In this innovative episode, Jahmad Canley, CEO of Potential Unleashed Consulting, shares how his ability to combine his energy and passion with a sense of humor and innate sincerity enables him to connect with a wide range of audiences and empower them to achieve the growth and change they earnestly desire.
You will discover:
– The one question you should ask yourself every day
– The truth about how your people experience your organization’s culture
– The three things you need to tell your team in times of uncertainty
Episode Transcript
Scott Ritzheimer
Hello, hello and welcome. Welcome, once again to the secrets of the high demand coach podcast, and I am here with yet another high demand coach. It is the one and only Jahmad Canley. Jahmad is a dedic is dedicated to empowerment and education for all people getting his start in organization development over 18 years ago. Jahmad has assisted numerous organizations across multiple industries in creating better, more effective cultures. He is internationally known as a top level culture transformation consultant, peak performance coach, author and masterful storyteller. His passion for helping others unleash their potential has allowed him to work in the top in top organizations such as Microsoft, Amazon, Western Union, LA, Philharmonic symphony, USA, swimming and many mornings here with us today. excited to have you here. Love to dive in one of the areas that ourselves was researching the episodes. Just a real area of expertise for you is not just culture in a kind of a soft sense of the word, but how you develop the leaders that will develop your culture. And so I want to first question, kind of out of here, out of the gate here is we’ve got founders, leaders, executives listening to this. What would you say is probably the most likely way that they need to think differently about developing the leaders within their organization.
Jahmad Canley
I love that question because I think that’s where you get the biggest return on your investment when you’re talking about culture, is developing your people, but starting with developing your leaders. Excuse me, one of the reasons why I say that, Scott is because in our research, what our research tells us is that people experience the culture through the direct supervisor. Yes, right. So you can have an organization with all types of great culture, but it doesn’t always work its way through the organization, because people experience their the culture through the direct supervisor. And we, we probably have all experienced that, where you have a, what I like to call a dynamic, magical CEO, right? Who it’s all about culture, but my supervisor is a little bit of a jerk. And even though we have these wonderful values of how we treat people and everything else, my supervisor doesn’t lead that way? Well, that’s how I’m experiencing culture. So if we’re not investing the time into our leaders, who then are investing the time in their leaders, and it just trickles down by the time that you get to the people who are often working the front lines or doing, you know, some of the most important work inside of organization, they’re not experiencing the culture. I say this way. They’re often not experiencing the culture the way that the founders or the top level executives dreamed of, imagine and envision.
Scott Ritzheimer
Wow. And how would you say folks who have gotten a hold of that who understand your culture is not the words on the wall, right? It’s the experience of the individuals in your company. What is the what are some of the primary differences between organizations who get that and those who are still on the journey of discovering it?
Jahmad Canley
Yeah, so the outcomes are so different, right? Right now, one of the things that I think most organizations that I work with are really looking for, I hear this all the time, is innovation. Yeah, well, innovation is not something that you just go and buy and pick up at the grocery store. It’s cultivated through culture, right? And the way that you get that again is exactly what you’re talking about. So organizations who have built cultures that are really inclusive and dynamic and and really bring about, you know, supporting people and ideas, they often will get the innovation, because people feel safe in that organization to bring ideas, people feel accountable and people feel empowered to bring ideas. I’ve seen other organizations that have success, so please hear me out, because you can, you can definitely be a successful organization and not have that culture, but when you’re put side by side with the organization who is really focused on culture, developing culture, developing leaders. The two will never match it. You can still have a level of success, and you often will, but when you come head to head, every single time, culture is going to right, the organization who has the strongest culture is often going to win that race. Yeah, and that’s one of the biggest differences. You know, you don’t get those things innovation, you don’t get high retention, you don’t get people the loyalty to the internal loyalty to a brand, without intentionally focusing on that as a part of your culture.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, a few of our more astute students of of the model we work with and predictable success will recognize the truth in that right away, because there are two things, yay, three that are really, really important around culture. One is the ability to innovate at scale, right? For a lot of our folks, especially the more entrepreneurial organizations, it’s not so much that they are not innovative because they have that super innovative CEO, right? Or a couple. People on their executive team, but it’s that they haven’t built an innovative culture that’s right, right? And so, so important. The other one is key transitions, and I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on this, because we’ve been through so much change over the last few years. How is it that that a strong leadership core really can carry a culture through the amount of change that we’re experiencing right now in the workplace?
Jahmad Canley
Yeah, I think one is creating that culture of trust right in uncertain times, people will look to leadership, and even if they’re unsure of what the future holds. If I trust leadership, and I trust that our leadership has our best interests at heart, and that I trust that our leadership has what it takes to navigate us through this. Yeah, I’m gonna stay right. I’m gonna have more confidence in that. What happens so often in some organizations is that we wait for the crisis to appear and then we try to all of a sudden. We want people to trust us, but we haven’t cultivated that culture all the way along. So I think that that one of the things you know that can really help people like you said in all the transition that we’re seeing is is trust. One of the other things I would say that comes along with trust is that culture of open dialog. Some older leadership models don’t believe in open dialog. It’s one way communication, and to even ask questions or to have those types of conversations would be seen as insubordinate, right? Leadership is one directional and, you know, all those different things, but open dialog, I think, helps in those times of uncertainty, times of transition. You want someone to say, you know, I’m nervous or I’m unsure, you know, the A big thing that’s going on right now, Scott, I know that you’ve heard of it, and others have, as well as the quiet quitting. Well, that’s a cultural thing, because when you have developed strong, strong relationships and that, that open dialog, you don’t have people silent quitting, right? If people are thinking about, you know, leaving the organization, if people are feeling like they’re not engaged, if people are feeling like the work’s not challenging, those conversations are being had. And then you can find ways to solve for it. When you haven’t developed that type of culture. That’s when you get people just disengaging, collecting the paycheck, but spending their time, you know, doing other things. And so again, I think that building trust and building that culture of open relationship, open conversation, open dialog. And one of the things that I share with leaders all the time is it’s not the expectation that you’re going to have all the answers. Open dialog is about saying, Here’s what I know, here’s what I don’t know, here’s what I hope to know, right? And that builds trust, right? So I think that those are key during those times of uncertainty. Those are keys during times of transition, that if you build that culture of trust and open conversation, you’re going to get a lot more people staying in right, versus jumping ship at the first sign of the waves.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, that’s so true. So there’s some folks listening to this. I can just hear it, right? Because I’ve heard it 1000 times, but they’re in all right? It’s like he got us, you know? He we’ve got to do this. How in the world are we going to do this? We have our real jobs to do. You know how we’ve already got all this stuff that we have to get done? How can we possibly spend more time? You know, what’s it going to take?
Jahmad Canley
Yeah, it takes intentionality. So here, here’s a great example, I think, on this, I say I think, because it’s my examples, right? And what I mean by that, Scott is we do an exercise. And some people have heard of these different quotes. There’s several of them out there about, you know, culture beat strategy, or culture eat strategy for breakfast and all those different things. And people have often asked me, Jamal, what does that mean? And why would you say that, especially considering that you do strategic planning. And what I explain to people is that in your strategic plan, you should be planning for culture. What type of culture do you want to create? Yeah, and it’s not one more thing. I I share this with organizations all the time, and we have the results we we have the proof that when you spend time intentionally focusing on culture, it makes everything else easier. Yeah. What I speak with leaders, especially mid level leaders and managers, one of the biggest complaints that they have is that they actually don’t have the time to lead, because they spend so much time putting out fires, right? But when you put culture in place right, when the culture is in place, those things start to take care of themselves, and it offers more time to actually get to the leading so when I hear leaders say, like, how are we going to do this with all the other things we have to do, I tell them, this is this is the investment. This is what leadership is. Leadership is about creating a setting culture. If there’s nothing else that you do as a leader, it’s about creating culture, right? Yes, you need to create vision and everything else. Culture needs to be right up there in the top three things that you’re doing as a leader and helping helping develop other leaders so that they know how to develop culture as well. Right? Because once you get culture in place, it takes care of itself. So I’ll just leave with this well, one question I ask every leader to think about when they get up in the morning before they start their day, before they answer a phone call, respond to an email, log into a Zoom meeting before they walk in the building, is to simply ask themselves this one question, and that is, what type of culture do I want to create today? It changes everything. Scott, it changes the way that I respond to the email. It changes the way that I walk through the hallway. Yes, I might have 30 emails on my phone that I’m trying to respond to, but if I ask myself, what type of culture do I create today as I walk past you in the hallway, I stop and I smile, and I say, Good morning, Scott, yeah, right. And then I may get right back to my emails. I stop and I speak to the person at the front desk. If I’m not consciously thinking about culture, it’s not that I don’t care about those people, but it’s just, I’m thinking about all the other things that I have to do. But if I just ask myself, what type of culture do I want to create today? It changes the way that I start the Zoom meeting. It changes the way that I kick off the staff session. It changes all those things, right? So when people say, How do I do it, when I have all these other things to do, I tell them, give it 90 days of intentional focus on culture, and I promise you, you will see the return on your time. Yeah, it’s the return.
Scott Ritzheimer
That is. It’s so, so very powerful. Because one of the challenges of a lot of the work we do around culture is that it tends to be very abstract, right? We have a culture of innovation or integrity, or something else that starts with an eye and and you know, it we put it out in like these 30 year plan kind of environment, it’s like way distance, way far away, and we don’t really ever take the time to map that to how do we actually Need to behave today as leaders, as open place, as customer service reps. So I love that question, because it’s so simple, but it’s so powerful. And, yeah, it’s just a brilliant little piece of advice. I could go so many places on that. Let’s keep going here. So I want to shift gears just slightly, and I want to look ahead a little bit further. And as you’ve been helping companies develop leadership, especially in the environments that you have, what would you say are some of the most critical skills that leaders are going to need to have to succeed over the next 10 to 20 years.
Jahmad Canley
Critical skills for leaders to have over the next 10 to 20 years. One that I think is going to be extremely important is being able to lead across generations. That is probably the biggest challenge that I’m seeing most leaders have, is that we have more generations in the workplace at the same time than we ever had before. And though there’s similarities, there’s also some great differences as well. And how do you, how do you lead that way, right? And how do you, how do you lead across those generational differences, understanding that communication styles are different, I think one of the other things that leaders are going to need to really think about is, what does the world look like post covid? And what I mean by that is the expectations of organizations have changed. People still want all of the hard tangibles, meaning that they want the organization to pay them and all those things. Remote work is something that organizations and leaders are going to need to think about. And here’s what I mean about I’m not talking about again, the the task of, do we do remote work, or do we not? What I’m talking about, as far as leaders are concerned, is remote work is going to be a part of the future? Yeah, the question becomes, how do I create culture when half of my team is hybrid and the other team is in office? How do I keep How do I keep the lines of communication? How do I build that, that teamwork and that feeling of belonging when I have people who may never actually physically come together? That’s a new challenge that we haven’t had before, because so much of relationship building historically has always happened in person. Yeah, it happens after. If you and I were together doing this podcast, immediately after this podcast, we would spend 10 to 15 minutes after this podcast just kind of having some small talk, talking about, you know, what do you have coming up over the next two weeks, and those types of things. And that’s where relationships are often built, right? Well, and so that’s how leaders have cultivated relationships. I dropped by your your cubicle, your office, and I, hey, that’s a cute picture of a puppy, you know. And I, we talk about, you know, dogs or whatever it is. Well, those things don’t happen that way in a virtual environment unless we’re intentional, yeah. And so again. I don’t think the question is about whether or not it’s going to be remote or hybrid. I think that question has been answered for us, whatever that looked like in each organization. The question is, as a leader, how do I create culture around that? Right? How do I create culture around having someone who is 65 or 66 in the workplace as someone who is 20 years old in the workplace, who are coming from very different perspectives on how they view work ethic, how they view communication, how they’re dealing with artificial intelligence, right? And how do I create that sense of respect for the differences and the perspectives, I think that’s a leadership challenge that people are going to need to think about as well moving forward. And then lastly, the last thing I would say too about leadership moving forward in the next 10 years, I think it’s going to be, how do we continue to to to lead in a way that not only allows our organizations to be successful, but also helps people focus on taking care of themselves. And the reason why I say that is I think that as leaders is part of our responsibility, and I don’t think it has been so much in the past, right? It’s like I just need to worry about what happens in the eight to five and make sure the jobs get done. But again, if we look at the research and we look at the data, we recognize that when people are whole, when they’re healthy, they bring a better self to work every day. And one of the things that the pandemic really highlighted for us was that people weren’t healthy, right? And all in different aspects of our lives. And so I think that it’s a leader’s responsibility to kind of help shape that in the culture and to lead by example. And that’s not always easy. It’s not easy for me. I was raised in hard work, right? And you work, you work, you work, you work. And so finding those moments to breathe and balance and do all of those different things, it didn’t come naturally for me. It’s a skill that I needed to develop, but I understood how eventually, how important it was, but also, how do I help other people build that into their life? And once we started doing that as an organization, personally, for our organization, the return has been I mean, again, people just bring a better self to work. When they are more well rounded, when they’re balanced in other aspects of their life, they bring a better self to work. The creativity is different, the engagement is different. So I think that’s a leadership challenge going forward. Is, how do we help people do that? How do we build that into our culture?
Scott Ritzheimer
So good, so good. So I’ve got another question. Ask all my guests this question. I’d love to hear what your thoughts are on it. So what would you say is the biggest secret that you wish wasn’t a secret at all? What’s that? One thing you wish everybody watching or listening today knew?
Jahmad Canley
It would be that, as leaders, specifically speaking to leaders, that there are high expectations and that you don’t have to know it all. It’s probably, you know, simple and just makes sense. But I work with so many leaders and so many organizations who still carry that pressure, that a good leader is supposed to have all the answers, and what I find you know so often is that the best and most effective leaders know that they don’t have all the answers. They’re transparent about not having all the answers, and they surround themselves with like well rounded teams, because they recognize that the best answers have come collectively. But I would say Scott that that is a rare trait that I see, and so leaders are under a lot of I guess I would say unnecessary pressure sometimes that we put ourselves under because of this expectation, or this feeling that we have to know it all and we have to figure it all out on our own, or that we have to be perceived a certain way, as being all knowing. And so I would say, I think that that’s a secret that I wish more people knew, is that, I don’t even know that the expectation is there. Of course it’s there by some people, because there’s also this idea that, well, you make the big bucks, so you should, you should know it all right. But I think the earlier that you can establish that that’s not your leadership style, and that’s not how you lead, and you know, the earlier that you can bring people in, just the more success that as leaders that we’re gonna have.
Scott Ritzheimer
So true. Jahmad, there’s some folks listening to this, and they’re just wrestling with every word you’ve said. They’ve gotta have more than they finally realize that piece that’s missing. How can they find more out about you and the work that you do?
Jahmad Canley
Yeah, you know they can definitely reach out to the website. Our website is www.potential-unleashed.com. I’m on social media. My book ideal, which I think, you know, is great for for everyone, not just leaders. It’s a really short read, because I, the way that I write, is for application. I think awareness is great. Application is better. So the book is 100 pages long, but it moves people to not just concept but being able to apply it. Sorry, so I those are ways in that they can find that book on Amazon, they can find it on our website, and, of course, you know, on the website, you can also find our contact information, my contact information, and reach out, you know, any way that I can help and support, that’s what I’m here for.
Scott Ritzheimer
Fantastic. Well, thank you so much. Thank you again for this episode, as well for being on sharing with us today powerful, powerful insights that I know are going to move some leaders and their cultures forward. So thanks again for being on the show for everyone watching and listening today. You know your time and attention mean the world to us. I hope you got as much out of this conversation as I know I did, and I cannot wait to see you next time. Take care you.
Contact Jahmad Canley
Jahmad Canley is dedicated to empowerment and education for all people. Getting his start in organization development over 18 years ago, Jahmad has assisted numerous organizations across multiple industries in creating better and more effective cultures. He is internationally known as a top-level culture transformation consultant, peak performance coach, author, and masterful storyteller. His passion for helping others unleash their potential has allowed him to work with top organizations such as Microsoft, Amazon, Western Union, LA Phil Harmonic Symphony, USA Swimming, and many more.
Want to learn more about Jahmad Canley’s work at Potential Unleashed Consulting? Check out his website at https://potential-unleashed.com/
Podcast Booking Status: Open
We are looking for podcast guests, and we want to share your story.
Are you a coach, consultant, or advisor for entrepreneurial organizations? If so, let’s do a great show together – and we can promote you to our audience on all our social media channels, website, and email list.
Guest requirements:
- As a coach, you should be experiencing some very good momentum AND be grossing $100K or more annually. We’ll be talking about how you help your clients achieve extraordinary results.
- Consider yourself as equally people and results-oriented in your mission.
- High-authority expert management and independent coaches who work with founder-led entrepreneurial organizations of 40 or more employees. We also encourage guests that are operations/strategy and culture consultants, advisors, and leadership coaches to be guests (no specialties in marketing, branding, sales, or IT, please
- Please, no new coaches (under 3 years), published authors, non-independent coaches, or non-business coaches/consultants.