Pullman Voices: John Amaechi

0:01As a leader, you have the power to shape the lives of those around you. but what are the skills you need to do that well? This is Pullman Voices, a podcast by Monocle Radio that offers fresh perspectives from cultural pioneers, business leaders and creative minds, challenging how we see and engage with the world. I'm your host, Tom Edwards. Today we're asking, what does it mean to be a visionary? And our guest is organizational educational psychologist and the founder of APS Intelligence, Professor John Amache. And so my job with most organisations is to say, this is who you say you are. Are you willing to keep that?

0:38Or do you want to change it? And if you're willing to keep that, are you ready to deal with the consequences of that? John grew up in Stockport in the north of England and spent most of the first 20 years of his career as an NBA basketball star, relocating from the UK to the US to fulfill his childhood dream. He played for multiple teams, but famously turned down a$17 million deal to play for the LA Lakers in order to stay at Orlando Magic, the team who'd signed him when no one else would. Integrity is a thread that runs through John's varied career. Since retiring from basketball in 2003, John's become a respected organizational psychologist and founded APS Intelligence, a consultancy dedicated to helping organizations cultivate high-performance, ethical workplace cultures.

1:28John's also the author of the New York Times best-selling leadership book, The Promises of Giants. Today, John Amache talks about the moments in his life that have taught him the importance of being able to lead people to positive change, the challenges in the current climate of DEI initiatives, and the frictions that we need to acknowledge in order to make progress.

1:58Can I ask you to start off with, John, just to tell us a bit about when you remember first seeing the values of great leadership in action? Was it as a school kid? Was it, you know, looking back to when you were tiny? Was it when you were older? When did you become conscious of the idea that someone could inspire with their leadership? I was seven years old. My mother was a doctor, a GP, family doctor, and I used to go on visits with her. I never got to see how she dealt with patients because they were up in a bedroom somewhere. But I did get to see how she interacted with family members. And it always struck me how she could transform the space that she was in, how she could make it so that you would enter the space where very clearly people felt they couldn't manage and couldn't cope.

2:45And she would leave this space no more than five minutes later. And five minutes in a house, carefully chosen words, the purposeful use of her attention and she delivered. And that's what I remember being my first instance of seeing the idea that an individual through their words, through their attention could transform a space. That was the Star Wars era, the 1970s. And so I was enthralled by Star Wars, indeed all science fiction. And so I thought that I had not, I don't know if they were magical powers, but I thought I had Jedi powers, because I thought my mom had Jedi powers. I saw the way that she would speak to family members who in one moment looked like they were going to explode from frustration.

3:32And I'd watch her de-escalate it in a matter of seconds. And I thought, this is her using Jedi powers. And I thought, if my mom's a Jedi, in all likelihood, I'm a Jedi. And that's the level I interrogated at that time. I went to my local library and I told my librarian, I told her what my mother did and that she was a Jedi and I needed some books about that. And she was the person who directed me to psychology. She said, I understand that this looks like Jedi, but have you thought about psychology? And so it was at seven years old, I decided to be a psychologist, not quite knowing what I was getting into.

4:07My perspective was, I had no idea where it was going to take me or even what it really meant for the future. But this idea that individuals can change the space and the experience of people around them, I thought it was intoxicating. I thought this is an amazing opportunity. I maintain that to this day. To this day, I'm extraordinarily excited about working with leaders and helping them to realize, by the way, you can and indeed are radically shaping the lives of the people around you. I think it's incredibly exciting. That appetite to embrace the positive potential of change, you seem to have to handle on that, seven, which is kind of incredible.

4:50But is that one of the core skills that you have developed throughout your whole career with all of its different twists and turns, do you think, over the years since then? I mean, I suppose there's a point where you realise that nothing remarkable comes without conflict. Nothing truly worthwhile happens without discomfort. And nothing that really moves the needle on the world around us happens without friction. for those of us who shy away from it, it is a fundamental disconnect from performance, for starters, but also it reveals the selfishness of many people. Because what happens in that moment where you decide, ooh, and this is in the smallest moments, right?

5:34It's when you see a coworker, and they've come from whatever your version of the break room is, and they've come from there, and they've got this lodged between their teeth, a nice juicy piece of veg. And you look at them and you see it and you realize instantly that this is going to lead to their humiliation and you say nothing because you have a sense of personal discomfort about it and so that to me is i think it's important for you to recognize the selfishness of it my personal discomfort overwhelms the need for me to act to avoid another person's humiliation or harm that's how you approach this thing about friction and and challenge and whatever else that's how you approach it.

6:14And that's interesting, John, because I guess, therefore, in order to be best equipped to help other people surmount that obstacle, one needs to have a level of resilience oneself, presumably. What people misunderstand about resilience, I think it's so important, because otherwise, you end up telling people, in dire circumstances, why aren't you more resilient, instead of looking at the circumstances and saying, why are you requiring people to be resilient? And so resilience to me is about how can you create boundaries that allow you to maintain some sense of control over your life? How can you save energy in key moments so that it can be focused in areas of more importance rather than less?

6:57How can you reduce the distractions that come from other people, whether it's the person next to you who's constantly asking you to take your headphones out so that they can show you a TikTok? or whether it's a boss who's checking for the 15th time if you've done that thing that you did 15 times ago. It's a set of skills and tools that allow you to manage the disruptions of the world around you. But it isn't without cost. All of those skills and tools cost you energy. So energy that might otherwise be applied to being brilliant is now no longer available. So anytime people are resilient, their performance is less well.

7:35It's less good. That is just objectively true. And what resilience in kind of the classical mindset is on many people, it should be considered how short the amount of time that your performance is depressed and how deep that depression is. And all of that is not just dependent on how amazing the individual is, but on how much auxiliary support they have at home from the workplace and from primarily their direct line manager, because that's the person with the greatest influence. John, we're talking a little bit in broad brush time today about visionary qualities. Do you think it's that capacity then to focus in and ensure that brilliance rather than being distracted or clouded by these other sort of attendant challenges?

8:23Is that what can unlock visionary potential? I'm not going to ask you to label yourself as a visionary, but I will say, John, for someone who, to my mind, embodies so many of these qualities and has done for such a long time. Is that part of it, that capacity to focus, to, I don't know, retain that control, focus it on those areas of brilliance? Absolutely. It is one of the qualities. It's made up by very basic components. Your ability to focus your energy and attention at the often moving target of the right thing to be working on in that moment, because it's not as if there's always one thing, especially in the short to medium term.

9:00There's often new things that you have to refocus on because of your circumstances. So it's that ability to focus. It's the ability to lever full effort in every moment. Sounds obvious, but most people's effort is as much as it needs to be to avoid observation, to avoid attention. So we do as much as we need to, to avoid looking like we're lazy, which is not the same as all the effort that you could possibly muster in a moment. But even that's not enough on its own. Effort has to be accompanied by execution. The idea that what you do is done excellently to the best of your ability. It's not just frenetic movement to convince people that you're working hard.

9:42It is full effort, but focused and executed in a way that delivers excellence consistently. Well, John, when you work with senior leaders, then they, I guess, when they're talking to you, they're acknowledging that they're not the finished product. They need to hone their skills further. Just to get into the mechanics of a little bit, how do you go about distilling the skills you have, the lessons that you've learned into usable, implementable policies, directions, attitudes for these leaders to then deploy in their own businesses, in their own lives? I suppose first I should say that I do not have all these skills.

10:21I know some of them through the research and some of them through examining amazing people, and I have some of them. most of the people who are in leadership positions are not great leaders. This is not a question of their intention or their will. Many of them wish to be the very best leaders. Many of them have seen poor leadership and its consequences and experienced it indeed. And they don't want to be more of that same. But they are elevated to leadership on the basis of their technical skills, not on the basis of their ability to do these amazing interpersonal and empathetic things. So they come knowing that they have deficits.

10:58And so my job is to help them really hone in on their self-awareness, build a sense of self-assurance in them. And self-assurance is not confidence per se, because confidence is highly overrated in leadership spaces and indeed workspaces. Everybody listening to this knows at least one leader that they have who would be so much better, and not just for them, but for everybody else if they were a little bit less confident. But self-assurance is the idea that you know in a granular and objective ways what skills and capabilities you have. But you also know in the same objective and granular way, not in a hyperbolic, self-critical way, the areas that you really have to work on.

11:37And then my job is to say, right, these are the things that we can work on that are in your control. These are the things that, based on your environment, would be especially important because the skills and capabilities we might work on for, I don't know, a director and a professional services firm might be different from someone who's leading a games team in a software company. And that's the approach we take. It's this idea of self-awareness, interpersonal skills, organizational influencing skills and tools. If we go right back to the launch of APS, tell me a little bit about the values you sought to instill at the beginning.

12:13And I guess if you're starting off, it's kind of you, it's your values. But obviously, as a concern like that grows and becomes more successful, and you have to delegate certain things to other people, you mentioned your super capable team. How do you ensure that you are instilling the values and that things are kind of headed in the same direction that you wanted them to head in when you started on the journey? They're iterative, I think. I mean, the values, if I'm fair, I think they very much look like me. And I think our values, especially as an organisation, might look odd to other people because we pair our values.

12:45And not just to get more words in, but because we think there's something about the idea that some things go together, but there's a theme that runs throughout them all. So we have things like care and belonging as a value because we recognize, you know, I'm a weird, odd, multiply identity person. And I would recognize that all of my colleagues are similarly so, regardless of whether the outside world would look at them and think, oh, you're diverse. We use that word a lot around people. And teamwork and accountability, We pair those two because people love the idea of teamwork, but they don't like the idea of the work that goes with teamwork.

13:20We say that teaming is a perpetual state of calculated selflessness. The best teams are those where people are proactively looking to make their life more difficult so that the entirety or another part of the team is enhanced. And that's why there are very few teams out there. There are lots of groups of excellent individuals, but not teams, not the same. And so these things have been built on what helps us thrive in this crazy world, what helps us compete against people with these massive brands and names that we can't match up to. And that's the type of stuff. What helps us support each other as colleagues?

13:59These are the ways that our values have developed. John, let's talk about this idea of getting clarity about what one wants to be. How do you help companies to understand that? Because I guess if everybody knew the answer, they wouldn't need to talk to you. So you're there to help them unlock that understanding. Again, do you reflect on how you worked out who you wanted to be? Talk to us about the mechanics of that process. Yeah, I definitely use tools that have helped me understand who I am more effectively. It works well with individuals. There's this technique called the soul in the dark. It's a question my mother asked me when I was young.

14:36I literally just started to play basketball. And the second I got home, I ran up to my mother's bedroom where she was lying and trying to rest. And I told her I was going to play in the NBA after my first 45-minute practice. and instead of telling me it was ridiculous or stupid because I was a fat kid who liked books and pie I'm still a fat kid who likes books and pie and instead of telling me I was stupid she looked she stopped she paused she propped herself up she turned off the radio she was listening to and she said would you recognize your soul in the dark and as a 17 year old the most frustrating thing she could have said because it was esoteric and I don't know what she's talking about and I've told you something serious and why aren't you listening to me?

15:18And she told me that people who want to achieve something unusual, a path less well trodden, one of the ways that they are stopped from that is by not knowing who they are. Not knowing what their skills and capabilities on the one hand, what their potential internal sabotaging mechanisms are on the other. And so we spent time asking questions about that. Soul in the Dark is the idea that because I am a six foot nine black man. I am easy to describe because I'm a psychologist, because I am an uncle and a father and all of these other things. But I haven't actually distinguished myself, even with the six foot nine black man part, from a huge swathe of people that you might be.

16:04So if you're not brother, mother, uncle, father, whatever, if you're not your job description, if you're not your height and weight and skin color, if you're not your ethnic origin, your geographic place of birth, if you strip this stuff away, what words could you use to describe who you are? Are you curious? Are you frightened of feedback? Are you compelled to want to change the world? What are you all about? And that's what you can do with the individual. I would say that it's different for organizations? Because if you look, most organizations have already told you who they are. So the challenge isn't helping them to understand who they are.

16:47The challenge is to help them meet the demands of that. And the thing that people talk about quiet quitting, and they talk about people's lack of engagement in work, and it's because the gap between what an organization says they are and the experience that people actually have is so wide that it's confusing, discombobulating. And so my job with most organizations is to say, this is who you say you are. Are you willing to keep that? Or do you want to change it? And if you're willing to keep that, are you ready to deal with the consequences of that? In this moment where we're getting rollback on DEI initiatives, in the face of evident common sense, we know more diverse groups of people around a boardroom table make a business do better, and so on and so forth.

17:31So if you follow the data, it tells you the answer. But that notwithstanding, Does a moment like this, when these initiatives are being rolled back, however counterintuitive that might be, is it actually an opportunity? Can we be positive and say, it's all the more clear then that corporates, individuals who focus on directing resource into these kinds of areas, having the kind of conversation we're having, you're going to cement your advantage. You're going to expedite your business's progress and advantage ahead of those who are missing out on the conversation. Ken, is it too soon to ask if there could be a silver lining to the current sort of slightly gloomy cloud and picture?

18:12Is there an opportunity here? On the one hand, no, because people are watching organizations who six months ago said that equity and inclusion and belonging and the dignity of all colleagues was important to them now turn around and say that it is not. and that is hard to recover from later on when they all go back to trying to do stuff when an administration shifts again or when it's convenient for them either politically or commercially it'll be hard to convince people because people have longer memories than corporations so on the one hand no on the other hand is there an opportunity for organizations who are going to brace this science who are going to say look we value as an organization cognitive abilities and competencies.

19:02We want business knowledge. We want experts with procedure. We want people with resource management skills and executive functioning. But we also recognize that emotional literacy, emotional regulation, interpersonal vigilance, the idea that you can behave in a way that is authentic to you, but is mindful of the impact you might have of others. And we're also going to embrace the fact that the world is not a meritocracy without casting any shade at all on those who have succeeded in this world, which isn't a meritocracy, will embrace the fact that it actually isn't as a matter of fact. Those organizations have a real opportunity now because there are colleagues everywhere, managers and colleagues alike, looking to find a new home with somewhere that is more congruent with them from an ethical integrity and values perspective.

19:51Let me ask you a little bit about what is required to deliver on some of the things we've been talking about? Because I guess the skills, the necessities, the urgency today is very different than that 10 years ago, 20 years ago, to state the obvious. So in 10 years time, how do you calibrate your expectations over that time period? And how do you gauge and assess and estimate and theorize what those same qualities to build success, to enable growth, to ensure that we're looking after one another, that that's effective over that kind of time horizon if we're sitting here in 2035 not 25 what do you think the tenor of the conversation would be maybe it would be very similar tell me how you make sense of that kind of time horizon i am 54 years old and i i'm experiencing the same things now as i walk through the streets of london or berlin as i did when i was eight in the 70s People like to talk about the cyclical nature of politics and perspective as if it has no human consequences.

20:57But it does. The amazing things about all the skills that I have is that they are no different than the skills for the apocryphal used car salesman. I can use the skills I have to help men going through midlife crisis to realize that a dalliance with their secretary is perhaps not the way forward, and a new car they can't afford is probably not the way. Or I can use them to encourage them to buy off me a car that they don't need and point them in the direction of the nearest bar or strip club. The skills that I have are the same. And so I can't tell how many Sith I might have produced in my time.

21:36But I know that all I can do is give them the skills and tell them about the consequences of how they use them. that's what I'll be trying to do for the next 10 years

21:53Many thanks to John Amache This is Pullman Voices a Monocle Radio production for Pullman Hotels This episode was produced by Holly Fisher and researched by Paige Reynolds I'm Tom Edwards Next time we speak to the urbanist Charles Landry Culture is who we are creativity helps what we can become. What are humans like? How do they feel things? What are their senses? And when you start from the human being, then you begin to get some of the principles. For more on Pullman Voices, head to Pullman's Instagram page at Pullman Hotels. And for more information and hotel bookings, you can visit pullman.accor.com.

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