Manbir Kaur
Executive Coach and Conversational Intelligence Enhanced Skills Practitioner
Human Leadership
Episode Summary
Are you the leader you want to be? On Episode 120 of the Keep Leading!® podcast Manbir Kaur explains her framework to help leaders answer that question in the affirmative. She also explains the need to develop our humanity and bring that to our leadership.
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Bio
Manbir Kaur is an Executive & Leadership Coach (ICF-MCC), a conversational intelligence (C-IQ) enhanced skills practitioner, and a Positive Intelligence Coach. She is the author of ‘Get Your Next Promotion’ and ‘Are You The Leader You Want To Be?’ (This book was nominated as the five best business books for C K Prahlad Business Book Award 2019).
She helps you achieve balanced and sustainable growth for yourself and your organization by aligning aspirations, purpose, and actions. She is passionate about helping leaders and teams bring more humanness in their mindset and actions. She is also passionate about assisting people in owning their growth and help them reach their potential.
She is an HBR contributor and host of a video chat show ‘Growth Mindset Conversations’.
Website
https://manbirkaur.com/
LinkedIn
https://www.linkedin.com/in/manbirkaur/
Twitter
https://twitter.com/buzzmanbir
Facebook
https://www.facebook.com/BuzzManbir
Instagram
https://www.instagram.com/buzzmanbir/
Leadership Quote
The best advice my manager ever gave to me was that you should have the wisdom to decide when to speak up and when not to.
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https://manbirkaur.com/books/
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Transcript
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This podcast is part of the C Suite Radio Network, turning the volume up on business.
Welcome to the Keep Leading!® Podcast, the podcast dedicated to promoting leadership development and sharing leadership insights. Here’s your host, The Leadership Excelerator®, Eddie Turner.
Eddie Turner:
Hello, everyone! Welcome to the Keep Leading!® Podcast, the podcast dedicated to leadership development and insights. I’m your host Eddie Turner, The Leadership Excelerator®. I work with leaders to accelerate performance and drive impact through the Power of executive coaching, masterful facilitation, and motivational speaking.Are you the leader you want to be? All of us can improve as leaders. My guest today has created a framework that will help us. She says we need to develop our humanity and bring that into our leadership. My guest today is Manbir Kaur and she has created a framework that will help us with human leadership. Manbir is an executive coach and the author of Get Your Next Promotion and Are You the Leader You Want to Be which was also nominated as one of the best five business books in 2019. Manbir helps leaders achieve balanced and sustainable growth.
Manbir, welcome to the Keep Leading!® Podcast.
Manbir Kaur:
Thank you, Eddie. Thank you so much for your kind words and the invitation. You are awesome. And, as I said, for me, it’s a fan moment. I am big fan of your work. You keep inspiring us.
Eddie Turner:
Well, thank you. You are so kind. Well, I’m a big fan of your work and that’s why I invited you on the show. I’m impressed with the work that you’re doing out there on the global stage and I wanted to share with my audience who may not have met you what you’re doing and why your work matters.So, can you share a little bit more about who you are and your fascinating background.
Manbir Kaur:
Yeah, sure. Happy to. Thank you, Eddie. So, I started my career in a bank actually. So, I come from the business banking background and then I worked for fintech organizations for a long time. So, I have been a techno banker for a long time. 10 years back in 2011, I started as an executive coach. Why? I saw people had the intention to do good work, people had the intention to engage teams, people had the intention to do a lot of awesome work actually and the impact they wanted to create but they were not able to create the impact. There was a gap between intention and impact. So, I call it Intention-To-Impact Journey. So, that’s what I do today. So, majority of my clients are tech leaders and most of the tech leaders get promoted because they have been doing some awesome work in the roles they have been into but when they come into leadership roles, especially senior leadership roles, they really get stuck. They are hyper-rational, they are very smart people, high IQ people and get stuck at managing multiple teams, cross-cultural teams, communicating effectively, influencing people. So, that’s what I do, Eddie. So, as an executive coach, I work with technology leaders and help them lead themselves and their team in the bestest possible, effective and human way because I feel leadership is very simple. It’s not that complicated. So, that’s what I do, Eddie.And on the way, I wrote two books – Are You the Leader You Want to Be and Get Your Next Promotion. Books is a way to reach more people because as a coach, I can only reach a handful of people but as an author, as a speaker, I can reach multiple people, more people.
Eddie Turner:
Very well said. Books allow you to reach more people and being a speaker let you reach even more than that in many cases and becomes a vehicle for the book almost. So, thank you for sharing that. And you also said something I really like. You said you work with people about moving from intention to impact and you said it’s a journey. Tell me more about that.
Manbir Kaur:
See, the foundation of any successful organization is a collective will of people. And most of the times, what I’ve observed, Eddie, that people have the will but I’m talking about collective will, taking people along, aligning them to the strategy of the organization, strategy of team. So, all that is very much important. So, now if we look where we are as a whole globe after COVID-19, COVID also, it was a fast-paced world we were living in. Change was anyways the only constant. We knew that already but COVID made it more visible. COVID shows us very clearly that if you don’t have engaged teams, it’s impossible to produce results. So, that’s why I’m saying intention is always there. Nobody gets out of the bed and says that “I’m not going to engage my team.” Rather it’s the opposite. Most of the people want to do good work, want to engage people, want to produce results but still struggle to do that. So, when I’m saying the impact, there is an intention most of the times, either it’s hidden or it’s very clear, but when they want to create an impact, they don’t know what to do because when they’re on the job, it’s like normal time, priorities, everything takes over and people get into conflicts, they have bad impression of each other. So, there are a lot of relationship problems, a lot of conversational issues. So, that’s what I say intention-to-impact. Impact is very important. And by end of the day, Eddie, I mean, when we create impact, we know it, we know it in our heart that we have created an impact. And this journey is very fulfilling for every leader, for everyone who goes through this journey.
Eddie Turner:
Wonderful. And that is what led to the book that immediately when I saw it, my eyes lit up – Are You the Leader You Want to Be. I absolutely love that title.
Manbir Kaur:
So, when I was working with these technology teams, I came across a lot of people. As I said, they wanted to create an impact and didn’t know what to do. And in today’s era, as I said, ever increasing pace, diversity of change, lot of change is coming up on the way and with COVID it’s all clear. I mean, this book, of course, came before COVID but I’m just relating it to today’s era. So, if people are not as collective units, success is not possible. As a word ‘leadership’, you will agree with me, Eddie, that is glamorized in multiple ways, isn’t it?
Eddie Turner:
Yes, it is glamorized in many ways because people have always attributed leadership to having a title to being where you sit positionally in an organization but more and more people are recognizing the work of Dr. Ron Heifetz and others that say no, it’s about influence and what you do at any area of an organization.
Manbir Kaur:
Yeah. And this world is glamorized, as you agree, and leaders feel motivated by attending some trainings, talks, motivational speaks, which is good but when they are back on the job, they are the same, they don’t know what to do. That’s the reason this book came. That’s where I created Human Leadership Framework. It’s a simple framework which reminds people that you are human and you’re working with another human. So, simple human-to-human things work the best to engage and take your teams along. That’s why the title is Are You the Leader You Want to Be. I always say make sure you’re not chasing somebody else’s goals. You’re chasing your goals. You’re working on your style of leadership. You create your own style of leadership. So, that’s what this book is all about.
Eddie Turner:
How does someone create their own style of leadership?
Manbir Kaur:
So, there are three things. They’re the pillars. I will relate this to human leadership part, Eddie. Would that be okay?
Eddie Turner:
Absolutely.
Manbir Kaur:
So, there are three things basically – Awareness, Relationships, Conversations – which are the pillars of this framework where you actually create your own style. So, there are five parts of human leadership. The first is Heed Yourself. Become more aware about yourself, who you are. That’s where, Eddie, the whole creation of your own style starts with. That’s where that embodiment that “Who I am as a leader? What’s my way of having conversation? I’m not copy-pasting somebody else’s way. Who am I? Does my team trust me?” So, there are two ways. One is to be self-aware here. One is there is a list of questions which I have given in the book also and in the framework. Those questions, self-reflective questions make that journey objective for you. The second portion to it is taking feedback and understand what is the perception of other people about you. So, this is a journey where you become more aware of yourself. That’s the first part.Then you understand your team member. Once you understand you, once you know you, once you’re more aligned with yourself, your being, then only you can understand other people. So, there’s again very detailed framework to understand that. You go ahead and talk to your team. It’s not only having those formal conversation. It’s understanding their motivations, their aspirations, understanding them human to human.
Then the third part is messaging – What kind of conversation you will have, how will you create relationships in your own style.
Acknowledging, that’s the fourth part of the framework. Everyone, even the different cultures have different ways of acknowledging. Even in one culture we have different ways of acknowledging and appreciating. Some people would like to appreciate people in public, some people may not. So, here in acknowledging also, you are understanding your own style, you are understanding people’s style and you are creating how would you acknowledge and appreciate your own team.
And the fifth part of the framework is nurturing, creating the leadership pipeline, nurturing your people, developing them, not only doing those formal IDPs. No, more than that. Sit with them, understand. Once you do these five steps, you develop your own style of leadership which is exactly your own and you are embodying that style. That’s what this framework is.
Eddie Turner:
Okay. If a leader wants to lead in their own voice, in their own style and not be like someone else, you’re saying it’s about human leadership and that the human leadership is your five-part framework of Heed Yourself, Understand Your Team, Messaging, Acknowledging, and Nurturing. And if people do this, they form a leadership both at the individual level and at the organizational level that is unique.
Manbir Kaur:
Yeah, absolutely. And they are authentic. It’s authentic leadership also. They’re authentic to themselves. They’re authentic to their teams.
Eddie Turner:
Authentic to themselves and authentic to their teams. We need more authentic leadership in the world today.I’m talking to Manbir Kaur. We’re talking about human leadership. We’ll have more with Manbir right after this.
This podcast is sponsored by Eddie Turner LLC. Organizations who need to accelerate the development of their leaders call Eddie Turner, The Leadership Excelerator®. Eddie works with leaders to accelerate performance and drive impact. Call Eddie Turner to help your leaders one on one as their coach or to inspire them as a group through the Power of facilitation or a keynote address. Visit EddieTurnerLLC.com to learn more.
This is Simon T. Bailey, author, and you’re listening to the Keep Leading!® Podcast with Eddie Turner.
Eddie Turner:
We’re back, everyone. I am talking to Manbir Kaur. She is an executive coach and author and she is helping us to understand her latest work Are You the Leader You Want to Be. And she’s also the author of the bestselling book Get Your Next Promotion.And so, today, we’re talking about human leadership. Now, you gave us your five-step framework about human leadership before the break, Manbir. And in your work, you talk a lot about taking action. Why is that?
Manbir Kaur:
Good question, Eddie. There are three things associated with any change, any transformation, whether it’s at individual level or organization level. Those are awareness, doing, being. And I believe if you have awareness and you’re not taking any action, you cannot embody it, you cannot bring it in your being. And most of the talks, trainings, programs, even reading books, they all create awareness in today’s knowledge economy. We have a lot of knowledge. We have awareness and many times what gets missed is action, action, and action. Maya Angelou says “Nothing will work unless you do.” For example, many of my hyper-rational clients I work with, those techies, very smart people, high IQ, they understand everything but they intellectualize concepts. They intellectualize the whole thing. Intellectualization is easy. Taking action is where all the discomfort is. That’s where when you face the fears – fear of failure and all the fears. It’s all about taking action, making that small progress.
Eddie Turner:
Taking action is where the fear is but also where the results are, right?
Manbir Kaur:
Yeah, absolutely. You said it.
Eddie Turner:
What’s your experience with getting leaders to take action?
Manbir Kaur:
Ah! So, that’s where the whole dilemma is. It’s very easy to understand and talk about things, as I said. My experience is people want to but taking action is changing something deep inside you and that takes lot of effort. That takes effort which not only comes from your rational brain, it comes from the other side of the brain also. So, that’s an effort. That’s going out of your comfort zone. So, my experience is people have desire but action many times gets amiss. So, my whole thing is to motivate people, rather I’d say not only motivate people, get them to action. Yeah, action becomes sometimes difficult, Eddie, but that’s what I do as a coach.
Eddie Turner:
Wonderful. That’s part of our work as coaches indeed.
Manbir Kaur:
Absolutely.
Eddie Turner:
You wrote a fascinating article in the Harvard Business Review that I also wanted to ask you about. I saw this title and here’s another title of yours that just made my eyes pop – Want Stronger Relationships at Work? Change the Way You Listen. I thought that was fascinating and it made me take notice because we talked about listening a lot in our work as coaches but it really is the secret to having better relationships and I like how you encapsulated it. Can you tell us about what you wrote there?
Manbir Kaur:
So, that article is based on Judith Glaser’s work CIQ – Conversational Intelligence. You’re aware of Judith’s work, Eddie?
Eddie Turner:
Yes, she’s a legend in our field.
Manbir Kaur:
Yeah. So, I am a conversational intelligence certified practitioner also. I am big fan of Judith’s work. So, what Judith says is that we take 0.07 seconds to decide whether we are going to trust the other person or not, 0.07 seconds. Wow! Isn’t it too fast, right? So, that’s how much time we have when we are engaging with people, engaging with our teams. So, your intention really matters a lot. Your listening really matters a lot. What happens is when people have conversations, they are just waiting the other person to finish and they already have made up their mind that “This is how I’m going to respond. Okay, this person had said this. Yesterday’s meeting, yesterday’s PPT. Okay, I have the defense. I have the answer, maybe in the feedback session.” When somebody starts defending the feedback, the manager also starts defending the defender. So, it goes on, on, on. The message doesn’t land properly. So, listening is the key to have any good conversation and good conversations is the key to have good relationships. So, that’s the crux of the article, Eddie.
Eddie Turner:
I like the concept and I like what you wrote there and, obviously, others do too and it’s no small accomplishment to get an article to the Harvard Business Review. So, congratulations on that and I’m looking forward to the next one that I understand is in the works.
Manbir Kaur:
Thank you so much, Eddie. Thank you so much. Hopefully, let’s see.
Eddie Turner:
All right. Well, we’re going to stay tuned and the Keep Leading!® Podcast audience will be cheering for you and waiting to read that.When we think about the work that you’re doing in the leadership space as a coach and through your books and your articles, I can only imagine all that you’ve learned. What’s the most important lesson that you’ve learned personally about leading as a leader?
Manbir Kaur:
I guess, I would say the most important lesson, for me … Before I say that, let me rewind. 10 years back, 15 years back when I was in corporate doing business roles, I was not the same. I had issues with creating relationships, nurturing relationship with people, having good conversations, growing up in the ladder, growing up in organizations. So, I had all those issues. I faced all those challenges which everyone faces in the corporate life. Why I’m sharing that is I have been there, I have seen the pain and I see what was missing. Many things were missing but one major thing is self-awareness, Eddie. That is the core of leadership, of any role, even as a parent. I’m just relating it to any role. Self-awareness is the key. And who can help anybody get better self-awareness than a coach, right? You agree with me.
Eddie Turner:
100%
Manbir Kaur:
So, self-awareness, I guess, if I would like to change anything in my life, 20 years, back 15 years back and do that corporate role again, that is one thing I would love to change and that is a lesson I would love to share with your audience here, self-awareness.
Eddie Turner:
Thank you for your willingness to be vulnerable and share that lesson that you’ve learned about leadership yourself. And I think that we all can relate. And it’s been a while since I’ve been inside of a corporation as well but that’s something I think many people would probably say if they had to do over again that they were not as self-aware as they could have been sooner and that there’s things that they would do different. So, now you’ve learned those lessons and you’re helping others to make the adjustment so that they can lessen the regrets and learn faster and do it better. Fantastic.How would you summarize our conversation today?
Manbir Kaur:
So, I guess, I’ll again start from a couple of things – self-awareness and taking action. When you are aware, as I said, in this knowledge economy, knowledge is on our fingertips, we can go and study, we can read HBR articles, any other articles, we have everything, TED Talk, sport podcast, and lot of good conversation. Eddie, you are doing some good work in this industry. So, lot of lot of these conversations create an insight for people, one, two, whatever. They bring an awareness but to take action, awareness-action combination because when you take action, you will always not be successful. Most of the times you will go and fail and that’s okay. Awareness, action and failure, that’s absolutely fine. Accept those failures. Go back. You’re more aware now. There’s a loop – Awareness, Action, Failure, go back, loop and success. I sincerely feel that all failures are basically success. So, action is very important to me.
Eddie Turner:
Self-awareness and not enough just be self-aware but to take action. Very nice.Is there a piece of advice or a quote that you use that helps you keep leading?
Manbir Kaur:
Long time back, one of my managers, and I owe a lot to her, she taught me a lot, in the fintech company, one of the companies I worked for, she said “You should have the wisdom to see, to decide when to speak, when not to speak.” And I think I didn’t understand that advice that point of time in detail. Now, in hindsight, I think the wisdom was in the art of conversations, art of having a good conversation, which is combination of speaking and listening. When she said when to speak, when not to speak, in the hindsight, I’m sure she meant that good combination of speaking and listening is the key. It’s an art to respond, not to react. I guess, she might have seen me reacting, not responding. So, I think I could make more sense of that one sentence now than it was given, actually speaking. So, I think I spoke about listening, how listening is important. I think that’s what she was mentioning too. So, combination of speaking and listening, right combination, and where to use. And that comes with practice, I guess, Eddie. That’s another thing, again, going back to action. When you understand that “Okay, I need a combination of speaking and listening, when you go on the field, go on your seat, in your cabin, give the meetings, you practice that and then you come back with more awareness. So, that’s what I’m referring to. I’m just relating it to earlier part which I said.
Eddie Turner:
Well, that makes sense and that is really good advice and sage wisdom that your manager shared with you deciding when to speak up and when not to.Manbir, I have really enjoyed our conversation today and I’m so grateful that you joined me on the Keep Leading!® Podcast. where can my listeners learn more about you?
Manbir Kaur:
I am on LinkedIn. The good way to connect with me is in LinkedIn. And my website is another good way to reach me which is ManbirKaur.com and you can sign up for my newsletter on my website and believe me, I won’t spam you and believe me, you’ll get all the good information which will push you, nudge you to action. I’m on other social media handles also, Twitter Instagram with the name @BuzzManbir. So, feel free to connect with me. We’ll be happy to listen from you.
Eddie Turner:
Wonderful. Thank you for sharing and I’m going to encourage all my podcast listeners to connect with Manbir. Follow her, go to her website, and grab one of her books, fantastic work that she’s putting out here into the world for us to consume and check out her HBR articles as well.I am so happy to have you as a guest. Thank you for being with us on the Keep Leading!® Podcast.
Manbir Kaur:
Thank you so much, Eddie. It has been my privilege to be here with you today. Thank you so much and you are a wonderful host.
Eddie Turner:
Thank you. And thank you for listening. That concludes this episode, everyone. I am Eddie Turner, The Leadership Excelerator®, reminding you that leadership is not about our title or our position. Leadership is an activity. Leadership is action. It’s not the case of once a leader, always a leader. It’s not a garment we put on and take off. We must be a leader at our core and allow it to emanate in all we do. So, whatever you’re doing, always keep leading.
Thank you for listening to your host Eddie Turner on the Keep Leading!® Podcast. Please remember to subscribe to the Keep Leading!® Podcast on iTunes or wherever you listen. For more information about Eddie Turner’s work, please visit EddieTurnerLLC.com.
Thank you for listening to C Suite Radio, turning the volume up on business.
The Keep Leading!® podcast is for people passionate about leadership. It is dedicated to leadership development and insights. Join your host Eddie Turner, The Leadership Excelerator® as he speaks with accomplished leaders and people of influence across the globe as they share their journey to leadership excellence. Listen as they share leadership strategies, techniques and insights. For more information visit eddieturnerllc.com or follow Eddie Turner on Twitter and Instagram at @eddieturnerjr. Like Eddie Turner LLC on Facebook. Connect with Eddie Turner on LinkedIn.