Hamza Khan believes the future of work is more human, not less. As a future of work and people-first leadership expert — and bestselling author of Leadership, Reinvented — he’s on a mission to help organizations achieve inclusive and sustainable growth by rehumanizing the workplace. He shows leaders how to unlock the tremendous power of a loyal, thriving, and innovative workforce by shifting from outdated, top-down leadership models to a more inclusive, people-first approach.

Hamza recently joined us “Inside Our Boardroom” to explore some of today’s most prevalent challenges facing people leaders today — from employee disengagement to low productivity, burnout to a changing workforce — and why embracing a more human-centric approach to work is the only way to drive long-term success in our volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous world.

 Answers have been edited for length and clarity.

Modern-Day Leadership Challenges

Speakers Spotlight: Why is there a morale engagement and productivity crisis in modern workplaces?

Hamza Khan: I’m so glad that you described it as a crisis. That word right there is very appropriate, especially in light of Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace report, which surveyed three million people over the past 10 years.

They reported that only a measly 15% of employees around the world are engaged at work. And here’s the kicker — 70% of the variance in employee engagement scores falls within the purview of their people leaders. And therein lies the rub. Most leaders suck. Which I know is not exactly eloquent for a keynote speaker to say, so let me reframe this by saying that most leaders are underprepared and underqualified.

I’ll be the first person to tell you that as a leader, I wasn’t born with the requisite traits that confer leadership. But the good news is that leadership is a skill that can be taught. We can learn leadership, except 60% of people never receive any leadership training throughout their entire career and of those who do receive training, it’s in the back half of their career. So, it’s no surprise that we’re in this crisis.

But let’s bring it back to the central question here. Why is this happening? So, the modern operating environment for leaders at the moment is characterized by a triple black swan, three events that would have been staggered in decades past converging simultaneously — wars, plagues, and recessions. And while we’re trying to navigate that backdrop, we’re doing so with another triple threat, which is God-like technology, crumbling medieval institutions, and primitive brains that haven’t received a significant hardware upgrade in at least 10,000 years.

So, what’s happening right now is leaders are wholly unprepared for the moment at hand. They’re defaulting back to grossly outdated playbooks for a world of work and beyond that is rapidly changing every single second.

Hamza reflects on this question in more depth in the video below:

Technology and the Future of Leadership

SpSp: What role does technology play in the evolving world of work?

HK: It’s almost a bit of a paradox that technology will enable a more human-centered future of work, but I truly believe in the very profound potential of technology to liberate not just leaders, but everyone in the workplace. We have been moving in this direction for a very long time.

The formal study of leadership is actually quite new. For the first 30 years of the 20th century, the definitions of leadership that were popular emphasized centralization of power, control, and even dominance. The strategy du jour in the 20th century was the “great man” theory of leadership, which is exactly what it sounds like — great men are born with the traits that confer leadership. That is wild.

How I see technology playing out is that it’s going to level the playing field, allowing everyone in an organization to have access to the same amount of information, the same information that leaders have. So eventually, there’s going to be a collapse in definitions. By the end of this century, we might not have leaders and followers at all. It might give way to a new category altogether. Perhaps fellows and fellowship might be the structure of tomorrow.

So much of leadership is about making the right decision at the right time based on the synthesis of values and quantities of information. No one person can combine all of the data points right now that characterize our volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous world. What technology does is allow us to make those calculations quicker, present the findings thematically, and free all of us up to be more human, to be more learning oriented, to be more vulnerable, empathetic, compassionate, etc. Let the math be handled by technology. For the rest of us, let’s just be more human.

Hamza digs into the out-dated leadership definitions that still guide workplaces today in the video below and how technology will help level the playing field to allow more people to shine:

The Spectrum of Leadership

SpSp: What personal experiences led you to dive into the world of people-centric management?

HK: This is such a special question because I consider myself very lucky to have experienced the full spectrum of leadership styles going from theory X all the way to theory Y. So, the theory X style of management assumes the worst in people. It assumes that people are lazy, unmotivated, and need to be micromanaged. While the theory Y style of management is at the complete opposite end of the spectrum and assumes the best in people. It takes a very pro-social approach. It assumes that people are motivated intrinsically, well-intentioned, and want to go above and beyond.

I’m lucky that early on in my career, I experienced the theory Y leader. It was in the form of a gentleman by the name of Alan Grant, the G-Man, one of my first bosses. On my very first day, in my very first leadership role, in the first meeting that I had as a newly minted leader, Alan gave me my first set of instructions — make yourself obsolete. I sat back and laughed because the ink on my contract was still drying. And then he explained himself. He said that when you do this, not if, but when you do this, it’ll presuppose that you’ve hired strategically, you’ve trained effectively, you’ve created succession plans, you’ve acquired all the necessary resources, you’ve empowered your team to run without you. And in the end, you’re going to become hands off. And I was like, Alan, what am I going to do? And without skipping a beat, he said, you’re just going to create more leaders. You’re going to build more systems. And he specified that obsolescence is not the same thing as irrelevance.

I’ll admit, back then I was still very hesitant about this whole ordeal, but I went ahead with it. I’m convinced nearly 15 years later that my career, my life, is an echo of that conversation that took place.

Hear about Hamza’s experience with a theory x leader in the video below and how that also impacted his career trajectory in unexpected ways.

The Burnout Antidote

SpSp: How has burnout and fatigue evolved in the workplace? What is its impact on a macro-level?

HK: I have been exploring burnout since 2014 after I experienced burnout at the hands of a “theory X” monster manager. And at the time, my understanding of burnout was just something you flippantly throw around. I did not actually know the extent to which burnout had debilitated my ability to work at the levels of intensity that I was used to. Two doctors said that, based on the symptoms I presented when I experienced burnout in 2014, I suffered a silent heart attack, which flabbergasted me.

Since 2014, there has been an awakening. In the zeitgeist, there has been an understanding of what burnout is. Most people are experiencing burnout right now and the market has met the moment. We are living through a golden age of solutions when it comes to burnout. There’s no shortage of apps, books, courses, you name it, are aimed at helping people beat burnout and achieve more.

Does that mean that burnout has been decreasing over the last 10 years? No. In fact, burnout is exponentially getting worse. Why? Because leaders insist on prescribing individual interventions to what is clearly a system-level problem. You cannot yoga or journal your way out of burnout. You have to look at the upstream factors that produce burnout. That’s where the work needs to be done.

Hamza digs further into the widespread impacts of burnout and fatigue on today’s workplaces and why labels like “quiet quitters” only antagonize the problem, causing even more damage.

SpSp: What’s the first step an organization can take to address burnout?

HK: The first thing an organization needs to do when burnout has become part of the culture is to get real about their situation, to really acknowledge the reality of their circumstances and accept that this is a human problem. There are humans being hurt here. It’s not just co-workers anymore. It’s daughters, sons, parents, children — it’s people.

It’s going to require everyone in the organization to cross perception gaps and reconnect with people through transparency, openness, understanding, compassion, and humility, and deeply internalize that the needs of the business are the needs of the people and vice versa.

This is something that we tend to forget, especially during times of stress, especially during times of change. We need to reconnect with this idea that the needs of the people are the needs of the business and to continually put people first. As simple as that sounds, that is truly the only way out of a burnout culture.

Hire Hamza Khan to Speak at Your Event

Inspiring and practical, Hamza Khan draws on real-world examples to equip audiences with the modern leader’s playbook for creating a thriving people-first culture. He illustrates how embracing a more human-centric approach to work can supercharge engagement, sustain productivity for the long haul, and help organizations flourish in an increasingly uncertain future of work.

Contact us to learn more about Hamza and how he helps audiences stop managing and start leading, today!