The Compassion Leadership Gap with Donato Tramuto - 203

In this conversation with Donato Tramuto, we discuss the compassionate leadership gap that exists today, and how we, as leaders, can fix it. 

The old way of managing just doesn’t work anymore. An authoritarian approach to running your business doesn’t lead to trust, cooperation, or long-term well-being. 

What you need is a compassionate approach. 

In fact, compassionate leadership is what will make your job easier and more rewarding. So, why does this gap in compassion exist today? 

Well, as Donato Tramuto points out, the average age of a CEO is 59 years old. The average age of half of the workers below the CEO is under 40 years old. This often means that leaders and employees were brought up to view leadership and work in very different ways. 

This gap is also what creates age biases. Older people assume the younger generation has poor work ethic and are just technologically savvy. The younger generation assumes the older generation is no longer relevant or able to change. 

Both are false. 

The only way to break down these biases is with more communication, more trust, and more compassion. There's nothing weak about being kind. 

If there’s one thing that Donato Tramuto reveals in this interview, it’s that in order to make the world better, it takes all of us working together. And that can only start with compassion. 

Timestamps: 
00:55 - The compassionate leadership gap 
05:12 - The problem with age biases 
11:48 - Why you need to build trust before culture 
17:54 - How compassionate leadership can increase your well-being 

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CONNECT WITH PETER BOOLKAH:
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http://www.Boolkah.com 
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ABOUT PETER BOOLKAH 
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Peter Boolkah (AKA The Transition Guy) is the World’s #1 Business Transition Coach whose main passion in life is to work with talented and high performing business owners who are in the process of creating exciting, high growth businesses. 

Peter helps you to navigate and transition through the crucial growth pains that all growing businesses experience making it as painless and exciting as possible. 

It is important to remember that businesses do not just g

CONNECT WITH PETER BOOLKAH:
--------------------

http://www.Boolkah.com
https://www.facebook.com/Boolkah
https://www.instagram.com/pboolkah/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/boolkah
https://twitter.com/boolkah

--------------------
ABOUT PETER BOOLKAH
--------------------

Peter Boolkah (AKA The Transition Guy) is the World’s #1 Business Transition Coach whose main passion in life is to work with talented and high performing business owners who are in the process of creating exciting, high growth businesses.

Peter helps you to navigate and transition through the crucial growth pains that all growing businesses experience making it as painless and exciting as possible.

It is important to remember that businesses do not just grow and develop on their own, it is up to us and our teams to make this happen by making every day purposeful.

As businesses grow some parts of the journey will be easier than others and most owners do not have all the answers. Starting a business is one of the most exciting things we get to do and we all have aspirations of achieving great things. In fact Peter is yet to meet someone who started a business with the intention of failing.

Peter’s ultimate life goal is to inspire and empower over 100,000 Entrepreneurs to create long term thriving businesses resulting in the creation of 1,000,000 jobs.

So if you are scaling up your business, you’re in a bu...

Transcript

0:00

(upbeat music)- Hi, Peter Boolkah here, and welcome to today's edition of The Transition Guy. Now joining me today in the studio is Donato Tramuto. The author of the book,"The Double Bottom Line". Welcome, Donato. Did I pronounce your surname correctly?- You pronounced it better than me. Fantastic. Peter.- My Italian's improving.(Donato laughing)- Well, thank you for joining us today.- It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you for inviting me.- And one of the reasons I felt really compelled to have you on the show is you talk about a subject that most people would consider to be a weakness. Now I'll give you an example of that. I mean, I'm a by-product of the 80's. I'm literally the by-product of industrial age thinking, I literally did my formative years in McDonald's, and literally it was one of those environments and I'm sure you can relate to it, where you could treat people really badly. I mean, if you were kind of someone, you were absolute weak and the whole purpose of the way that you would lead in management and leadership then, was that you'd give them a small cover, and then beat the shoot (indistinct), if I didn't achieve the goals. And even sometimes you'd beat them with the (indistinct). And that's what you were told. And a whole generation was leading big corporations in this fashion till about 2005 to 2010 until the next people would come up. But it's actually quite horrible and toxic out there. I dunno how you see it. And that's how compassion seems to have disappeared. And you address this in your book, don't you?- I do and it's very interesting. You touched upon something that we uncovered. First of all, this is not a issue or opportunity according to Donato. I wanna dismiss that right now. What we did, Peter, which was really interesting. We administered a survey among two groups of people. The first is I literally interviewed 40 world leaders. And I think those who read the book, they'll know many of those names. I interviewed them hours of interviews to really uncover what you just shared, what and how did they view compaction? But then we took it one step further. The second group consisted of 1500 plus individuals that were randomly selected from a database of over 500,000 individuals here in the United States. And we did that because we wanted to make sure that nobody reads the book and says, well, that's Donato in his years and years of experience, certainly I add my commentary, but by really doing the survey, and then unveiling what the leaders thought compassion really is help us to uncover that there is what I call the compassionate leadership gap. Exactly what you just said. And let me give you one example. We had in the survey, 84% of the respondents. This is in the 1500 group, believe that a compassionate workplace encourages cooperation, which in turn led to a greater sense of profitability and productivity. 68% believe that the workplace is more competitive than cooperative, but yet when we interviewed the 40 leaders, they actually felt that the workplace wasn't competitive. So here you have a gap. You have the actual leaders who are leading the organization, believing that there's lots of cooperation. And even though the 1500 individuals felt that more compassion led to cooperation, they also actually felt that the cooperation wasn't taking place and it was more competitive. And there's scores of those data points that came out of this survey. And so it really did help us to unlock where we feel the gaps are, and where we feel there's an opportunity to really help the current and future leaders, really understand what compassion is.- I got a question for you. Do you think hierarchical structure, and the higher up you go in the organization, the narrow it gets, lends itself to the behavior where you don't have corporation, and you've got people stepping on one another in order to have career progression.- It does, but there's another very interesting data point that came out of this book. The average age of the CEO and C-suite executives in the United States is 59 years old. Yet 50% of the workforce is made up of individuals that are 40 years old and less. And by the way, Peter, that's also correct with our political system. If you look at Congress and Senate, the average age of our elected politicians is 59. So here's another gap, you have the millennials and the Gen Zs coming into the workforce, who are expecting a totally different sense of leadership. Yet the average age of the CEO is 59 years old, which means that they were being educated by CEOs who were trained in the 1950s. So what you just said is there is an enormous gap. A case in point, I had to change my leadership style when I was running a public company. And when I looked at who I was hiring, I was hiring individuals close to my age. Now imagine here we are making decisions--- We had a program that provided gym membership to young people. Imagine the lag of input that we were receiving from younger executives, who should have been on my team, helping me think through what technology might we wanna incorporate. And so not only do you have loss of innovation, but you have loss of real creativity and understanding of what this generation wants from their leaders. So a lot of it is we're going to have to--- we talk about diversity, but quite frankly, what we found in our survey is that most diversity, unfortunately, is looked at more in terms of gender and race. However, the age sense of diversity is overlooked.- And you know what, that's probably the biggest one. It was quite interesting. You just reminded me of some things, what's quite interesting, was I hear a lot, I heard it when I came into the workforce, people in a more senior position were saying, well, the youth of today are not what they used to be. And I'm hearing the same garbage today by older executives saying, well, these younger people, their work ethic, isn't what it used to be. And they're absolutely right. It's not, it's different. And it can't be the same because the world of Anders has changed. I honestly believe that today, if we look at youngsters, they leverage technology in a way the older leaders just cannot fathom.- We devote an entire chapter to what you just said about biases. And by the way, those biases just don't work from the older to the young. It works also the young to the old, right? The younger person looks at the older person and says, you know what, they're not technology savvy, or you know what, they're a tired pony. And so we try to help in that chapter of how to rid yourself of these biases. And if you don't rid yourself of the biases, by the way, another bias is thinking that a younger person is technology competent. They may be technology capable because they view social media, but it doesn't mean they're a 100% technology competent. And what happens is the older executive gets upset when that younger person isn't showing competency. Well, maybe they've only used technology for social media. And so you've got to apply the same level of training and not just assume that that individual is in fact technology competent. And so the biases are the number one, and I devoted an entire chapter to it. Let me give you a great example in the book. When I was forming the task force to write the book, I hear the son of my writer, my boat at my lake house. We went out on the boat and we were trying to brainstorm how we were going to do this. And there were seven individuals over 50. And I asked all of them what compassion meant to them. And this 14 year old boy was sitting to the side. And I said to myself, I'm violating my own commitment to not isolate the younger person from this question. So I asked him the question. Do you know, he provided the best answer out of all of the eight people that I had on this task force. My point is, you've got to really discipline yourself to understand that just because somebody is 14 years old or a 23 year old enters the workforce, the historical notion that they have to pay their dues, that they have to go through a management, a director, a vice president and into the C-suite, before their thoughts and ideas matter, you need to toss that out because what you're going to do is you're going to interfere with your ability to be competitive, your ability to be innovative. And quite honestly, the reality is now that the C-suite leader doesn't have all the answers. What we try to help them with is have all the questions...- Absolutely.- I won't have all the answers.- Absolutely. And I think the one thing that people totally underestimate with the younger generation is they probably do far more education than you and I did, when we were youngsters. We were out there, yes. We may have done the sports and everything. And there's an argument where kids aren't playing as much as they used to, but kids today, they live on YouTube. I mean, the amount of research that they do is astronomical. By the time they come into the workforce, yes, they've got their school in knowledge, but they've got so much supplementary stuff. It's unreal and people are unable to tap into that. They really look at them and think they're stupid.- You are 100% correct on that. In fact, there is a chapter that I know is gonna shock a lot of leaders. For years, you and I and others have been taught that culture each strategy for lunch, always been taught, you've got to get the culture right. Guess what, what I propose in the book is field the culture out. That's not what you do first. The most important thing to do first is to get the trust. You've got to build the trust. You know, by the way, when you met your wife or I met my partner, we didn't talk first about families or what homes, where are we gonna live? We started to really develop trust with one another. And so what's happens, we have trust (indistinct) right now, is that we don't trust one another. And it is important for a leader to take the time to develop the trust, to make sure that that 23-year old employee feels as value as the 55-year old. Once you've developed the trust, I'm not saying you throw the culture out, then you go to the culture. But so many CEOs that we've observed in our survey jumped into the responsibility and said, yeah, yeah, I got the mission and I did the values. And then we asked them, well, how many employees did you meet with before? Not many. Well, how do you think they felt about when you pushed that culture down to them? When you push the mission, right? Go ahead, Peter.- I was gonna say, the big challenge there is you look at it from a pandemic point of view. I think the leaders have a challenge trusting their employees. I mean, if you think about it, everybody wanted people in the office so they could see how busy they are, you're late from lunch, or perhaps you're talking too much. They weren't measuring output. They were measuring activity or perceived activity.- Peter, you are so right. You know, during the last 18 months, I worked with over a hundred CEOs and observed them on their Zoom calls. Those that performed effectively, they opened up the Zoom call in the manner that I'm gonna open it up right now. They put the agenda to the side and they took the time to ask each one of their employees and colleagues, tell me how you're feeling right now. And they went around for 15 minutes, and they put the agenda to the side, versus those that just historically were married to the agenda. They didn't take the time to understand. And that's compassionate leadership. In fact, in the book we introduced what I used in my company called the 3Ts, tenderness first to get the trust and then tenacity. Too many leaders use tenacity first and then they go around with a pooper scooper, to try to get the trust. And what we're trying to really help--- I'll give you another great example. This one think is one of the best, we're working with somebody with respect to a customer. And he said, I don't know why I lost the customer. And I said, well, walk me through what happened. He said, well, the customer said that they had COVID. And I said, oh, I feel so bad. When will the PO, the purchase order come in, rather than saying, what did that feel like? How did that impact your family? Maybe talk about the purchase order next week, but too many of us are hardwired to think about business first. And you said it well, the pandemic, listen, we were lacking compassion in our leadership approach before the pandemic. If the pandemic has taught us one thing that there is a new term that's being introduced called the great resonation, not the great depression, not the great recession, but the great resonation. And we have to understand why that's happening. And as we're tearing that apart here in the United States, what we're finding is people don't find value in their jobs. They don't find that their input matters. They don't find that their boss is connected to them. And that's the compassionate leadership gap. Because when you ask the leaders, they say, wait a second, I'm making my numbers, you're making your numbers, but you have a turnover now that's about 18%. Will you be able to make your numbers next year? And so I think there's a real opportunity to help these leaders understand that there's nothing weak about being compassionate. There's nothing weak about being kind and understanding the stories of your employees.- I would agree with that. There's nothing so wrong with starting to trust your people. I mean, I don't know what it's like in the States at the moment, but definitely when you start to look at somewhere the UK and many other European countries, what you're starting to find is people are now putting pressure on to say, okay, well, we want things to go back to the way they were pre-pandemic, but the world has shifted in 18 months. People have changed. People don't necessarily need to commute anymore. In fact, it's been said that the productivity levels of individuals has gone through the roof when they're left to their own volition and they understand what the output is measured on output, no longer on activity.- Peter, you are so correct. And there's a line in the book that I think will be very helpful to those who are listening. All of our lives, we've been taught that our titles matter. You've ranked your title, you own your character, and no longer--- By the way, just recently I read in the wall street journal and I was shocked by this study that they did. They indicated that a CEO of a public company loses two years of their life. And I scratched my head, I was CEO of a public company. I don't feel that that's correct. And I'll tell you why I don't feel it's correct for me. There's benefits to compassionate leadership. And the benefit is you feel better. You go home and you feel like you helped and you guided and you connected with your employee. And that's why I don't feel like I took two years off my life, because even though it was a very high pressure job, you know, the stock is up one day and the stock is down the next day. By the way, before I put my strategy in place for that company, do you know that I met with all 3000 employees, even though the public markets were demanding that I announced the strategy, I said to them, I'm not announcing any strategy, until I receive the input from the employees. And some of them, I met in groups, some of them, I met one-on-one, but I got the trust first. And that made me feel good. When I started to make decisions, six, seven months after I became the CEO, I didn't have employees that were revolting. They were part of the decision-making. So there are a lot of benefits to leading with compassion. You're gonna feel better. You're gonna go home at night and not feel like you've let somebody down, or that there is a faction occurring in your company.- No, I agree. And probably one of my favorite resources. I mean, it's interesting that you spoke a lot about trust and it is true. It should really be trust first. And Stephen Covey covers that beautifully in his book,"Speed of Trust". I mean, he was ahead of the time then.- Yep, absolutely. And that's gonna be hard for people to understand, because without exception, in these interviews, culture always came up as first. And I think what's gonna be great here is when people read the book is that they're going to realize is that, we really unwrapped the data in a way that was very compelling. And even a study that came out of Harvard said that 80% of leaders wanna be compassionate, but they don't know how to. And that's the other takeaway. What we learned is that there are some people that just don't --- you go back to the biases for whatever reason, they think that compassion is being nice. What we uncovered, compassion is empathy in action. That's the difference. I could say to somebody on the street, gosh, I feel bad that you don't have any food and walk away, but compassionate leadership is I recognize it, you don't have food and then I do something about it and that's the difference. Too many of the leaders we interviewed, really felt that, Hey, I'm nice. I say hi to my employee when I walked into--- I'll give you another great example, and I use this in the book. Many years ago, I got onto the elevator, and there was a elevator just for the CEO that I never took. I always took the elevator that the employees took. And I went in the elevator at seven in the morning and this employee walked in and I didn't just say, Alex, good morning, how are you? I said, Alex, good morning. How are you? How are you doing today? And all of a sudden he broke down crying. Well, he had a family in Iraq that had been absolutely exposed to danger. He lost his uncle. He lost his brother. I brought him up to my office, and we set up a fund to help his family. That's empathy in action.- Yeah. Isn't that a saying now on kids, what you know, until they know how much you care.- Maya Angelo said, "People will forget about what you said. People will forget about what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel."- It's gonna be an interest in 10 years ahead, isn't it?- Yes. But you know what, Peter, it's not gonna be one person that's gonna change the climate. It's not gonna be one person that changes the racial unrest, it's gonna be all of us. And I think we're all looking for that one hero, while we're going to wait a long time. And that's what the book is about. The book is about a movement that we all have to work together now to change the course of our future.- In order for that to happen, we've all got to go on that journey of change really.- You got it.- We can't expect other people to change around us to make it happen.- Well, it's funny. I throw an interesting number out there. I'm looking to get 21% on board, and you may be asking 21, why not 20. 21 stands for takes two to make a movement, but it takes one to start it. And if you start it and you bring somebody else into the compassionate leadership movement and I do it, before you know it, we'll get 21% of the population. And by the way, I'm sure you've heard about this, the 3.5% rule. There was a Harvard political scientist who came up with this, that most changes in our society have happened with getting 3.5% of the population on board. And you can change without violence. John Lewis did it, Martin Luther King. And so if we can get 3.5 percent to change an issue in our society, in companies, all I'm asking for is 21%. That means if you have a staff of 10 executives, well, let's get two to three to adopt to this new compassionate leadership approach, and you'll start to see the organization moving in that direction.- What would be the key takeaways, to wrap it up with the audience, if you had a key takeaway for them, a key set of messages, what would they be?- Compassionate leadership is not weak. It's actually strong. There is a disconnect between what the employees are feeling and happening in the organization versus what the leader is in fact doing. And that we've got to expand our sense of diversity, that I think we've narrowed diversity into race in section, as I shared with you today, there is a significant age discrimination, and we've gotta be willing to let young people--- when I was running my company, I had my own advisory board. And my advisory board was made up of young and old people. So don't lock out the young insights and thoughts. And so I think that's the other takeaway is bring the young end as much as you bring the middle age and older executive into your fold.- Now your book is coming out. So your book's due to be released early February, February, the 1st, you said, and you've also got some resources for people, haven't you? So where do they go for these resources?- donatotramuto... let me just make sure Peter that I get that.- I Think it was .com/compassion.- There you go. Yes. Yes. It's a new website and there's going to be materials, not only in terms of reference papers, but we are going to have in the future podcasts, we're going to have an annual conference where leaders can attend. And I'm very pleased. We're already have one college that's going to incorporate the book into their leadership, sustainability class. And boy, if we can start to really move this in a direction that young people can learn early about compassionate leadership, and the future executives can learn it, I think your call out about the next 10 years, I'm very optimistic that 10 years we're gonna look back and really be grateful that we have this opportunity to change.- And this isn't just for big corporate either, all entrepreneurs of any size can really join in and help make the changes.- Absolutely, absolutely. In fact, a lot of the cohort of 40, is not just fortune 50 CEOs. I interviewed a 16-year old founder of an organization that's providing education to seniors on how to use their iPhone for social media. So the 40 really represents what I call the demographic of the world. I made sure that we were not just isolating celebrities or well-known CEOs, we have CEOs of companies where they only have 50 employees.- Yeah. Brilliant. Thank you. But you know, it's been an absolute pleasure having you on today's episode. If anything resonates with you, want more information, head over to boolkah.com and get in touch and remember, failing to learn is learning to fail. So please stay safe. Donato thank you so much, it's been a pleasure.