Amir Bormand: [00:00:00] On this episode of the podcast I have with me Taha Hussein. He is a leadership coach, and we’re gonna be talking about motivating people. To solve tough problems and we’re gonna be covering, areas of how do you help people through motivation, learning new skills when challenge somebody, they have to be able to raise the bar and you have to support them.
It’s not always just asking people to go jump higher. You need to provide that guidance to make sure that they’re supporting the right ways. Taha, I’m excited to have you on to talk about this.
Taha Hussain: Excited to be.
Amir Bormand: Awesome. So before we dive in, let’s start off right at the top. If you could just let everyone know a quick summary of who you are so that we can have some context to the episode.
Taha Hussain: Awesome. So I’m, I am a software engineer who turned into a manager and leader at tech companies. I worked at startups tech companies like Microsoft, Yahoo, Walmart, and last year I [00:01:00] started a business. For leadership coaching. And so what I do is I work with individuals and also groups to talk about leadership and how can they lead the teams and themselves better.
Awesome. Awesome.
Amir Bormand: Yeah, I think this topic kind of feels fits right into your wheelhouse of leadership and it’s a great topic about motivating people to solve tough problems. And I know obviously, there’s. Different ways to approach this and I want to hear your take cuz obviously the biggest challenge people have when solving any problem is how to go about.
Actually the process of figuring out what to tackle, right? A lot of times somebody comes tells you, go do this, and for the most part, if you don’t know how to solve it, you have to spend some cycles just to figuring out what don’t, trial and error that doesn’t necessarily fit or help a company in reality, obviously it’s not what they want somebody to do, but a lot of times it happens.
I guess from your point of view, when you think [00:02:00] about people and approaching. Problems, tough problems, what are some of the initial frameworks of helping support someone, right? Off the bat, I wanna go ask them. I do something. They might not be in their wheelhouse, they might not be comfortable.
What do I do?
Taha Hussain: That’s a great question. Asking people to solve tough problems and tough. An example is they haven’t tried something before, something new for them. I’ll talk about a story. There’s back in Yahoo when I was a new manager, I had a new team and I didn’t know. On the team and I was doing one-on-ones.
And one of the engineers who was a senior engineer, he asked me about his growth plan. And so I asked him about, cause a lot of team members that we had worked on big data and he had, he didn’t have the expertise in that. So I asked him, Hey, we need help over there and so it’d be great for him to learn this new skill.
And he was like, Hey, big data that’s you seems like big data is like too big, like out of my comfort zone. I haven’t even heard about it. I see people talk about it, it seems. Something too [00:03:00] big for me. And so that was one thing I realized. And then over the course of one week, I got to know more about him, what he really likes doing, what his strength is.
He was a great Java programmer. He could write code like I have not seen the right code like that sometimes. And so I saw that, and that’s a basic requirement for you to learn the technology of big data. But he didn’t know that part. The second part was the team actually needed a lot of help. The team signed up for big.
For by the chief architect for the for, for the company in that quarter. And so we don’t have enough strength to fix all those problems in that quarter. So I went to this guy and I said so first thing is that you, we want to connect people with a pain point that they care about, somebody that they care about.
If you are, say for example in the eSports industry, like I was in the last time, people care about the players experience, but sometimes it’s not the customer, it’s your immediate team members or your family members or your friends, whoever that is. And so I talked about the team that [00:04:00] he’s working in for a while and he’s a senior engineer and the team desperately needs someone to come and help.
And based on what I’ve seen him doing, his Java, his expertise, he’s the right candidate to solve that. I could go and hire somebody, but I would still be doubt. But this person can actually solve this problem. So what I did was to make people go towards solving a tough problem, you need to show why it’s important.
Cause they have to get out of their safe zone. I don’t call it comfort zone, I’ll call it safe zone. They have to come out the safe zone feeling I can fail. And at the same time, you have to give them confidence that they can do. You have to make them believe that they are the ones who can actually do it.
You know what? In three months the person not only learned the stuff, he was the maximum contributor to the court base. My boss was amazed by that.
Amir Bormand: Interesting. You said something Really I think interesting there when you said move out of their safe zone and obviously as people when you, we are kind of risk averse, right?
Humans, however way you view evolution, that’s a whole different topic on [00:05:00] that, an expert. But obviously part of our D n A is built on survival still. And our safe zone, our comfort zone’s, very important to us. You mentioned connecting. The problem why it’s important you’re trying to connect that, why give them a reason to move out of their safe zone?
So when to get somebody to move outta their safe zone and to for them to feel comfortable that failure is okay. Is part of that solution. Also understanding that like it’s, the accountability component isn’t, we don’t want that quote unquote blame culture. We wanna understand what happened, you’re safe if you fail.
Because a lot of times we talk about creating that blameless culture, but most people don’t feel that’s accurate or true.
Taha Hussain: That’s an excellent point that. We are not feeling safe because we would be judged by other results or the both we are doing. And so if I fail, I’ll be judged by that. And while that sounds true, it’s also based on behaviorism that Watson suggested.
Came up with, a hundred years [00:06:00] ago, and that has been proven wrong because we are now saying that, Hey, I like you as a team member because you’re doing good rewards the day you don’t produce rewards. I don’t like you. And there’s a lot of corporate culture talking about why you should not have friends at work.
But thing is that. As a human being I’m working with you are going to build a happy relationship with them. Drawing those lines is much more difficult than accepting those lines that these are human beings. I’m just working with them. The main goal over here is not to tell people to produce excellent results.
It’s about did you put in your best effort? If you have putting your best effort, that’s what counts because there’s so many unknowns that are happening and you can’t control everything. As an example, It’s a movie called Apollo 13, which Ed Harris plays the role of the flight operation. And this is based on a real story.
And they talk about how there was one guy who hu scheme. Build the lunar module and now they’re need use the lunar module to land on earth. And he is asking to do it and he’s saying, Hey, I [00:07:00] don’t wanna take any responsibility cause I didn’t design it to land on earth. I didn’t design to land on moon.
And this gene keeps on, it had escapes on focusing on, hey, but that’s not the design. If we are a work with what we have, and this guy wasn’t like talking about that he’s not feeling safe. Eventually he figured it out and he said, I know what you’re trying to do. I’m not gonna hold you personally responsible.
If it lights, it, lights, and then everyone make it work. Because if you are not feeling safe, you can do all the reasoning you want. The person is frozen, they’re not gonna do anything about it. That’s just our nature. And so accepting that as a reality that we have to make people safe and not create environment and environment in which they, their creativity does not flourish, doesn’t
work
Amir Bormand: for.
That’s a good example. And I think I was in this case, yeah, the Apollo 13. That’s a good example of, a case where somebody does have to take that risk and sometimes, and I guess the example, you had a Yahoo, you [00:08:00] observe this person, you felt very confident that their skillset would translate.
And I guess sometimes, we do have that component of this person. Some new skill is gonna mean they can achieve this. And as a manager maybe you’re observing that person obviously is in the thick of it. They’re not necessarily, seeing that, purview of where they are with that gap.
That gap is important though, right? And obviously the organization has to make an investment for that person to to upskill learn whatever they need to do to be able to tackle this problem. If it is something, if it is a skill-based issue, You also have to take into account somebody needs that time, somebody needs to have that opportunity to learn those, that, that new skill.
And then also apply it. There’s the cycle. How do you support that so that obviously people have to still do their job and you’re asking me to take on something new and making sure that they have the right skills to do it.
Taha Hussain: So planning is part of everything. We have to leaders plan a. They plan to plan a lot too.
Plan to plan is very important. And so [00:09:00] what you’re doing is that you’re making a plan as a project manager and taking this as a project, uts go and learn and saying it doesn’t work. You gotta help the person through the process, help them build a plan. Cause they are, in this case, was a software engineer.
It’s not necessarily a project manager. But I am, and I’m supposed to help him with that. So I use my expertise on breaking down his learning goal into small steps. But each step is also aligned with the goals that we need to deliver in a quarter over a period of time. It’s not like a big bang and of three months, here’s a result that won’t happen.
And so we have to break it down, small pieces. Now, what that does automatically, it creates small achievements. Now the person is, does something, he solves a problem, feels good about. Gets more confident, picks up a higher task, and then it just becomes a snowball and keeps on rolling. Now, as a manager, you have to manage the learning aspect along with the delivery of the project and they go hand in hand.[00:10:00]
Amir Bormand: Yeah, I was actually thinking. As you were mentioning that you referred to the safe zone. You talk, we’re talking about skills and we’re talking about, obviously, people have to, they’re being challenged to solve something new. It happens every day. They have to, raise some aspects of their, ability to deliver.
I guess the tricky part, we talked about accountability as well, but the tricky part. When it doesn’t happen and obviously let’s say you’re in a good environment, there’s accountability, but the person themselves, outside of the accountability per perspective, if they aren’t successful, there’s a lot of internal thoughts.
Am I good enough? How are they gonna view it? My, my teammates? And that all’s impacting someone. And I think, when they’re about to take something on, there’s even sometimes thinking about the failure or what could happen and actually if in lo and behold it does happen, there’s a whole component to making sure that person comes out not feeling, worried about taking another chance, but feeling.
Supported. [00:11:00] I guess when you’re looking at that side of the house, is that, yeah, somebody is gonna try and they’re gonna fail, and of course we’re not gonna hold ’em accountable, but for their own wellbeing, how do you help them understand and support them and pick
Taha Hussain: them up? Okay, so I’m going to take the help of some biology here.
Okay. Let me explain one other part before we go into about the fear and handing that, what does it mean, what we are doing? I’ll tell you a story about it first. Tomorrow is my daughter’s birthday, and about an year ago, around the same time, she started sending me pictures of pugs. Like wearing ballet dresses or dressed up and all of that.
And I was thinking, why is she sending these pictures? And I figured she had spoken to me before about having a P cause she likes pugs and maybe she wanted a bird, the gift of the pug. And afterwards I walked out and I saw someone walking with three dogs and one of them was a pug. Then I went for a walk in the park.
I saw so many pugs. They said, the universe [00:12:00] was telling me you need to buy a puck for your. And this happens to us all the time. We think about buying a car, say, I wanna buy a Tesla. And you are thinking, and you all you start seeing is Teslas around you. This just happens to us. And so in biology, This is referred to as RAs reticular activating system, and it’s a two inch or two centimeter thing that sits right above our spinal cord.
And that’s where it connects our rational mind to our subconscious mind. Emotional mind, which does all the activity. It’s also all about feelings. Like fear is a feeling, safety is a feeling. It’s an emotional concern or a rational concern. And so what’s happening? This RAs is like a cup. The concerns we have in this cup, we are gonna look at the world with those, with that information because we get about 11 million bits of data every second, but we can only process around 50 bits, 50.
Versus 11 million on a good day, you can say 70 bits, but that’s [00:13:00] still not enough. How do you get all this data extracted every second? So this RAs system acts like a sea. It takes our concerns, put datas through it, and then what comes out is those 50, 70 bits that are all about our concerns. Okay? Now, if I’m concerned about failure, I’m gonna see failure everywhere.
And it’s just limited list, right? So we have to work with that as leaders, lead people by mastering how to manage this ra, this cup. And they start with themselves first. If you are scared, you will emit more. You make, you’ll make people more scared around you. And this is why I gained the example of Paula 13.
Everyone was. And these are all like moonshots. They’re all scared, but this leader is not scared. He’s thinking, Hey, failure is not an option. You gotta go bring people over here. And he has to have that. If he’s scared, he would not be able to, lead other people [00:14:00] when he’s scared. So having, knowing you can fail is important.
So you can build a plan, but focusing on failure is not a good. That makes that all is feel around you and you start thinking, I’m gonna fail, and you end up failing. So as a leader, as people are working through that, you have to keep on giving confidence. And so motivation is something that I say as, it’s like an energy and it’s a different energy.
It’s not like it doesn’t build up slow. It’s like a big bang kind of a thing, like an event happens when the person that you are motivating generates a feeling inside of themselves, which makes them change the course of what they’re thinking. Okay. And that’s a big bang kind of energy happens inside them with the do.
And so that talk has to happen. So for Yahoo for example, my talk was with that person about the teammates, and he can do it, and I believe in him. And after that it’s like just keeping momentum going on. You meet a person on a regular basis, [00:15:00] but you have, if we have defined problem into smaller pieces, they’re not looking at failure, they’re building confidence.
And if they fail at a small task, another task, then you can pivot. It’s like a project. So you start totally, they start and they finish on the end. You manage through the process and you learn in that process. So you have small failures. And then you start pivoting and you figure out what you want to do.
So it builds confidence in them. So as a leader, that RAs that you’re working with a person, you’re focusing on what’s in their, what’s in their sea, what are they looking at? And each time when they’re looking at something, help them figure out it’s doable and they
Amir Bormand: can do it. Interest. I think when I was listening to you talk about the, 50 mi, the 11 million bits of information coming in. We can process, 50 bits a second. And I was thinking, how many times does somebody find themselves overwhelmed when they’re tracking a problem?
And it could be anything. It doesn’t have to be work, it could be home. And it’s interesting that. We’re trying to potentially process [00:16:00] over our capacity, and all of a sudden you throw your hands up and you’re like, I can’t. And you mentioned, that factor of, if you could help somebody and actually break that down to a smaller, bite size component to help them through the process, sometimes that’s all we need.
So that you’re not trying to process that whole ocean. It’s just it sounds like it’d be impossible for our minds.
Taha Hussain: Yeah, so breaking it down like that helps relieve anxiety and it’s also breaks down to smaller pieces so you can pinpoint and focus on the problem.
Amir Bormand: Yeah it’s funny as I, I do a lot of podcasts and a lot of times things come back to very few fundamental, psychological things.
Safe zone, psychology component, anxiety, psychology, component motivation. It’s really interesting how, as people managers, a lot of the aspect of it is to help understand. Your direct reports, understand them to get through some of those mental components. Cuz skills are probably less of an issue cuz when you hire somebody, you do know what you’re getting [00:17:00] and what you’ve been talking about, this motivation component is and you went back to, in the beginning you mentioned if you could explain to them why the problem’s important to help them focus, to get them on the same page, to help them raise their game.
It’s really interesting. It’s so much of an art. It’s and there’s so little. People get taught on the job before the job of becoming managed to help people, approach these type of managerial problems. And that’s the real challenge in being a manager is, you’re part psychologist, you’re part, person who breaks down work, as you mentioned.
It’s all these different hats that you have to wear and this one’s critical.
Taha Hussain: You are right in the point, the way I look at the aspect of you are a people manager. Psychologists, for example. It’s a little bit different than that. We have not been taught formally, about so many things.
For example, one of the things that I learned last year is how important is storytelling. And we are never taught storytelling in school. There is no course. I talk about writing essays, but they don’t teach you formally how to write stories. And we watch stories [00:18:00] around us all the time in ca growing up in cartoons, watching movies, some stories, but the way we communicate to ourselves.
Is in terms of stories, we motivate each other using stories. That’s the key component. So we are not being taught how to lead ourselves. So my main goal is to learn as a leader, you gotta learn how to lead yourself first. And so then what are we leading over here? Have you read a book called The Happiness Hypothe?
So Jonathan had, in that book, he uses a story that he went to Arizona and he was riding a horse. He learned the horse, and then as he started, the horse was taking a walk. It started going towards the cliff. And then he started moving the horse, but the horse wouldn’t turn. And then he started panicking and the horse kept walking towards the cliff.
And then the horse stopped five feet before the cliff. And then, once he caught his breath, he looked around. It was amazing scene. It couldn’t only be seen five feet from the cliff [00:19:00] at least. And on a horse, the horse was actually trained. To bring visitors at this location. After 10 minutes, he turned the horse.
The horse turned. So he writes about this, that, brain works like that. He’s psychologist. He says, we have a rational mind. We have an emotional mind. And the writer’s responsibility as a rational mind is to guide the elephant. Cannot force the elephant because, so this is a horse. He talks about an elephant instead, our emotional mind is as big as an elephant, six tons.
While the rider rational mind is like 0.1 tons. And so rider can’t push, can’t force the elephant. You have to influence the elephant. And the way to influence the elephant is by telling stories the elephant cares about. If you like, there’s there, there’s a leader in Pakistan who’s right now who used to be an ex-prime minister.
His mother went through cancer in 85 and she died and then he built a cancer charity hospital in Pakistan in eighties, like early nineties. That’s a corrupt country. But he did that through charity [00:20:00] and he had no expertise in cancer or medicine or anything, but he felt the pain of his mother and he saw other people don’t have access to the care and they’re going to the pain.
So he felt their pain as if he’s feeding his mother’s. And I see why he went towards solving a problem. And so these things move us. Connections are so important to us and people talk about at Work Act. There are no friends cause you have to send them by one day. I say you’re not fully committing yourself into it cause you’ll be hurt.
One day you might say them goodbye and that’s just part of life. But at least devote yourself completely as a team member.
Amir Bormand: That’s actually quite interesting. I think storytelling is is something very hard to actually master. I think it’s a, it’s always a work in progress and I think when you were, when you’re talking about.
The conversations you’re having with your teammates, you’re trying to phrase the why of that problem and connect. I think, I guess Simon Sinek talks about that a lot. If people can connect the why that does change the attributes, and I guess that’s, that [00:21:00] storytelling, that ability does help.
So we’ve been talking a lot about the high level of motivating people. We’ve been trying to, get them to understand, connect with the problem. I guess on a little bit more of a macro, micro level, right? Not the macro, looking more at the day-to-day, the weekly, you’re gonna have one-on-ones with people on your team.
And if you have asked somebody to go outside their safe zone to, to try to tackle a problem. When you’re in your one-on-ones, what are you hoping to see to. Observe their progress and make sure that they’re still supported on that, like that one-on-one basis with the time that you have with them.
I see.
Taha Hussain: So the first part is that every time I’m having one, one with anyone, or I’m talking to anyone, I look at what their rast looks like. Where are they focused? This is what like the entire world says where focus goes, energy flows. So if they’re focused on a personal problem they’re having at home and we say, Hey, don’t bring your personal problems to.
The thing is that a human can’t leave their problems at home. It’s part of their life. So you have to accept [00:22:00] that, that will be there. And everybody’s going through something every day in life. So when a person comes, I let them hear what they’re talk, what they’re thinking about, and for them they have to feel comfortable that they can share anything they want to.
So you have to build that trust with them. It takes a while with some people and so they’ll information you realize if they’re having some personal trouble and stuff that you have to work towards that you have to help them. It out so that they can now remove those things outta the RAs. So you are a RAs master.
Your job is to figure out your own, and you also can help the other people work with their RAs. So I focus mainly on that. And if those things are causing trouble, for example, the person problem, help them aid it out, they take it out. Then I ask them some questions. And here’s an example for example, if somebody’s not like responding themselves to something like they’re sitting.
Like they’re not excited about, or they’re not thinking about it. The way I do it is, you think about this rubber band over here, right? So if you have a rubber band and like you, you move it like this. Now there’s tension between them. So if I say, Hey, you are here and this is your goal, [00:23:00] and I’m gonna set a goal over here, it’s going to immediately create attention over here.
Okay? And so one response would. Remove the goal state, I wanna go back. I don’t wanna do it. And that’s how you can release attention. Other way is that, let’s make a plan. Let’s go towards solving this problem. And so the goal over here is to create this tension first. And the way you create that is by asking questions.
We invoke critical thinking. Instead of saying, Hey, I want you to work on this, talk about the problem and say, what do you think we should be do be doing about this? And now they’re using the critical thinking from their perspective thinking, okay, I have autonomy in how I solve the problem. And if they’re not excited, you’re define the problem correctly.
You gotta connect problem with them. Like he wasn’t excited about big data and I said, Hey your teammates need it. You can do it. And then you got excited about that. So you have to work with that. But the first step starts with these two things. So there’s a framework for it. It’s a famous framework.
People don’t talk about it like this though. It’s called the Grow f. And you are helping people grow. Whenever this solve problems, we are always [00:24:00] growing. So G’S for gold. So you define the goal over here and the second part is that you define the reality. R is for reality. So now you have to these two things.
It creates an energy now. Now you’re not telling them what it is. You’re having a discussion with them through q and a, and they’re the ones who’s saying, oh, this should be the goal, or this should, this is what the reality looks like. So with this. Because you’re asking questions, you have to convince them.
There is no convincing, there is no argument. It’s a conversation. You’re asking question, they’re answering. You’re not even suggesting anything. Now, with this one, you’ll also explore if they’re not moving towards this, there’s some obstacles. So I say strategy is about when you wanna hit a goal. If there is no obstacle, you can just make the.
But they’re obstacles in between. They’re defenders, they’re lies of defense. So you gotta have a strategy to overcome those defenses. And so when you have obstacles, you gotta have a strategy for that. And so for this person, he was saying, Hey, bit as too much for me, for example. And so for that, he needed some confidence, some actual confidence.
And I was [00:25:00] also, back in the day, used to be a very good, big engineer, but I did not mentor him. My goal was to coach him cause he had his own talent and he could go and find all the information he wants to. So obstacle is, Always for obstacles, but so also for options, sometimes people will start discussing options.
Hey, I’m excited, I wanna do this. And if there are obstacles, you help them move the obstacles that are part of their ass. And then you start discussing options with them again, questions. So they come up with, Hey, I can do this, I can do that, I can learn this first and I can do that. So they you’re planning with them also around this thing.
They’re part of the planning process and so the ownership is completely on them. You’re not owning. You’re saying, I’m here to help you go towards that direction. You’re asking questions. They are the one who’s giving you these solutions. They’re the ones who’s saying, this should be the goal. This is the reality.
It looks like you’re only challenging them when they are not looking deeper, or they are like they have blind spots. You are only challenging through questions like that, and this is Socrates method [00:26:00] of invoking critical thinking. Now, the last step is will, which is what will you do next? The important part is once they discuss what they want to do, like it’s out there.
It’s not part of the RAs like once, its, when they talk about it now, it automatically goes onto the RAs, the list that they want. Now they start looking forward towards it. All the data they see around them 11 million bits, the filtered 50 bits that come out is part of the grow plan and it because they have the ownership.
Ownership is the key piece for motivation to motivate
Amir Bormand: people to. Absolutely Todd I love the conversation. I think. There’s there’s so much more we could probably cover. We’ll have to save it for another episode, but fantastic. Insights and yeah, I’m gonna have to try to work on my re myself.
I think like everyone else, like you said, that’s a work in progress. Fantastic stuff. I’d like to ask all my guests this question and it’s if they could have a future guest cover a topic, what topic they would like to hear.
Taha Hussain: [00:27:00] Excellent question. I am going to give you, there’s a topic that I’ve been researching and I don’t have an exact answer yet on that.
I have like different people, different theories, and I want an expert come in and talk about that. And that’s on the word of gratitude. You think about it everywhere. Let’s talk about religions for a minute. Almost all the religions, no matter what they do, they talk about. No matter where they come from.
So that’s one thing. The other part is that even now, people who don’t follow religions in the community of leadership and others, they talk about gratitude. You mentioned Simon Sinek. He talks about gratitude, right? He talked about something, Hey, I don’t have a bucket list, because then it means I’m not enjoying what I have for that.
And so the question is that why is gratitude so important for. Do big things. How does it motivate us? People say if you don’t have gratitude, then you’re not attracting things towards you. Why is that?[00:28:00] I wanna know a lot more about that. That’s a good one. I
Amir Bormand: like that. How would you like somebody to reach out to you, by the way?
Cause I’m sure other people wanna reach out and pick your brain
Taha Hussain: on what you’ve, LinkedIn is one of the best options to reach out to me.
Amir Bormand: Okay. Yeah. All right. We will make sure we include that. Taha, thanks. Thanks for being on the podcast. Thanks for sharing your thoughts. It was,
Taha Hussain: Thank you Amit. It was great being.
Amir Bormand: Absolutely. Thank you. That’s it for this episode. We’ll be back again. Different guests, different topic until then. Two things. One, I think that topic of gratitude’s a great discussion and understanding, how it impacts people, management teams, why it’s so important and, good go ton of different directions.
But if you’re an expert or know someone who could talk on that subject, I’d love to have you on the podcast. And secondly, if you find the podcast. Please share it with somebody else. That’s how the podcast has grown and I appreciate anyone who does share it and also leave a review, subscribe. That’s the other way we like to see growth is through the subscription.
So I appreciate anyone who is subscribing, and [00:29:00] until next time, thank you and goodbye.