And the village is evolving so much that you don't have that same feel. And you couple that with the outsourcing that's going on.

22:00And then the post pandemic restructuring of the whole workforce, and the village is gone. It's now become a global village. So I put that all as a backdrop for the demands that are put on leaders today. It is so different from when I was leading teams at Lowe's and Dell, when we were dealing with offshoring, But we still had a huge amount of workers who were there. How does a leader start to approach this? Because when you think about it, it's just staggering what they're having to jump into these days. Well, this is where I think the great hope lies with our book, is that these realities in this perfect storm of forces against or creating chaos in the workplace, in our society overall, can be healed.

22:58And it can be, there is hope for the promises of fulfillment at work and the village, as you talk about, and community and connection with the right skills of leadership. Now, what we talk about is building a blueprint of what we call the emotionally mature leader. Now, where did we come at this kind of conclusion? Well, we looked very closely at the other leadership models that have been prevalent in certainly my lifetime and for generations. If you think about servant leadership in the 70s and then you look at emotional intelligence in the late 80s and 90s, these were great frameworks for leaders trying to understand themselves, right?

23:53Especially emotional intelligence. Emotional intelligence is a great tool for me as a leader to understand what my proclivities are in terms of my own emotional capabilities, right? But I can take an emotional intelligence test or course or what have you, and I can put those results in a drawer. It's not that I am being held account to them. We believe really strongly that we need to build on this idea of emotional intelligence, but move dramatically from that inward-looking self-diagnosis to an outward-focused model, which we call emotional maturity. Now, emotional maturity is built on a couple of key elements, the first being suspension of self-interest.

24:50In order for us to lead the complexity in the workplace today, to connect with our employees, to connect purpose to the work that is being done, we must suspend our own self-interest in getting that work done. Right? It's not about us anymore. And that is a key element we have found to great leadership. The second element is this notion of insatiable curiosity. In order for me to suspend self-interest, my interest has to lie on you. And that is understanding our employees by asking lots of questions, by taking time. Listen, I'm sure your schedule is like mine had been, which was get up, check my smart device and my email, and then meeting after meeting.

25:53And very little, and all of those meetings are about productivity and outcome. Very few of those meetings are set up to spend time with employees to really understand what makes them tick, what motivates them, what kind of work that they want to do. if the conversation allows and the employee has to allow it, what is going on with their life that is hindering any aspect of the work that they can get done? We need to be more curious as leaders. Interestingly, after we had submitted the final manuscript on the book, Jamie Dimon came out and started talking about curiosity as the number one leadership skill.

26:36Well, I think it's maybe not Not one, I think suspension of self-interest is one, but two is, okay, curiosity. The third thing is focusing on creating cultures of excellence. Now, creating cultures of excellence is really looking at how do you construct the work that needs to be done? And how do you take the team that you're responsible for and architect the work such that each individual feels that they are fulfilled, but know that their success is dependent on the rest of the team? And that there's this notion of, if you go back in the day with the Chicago Bulls when they were a championship team, I know what my role is on the team.

27:23Dennis Rodman's role on that team was to get rebounds, right? That's all he was supposed to do. The minute he started taking three-point shots is when he got benched because that wasn't his role. That was Jordan's role. And so the understanding of how do I architect this team and its culture to create that sense that we are a team and that everybody is contributing equally to that team. Christy, thank you for bringing that up. And I'm not sure what your experience was like, but when I was at Dell, the way that they operated was we had to have at least 12 direct reports and they typically wanted 16.

28:08And I remember I just got to this point where everything that I was doing was either like you're talking about looking at output, dealing with HR issues or dealing with the politics that were happening because we had forced rankings. So you knew 20 % of the people that you were working with were going to be gone, including the leaders you were working with. It just made it so difficult to find any time to truly be present. And I found one of the most important things I learned from being in the military was the greatest leaders speak with their feet and they are on the floor. They are interacting with the front lines.

28:52They're getting a pulse of everyone from the lowest person in the organization to the highest and understanding what the pulse of the organization is like. And so what I have been calling for, because most of my life I was a servant leader and I don't think it suits the environment today, is something I call a gardener leader, which is very similar to what you're talking about. Meaning similar to a gardener, you have to really nurture your crops, but you can't expect to stand over them all times. So I really call this eyes on, but hands off. And a key component of this is you got to inspire your people through a noble mission, what you were talking about with purpose.

29:38You have to put the team first at all costs. But one of the most important thing is you need to be ambitious. A leader in the future cannot have an ego or you're just going to go to the wayside. So I love what you're saying there. So thank you for creating this new model because I completely agree with it. I appreciate your words. And I do think it's interesting when we look at, you probably know this as well as I do. I've talked to hundreds, if not thousands of leaders who are in and still doing this today in transition from about five years out, maybe shorter period of time from retirement. And inevitably to a leader, they say to me, well, I really want to focus on my legacy.

30:30I want my legacy to be how much I cared about people and the culture I create and blah, blah, blah. It's never about I created billions for the company and created the best widget in the world, whatever. I have not heard that at all, right? What I've heard is I want my legacy to be about the people and the culture and the commitment and love I had for the brand, right? It's what we're suggesting with an emotionally mature leader is don't wait for that five years out. Don't wait until you start thinking about retirement. This is something you must do from day one, right? It's cultivating those attributes of suspension of self-interest, curiosity, thinking about architecting teams and constructing the way work gets done.

31:22moving from a focus primarily on productivity and financial metrics to the consideration of, yes, financials, but environmental, societal, your people, and what matters there. It really is a fundamental shift. And I'm not sure if you've heard of, I think that it's called the B Team. It's this organization that Sir Richard Branson was forming. Mark Benioff is one of the people on it. And what they were trying to do is to get the leaders of the biggest companies to stop making shareholder value and top line, bottom line, the major metrics that were governing whether a company was successful or not.

32:01So that sounds like it aligns with what you're saying. 1000%. I think we need more leaders like the two of them in terms of that kind of mission of the B Corp, right? Or the B team rather. That we would term as a great example of an emotionally mature leader. Well, I would agree with that. And I hope companies go that way because as those who are public, it is quarter by quarter and it's very difficult to get that out of the environment, which is why when I got involved in private equity, I liked working in that environment better because it tended to be, even though they were looking at a shorter duration, it tended to be longer term thinking because you weren't held to the same market demands.