Humbitious – The Power Of Low Ego, High Drive Leadership With Amer Kaissi

Posted by John Livesay in podcast0 comments

 

The best leaders often do not see themselves as above anyone. They recognize the things they don’t know thus, striving to become even better not only for themselves but for others. If we could name the qualities that this point, it would be humility and being ambitious. Award-winning Professor of Healthcare Administration at Trinity University, Amer Kaissi, Ph.D. put the two together and came up with what he called Humbitious —which is also the title of his new book. In this episode, he joins John Livesay to shed light on these qualities and why he thinks they are important for leaders. He talks about the power of low ego, high drive leadership and being both compassionate and decisive, breaking down misconceptions in seeing kindness as a weakness. When leaders behave with both compassion and action, humility and ambition, good things happen. Let this conversation show you.

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Humbitious – The Power Of Low Ego, High Drive Leadership With Amer Kaissi

Our guest is Dr. Amer Kaissi, who is an award-winning Professor of Healthcare Administration at Trinity University, which is a top fifteen national program. He is the author of the book Intangibles, which has won the 2019 Healthcare Book of the Year award. At Trinity, Dr. Kaissi teaches courses in Leadership, Professional Development and Public Speaking and is the Director of the Executive Program. His research interests include leadership and strategy. He’s a national speaker with the Studer Group and a faculty member with the American College of Healthcare Executives.

He is also a certified Executive and Physician Coach. He works with MEDI as an Executive Coach, where he consults with hospitals and healthcare organizations in their strategic planning efforts. He lives in San Antonio, Texas, down the street from me as they say here in Austin. What is also very exciting is he has a new book coming out that I am looking forward to hearing more about. It’s called Humbitious instead of ambitious, combining humility with there, I’m guessing. Welcome to the show.

Thank you, John. Thanks for having me. I’m excited about this.

Let’s hear your own story of origin. You’ve got such an impressive background. You’ve got your PhD, obviously and all of these things. You can go back to childhood or when you were getting your PhD. How did you get so interested in EQ and all of these issues?

I will go back into childhood a little bit. As the audience can tell from my accent, I wasn’t born in the US. I was born in Beirut, Lebanon. My childhood coincided with the Lebanese Civil War, which some audiences may be aware of. It was not a regular childhood per se but I would say it was a happy childhood. One of the main things that influenced me growing up was that my mom worked as a Director of an orphanage. A Civil War was happening so there were a lot of orphans. With the nature of her job, she had to be there 24/7. My mom worked long days. She worked weekends, holidays and summers. During those times, I would go with her to the orphanage.

[bctt tweet=”Humility is being open-minded.” username=”John_Livesay”]

As a child, you will go through the orphanage, what are you going to do? You are going to play with the kids. For years, I played with the kids every single day, I ate and spent time with them. I felt like I was one of them. I was the son of the director but kids don’t care about this stuff. These experiences started teaching me about the value of humility. The value of not seeing yourself as above anyone else because your parents have more money, you have more education or whatever it is.

At the time, I didn’t realize it was humility but now reflecting back at it, that experience influenced my personality and primed me to start becoming a little bit more interested in this topic of humility. The rest of my childhood was normal. The war in Lebanon ended. I ended up going to college. I did an undergrad in Public Health. I then started focusing on Healthcare Administration. I always knew that I loved teaching.

For some reason, teaching was my passion. I call it my first love. I knew that if I wanted to work in higher education in teaching, I needed to get a PhD. I started looking at PhD programs. We didn’t have 111 so I looked at programs in the US. When you are overseas and looking at a program in the US like Nebraska or in Oklahoma, it all sounds the same. I ended up going to Minnesota in the middle of the winter. That’s where I did my PhD.

I was young when I started my PhD. I was 23. I had no business doing a PhD at age 23. No one should do that. That’s my advice to the audience. Don’t do a PhD at that age but for a variety of reasons, I did that. Going into the PhD program, I was thinking to myself, “I’m a pretty smart guy. I’m book smart. How hard could it be?” I didn’t know what I didn’t know.

I went into this program and the people who were doing their PhD, at that time, were at least 15 or 20 years older than me and they have work experience. They had done stuff with my life and I was a 23-year-old kid. I knew nothing. That also taught me another aspect of humility, which is to recognize what you don’t know and to try to know what you don’t know.

In that situation, I did what everyone should do, which is I stayed quiet. I listened because I had not much to contribute to the conversations that were happening in the classroom. Here, I was sitting next to people who had worked and healthcare for years. They had experience and had stories. I had nothing. All I had was book-smart. I learned from them and I started to improve.

I would say these two major experiences primed me for studying humility later on in my life. I then finished my PhD. I’ve got the job here at Trinity in San Antonio. I started teaching graduate students in healthcare administration. For the audience that is not familiar with healthcare administration, this is preparing people to manage hospitals. It’s like an AI program but for healthcare administration. I started working with graduate students who wanted to work in hospitals.

One thing I started to realize is that both our educational system as well as our organizations do not value humility. If you are going to think about it, in the classroom, this is something that I admit that I used to do earlier on in my career, we reward the loud students. We reward the students that are raising their hands all the time and talking before they speak.

We reward that behavior but we don’t reward the students that are a little bit more humble in terms of, they want to take their time to think about things. They don’t want to open their mouth before thinking. That was happening in the classroom but I also noticed that organizations didn’t value humility that much. When they’re hiring for leadership positions, typically you tend to hire the person who is self-promoting, who is charming, maybe a little bit of narcissism in there. Whereas like the humble person, the humble people tend to get passed on for promotions for development in the organization. So all of this stuff together made me think more and more of what the value of humility in our lives and especially within the context of leadership.

All of this stuff together made me think more about the value of humility in our lives, especially within the context of leadership. One major study that I’ve looked at got me into starting to study that in a more formal way. In 2014, the Harvard Graduate School of Education published a report in which they interviewed middle school and high school students. They asked them, “What is the most important thing for you? What is your priority as a 12, 14 or 16-year-old? What do you want to achieve?” The middle schoolers and the high school about half of them said that their priority is an achievement, which is not surprising. They said, “I want to get good grades. I want to go into college. I want to get a good job.” That was not surprising. A little bit less said that their primary priority is happiness. “I want to chill. I want to have a good life. I want to have fun.” As my kids would say, “I want to vibe.”

 

That wasn’t surprising either but what surprised me was about only 22% of the middle schoolers and high schoolers said that caring for others was a priority for them. Think about this, 1 in 5 younger Americans say that caring for others is a priority for them. That got me concerned, especially as an educator, because I started thinking about it. I’m like, “These kids are in middle school and high school now, which means that in a few years, they are going to be in my classroom. More importantly, a few years later, these are going to be the people leading our organizations.”

Only 1 of 5 of them said that, “Caring for others is important.” I dug a little bit more into the values of empathy, compassion at work and how that impacts individual outcomes but also team outcomes and organizational outcomes. I started doing more research on that. I ended up writing the book that you mentioned earlier Intangibles and that’s why I published my second book called Humbitious.

[bctt tweet=”Leaders should have agility, humility, and kindness.” username=”John_Livesay”]

One of the other guests I had on the show, Dr. Diana Hendel was talking about her 100th day as the CEO of the hospital all the tragedy happened with a former employee coming in and killing some people. If you are not prepared with some compassion, as a leader in that situation, if you are only good with spreadsheets, let’s say or leading from your ivory tower, that is not nearly enough in those situations.

That’s why leaders of countries and the president of our country, whoever it is at the time when there’s a tragedy like that, people need to see compassion for what people have gone through and empathy skills in those situations. You may not think that will ever happen to you or under your watch. If you haven’t done any work on developing that skill, you are going to be seen as coming up short in those situations.

In the story that you shared, every leader has one of these stories where there’s some crisis, a major negative event where you have to show up as a leader with humility, compassion and empathy. I agree with you 100%. This is important for leaders but I would say it’s not enough. In addition to compassion, what people want from you is action and decisiveness. That’s where I start talking about the importance of compassion but also courage.

You mentioned the title of my book. It’s not only humility. It’s humility and ambition. These traits, humility, compassion and empathy, I would say they are necessary but not sufficient. If you only have that, you are not going to be successful as a leader, whether during a crisis or during regular times. You need to add more to that. You need to add more tools in your toolbox if you will and have action, competence, courage, ambition.

Let me share with you a story that many people may be familiar with because it happens at the world stage. I don’t know if you are familiar with the Prime Minister of New Zealand. Her name is Jacinda Ardern. You have heard of her and I’m sure many of the audience have heard of her. Jacinda Ardern became the Prime Minister of New Zealand a few years ago. She was the youngest female leader in the world.

Typically, when that happens, people are a little bit skeptical and they were like, “What does she have to offer? Is she going to rise up to the challenges?” She had a challenge right away. Right after she became the Prime Minister, they had a shooting attack in the sound of Christchurch. It’s very similar to the story that you shared. There was an event, deaths involved, victims, mourning and all of that. The first thing that she did showed up as a compassionate leader and was there with the families of the victims mourning with them.

That wasn’t all she did because right away, she went into action. One of the first actions she took was to go to her parliament and force them to pass Gun Control Law. Now, I don’t want to get into the politics of Gun Control Law because I know people agree or disagree with that. I want to focus on the actions themselves, which was Gun Control Law in New Zealand worked fast two weeks after the attack.

That shows that leaders can do both. You can be compassionate, humble, empathetic, and be there with the victims and people who need you. You can also be courageous and take action. You need to have the competence to get things done in these situations. I realized that example because it shows how we can combine these two traits.

Fast forward to the COVID crisis. Again, when New Zealand, like any other country, was facing a global pandemic. What the first thing Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern did was action. They closed their borders. You can agree or disagree with her actions but she was decisive and at the same time, every single day, she was on LinkedIn, social media, talking to the people in her country and trying to understand what are the concerns of the small business owners. She’s trying to emphasize with them and tell them how the government is going to help them to stay above the surface while the lockdown was happening.

[bctt tweet=”Humility is in the value of not seeing yourself as above anyone else.” username=”John_Livesay”]

I have been following New Zealand on what’s happening there for a while now because that interests me. In June of 2020, they had zero active cases of COVID-19 in New Zealand. It’s a small country. It’s an island different than the US. The point remains that when leaders behave with both compassion and action when they behave with humility and ambition, good things happen.

The other thing that you talk about is kindness. That’s something that I resonate with as well. I interviewed the author of a book about deep kindness and the old way of selling, which is my background it’s Always Be Closing, ABC. I have changed it to a new acronym of ABK, which is Always Be Kind. I have people write it on Post-it notes, post it on their mirrors, phones and their computers.

If we can’t be kind to the way we talk to ourselves, how can we possibly give it out to others? I would love to hear how you incorporate kindness, compassion and humility into leaders. I also interviewed Tim Sanders and he goes, “Sometimes people confuse being nice with being weak and it’s not true at all that nice and smart people are successful.” It’s not being kind. Much like you were saying, humility is not something to be avoided but instead, embraced.

I agree with that. Many people have this misconception that being kind is being weak. “She’s sweet or He is so nice.” That’s not what we are talking about here within the context of leadership. We are talking about being kind in a way that you care about the other person, whether the other person is your employee, a client that you are trying to sell something or you care about them. You want good things to happen to them with that concept of kindness, compassion and humility. My background is in healthcare so I want to share with you this healthcare story.

This is a story that was told to me by a physician, a friend of mine who I was working with. Let’s call him Dr. Lee. That’s not his real name. Let’s call him Dr. Lee for the sake of the story. Dr. Lee told me about the time when his diabetic patients came to see him. The patient was there for a regular foot exam. Now that specific patient was severely obese. We are talking about someone very big. Now the patient came in for the foot exam. After the foot exam was over, the patient was sitting on the chair but was having a hard time putting on his socks and shoes back because of his size.

What Dr. Lee did, he noticed that the patient was struggling so very quietly and gently, he went towards that patient. He knelt on his knees and kindly helped that patient. He slipped his socks on, put his hand behind his foot and allowed him to put his shoes on. At the moment, that patient was at first embarrassed but then he started feeling an overwhelming sense of gratitude. He thought to himself, “Look at this prestigious doctor. He’s kneeling in the very humble way, in a compassionate way to help me put my socks on and my shoes on.”

Six months later, that patient came back to Dr. Lee having lost 60 pounds. He told him, “I have been trying to lose weight all of my life. I have never been able to lose more than 5 pounds at a time but because of the act of humility and compassion that you showed me that day, I lost 60 pounds. I have always been sabotaging myself when I tried to lose weight but because you showed me that compassion, I was able to show that compassion to myself.”

He said, “Mark my word, in six months, I’m going to come back having lost another 60 pounds.” That story shows the power of kindness, compassion and humility. When we talk about these traits, we are not only talking about the basic stuff like saying, “Please and thank you,” and all of that. We are going beyond that. We are talking about an act that transformed the life of the other person because you show them how much you care about them.

 

When we are talking about leaders in organizations, they all can do similar stuff that showed their employees that you care about them as whole human beings. Same with entrepreneurs or salespeople. You can do similar acts of kindness towards the person that you are working with to show them that this is not only a transaction. “I don’t care about me selling you this product. I want to build a relationship with you because I want what is in your best interest.” That’s how I understand and I studied these concepts within the context of business.

The need to be seen, heard and acknowledged that we have as a child when you jump in a pool and I watch me swim or whatever it is to your parent it doesn’t go away in a job. When you can make employees or patients feel seen and heard, not only a cog in a wheel, then you get incredible results from them because they feel seen and heard.

The flip side of all this is we still get triggered. We hope that our best self shows up and we have acts of kindness and compassion. There can be situations where we get embarrassed. You wrote about this in a blog about this one-second gap that we can have between feeling angry, scared or whatever the issue is before we relax. Can you talk a little bit about that?

[bctt tweet=”Another aspect of humility is recognizing what you don’t know to try to know what you don’t know.” username=”John_Livesay”]

A great philosopher once said, “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” Do you know who that great philosopher is? Mike Tyson. How does this connect to your question? I believe that most of us want to be humble, kind and compassionate, especially when the world around us is behaving the way that we want it to behave.

When I wake up in the morning, the sun is shining, it’s a beautiful day, I have my morning coffee, my kids are listening and there’s no traffic on the road, I tend to be very humble, kind and compassionate but that is not the real test. The real test is how do we behave when the world punches us in the mouth? When they are in crisis, when someone on your team commits a mistake, when you, yourself, make a mistake. Are you still humble, kind and compassionate? That’s why it’s so important to remain calm under pressure. It’s important to delay the response.

Viktor Frankl once said, “Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our freedom. Freedom to choose how we are going to react.” We are all are getting stimuli from the environment. We are all getting stuff that’s happening to us that irritates us. It may be a colleague in a meeting that rolls their eyes on you, your boss that dismisses your idea, a client that you are going to see or you call who behaves rudely. All of these are happening around us.

We can’t control that but what we can control is our reaction to it. What we can control is how to fall. That’s the One-Second Rule. It could be more than one second. It’s about giving yourself space to react intentionally, rather than to react on autopilot, to lose your cool, yell and scream or get upset, irritated and all of that.

You can still do that later on if it’s appropriate but at least you are doing it intentionally. You are driving the emotion rather than the emotion is driving you. There’s a concept in psychology that people refer to is called the Amygdala hijack. Very briefly, this region in our brain says the emotional region. When we don’t take time to pause, when we are reacting emotionally, the amygdala literally takes over the whole brain and the rational parts of the brain stopped.

There’s no rationality and no logic anymore. An example of that is when you get an email that annoys you and you reply right away in all caps. Five seconds later, you are like, “What have I done? Why did I act in this way?” The One-Second Rule may be the One Night’s Rule, which is sleep on it. Don’t reply to this email right away but allow yourself to be calm, controlled and think about it before you react with it. This is not a call to be submissive or accept everything that people tell you. Not at all.

You can still send an angry email in the morning but at least, now the anger is controlled. You are intentional about you being angry may be appropriate to go and confront that colleague that dismissed your idea but when you do it, you are doing it in a way that you are driving the emotion, rather than the emotion is driving you.

That’s key because where the thinker is thinking our thoughts and not the other way around. I remember Dr. Wayne Dyer, when he was alive said, “When you squeeze an orange, you’ve always got an orange juice. Doesn’t matter what time of day. You squeeze it in the corner, it’s still orange juice,” but what happens when someone squeezes us, we are pressured and in the corner? Do we still get kindness and love or do we get a little anger?

[bctt tweet=”In addition to compassion, what people want from leaders is action. ” username=”John_Livesay”]

I was parked in a parking lot. I wasn’t driving and someone bumped me with their car. I was like, “For God’s sakes, I’m not even driving.” He bumped into my car and I was like, “Take a breath.” When I looked and he didn’t damage the car. It was this big truck and I had said to the driver, “Back up,” and they dinged it again, then my amygdala got hijacked because I was like, “What? You made the same mistake twice?”

You realized that person probably got their amygdala hijacked. They were so nervous. They went the wrong way and didn’t do it intentionally. Once I calmed down I thought, “You have made the same mistake more than once sometimes yourself,” but you don’t have a lot of compassion for somebody when your brain has been hijacked like that.

Let’s get back to reminding everybody if they want more of this insight, skills and takeaways, the book again is called Humbitious: The Power of Low Ego, High Drive Leadership that allows people to realize that they are not mutually exclusive, you can have a low ego and still be a high drive high-performance leader.

To dig a little bit deeper into this concept of humility, what does this concept mean and how do we combine it with ambition, sometimes when you look at the word, it helps you go back to the origin of the word. Sometimes I do that. I’m a professor. I went through the Latin origin of the word humility. Now the Latin origin is humus. What humus mean is close to the ground or close to the Earth. Think of that definition and its application to leadership, and business situations. For someone humble and close to the ground or the Earth, how does that look like in a real-life leadership position?

Let me share with you the story of a leader that not a lot of people are familiar with. Although, he was the CEO and Founder of one of the biggest companies that we all know. This is a story of a guy called Jim Sinegal, the Cofounder and CEO of Costco. We all know Costco. I don’t think anyone is not aware of Costco. We all love Costco.

Jim Sinegal, when he was CEO of Costco and when he cofounded it, if you want us to go and talk to him on any given day, you couldn’t find him in his office. The company headquarters is in Washington State but he was never there. The reason he was never there, it’s because every single day, he still kept playing and visited a different Costco store. Think of that.

Some days he would visit more than one store. Why did he do that? He would show up like that with a name tag that said, “Jim.” He would go into the store with no entourage, no fanfare and he would start talking to the employees working at that specific store. In a very informal conversation, he would ask them, “What do you like about working at Costco? What are some things that you need so you can do your job better? How can we help you? How can we support you?”

[bctt tweet=”When leaders behave with both compassion and action, when they behave with humility and ambition, good things happen. ” username=”John_Livesay”]

In the same way, he would walk up to customers and say, “Why do you like shopping at Costco? There’s a stem club down the road. Why don’t you shop there?” Every single week he would do that, then on Friday, he would fly back to the offices, meet with his executive team and make decisions based on what he learned.

When we think about, what does humility mean? What does this abstract concept mean? That’s what it means. It’s close to the ground or the Earth. Being close to the people that you are leading. He didn’t stay in his ivory tower, in his corner office, closes the door and makes decisions based on what he thought was the right way to do it. He listened to the people and that’s how he made the decision.

 

One of the main aspects of humility is to be open-minded to realize that you do not have a monopoly over the truth. You are confident in your abilities, experience, qualification. You have done this before but still, you don’t know everything. That’s why you need to be open-minded. In humility research, we call it teachability, that you are willing to be teachable, whether you are talking to a fellow executive or the janitor in your organization. You go into that conversation with curiosity. You go into it with the open-mindedness that, “I’m going to learn something new from this conversation. I don’t know everything.”

I have been reading a lot of autobiographies of movie Directors like Mike Nichols. They obviously have their own ideas, they were also open to other people, the actor’s ideas. If somebody else had an idea of how an ending should come that they were struggling with, they were open to anybody’s input. I love the Costco story. It wasn’t only talking to customers but talking to the employees and getting feedback from both.

I think that shows the willingness to hear both sides of how you can improve and not like, “I don’t care what the employees think. I care what the customers think,” and vice versa. You need both, which is it’s great. Any last thought or do you want to send someone to a particular website to learn more about you as a speaker or a coach?

[bctt tweet=”One of the main aspects of humility is to be open-minded to realize that you do not have a monopoly over the truth.” username=”John_Livesay”]

They can go to my website AmerKaissi.com as well as to anywhere where books are sold. They can get themselves a copy of Humbitious. My hope is we change the way with humility. Let’s stopped doing it as a weakness but we recognize that it’s a strength. It takes courage to be humble, especially when we are combining it with ambition and with competence.

You remind me of the research that Brené Brown does on shame. You are doing it on humility, which obviously the world needs both. Thank you so much for your work and for sharing your insights with us.

I appreciate that. That’s the ultimate form of flattery to be in the same sentence as Brené Brown.

Thanks again.

Thank you. I appreciate it.

 

Important Links

• AmerKaissi.com
• Trinity University
• Intangibles
• Humbitious
• Studer Group
• American College of Healthcare Executives
• MEDI
• Diana Hendel – Past Episode
• Tim Sanders – Past Episode
• Better Selling Through Storytelling Method Online Course

 

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Tags: Ambitious, Compassion, High Drive Leadership, Humbitious, Humility, Kindness