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Starting and running a business or managing one isn’t for the faint of heart. You’re balancing internal and external forces in a continually changing landscape. You’re building strategies, and banking on the future – no matter what it holds. This is where Cadence Bank’s In Good Companies comes in. We share our wealth of knowledge, and insights from noted industry experts, to guide you through the forces shaping business today.
We’re back for Season 6, and this time, we’re setting our sights on the future of work. We’re asking the big questions, like:
What will your career look like in 2030? Or 2050, even?
How is ESG shaping the future of companies?
And how can we leverage AI to our advantage?
We bring together experts from across the board, from Silicon Valley to multinationals like EY, to help you stay on the cutting edge of business. And we get to know those who are building the future of our companies; because at Cadence Bank, we want to hear the human side of every success story.
Hosting our stellar range of guests this season is our new host, Ari Marin. He is a Cadence Bank Senior Vice President and family enterprise advisor, whose specialty is consulting with family-owned and small businesses. Ari’s idea of “good company” is being around creative, insightful people with unique and inspirational stories. For Season 6, he brings in his curiosity and ambition to In Good Companies, to lead discussions with our guests, and bring listeners across the U.S. all the information they need, in one place, in under 30 minutes.
Ready to launch into the future? Then join us!
[IGC] S6 Re-run - Love as a Business Strategy
[00:00:00] Mohammad Anwar: We were broke. We couldn't do any of those things. We had to find ways to build a culture just by the way we treat one another. And guess what? It doesn't take time. You just have to show up to the meetings and treat your teammates with that love and compassion and kindness, which doesn't cost anything. So, it doesn't cost you time. It doesn't cost you money. So those excuses are down the drain.
[00:00:21] Ari Marin: I'm Ari Marin, and you're listening to In Good Companies from Cadence Bank, the podcast, where we guide you through the forces shaping your business inside and out.
[00:00:43] Ari VO: Most of us spend 40 hours a week at our jobs, at least. That's half your waking life - Monday to Friday. Our most attentive hours, when the sun is shining and our coffee has kicked in -- we spend them with coworkers, colleagues, clients... BOSSES.
And how much better would we feel... How much more meaningful would our lives be -- if everyone loved going to work? If our companies were a place that made us feel valued… Excited? That's the vision from our guests today.
[00:01:12] Chris Pitre: My name is Chris Pitre and I'm the Vice President of Softway and the co-founder of Culture+, which is a subsidiary of Softway.
[00:01:19] Mohammad Anwar: My name is Mohammed Anwar. I'm the president and CEO of Softway and Culture+, I'm also the co-author of a Wall Street Journal bestselling book called Love as a Business Strategy.
[00:01:32] Ari Marin VO: Mohammad and Chris are just two of the minds behind the concept of "Love as a Business Strategy". I know -- it might sound crazy, but it's got potential to drastically change the corporate world. For the better. So this episode - while we take a well-deserved thanksgiving break - we're going to explore their ideas.
Today's episode of the show is a re-run. And it's a real love story. The kind with twists and turns, and redemption arcs! It's the tale of a leader who learns to love his team.... And how that appreciation can transform a company and the people behind it.
So I'll let Mohammad & Chris tell you their story. Which starts in 1999, all the way back... To the early days of the internet. When it was all so simple. Here's Mohammad:
[00:02:22] Mohammad Anwar: When I first started the company, I was 20 years old and I started it with my brother and some classmates from college. So, it was definitely the startup environment. The culture that was typical of startups were, you know, eating, sleeping, working day, night, hustling as much as possible and a lot of camaraderie. We take care of each other, we help each other and so forth. So that's how it started. But as we began to become successful and grow as an organization, our culture started to take a turn. And that had to do a lot with me as the CEO of the company. As we began to grow, we had over 300 employees within 10 years. I think success got to my head. And I started to model behaviors from other leaders of larger corporations that I had witnessed or interacted with. Our culture then took a turn to where it was more based on fear. I followed the command-and-control approach. It's my way or the highway approach. And led with behaviors that really created an environment of fear in the company. So, people were not showing up with their true self or putting their heart and passion into what they were doing. It was just, hey, do whatever gets us to get the paycheck and get the minimal work done. A lot of people would bring about feedback, but I wasn't willing to listen. Right? Because in my mind, this is what you need to do. This is how you become successful; this is how you make profits. This is what is necessary for the organization to be successful. I was also quite honestly trying to mimic quite a bit of the other organizations out there and say, but this is how it's done. So, I hear you, but this is business. So, I created that kind of an environment not knowing what I was doing.
[00:05:22] Ari Marin VO: By the time Chris joined in 2015, things had taken a turn.
[00:05:26] Chris Pitre: You had this organization of people who were skilled and talented, but you could hear a pin drop when you walked into the office. It was super quiet. The median age in our organization is like 32 or 34, something like that. So it's really young, but it's like you could hear pin drops.
[00:05:44] Ari Marin VO: The culture at Softway had soured. Literally. On a particularly bad day -- a dirty fridge in the break room lead to a.... particularly harsh email from Muhammad.... To the entire team.
[00:06:13] Mohammad Anwar: Well, the message was downright aggressive. It called into question people's home training. I accused people of being lazy with a lot of passive aggressive tone in there. I mean, not trying to rationalize why I wrote the email, but there were lunch boxes in there that had all kinds of let's just say it was like a science experiment going on in there. It was really bad. And I basically said, “Hey, look, it's a privilege for you to have a refrigerator here, so if you're not going to keep it clean, I have the right to take it away” like all kinds of threats. And then also threaten them to get to clean the fridge no later than the end of day and acknowledge this email. You know, in a very threatening tone.
[00:06:46] Chris Pitre: I personally did not respond cause I was like, you ain't getting that from me. I'm still Alice Pitre's son, so there's no way that we're going to do that. My honest reaction, if I were to be completely candid, was, he lost his mind, but somebody needs to help him find it. And me being this new hire, I'm not using the fridge, I don't understand the fridge politics. I don't know whose stuff is in there. I've never opened it, but now I'm being accused of being lazy. You know, my home training is all in question. So, he's brought my mom into this, right? And I'm sitting here like, oh my gosh, what is going on?
[00:07:20] Mohammad Anwar: So that email unfortunately got circulated with ex-employees, made it to Glassdoor, and it became the laughing stock… Look what the CEO of Softway is up to. And even in that moment, I still justified it. I rationalized it, and I was not willing to have it any other way. That's how blinded I was.
[00:07:41] Chris Pitre: My peers, who were other directors at that time, they were talking and they were like, Chris, we really think you should be the one to go and talk to Mohammad. I'm sitting here, like me? I just got here. I'm two weeks in and you want me to go and have a crucial conversation with the CEO, who I don't even know? And they're like, yeah, he'll probably listen because he doesn't know you very well. And I'm like, probably is not the confidence builder you think it is. I set up the meeting with Mohammad. It's a Friday at 4 p.m.; I'm like, if this does not go well, I get to leave and exit with dignity and without eyeballs. So, I got into that room and here I am, the new hire, having a conversation with the CEO about his behavior and how he's communicating, and I was just like, Hey, Mohammad. So, I want to talk about that email and I really want to understand, you know, what was your objective and what were you hoping to accomplish with that? And do you think there could have been another way to sort of get that outcome? And he looks at me and he's like, Chris, you don't understand. I know you're new here. You don't understand. I've been telling these people that they need to keep this fridge clean because this is a privilege. It's not a right. I don't have to give them a fridge. I was like, we’re going in the wrong direction. I was like, I'm about to be known as the person who got the fridge taken away.
[00:08:56] Mohammad Anwar: Oh, immediately I was justifying why I did what I did. I wasn't having it; I wasn't willing to listen to him. I was rationalizing everything and justifying my actions, justifying my email.
[00:09:09] Chris Pitre: Then I finally just ripped the Band-aid off and I was like, well, Mohammed, I'm just going to be honest. If we were at my last job, you would've gotten fired for sending that out, because that's not how we talk to each other. That is just not the way that you unite a team. That's not the way that you communicate. That's not the way you get people sort of committed to changing their behavior.
[00:09:25] Mohammad Anwar: I really had that realization moment, wait a minute, that doesn't sound right. Maybe I did do something wrong.
[00:09:31] Ari Marin VO: The fridge email opened Mohammad's eyes to his behavior. But it was nothing compared to what happened next. In late 2015, Softway experienced its "Darkest Day".
[00:09:47] SFX: Music in underneath
[00:09:48] Mohammad Anwar: You know, our company was on the verge of bankruptcy in 2015, 2016. Although we had had huge successes up until that point in time, and we had been in business almost 12 years, because of the culture, because of my behaviors, our company was on the verge of bankruptcy. And in order to keep the company from shutting down, we had to do layoffs. We had to layoff one third of our organization, almost a hundred employees, all in one day. The unfortunate thing is that we did so in a very dehumanizing manner. It was not something that I was proud of. I was having all kinds of doubts in my heart, at the moment, but I also was being told and reminded, this is how the corporate workplace is, this is how it should be done. So, I was just taking the guidance. I mean, still full ownership. I allowed it to happen and I did it. But at the moment, apparently this is the norm in the corporate workplace and that's how it should be done. So, we followed suit; we followed whatever was out there known to be done in terms of layoffs and mitigate any lawsuits, mitigate any legal consequences, speak as little as possible, just let them go. Right? Don't give any information. Don't divulge the why, don't say anything beyond X, Y, Z. Be stoic. Do it, get it done.
[00:11:12] SFX: Music crescendos, then ducks underneath
[00:11:14] Mohammad Anwar: All the people who were being laid off were asked to assemble in one conference room, one area. And then the people who were not getting laid off were asked to assemble in a different part of the office. And we announced all at once, gave them folders and said, you're being let go, there's boxes out there to go pack your stuff. The security guard will escort you to the parking garage. That was it. After that moment in time, I would say I hit the lowest point in my life. I did not know if I was the right person to continue to be the CEO of the company. I lost all my confidence. I questioned the existence of Softway. I didn't know if our company's doors would even remain open for a month longer. I hit the lowest point in my life at that point in time. For sure.
[00:12:00] SFX: Music finishes, and a little pause
[00:12:02] Ari Marin VO: It might be hard to have sympathy for Muhammad at this point. He was a bad boss. Callous - prone to angry outbursts. But in his position, Muhammad also felt isolated and stressed. He felt like a failure and didn’t know where to turn... But - he was about to have a life changing experience.
[00:12:37] Mohammad Anwar: A couple of weeks after the layoff, I received tickets to go to my alma mater's football game. I was looking forward to a distraction. I wanted to just forget about everything that was going on with the work and life, and I just wanted to go have a good time, and we were having a Cinderella season up until that point in time. So, I went to the game. We were ranked, playing another ranked opponent, but unfortunately going to the fourth quarter, we were losing by 20 points, playing with our third-string quarterback, and the stadium was emptying out. ESPN Game tracker predicted we had a 0.1% chance to win that night. I was disappointed as well. I debated if I should also leave the stadium and go home. But something inside of me told me to stay back, be there to watch the game. And I'm glad I did because I ended up witnessing one of the best comebacks in Cougar football history. We won that night with less than 30 seconds left on the clock, by 35 to 34. Watching the press conference of then rookie head coach Tom Hermann, who had taken us on a 10 and 0,record till that point in time. You know, one of the reporters asked him, Hey, what had led to the success that night or the resiliency in the comeback victory that night? And it's what he said that changed the course of my life. He said it was the love and support the football players had for one another. Genuine, you have my heart in your hand, kind of love. And that's the kind of love that is required to go win championship games. As he was saying all of this, you know, I was thinking and asking myself, do I love my team? Do I care for my team the way coach Tom Herman is describing? And the resounding answer that kept coming back was, no, I didn't; I did not care for my team the way he was describing. And that's when I had the realization that something has to change. And if I build a culture of love inside the walls of my business to emulate the success that the University of Houston Cougar football team was having, then I needed to change my behaviors and how I treated people and how I behaved with people. And that was the start of the journey.
[00:13:54] SFX: Music Transition
[00:13:55] Mohammad Anwar: There's a saying, I might butcher this saying, but you know, it gets lonely on the top. So, when you're a leader, one of the challenges that I think leaders face out there is the stress, the pressure of performance of the company, performance of their business objectives. They're not allowed to be vulnerable and open. They have to keep up this facade of being successful and being poised and know what they're doing. And that pressure of being artificial, of being someone that's not human and that's not really internally at your core, I think puts a lot of pressure on leaders And that's where a lot of the stress, the anxiety, the pressures come from. Yes, there's realities of business pressure, the realities of making payroll, meeting the business needs and so forth. Those are not something I don't want to undervalue. But a lot of it is also just manufactured and that, I think, is a big part of the burden that leaders carry. They're not able to be vulnerable and be themselves because they think that's a sign of weakness.
[00:13:41] Patrick VO: When it comes to love as a business strategy, some leaders worry about what they lose: power, respect, time. But leaders have so much to gain from a culture of love.
[00:13:54] Mohammad Anwar: Love as a business strategy allows leaders to be human, allows them to be vulnerable and be valuable like everyone else. It automatically takes away this pressure of being someone you're not. I'd rather be Mohammed, you know, and I'd rather be who I am as a person inside of work and outside of work. I want to be true to myself and not try to put on this other jacket when I'm entering the workplace. So, Love as a Business Strategy allows us to create a culture where your team members become your support system and you see each other as humans first before titles. You're able to now go into a workplace knowing that you're not alone on this journey. You have a lot of people around you who can support you, help you, and it makes your job a lot easier. So, there are a lot of benefits to leaders in following the culture of love. It is not the romantic type of love. It is the love where we can hold people accountable through trust and empathy. Love is not soft. But, it actually enables you to have tough conversations, tough love.
[00:17:39] Chris Pitre: For us, love is not always just about being nice and cordial and warm and happy go-lucky, holding hands and skipping through the daisies. For us, it's about really ensuring that people can say what needs to be said to get the thing done right. It means having the tough conversations. It means turning controversy and confrontation into effective and powerful conversations that actually might change the solution. It might open up an idea, it might open up a revenue stream. Right? And we have plenty of stories in our organization where one conversation that started out to be sort of uncomfortable, I don't think this is the way it should be, or I don't like this. Or this is rubbing me wrong. Turn into an opportunity, turn into a new partnership, turn into a better or deeper relationship with a client.
[00:18:30] Ari Marin VO: We all have something to gain from this culture of love. But when the relationships within your company have been difficult, it can be hard to bring about change. So how do you take that first step? How do you turn the page? You might want to start afresh, but people will only believe what they see. Take it from Mohammed and Chris.
[00:18:42] SFX: Inspirational, orchestral music builds underneath
[00:18:44] Mohammad Anwar: The day after hearing that press conference, we had a company town hall meeting with our entire organization, and I decided to tell them, I love you all.
[00:18:53] SFX: Inspirational music falls apart.
[00:18:55] Chris Pitre: It was like somebody passed gas in church. It was not good. Everybody was just, like what? And nobody trusted it. Nobody believed it.
[00:19:04] Mohammad Anwar: I got the strangest and the weirdest looks. People were rolling their eyes, like, is this the same CEO that just laid off one third of the company is now telling us he loves us? What is going on? So I realized that, wait, I needed to really stop with the declaration and I needed to first learn to walk the talk.
So, I went on a journey of just working on myself, trying to build a self-awareness of how I was being experienced by others and had to go on a commitment journey to try and strive to change my behaviors. The reality is the leaders have a magnified influence on the culture of any organization. Their behaviors set the tone. So, from the topmost leadership, if you want to see an effective culture transformation, it has to begin with leaders. Everyone has to get on board, but the starting process has to be with leadership. It has to begin with the topmost leaders embracing the culture of love and behaving and acting in ways that represent it. Because that sets the tone, it gives the permission, it gives other people the inspiration to follow their footsteps.
[00:20:21] Patrick VO: With his misguided "I love yous" - Mohammad had stumbled upon an important lesson. Culture isn't what you say, it's what you do.
[00:20:37] Mohammad Anwar: Leaders look at culture as, you know, the ice cream shops, the free food, the table tennis, all of those things as the definition of culture, a great culture. The reality is those are just perks and benefits. They're not culture. And that is the biggest misconception I have found. It's like, well, we have Taco Tuesdays and we have goat yoga on Thursdays. I'm like, that is not culture. That is just benefits. So, culture is ultimately the culmination of how we behave with one another, how we treat one another. That emotional environment that we create is what culture is and it is an intangible. Think of it this way, I know we've heard of the saying “Culture eats strategy for breakfast” by Peter Drucker, and we are very fond of that saying, and we truly believe in it. But at Softway and Culture+ we have a saying, “If culture eats strategy for breakfast, then behaviors eat culture for lunch.” Because at the end of the day whatever culture you aspire to build, it starts with the culmination of how you behave with one another. So, behaviors are the foundation, they're the bottom line that makes a difference to your financial statements. The key to changing culture or strengthening culture is changing behaviors of people.
[00:22:05] Ari Marin VO: Chris points out that emotions aren't behaviors. He made it his mission to help Mohammad with that.
[00:22:11] Chris Pitre: I truly believe that when you're angry, everybody behaves differently. But unfortunately, especially in the workplace, everyone sees anger in one form of behavior, which is usually yelling and aggression. But when you're not angry and you're not aggressive, you can be passive, you could be quiet, you can ice people out, you can play mind games. I will be sarcastic with you. I will say the sharp biting comment that just shuts you down. That's where I go when I'm angry. And so, once I understood that personally, I just saw someone else. Maybe he wasn't as self-aware with his anger, but also, I wasn't there to judge. For a while there, whenever he was triggered, we just had this agreement that he would exit the room and I would follow and we would just talk about it. And after a while, he didn't need that because he found ways to emotionally regulate.
[00:23:01] Mohammad Anwar: Yeah I think we have to understand our role as a leader. What does it mean to be a leader? Our job is to make other people's jobs easier. Our job is to make them more successful, set them up in their career, make sure that they're doing the best work of their lives. Our job is to remove those obstacles, empower them and give them the necessary tools, resources to be successful. But as long as we're in this mindset of, well, I'm a leader, I'm more powerful, I am the one who owns this. You know, as long as we come with that mindset, we're going to expect other people to come serve us. And to become a leader, we have to first fundamentally reset our mindset, reset our operating system, as I would call it, what it means to be a leader. Then when you can start creating your behaviors, your policies, your processes that represent the roles of a leader are there to really serve the people, then everything else starts to fall in place.
[00:24:11] Ari Marin VO: As part of this journey, Mohammad had to redefine what it meant to be a leader. His favorite example of this? Open door policies.
[00:24:14] Mohammad Anwar: So, first of all, I think open door policies suck. Sorry for my language, but I think it's just another way to say, Hey, look, I have an office. I'm your boss. You want to talk to me? My door's open. Come walk the hall of shame to come talk to me. I think that in itself is not serving others. I think that's a policy that needs to be long gone. Leaders need to walk up to their team members. Leaders need to go to their team members where they are and say, Hey, how can I help you? Not sit in your cozy office and say, I have an open door. Come walk in anytime you like. It's still intimidating as hell for people to even do that. I personally did that, so I'm guilty. I had to then realize that I'm here to serve them. They're not here to serve me, so I need to go out to them. I should never ask them to come to my office.
[00:25:14] Ari Marin VO: By reimagining his role, Mohammad knew what behaviors he wanted to emulate. And he started doing them.
[00:25:20] Chris Pitre: He started to really change how he showed up. So, one of the things that you should know about Mohammad is his awesome wife, Julia. She's a five-time Olympic medalist in diving. And she's also a great chef. So she usually makes his lunch and it's delicious, amazing, a totally different meal every single day. And he would bring extras and let people eat along with him. So, he started to offer up things that she would make to people and everyone strategically tried to eat with Mohammad during that time because it's like, who doesn't want to pass up on this really grade A quality food, because she was only organic. And so that was one of the ways that he really tried to start serving people in a way that didn't require anybody to do anything differently or the processes and sort of workflow to change.
[00:26:14] Ari Marin VO: He didn't make grand gestures. He took small, consistent steps. If employees stayed late, he stayed with them until they went home. He left thank you notes on their desks…
[00:26:30] Chris Pitre: He knew that took away from family time. So, Mohammad went out and bought gift cards to take the families out so that, you know, the employees could actually make up that time on Mohammad’sdime for the overage. So, he started doing those really small things to not just say that he loved people, but to show it and let people see that it was real.
[00:26:56] Ari Marin VO: And little by little… Muhammad's behavior brought about change in others.
[00:27:20] Chris Pitre: In watching Mohammad change, I had to be real about how I showed up in certain situations. Right? I have this thing that I struggle with constantly, which is, I'm going to tell you once and if you choose to go forward, I'm like, I'm done. You’re in that ditch by yourself, but I'm not helping. Right? So really helping others realize, hey, sometimes people need to hear it more than once. Sometimes people need someone to sit alongside them and work with them as they make calls or decisions, right? And so really changing my mindset to be of service and to not necessarily do the work for people, but to sit alongside them as they do it so that way they could be more self-sustaining afterward, they could learn a new skill. They could sort of apply it forward. So, for me it really was about shifting mindset and service mindedness to be even more conscious of how I'm coming across, but also how my voice or talent or knowledge is being transferred into the team that's doing the work.
[00:28:27] Mohammad Anwar: I think the key is that we have to act before we expect, so the leaders have to start behaving and acting in ways that are different, that is representative of the culture of love, so people can truly believe it and see that weight. This is real. The leaders are behaving differently. The leaders aren't poking my presentation like they used to. They're not focused on the font size. They're actually focused on what is the substance of the presentation. Something's different about my leader all of a sudden, right? They got to experience those differences first, those changes in behaviors first before they become believers of the cultural love themselves.
[00:29:04] Chris Pitre: Actually, the way that we went about it is we didn't require sort of stand-up new values and vision and tell everybody to get on board. Mohammad first started it with him. And then what he wanted to do is after he started to change, he started inviting feedback from the contributor level. And as he was talking to them, the feedback came less about him and more about us as leaders. And that's when he realized, okay, now I need to get my leaders on board. So, we actually did a two-day offsite and we brought all of the leaders, and we had our team write anonymous letters about how we as leaders made them feel. And I'll remember that some of them actually said, when I'm with you guys, I just feel so small. I feel like I'm unheard. You hear some of those things and that was sort of the big awakening for the leadership team. We encourage everybody, like if you're a leader who's never gotten honest feedback, you should try and solicit some anonymous letters because you might get some honesty that you haven't really gotten in your career. And as a result of that, that's when the work really transformed.
[00:30:15] Ari Marin VO: Mohammad was growing as a leader, and management had begun to change, too. But there was still hesitation from employees. Because there was still something important Mohammad hadn't done.
[00:30:27] Mohammad Anwar: So, I think the biggest journey for me was reaching a journey of forgiveness and the biggest obstacle for me was short of apologizing. Just couldn't get to the point of apologizing until about a year and a half into my journey. When I then openly apologized to the whole organization and sought forgiveness is when I think it started to flip where people were then able to really see that I was genuinely trying, I was genuinely human. And I think when that grace was extended to me, things started to move a lot faster.
[00:31:34] SFX: exciting music in
[00:31:35] Mohammad Anwar: After that moment in time, that was a very pivotal moment in our journey that led us to then operate at a more unified front. We were able to do things that we were not able to do before, and that propelled our business outcomes. It helped us become a profitable business again. We tripled our revenues, improved our margins by 42 percentage points, and reduced our attrition from 30% to 12%. You know, we started to grow our accounts with customers. Everything just started to become more and more positive as a result of that.
[00:32:09] Ari Marin VO: Chris could see that the whole company had changed.
[00:32:12] Chris Pitre: The reason why I can say I saw it is because clients saw it. When our clients came back and said, you guys are a different organization, a different team. We had this one client group where our meetings started out to be 30-minute check-ins weekly. And then the 30 minutes grew into an hour. The hour grew into two hours. The two hours grew into four hours on site. And then we would just spend the whole day with this client. We would all be working on different things, but they just enjoyed the environment and the atmosphere. So much so that they didn't want to go back to their desks.
[00:32:46] Ari Marin VO: In fact, the shift led to a whole new business culture. Plus…
[00:32:51] Mohammad Anwar: When we finally encountered this culture of love and tried to bring it into the workplace and experimented with our own environment, one of our largest customers noticed our transformation and asked us, Hey, can you help us with our leaders and our culture? And we're like, wait a minute. We're a technology firm. We don't do that kind of stuff. But they pushed us and empowered us to do a pilot. And that pilot led us to travel the whole world. We've trained 1,400 leaders from 46 different nationalities and backgrounds. We traveled to 10 different countries all over the world and we imparted training on how to lead with love. And every session we went, we met humans from every corner of the globe with different backgrounds, differences in language, religion, ethnicity, gender, you name it. And every one of them resonated with the concept of love. And they were like, this needs to be shared with the world. This deserves the world to know that this is the way to move forward and anything and everything we do, we want to bring back humanity to the workplace.
[00:33:53] Ari Marin VO: And Mohammad thinks, if he can do it – anyone can.
[00:33:59] Mohammad Anwar: At the company, they've coined the phrase, oh, Mo's having a “moh-ment”, which means I'm reverting back to maybe some of my past behaviors, but at the same time, I think that is self-awareness, right? You don't flip the switch and all of a sudden, you're this great human, It's a journey. And the more you can catch yourself doing those things, it's a victory. It's a win in my mind because now I'm at least having the awareness, and think, wait a minute, versus before, I wouldn't even care. I wouldn't even know I had done something wrong cause I had no awareness. So, it's a journey. This journey is a never-ending journey. It's a permanent state of transformation; you're never done. And also, we're human and we all make mistakes. We all have moments, we all have stressors that sometimes can push us to the limits, but what’s beautiful about the culture of love is that people accept that. People appreciate that people can have bad days, can have moments, but it's how we show up for each other in those moments is what is different than if you were not practicing a culture of love where people are forgiving, where people are now empathetic and appreciate and want to help and say, Hey Mo, I see you're having a moment. Can I do anything? Is there something that's bothering you? Can I help you? Versus before, if I had a moment, first of all I wouldn't even be aware of it. And then secondly, everybody else would be just scared and not even care and run away as far as possible in a culture of love. There would be other ways around where they will actually reach out to you, want to help you, want to support you.
[00:35:44] Ari Marin VO: So when leaders tell him: “we'd love to do this, but we just don't have the time.” He's honest with them.
[00:35:54] Mohammad Anwar: Just making an excuse. I have a whole chapter in the book called No Excuses. It's the last chapter, every single excuse that I have heard in my whole career for leaders, including my own. I have a rebuttal for every single one of them. I will tell you, it doesn't cost you money. It doesn't cost you time because all we're asking of you is to treat one another better, treat one another with love. And trust me, you don't need ping pong tables. You don't need ice cream parties. In fact, when we were bankrupt, we were broke. We couldn't do any of those things. We had to find ways to build a culture just by the way we treat one another. And guess what? It doesn't take time. You just have to show up to the meetings and treat your teammates with that love and compassion and kindness, which doesn't cost anything. So, it doesn't cost you time. It doesn't cost you money. So those excuses are down the drain. They don't work.
[00:36:46] Ari Marin VO: Change is hard, it's worth it.
[00:36:50] Mohammad Anwar: Because we believe that if you want to see a change in the world, a place that we have ignored far too long is the workplace. And if we can help institute change in the workplace, then we might be able to change the world.
[00:37:03] Ari Marin VO: We’ve learnt so much from Mohammad's journey today.
A culture of love can be transformative, both for your bottom line and your business life. I suggest you think about your team: Do you have a culture of love? Do your employees feel the same? It's up to you as the leader to be the catalyst.
Think about the kind of leader you want to be and act accordingly. Behaviors are the bricks with which you build your culture.
Even if it's hard, remember: leading with love is free, and the benefits could be enormous. You could revolutionize your communications, empower your employees, harness the power of tough love… And find that you’re grateful for the team that surrounds you… A little thank you can go a long way.
So in the spirit of that – I’d like to thank Mohammad Anwar and Chris Pitre for lending their voices to the show today. If you want to dig deeper into “Love as Business Strategy”, check out our double episode on the topic. They aired back in Season 3, and they’re linked in the show notes. There, you’ll find Mohammad and Chris’s bestselling book, and a link to their podcast, too!
And if you've been inspired to become a better leader, consider this final word of advice:
[00:38:28] Mohammad Anwar: We have programs that we offer called Seneca Leaders, where we basically take leaders through an introspective journey to build that self-awareness and get them to realize that, wait a minute, I'm not the leader who I think I am. It's inspired by, obviously, love as a business strategy, but if you've read the book, trust me, it's nothing like the book. It is a very transformational experience that leaders go through to build that self-awareness. And it's done in a very psychologically safe manner, but you will come out of that session committed to transform. And if you personally are a CEO and a leader, I would highly encourage you to go to our website, senecaleaders.com, to find upcoming Seneca Leaders Sessions. We are actually hosting Seneca Leader events at the University of Houston Football Stadium, where it all began. But we also travel occasionally for destination training so you can get up to date details on events that you and your leaders and your managers can attend and build that self-awareness muscle.
[00:39:51] Ari Marin: This was In Good Companies from Cadence Bank. If you liked this episode and want to hear more, why don't you follow us on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen. And when business is hot, you'll be the first to know. You can always leave a review or a five star rating or share this podcast around. The more, the merrier.
In Good Companies is a podcast from Cadence Bank. Member FDIC, Equal Opportunity Lender. Our production team is Natalie Barron and Eydie Pengelly. Our executive producer is Danielle Kernell. This podcast is made in collaboration with the team at Lower Street.