2378 - Compassionate Leadership and Grief Support in the Workplace with AGRA’s Carl Manlan

0:03Welcome to the Thoughtful Entrepreneur. If you're committed to growing your business by serving audiences with generosity and real expertise, you're in the right place. This is a daily 15-minute show featuring leaders who believe real impact comes from generosity, not hype, which means as a listener, you're going to get the good stuff. In fact, we created podverified.com to give thoughtful leaders like you free tools to show up better on podcast stages like this one. That includes your free podverified score, free podverified guest training, a free media kit builder, and so much more. It's the first ecosystem of its kind built by podcasters who genuinely want to help guests thrive and grow in podcasting.

0:46Visit podverified.com if you'd like to be featured as a future guest. I'm Josh Elledge. Let's get into it.

1:20have you. Thank you, Josh. Very happy to be here. Yes. Before we get going into your superpowers and talking about the book, and also you have a podcast. I always love to point that out. It's called Inside the Blueprint Podcast, which I'll ask you about that as well. But Carl, before we get into all of the business and impact that you have in the world, you always love hearing what high-level leaders are doing for fun on the outside. Most leaders are very multi-passionate. So tell me what you're into right now or kind of geeking out on. So I started a very simple but I think powerful exercise, which is a writing course, where for 120 days, every day for 30 minutes, I have that moment to pause and go through a very dedicated process.

2:13And it's a friend of mine. I was having coffee with in Cape Town last week, and she says to me, you should check this out. and I registered. But, you know, sometimes when you're in business, you kind of sort of rush, rush, rush. But we hardly give ourselves our time to pause. And this morning exercise was looking for the inner child. You know, and going back to the things that, you know, and I remember as I was going through this, I remembered something that I wrote when I was in primary school, which was about a fire that was lit in the savannah because somebody threw a cigarette butt. You know, so suddenly you sort of connect to things that are very, very important to us as leaders, not to forget the inner child.

2:54So 120 days started on the 1st of January, 30 minutes, which I think I want to invest in myself to do something which is very different. And maybe at the end of these 120 days, I'll have a new book. Well, I'm sure that that led into, yeah, tell me more about your book, I Can Breathe. So, I Can Breathe is my debut poetry collection. And I started writing it when I was in San Miguel de Allende in Mexico at the Writers' Festival. Because we were sitting around the table on this workshop and it was about grief. And we don't speak about grief. Yet, it's something that we equally share. So I felt when one of the participants was telling the story about the challenge he has every time he introduced himself, he said, I have to say that when I introduce myself, I say I have three daughters and people often look for the third one.

3:54But if I don't say that I have three daughters, I feel I'm betraying the memory of my daughter that passed away. And as I listened to him, I said to myself, why is it something that is so universal? we are not able to speak about it in a way that really reminds us that you can only grieve if you love. That's the only reason why there's grief, because there is love. And love doesn't die with a person or the animal, the pet, and so on and so forth. So really, it's a path between losing and learning, you know, to live with loss, exploring our memory and sort of a gift, intergenerational gift that we have.

4:33And that's what the book has been about. And it's been interesting to see the reaction from different people that have come across because we all experience grief in different forms. And that's where you come from. Yeah. You know, grief is an interesting thing, too. I've actually had a couple of clients who recently, one just lost their dad, one just lost their mother-in-law. And, you know, I think that I think most of us could probably do with a little bit of reflection on what it means to both maybe talk about our grief in a setting where we feel, oh, I don't want to bring this into a conversation with my business partner or my team because, you know, their own fears.

5:19I don't want to bring anyone down. I need to be tough. And at the same time, too, Carl, I think that for many of us, we don't know what to say and do. And maybe it's our own awkwardness that perpetuates this cycle of it's not safe to express our grief in certain circles. Can you maybe expound on that? So let's take a different example. A small business objective is to breathe change, economic change, social change into people by running successfully that business. So different because someone that does not have access to financial services, somebody that doesn't have access to food and so on and so forth, is grieving in a certain way.

6:09So when a small business comes along and fixes that problem, it's that economic breath and social breath that is happening. But of course, we don't see that. We think about the money that is being made, the money that is being lost. But again, if you look at the words that we're using here, we talk about gaining and losing. It's about love and it's about grief. So it's in everything that we do, in a way. So to me, engaging on that is actually an opportunity to connect as humans. and really understand that if you're a CEO and if I'm the analyst, we both grieve differently. But that's something that we share.

6:49And it opens up the opportunity to speak about who we are as humans and not necessarily the title that we hold. Because the CEO probably doesn't grieve differently to an analyst. The experience is different because of the personal experience, but the grieving remains the same. And that's how I see it. Yeah. So if I'm a leader and let's say I have someone on the team and I know that they just experienced something traumatic, what can I do, not just in that moment, I think more importantly, what can I do to inspire a culture where people feel safe around whatever they're experiencing? So, for example, obviously, I think most of us hopefully are very, very empathic in a listen.

7:44You know, when there's something personal like that, your work stuff, that can get handled. Don't worry about that. Like, you know, I think anyone that has a culture where we are not empathic to someone's trauma or someone's, you know, where they're going through something. And hopefully we're communicating that regularly. but maybe you could give a couple of other ideas to leaders that are listening to our conversation right now. The first one, you need to give space because grief is a process. You know, I mean, even after losing my father 21 years later, sometimes I get emotional. You know, when you sort of get that moment where there's something that you want to share with him, but he's no longer there.

8:30So the person as a leader, you need to give that space. and make sure that your colleagues understand that that conversation is possible in the office. Because when you walk into the office, you do not leave grief at the door. You come in with grief and people around you need to be able to help you and assist you to understand that you still have to deliver on the work. But there are some elements that you are struggling with and that's okay to be able to speak about it. I'm not saying we need to be slacking because we are grieving. I'm saying we need to feel comfortable and confident that this space will understand that because I'm grieving, I may need probably a little bit more attention on things that I'm doing.

9:10And somebody may be willing to spend a bit more time to sort of help me on some items that I wish usually would do it easily because I may have made a mistake in that moment. So to me, it's more saying as a leader, first acknowledge the fact that it's a commonly shared experience. And in that moment, if you have not experienced it, It's an opportunity for you to understand how this person is going through and most importantly, is giving the space and allow that person slowly to be comfortable to speak about it as they go through their own emotions. So what is the outcome that you would expect someone who reads your book, I Can Breathe?

9:50And by the way, it's all linked from your website, CarlManlenOfficial.com. But what would you expect the outcome by the time? Because again, we're talking poetry. I don't know how much poetry our friend who's listening to our conversation reads right now. Admittedly, I don't read a lot of poetry. I read a lot of nonfiction. But what I know is that, you know, works like poetry and, you know, narratives and, you know, and great works of fiction, they inspire me from the inside out. And so I just want to put that out there. I'm basically just externally processing here, reminding myself I probably should read more poetry.

10:32But Carl, what would you hope the transformation that would take place from someone who reads I Can Breathe? I think start with a title. I chose the title using I, meaning when you read it, it's about yourself. It's about you as an individual. The fact that you do something unconsciously breathing. And if you are breathing, it means that you are still alive. It means that you have an opportunity to achieve things that are still possible, reachable and within a realm of possibilities. So as you read this book, you need to understand that you can go through grief, you can go through loss, but as long as you are breathing, you have an opportunity to achieve more.

11:16And the person that you love that is lost is physically lost. But the love that you carry and the ability for you to achieve more is the best way to honor the memory. And that to me is really what I would want people to read to understand that when somebody dies that you like, even if it's your pet, you can grieve a pet, but you have to continue to do what you have to do. It doesn't mean that you need to replace that pet. You know, even if you replace the pet, it will never be the same experience. It will never be the same feeling. You can't do this with human beings. Once your dad is gone or once your mother is gone, she's gone.

12:00but you have a community that you built that is there to continue the journey and then ensure that you keep the values that you learned from your parents i mean some people may say you know what my parents never taught me anything i don't think it's true regardless of the type of parent that you had there's something that they taught you and you need to figure out how do you take this forward even if you think it was bad how do you don't repeat the same mistakes so when you read the book, it's really about you as an individual, understanding that because you are still breathing, you still have an opportunity to do some good in the world.

12:38All right. Carl, can you tell me a little bit about your work? You're Carl Manlin official. I know that you are gainfully occupied with your role with AGRA, and you're welcome to touch on that just a little bit. But I'm curious, obviously, aside from the book, if there's other ways that folks can engage with you. So my professional career has been about small businesses. It's been about ensuring that people have access to financial services, access to better health. And as I'm moving into agriculture, it touches all these elements. You need to be healthy. You need to have access to financial services because agriculture provides nutrition.

13:22So if you think about the spectrum, it's how do we make sure that the resources that we have available to us to be more productive as human beings actually have the right nutrition to be able to evolve, to be able to support economies. In the African context, I think people that are thinking about, is our emerging market safe place to be? Is it the right thing to do. You have 1.4 billion people on the African continent. And I like people to think about the Africa we have and not always about the Africa we want. Because the Africa we have means that you have young people that are creating things that are not necessarily visible.

14:05And here's an opportunity to help them with the expertise and the skills that are available to actually not repeat some of the mistakes and really move forward in a way that with the experience from different parts of the world, they can see. I mean, technology allows them to do that today, but with better access to capital, both human capital and financial capital, we can sort of accelerate that process of making 1.4 billion people happy on the African continent. And that to me is very important. That's really, really what's important. One last thing. I know you've got a podcast. It's called Inside the Blueprint Podcast, hosted by you and your daughter, Claire.

14:48Absolutely. So for a friend that's listening, go ahead and search for Inside the Blueprint Podcast. Of course, we have a direct link to it in our show notes as well. If you just click around on the information icon or click around in your podcast app right now, you'll find that direct link. Carl, what do you talk about in that podcast? So before I get to that, it was born out of the idea of having intergenerational conversation. young people. So when I look at my daughter who's 13 today, I tell her when I was 13, I had no way of imagining a bigger world than where I was growing up in Abidjan, Cote d 'Ivoire.

15:21There was no internet. So my worldview was limited to what my teachers, my parents were telling me what I could pick up in newspapers. Now, fast forward to this generation, they have access to internet. She can compare herself to any other child that is around the same age around the world. So I wanted to make sure that we have a conversation between two generations, a father and a daughter. And I made it specific to ensure that it's written co-host at the bottom and not me with a list of things that I've done and her just saying Carl's daughter. No, because it's about shaping the identity of a young person to be comfortable to speak with adults about different topics.

15:58So we move from identity with a French Comoran artist to talk about skills development with an Ethiopian-American, to speak about health with a Nigerian-American, and to speak about, with Cape Verdean, to speak about small businesses in Africa. So all these episodes were chosen as topic for her to start to see the spectrum of possibilities as she's thinking about, okay, what do I want to do? And I discovered through that postcard that she's interested in interior design, which I actually didn't know. but that's one of the things that came. And then we invited the French Moroccan interior design to speak about their own experience.

16:38So that's season one. We're thinking about season two, but in the midst of a move and all this stuff. So we say, you know what, we'll probably do it once we are settled in Nairobi and make sure that she has an opportunity to see the transition from living in the UAE and living in, in Nairobi. I love it. Carlmanlanofficial.com is the website, your book. I Can Breathe. I just downloaded it. Thank you. To our friend that's listening, if you happen to have Kindle Unlimited, you can grab it right now. I can't promise for when this episode airs, if it's still available there. It will be available. You can also catch it on regular Kindle, paperback, or hardcover.

17:19Carl, again, your website, carlmanlanofficial.com. Thank you for the great work you're doing. Thank you for the podcast that you're doing with your daughter. That sounds awesome. Can't wait to sample that. Carl, thank you so much for joining us. It was a pleasure.

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