693: An Invitation for Kindness in Leadership, with James Rhee

Dave Stachowiak [00:00:00]:
Bad news. Leaders are often the ones who make the rules that prevent kindness. Good news. Leaders are also the ones who can change the rules. In this episode, how leadership and results improve when kindness is at the center of our work. This is Coaching for Leaders episode 693. Production Credit: Produced by Innovate Learning, maximizing human potential.

Dave Stachowiak [00:00:26]:
Greetings to you from Orange County, California. This is Coaching for Leaders, and I’m your host, Dave Stachowiak. Leaders aren’t born, they’re made. And this weekly show helps you discover leadership wisdom through insightful conversations. The chief value in our home is kindness. It’s also the chief value in our business. And so when I came across today’s guest and his work and his book, I knew right away it was a book that I would learn a lot from and also would want to share with so many of you. I’m so pleased to welcome James Rhee.

Dave Stachowiak [00:01:06]:
He is a former high school teacher and Harvard Law School graduate who became a private equity investor and unexpectedly an acclaimed CEO. He bridges math with emotions by marrying capital with purpose while composing systems that bridge people’s disciplines and ideas. He is the author of Red Helicopter: Lead Change with Kindness (Plus A Little Math). James, what a pleasure to have you on.

James Rhee [00:01:31]:
Hey, Dave. Thanks for having me, and hello, everyone.

Dave Stachowiak [00:01:34]:
I loved this book, and I think we’ll probably get into why you wrote it because it’s it’s really key to the story. And part of the story you share in this book is the story of your parents, and you talk about both of them extensively. And you write about your mom, and I’m quoting you. “For my entire life, starting when I was a child, I saw my mom as vulnerable and isolated, kept back by her poor grasp of English. But there were certain punctuated moments when I felt I had her all wrong.” And you share in the book that once a year when you were a kid, your family would drive into Manhattan and see a Broadway musical. And on the way back, you would stop at a Korean grocery store in Queens. And she showed up in a really different way when you did.

Dave Stachowiak [00:02:26]:
What was different about her then?

James Rhee [00:02:28]:
Well, she showed up more like she was in the house, which was neck and shoulders relaxed, just confident with a certain bearing of calm, whereas for most of the time outside the house, I think that it’s fair to say that the way that things were aligned in this country, she was made to feel or she felt small. And she would physically appear that way, too, reluctant to sort of make eye contact, shoulders slightly hunched. I I think symbolically like many of us, right? Sometimes when we’re not feeling our most confident, we sort of try to play small. But at that Korean grocery store, she was not like that. She felt very comfortable, and she felt and I could see her. And, yeah, that’s I’ve always thought about this. In most of the book, in the end, I realized how wrong I was. It was, growing up, I would think about how she feels small, but she didn’t, actually.

James Rhee [00:03:22]:
Deep down, she really sort of, she kept herself, she maintained her agency. But most of my life has been influenced by that interaction, where I tend to be very empathetic and or in Korean terms, it’s that I don’t love seeing people, and I can sense it when people feel uncomfortable or small due to an environment. It doesn’t sit well with me, and I tend to gravitate toward those situations to make those people feel comfortable about the fact that they’re okay. It’s not them, that it’s their environment.

Dave Stachowiak [00:03:55]:
Yeah. It’s such an interesting parallel to where you ended up landing professionally. And you became the CEO of Ashley Stewart, which for those who aren’t familiar, is a fashion retailer with deep roots in the black community. And for a whole slew of reasons, you were really an unlikely person to end up in that role. How did that happen?

James Rhee [00:04:18]:
The timing was almost perfect. I was young forties. I had been in commerce and really in private equity for my entire career. I understood how money moved, who was in control. I obviously grew outside of that system, so I really understood it. Plus I went to, as you said, Harvard Law School. So combining the systems of money and law, I kind of understood why and how the game was designed, the rules of engagement that we all sort of take for granted behind the curtain. And so young forties, picture me, young forties, father, sort of understanding what it meant to be a father and not living for myself anymore.

James Rhee [00:05:02]:
My dad was dying of, like, horrific Parkinson’s, and my dad and my mom were both caregivers. I grew up as a caregiver son, many generations of caregivers. That’s it sort of courses through my veins. I came across this company wearing my private equity hat that employed and served a group of women in this country that I think is fair to say are made to feel small an awful lot. They were plus size, moderate income, black women. And I don’t think it should surprise any of your listeners that the rules of the game were not designed to have this company be particularly successful. And it wasn’t. It was 20 plus years of just futility, frankly, from a corporate standpoint.

James Rhee [00:05:45]:
But what attracted me to it was that the company, even though on the surface it sold clothes, that’s not how I saw it. I saw it more like the Korean grocery store that in these 35 100 square feet, a lot of these women were made to feel very proud in themselves. And anytime you find a place like that for anyone, and I think it’s fair to say that those places are dwindling down a bit, I think. I think they’re worth fighting for. And so I in a lot of ways, I got to relive my childhood. And these women, even though I was, quote, their CEO, I really sort of perceived my role more as their son. Like, it was a way to design a system at this point for women like my mother that I couldn’t do as a little boy, but the heart was the same.

Dave Stachowiak [00:06:34]:
You write that a month after arriving at Ashley Stewart, I knew in my gut what I had to do. My intuition told me that I had to strip off my armor. What did that mean for you, stripping off the armor?

James Rhee [00:06:45]:
Yeah. I think it’s fundamentally that divide that we all feel that, you know, we I think I call it home James and work James. I mean, we all, in the end of the day, like, you wanna live as human a life as you can. Right? And you wanna have a certain degree of autonomy and also be part of a collective. And we all aspire, maybe with a few exceptions, to be just genuinely decent people, and you want better for your kids. Right? That’s fundamentally what what I found throughout the world most of us want. At the same time, we wanna quote we all have egos, and I think the name of the game also is that it’s becoming more competitive. So you have to be, quote, successful in a different way.

James Rhee [00:07:25]:
Right? And home success, those qualities sometimes are difficult to exhibit in a work environment that, for some reason, the trope of being success at work, frankly, run counter to a lot of the values that we espouse at home. And so that armor that I had, it’s all like the degrees and the credentials and the accomplishments and adjectives like being, you’re smart or you have influence and power. It’s these things that we equate with success, and they become armor. Ironically, as you get older, they be become heavy and sometimes some of us get lost in them and we start identifying ourselves through our business card or through our title or through our company affiliation. And it didn’t sit well with me at some point. Late thirties, early forties. I’m like, this isn’t I don’t care. Like, I don’t want the first adjective that people use to describe me as being, like, smart.

James Rhee [00:08:24]:
That’s not really how I want my legacy to be or what I want on my tombstone. I really don’t want it. And so it’s that armor that I just started stripping off and saying, if you think that these credentials and degrees, if they impress you, great. But they don’t really impress me. What would impress me is how I use the knowledge that I’ve acquired, fundamentally how I treat other people. I hope that I can use some of the skill sets I’ve acquired and all the knowledge that the public school system in this country has invested in me. I hope that you view me as successful if I’m able to design systems that improve the lives of others and mine and our children. And that’s the conclusion I came to by my mid late thirties, early forties.

Dave Stachowiak [00:09:08]:
When you stepped in as CEO of Ashley Stewart, it’d probably be a bit of an understatement to say the company was not in a good place. And in fact, I think your initial goal was just to buy some time so the company didn’t have to go through liquidation. And you landed on kindness as a foundation for change. How is it that you ended up landing there?

James Rhee [00:09:30]:
Yeah. I wish I could say it was more planned than it was, but I think that’s the point of the story and also the book. It’s us retrusting our intuition and not succumbing to groupthink or tech inspired tidbits of knowledge in 20 second sound bites and not confusing wisdom with knowledge. It was very different than knowledge. I remember the day very clearly. I was standing there, and I’m Korean American, right? So and I’m a guy. And it was a business that was for predominantly black women, and I’d never run a company before. And so that was the environment and me standing up there and saying things are so bad that, you know, ultimately I had to hire a police officer to protect the employees in the parking lot because they were going to get assaulted because the company hadn’t paid its bills and had already gone bankrupt.

James Rhee [00:10:23]:
So it was chaos, metaphoric chaos. And I had nothing better to say. Like, I literally trusted my intuition. Armour is now peeling off. And instead of coming in there and saying, which I think a lot of tropes of leadership sort of espouse this and say, I’ve got the 5 things you should do to solve everything, the sheer ludicrousness of the situation for me to say that I knew anything, it freed me up and made me wiser to say, I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m the only one who cared enough to come, which makes me, I guess, qualified in some ways. And then I said, kindness. I said, kindness and math.

James Rhee [00:11:01]:
I said, if these two things, if we can aspire to be kind and be mathematically truthful, these two things in that order, then maybe we could find a way to get out of this. And those words came from my deep in my chest. I mean, these were highly intuitive, unscripted words. And I hadn’t said the words kindness or referred to math in that sort of way in a long time. I mean, these were like childhood type simplicity words that came out of my mouth. I hadn’t said the word kindness in a business context maybe ever up until that point in time.

Dave Stachowiak [00:11:38]:
You alluded to this a bit earlier that we have these childhood values that so many of us read and we hear about in early childhood education and we see in books and espouse kindness and friendship and care for others. And I think most people carry that with them in their personal relationships and in their friendships. And yet, the working world may espouse that, but by and large, we don’t see those words show up. At least kindness isn’t the word people lead with. It really is a disconnect between the values we’re all taught as kids and then we show up in the working world, and it’s it’s really different, isn’t it?

James Rhee [00:12:19]:
It is really different. And I think part of this is just the reason why people don’t talk about kindness. And I don’t think we define it correctly, but, we can get to that in a little bit. But I’ve come to a conclusion that it’s just an extension of trying to be cool, that kindness somehow is not cool. Oh, that’s not cool. That’s just relegated to places of worship or with in kids’ books. And despite the fact that we know intuitively deep in our hearts and it really starts coming across more as you get much older and you care much less about what other people think of you with much less need of external validation to stroke your ego. And particularly when you sort of face death, whether it’s your own mortality or, in my case, bearing both my parents, we all know that a life worth living and a life well led, backed up by science studies, by longitudinal Harvard studies, it is your relationship with other people.

James Rhee [00:13:17]:
And it’s about kindness. It’s about which is a central gateway to investing in your relationship and in the agency of other people. It’s a non transactional way of being. It’s a holistic enterprise way of living that we all know to be true. It’s just much more difficult to live like that, particularly given the fact that work and the reach of tech with technology, work has now in many ways taken over the environments that we once called the exclusive province of home. You work everywhere now. And so that’s one of the reasons why kindness is, you know, the talk of it is there are fewer and fewer places with the decline of organized religion or the fact that you work from home. Where can you be kind? Where do these values exist anymore? And I think that’s one of the sort of challenges that we’re all facing.

Dave Stachowiak [00:14:11]:
Indeed. And you write about this. “The pure common sense things we intuitively knew to be true as children are central to understanding who we are and how we should treat one another as human beings. It’s about finding the courage to face down a world that would prefer we forget all those truths and blur them with the new rules and norms of behavior, contrary to the ones we all know deep down are right. It’s about challenging the powers that be, even if you are, like me, a card carrying member of that power structure.” It really surfaced for me the the truth in this, but also the complexity of this. And you said a bit ago, like, sometimes it’s helpful to define kindness. And one of the things I’ve heard you say is that, what kindness isn’t? And I know you’re not a fan of random acts of kindness.

Dave Stachowiak [00:15:00]:
When you think about that sort of meme that’s gone around over the last few years, what is it that that doesn’t work for you about that?

James Rhee [00:15:07]:
That it’s not intentional. That it’s sort of, throwing up your hands and saying that we can’t design systems that reward intentional investments in other people and in a broader shared system. It that it’s kind of like phony. That it’s sort of, oh, it’s a nice thing to have. Every 2 seconds you see something and everyone feels great. And then we go back to our to our other absurdly selfish self seeking identity. We have both. Right? We all have the need for survival, and we have a way of living we have to sort of live and pass down our genes.

James Rhee [00:15:46]:
And as Darwin also wrote, which people misquote him all the time, part of that survival, being fit for survival, is your ability to invest in mutually beneficial relationships. And it’s just not told that way. Right? So I think kindness for me, just like a lot of game theorists would say, it’s a broader strategy of a design of a superior system, which is one of the reasons why in our world these days, you have a real declination in, like, the economics of mutualism. People are really starting to think, oh, I don’t need other people. They’re living really lonely existences. From an economic standpoint, when you live alone, it’s awfully expensive not to have a mutual system to rely on. And so I just I think that these things become little vignettes of like feel good belief from trauma versus and it’s a resignation of the fact that I think we can improve the way that we create systems to prime the type of behaviour that we want to prime. Because people prime our behaviour all the time, right? The systems are designed that way.

James Rhee [00:16:49]:
Why can’t we prime people’s better motivations and to create a more holistic sense of wealth amongst a mutually dependent population? I think it’s very possible. And that’s what we did at Ashley Stewart.

Dave Stachowiak [00:17:04]:
As you were saying that I was thinking about this. I don’t know how recent it is, but on social media, these little vignettes and videos that go around where someone will there’s, like, some 45 second video of someone being in a tough situation and someone doing some random act of kindness. And clearly, a lot of them are staged. And I see them and there’s a part of me that sort of, like, makes me wanna vomit a bit when I see that because it’s just I get it. Like, it makes you feel good for 45 seconds, but it just seems so transactional. And like you said, it’s like an escape from the reality versus what are we doing to create a reality where kindness is a practice. It’s not entertainment.

James Rhee [00:17:51]:
Right. We should have instead we should aspire for a world where there are memes about random acts of unkindness where that’s not the norm. Right? It’s like, look how ridiculous these unkind people are. I also think the thing that bothers me about this, I like the question I was thinking about this while I was answering too, is I also think it distorts the meaning of leadership and relationship. So those random acts of kindness, it tends to put 2 people in roles. 1 is vulnerable and weak and in need of salvation. And then the

Dave Stachowiak [00:18:23]:
Yeah.

James Rhee [00:18:24]:
Act of kindness is some hero that is somehow a saviour. And I, I just, that bothers me too. I think we have too many people with saviour complexes in this world. And I think we generally, as a population, we tend to seek some divine strength of one person, whereas I look at leadership as being much more dispersed. And in real leadership, real kindness, the relationship is truly mutual. Right? So I think real leaders realize that other people, while they’re leading, help them lead themselves. I think it’s very difficult to lead other people when you can’t lead yourself. And so there’s a higher degree of mutualism in real leadership and real kindness, and those videos tend to sort of portray a victim and a savior, which I just don’t think is the right metaphor for leadership or the way we should live our lives.

Dave Stachowiak [00:19:21]:
I was having a conversation with one of our members yesterday, and he’s a big believer in kindness and approaching the world that way. And his manager is a big believer in looking at business and organizations through the lens of battle and war and often uses war analogies and how we need to win and they need to lose. And I was thinking about that in the context of our conversation and how interesting it is that we think about kindness and friendship a lot of folks in our families and personal relationships but at work it’s something different. And there are a lot of people actually who view the world that way. Like, they get into an organization. They say, hey. I’m going to battle today. And I’m wondering, like, when you hear that kind of language and someone says, well, kindness isn’t really a leading value in an organization.

Dave Stachowiak [00:20:23]:
When you hear that pushback, how do you respond?

James Rhee [00:20:26]:
Well, I think it’s I’ll try to approach that in a couple of different ways. So number 1, we’re all leaders. We all lead a life. I mean, so your life is a creative endeavour, and particularly for our children, they’re going to have to be even more creative because so the ruts than the pathways that maybe were available to us, a lot of those are not particularly reliable anymore. They’re gonna have to be more creative. And so number 1, I think that kindness is very closely related to just leading a life, creating a life for yourself and your family. And so that’s number 1. Number 2, there’s a big difference at work between leading and managing.

James Rhee [00:21:09]:
It’s different. I think leading a life, leading a company, it’s a creative endeavor. You’re creating something new. And when you create something new, you have there’s more munificence. There’s a more inclination to say, we’ve created a new source of value, a new pizza pie, so let’s have a lot of people eat it. Versus sometimes in companies and at work, it can feel less like a creative exercise, more of a managerial exercise where you’re just sort of kind of going through the paces and it becomes much more zero sum game ish where you’re not creating a new pie. You are just taking there’s only you live a life where you think there’s only 1 pizza pie. And then if you don’t get it, then someone else will.

James Rhee [00:21:53]:
But I’ve tried to live a life in both my personal and professional life of creating new pizza pies, which also I think creates a lot more wealth, emotional and financial and otherwise. That’s, that’s how I tried to live my life, and it’s from a private sector perspective. Yeah. The other way that I would reply to this is that, you know, in addition to Ashley Stewart, I, I, sometimes I have to do this, right? Sometimes if I do get pushed back, I just say, but I don’t know my financial returns, if that’s the only way you wanna gauge success, like it’s over triple digit IRRs. Is that good? And I hate doing that, but I think that part of the interest in the Ashley Stewart story in particular was that the entire world turned its back on me and the women. They all saw value wrong. Literally, they all turned their back.

James Rhee [00:22:46]:
And I guess we were right, you know, in their way, but I think even in a broader sense, in a more human way, which I think is what the interest story is. It wasn’t just the financial returns. It was the returns that we created that are still reverberating to this day. Just it has it’s enabled me to meet you and your listeners and have this conversation. I think that when you really create value, like create that word and value, in this case values, those stories, they reverberate. It’s not a transactional success story. They inspire others to sort of dig deep and say it is possible. That is what we want.

James Rhee [00:23:26]:
It may take an extra step. It may take us to not subscribe to groupthink and to seem a little bit unorthodox, but it inspires people to sort of dig down and say, no. This this is the life that I wanna live. And I think that’s why I wrote the book. It’s to inspire a lot of people to sort of just trust their own instincts. I think many of your listeners are listening to this and saying, I knew it. It does work, and that’s why I wanted to write it.

Dave Stachowiak [00:23:52]:
You’ve said the word creativity a couple of times in this conversation. And I think the Ashley Stewart story is just what a wonderful example of, like, where creativity can really open up the door for kindness. And one of the real practical things that I’ve heard you say that I think is really a great portal is that the cost centers of an organization are an opportunity for kindness. Tell me a bit more about that.

James Rhee [00:24:21]:
Yeah. Yeah. It’s so funny. Right? So everyone focuses on revenue, which is I get it. You know, an income statement. I get it. But there’s so many other figures that, the true where the rubber meets the road in terms of a wellness of an organization or a society, it’s in your balance sheet.

James Rhee [00:24:39]:
Right? Your balance sheet doesn’t lie. It shows you what you are valuing as an asset or a liability and how you funded it. But it’s also all the unsexy data at work. It’s the insurance data. It’s your actuarial data, right? It’s how your workers’ compensation claims. It’s your health care incidence, how many people are getting preventive medical exams. You know, in my book, I also said that one of the most important metrics I measured was that I wanted the people that worked with me, if they wanted to, to be able to have families before I got there that, you know, people weren’t having babies. And I set as a goal that I wanted to have a lot of babies, which required a whole holistic reassessment of every policy and accounting metric in the company.

James Rhee [00:25:24]:
So these things that they may seem like, you know, I said this at a big JP Morgan conference, like 50,000 people and the whole audience just went like that. And they hadn’t thought about it. But once I said it, they’re like, why wouldn’t we want that? And it sounds silly or simple, but it’s not. Like people want this. And when you can sort of design a system that rewards this type of behaviour, you can imagine what happened. Right? We had more babies. Like, we had people felt much more agile and flexible at work. Our turnover, like our involuntary stuff that we didn’t want, that type of turnover, went to almost 0.

James Rhee [00:26:02]:
All the costs you save on hiring costs, legal costs, they all dissipated and we took that money and allowed us to fund bigger bonuses and wage increases. I mean, it’s all fungible money. And so we as a collective decided to not spend money on things that were confrontational, litigious, and said, let’s take these collective savings. Let’s hanging out to the people that caused them, which is us. It’s mutual. It’s us.

Dave Stachowiak [00:26:30]:
And what you did with workers’ comp in particular, I think, is really fascinating of, like, what you discovered through looking at the math, which is part of this. Right? Could you share that story?

James Rhee [00:26:41]:
Yeah. Sure. I mean, insurance and actuality are that’s the intersection of kindness and math. Right? It’s sort of like, you know, having people exercise agency, but in a mathematically mutualistic way. And so insurance, if it does right, then insurance rates and your risk should go down. And so workers’ compensation, when I first pulled the company out of bankruptcy, and I almost had to put the company right back in because we couldn’t get workers’ comp insurance because the company’s history was so horrific. And I pulled in a few favors from my private equity life, and I got a policy. And I said to everyone, I said, you think workers’ compensation is just like, you know, insurance is just like mana from the heavens.

James Rhee [00:27:22]:
That but I was like, we all pay for it. It’s a direct reflection of us. And I said to people, reminding me of my father, you know, in the lessons he taught us, I was like, if you come to work and you get hurt, whether it’s physical or emotional, that’s on me. It’s my fault. I’m CEO, chairman, and a big owner of this company. Like, you can’t come to work and get hurt because just think about this as an extension. Many of us who are on this listening have children. I couldn’t fathom sending my child off to work and then them getting hurt.

James Rhee [00:27:57]:
And then that employer saying, well, that’s part of the cost of business, so we’ll use statutory workers’ compensation. It’s not our problem anymore. Right? There’s a rate by which you’ll get compensated if you’re hurt. And we sort of shed accountability. Like, we leave our humanistic, just common sense at the door. And so I introduced it back into work and said, I don’t care what the law says and we’ll comply with it, but if you come into work and get hurt, it’s my fault. It means we have bad processes. It means that harassment levels are high.

James Rhee [00:28:29]:
And it means that I’ve not created a safe work environment for you, physically or emotionally. And at the same time, I also said, if you come to work and you don’t get hurt and you make fraudulent claims that you’re hurt and you hurt the collective, we’ll prosecute you. Like, you can’t do that because that’s impinging on someone else’s agency. It’s unkind behavior. And I asked everyone much more like a 19th century humanist, like social compact. I said, is this a fair social compact that we should aspire to be kind, mathematically honest, which is accounting is often not mathematically honest, but mathematically honest? And that can we create an environment where the mutual does well and individuals can sort of exercise their individuality within the context of a broader mutualism? Is that a fair thing to ask? That you should not hurt people, not get hurt. And everyone looked at me and said, yeah. Then that’s how I started.

James Rhee [00:29:29]:
And then, you know, you don’t just say it. I said it once or twice in the beginning, but then you act, and we acted on it. So as the savings, the we broke every actuarial record. So you had a you had a bunch of quants come into our office, and they asked me because I’m a quant too. Right? They they just said, how did how did you do this? They said, we’ve never seen this happen before, ever. And I just said, oh, it was just through kindness and math. And I said in the book, I whimsically said it, but you need really strong culture and operations to bridge kindness and math. Whenever you have oxymorons, you need a bridge.

James Rhee [00:30:07]:
And so great operations, great culture bridge those two things. And but think about the profoundness of what we did is, like, we refused to be a prisoner of history, of past behaviour, of binary inputs, 0s and ones, which in this age of artificial intelligence discussion, it’s very relevant. We just said, you know, we can be informed by history, but we have a collective decision, a collective choice to make that we don’t have to be a prisoner of it. And so we can learn from it and then start a new course. And that’s what we did. And so these actuarial results were so shocking. And I just said, I think you’re thinking of it in the wrong way. We didn’t turn this business around.

James Rhee [00:30:49]:
We made a wholesale like, restart a new social compact. And that’s the only way that you can explain sort of the meteoric change that happened, you know, very quickly. And that’s something you can’t do in PowerPoint and you can’t do in Excel. That’s an eye to eye shaking of human hands. And they were rewarded because, as you said, the savings we got from the premia, instead of it going to a third party insurance company, I made very clear to everyone that this was what was funding the bonuses and raises that we were able to afford in an increasingly more difficult and competitive environment that they paid for their own raises. So everyone this was like synthetic ownership in many ways.

Dave Stachowiak [00:31:30]:
Leaders are always learning, growing, sometimes changing their minds. The book has been out for a bit as so many people have engaged with your work, James, in the last year or so, and the book’s been out, and you’ve talked with people about the stories, especially about with Ashley Stewart. What, if anything, have you changed your mind on in the recent past?

James Rhee [00:31:54]:
I think what I’ve changed my mind on is, like, doing public conversations like this one. Like, so much of my work was quiet. Like, we were I went away. I think most people didn’t know what we did for the vast majority of the time that we did it. But I think as the world is sort of catching up, and I had been sort of living, I think, in a world that I was saying was coming, sadly, that there’d be more loneliness and discomfort and chaos. And it’s I think that’s sort of coming, and that we’re in it. And I think that’s, for me, the book was a step in having changed my mind and sort of saying it’s like talking myself into sharing it more publicly about that it being helpful to other people. And so I’m developing more, I think, courage, I guess, or just sort of conviction that what we did really could be part of a solution for not just companies generally, but I think civically that the cafeteria that I’m referring to and Ashley Stewart is a metaphor for a lot of things, and that gives people hope.

James Rhee [00:33:04]:
It’s like, how could a Korean American man partner with predominantly black women in a twice bankrupt company? How could they do what they did? You know, and how did they get everyone to sort of root for them and buy into this? Even the sort of most cynical people, they helped us. How and why did that happen? I think that how and why is what I I feel like our story can add value to a broader dialogue about so much of the greatness that is in humanity, and we tend to focus on show the worst of it. You know? So anyway, so that’s where I am changing my mind. I’m getting a little bit bolder about just saying some of these things and helping people sort of connect the dots as to why this story is not just a business story. How come it’s sort of capturing the the fascination of people well beyond business?

Dave Stachowiak [00:33:59]:
James Rhee is the author of Red Helicopter: Lead Change with Kindness (Plus A Little Math). James, thank you so much for your work.

James Rhee [00:34:07]:
Dave, thank you for your work. I appreciate you inviting me on to this. Thank you.

Dave Stachowiak [00:34:17]:
If this conversation was helpful to you, 3 related episodes I’d also recommend. One of them is episode 395, how to create meaningful gatherings. Priya Parker was my guest on that episode, and we talked about her work in helping leaders and all of us to establish and create gatherings that are meaningful. And it’s not so much about the logistics and the venue and the food and the temperature and the facility. Although, all of those things have their importance, but it’s really about the connection, the conversation that emerges from whatever gathering we may be involved in. So many wonderful invitations in that in a wonderful overlap with James’ work on kindness and being able to connect so well with people. Episode 395 for that. A great listen, especially if you are putting together gatherings or influencing or creating invitations in any way around that.

Dave Stachowiak [00:35:11]:
I’d also recommend episode 491, how leaders build. Guy Raz was my guest on that episode, the popular host of the podcast, how I built this. Guy and I in that conversation talked about what he’s learned from entrepreneurs and how they’ve built organizations and many of the unexpected lessons and also debunking some of the assumptions we tend to think of when we think of entrepreneurs and how our society views that. And one of the things we talked about in that conversation is how so many people, of course, wanna be featured on his show. One of the important screening points they have is kindness. He’s really big on featuring leaders and organizations that are bringing kindness into the world, a great alignment with what you heard today from James. Anyway, episode 491 for that. And then finally, I recommend the recent conversation with Will Guidara, episode 688, the power of leadership through hospitality.

Dave Stachowiak [00:36:07]:
Will the former owner of the top restaurant in the world? And unlike most restaurants that have reached that top status, they didn’t do it by focusing on their food first. Although their food was amazing. But they started by focusing on hospitality kindness taking care of people ensuring the experience through hospitality was beyond anything someone had experienced before. Episode 688, so many wonderful examples of that and, of course, relations back to kindness. All of those episodes you can find on the coachingforleaders.com website. And I invite you to go there and set up your free membership. Because once you do, you can search the entire library by topic area, and you can find what’s most relevant to you. We are filing this episode under organizational culture.

Dave Stachowiak [00:36:57]:
We’re also filing it under influence critical skills for every leader. And we’ve had so many dozens and dozens of conversations on both of those topics over the years. If this is important to you now, or another topic is critical for you today, you’re thinking about it. Maybe you’re struggling with something. If you are, I’m so sorry you’re struggling with something. And that’s exactly why we have the website there to help you to find exactly what you need right now. Go over to coachingforleaders.com. Set up your free membership.

Dave Stachowiak [00:37:27]:
As soon as you do, you can go right into the episode library. You can search by topic or use the search box to track down exactly what’s going to be helpful for you. And if you’ve been using the free membership for a bit and you’re looking for even more, I’d invite you to learn about Coaching for Leaders Plus. It is an entire suite of additional benefits that will help you to support your continual learning as a leader. And one of the things that we all struggle with in our work, I think I can fairly say we all struggle with this, is work life integration. How do we do a decent job? Some days a good job. Some days we all struggle with this of balancing a bit of work and family and personal life and friendships and hobbies and all the other things so many of us have a heart to do, but, of course, none of us have all the time to do everything. How do we do that well? Well, we recently had a conversation between Bonni and I and our members on our monthly expert chat where we sit down and have a conversation between our members and recent guests, and we thought it’d be fun to instead of inviting one of the recent podcast guests as we normally do, Bonni and I sat down and had a conversation about how we do work life integration.

Dave Stachowiak [00:38:42]:
How do we balance parenting and demanding jobs and time for ourselves and sleep and all those things? We had that conversation recently. It was recorded, and it’s one of the dozens and dozens recordings inside of Coaching for Leaders Plus that is part of the Coaching for Leaders Plus membership. If you’d like to find out more and have access to that and every other recording we’ve done in recent years, just go over to coachingforleaders.plus. Coaching for leaders is edited by Andrew Kroeger. Production support is provided by Sierra Priest. Next Monday, I’m glad to welcome Maureen Dunn to the show. We are gonna be talking about the edge that neurodiversity provides in our organizations. Join me for that important conversation with her, and I’ll see you back on Monday.