How do leaders create workplaces where people don't

just show up, but truly engage, contribute and thrive? My guest,

transformational executive coach and best selling author, Susan

Inouye, shows us how, with her groundbreaking approach, Susan

helps leaders shift from control to connection, from authority to

authenticity and from bottom line myopia to true belonging.

In this episode of the courage of a leader, Susan shares

inspiring stories and practical shifts that will change how you

lead and how your people flourish, I'm glad you're here

to listen in you

Welcome to the Courage of a Leader podcast. This is where

you hear real life stories of top leaders achieving

extraordinary results, and you get practical advice and

techniques you can immediately apply for your own success. This

is where you will get inspired and take bold, courageous

action. I'm so glad you can join us. I'm your host. Amy Riley,

now are you ready to step into the full power of your

leadership and achieve the results you care about most.

Let's ignite the courage of a leader.

Susan, thank you for being on the courage of a leader podcast

today.

You are so welcoming. I am so excited to be

here.

I'm very excited to have this conversation like

we're talking about something that is super critical. I'd say

it's a crisis right now in our workplace, we're going to talk

about how every leader out there, in their teams, in their

sphere of influence, can create cultures of engagement and

belonging. Cuz, of course, if someone's going to be engaged,

they need to feel like they belong. And I love the ways that

you think about and access this. Where do you want to start?

You know, yeah. I mean, when you talk about

cultures of belonging, this is what got me into this so many

years ago, yeah, and learning how important it was, I think I

talked to you briefly about it was because, gosh, what was it?

More than 13 years ago, I started getting calls from

executives complaining about their young people, and at the

time, it was the millennial generation. So there was so much

pain and suffering between generations, that I had to find

some kind of answer. And I guess I was looking for a method that

wasn't just based in academic or theory, but really proven and

grounded results. And that is when an executive client, he

came to me and said, Susan, I think I found your answer. And

he took me, of all places, Amy, to the ghettos of South Central

Los Angeles to meet a man by the name of Tony La Ray, who was the

founder and CEO of youth mentoring connection. And I

found out that Tony was a former CEO. He had sold a very

successful business, and for the past decade, he had been saving

youth through his mentoring programs with unprecedented

results. Nice, yeah, and what I loved about what he was doing

was he had actually gone into the community. He asked these

young people what it would take to engage with them, and they

told him, and over the years, he created what he called the gift

centered approach. Now the gift centered approach was at the

heart of the way he led, which he called salbona leadership.

And salbono was Zulu for I see you, as in seeing the whole

person. Mm, hmm. So I wanted to see this in action. He invited

me to a mentoring program that he was having, and I gotta tell

you, when I went there to the Baha center years ago in South

LA, I was taken aback, because here was a community of people

of all different generations, genders, ethnic backgrounds and

the deep connection that they had and that the way they

engaged each other that brought out the best in who each other

was. I remember after that session, I went up to him, and I

said, I need you to mentor me. I need to take this into the

corporate world. Because I not only saw a way of helping my

executives to better engage their young people, but a way of

creating cultures of belonging, yes, and so what he did was he

said, Okay, I'll mentor you. And he mentioned me, and I took it

into the corporate world over 13 years ago, I started to turn

around companies and cultures in a way. That was long term and

sustainable nice and today, Sal Bona in the gift centered

approach is in over 30 countries. It was a subject of a

book that I wrote called leadership's perfect storm, and

became the number one Amazon Best Seller in leadership and

business management, and it's sold all over the world. I love

it.

Susan, yeah, here you clearly talking about the gift

centered approach. So of course, we want to see people's unique

gifts, their unique value. But you also talked about seeing the

whole person, and so we've got to accept that someone in the

millennial or the Gen Z generation might be asking, How

can I have your job, in fact, right? And and accepting that is

part of who they are and what they're thinking of and what

drives them right, accepting that that whole person

and Sawubona, it means I see you, I see and

accept because what we found Amy is when we see and accept people

for who they are, they see and accept us for who we are, and a

different conversation unfolds, not one where we're lecturing to

each other with our right wrong judgments, but one where we're

listening and learning from each other with openness and

curiosity. And so this is what Millennials and Gen Zs want.

They want to be accepted for the whole of who they're. They are

their gifts, their blind spots, their strengths, their

weaknesses, their genius. And this is why salbona. They

gravitate towards Sawubona. It's not just because it was born out

of the millennial generation, but it closely aligns with their

values and their needs. And it's interesting. In having done a

lot of speaking at conferences, I have a lot of millennials

approach me and they tell me their needs, but there are three

needs that keep echoing, okay, yeah, and that's to feel heard,

to use their gifts and to have meaning and purpose in their

lives. But what's interesting when I'm speaking to a group of

leaders of all different generations. And I asked them,

Is this something that you want to every hand goes up, yeah,

because it's not a generational need, it's a human need. Yes.

This is what we all want, yes. And so the way that we enter

through salbona. In order for someone to feel heard, you have

to connect and receive. In order for a person to use their gifts,

you have to as a leader, see their gifts. In order for a

person to have meaning and purpose in their lives, you have

to create a culture where they feel a part of something greater

than themselves, and what we do is the journey to this is

through what we call the five salbuana leaderships. These are

the shifts that are so important that leaders make today to be

the kind of leaders that thrive in the 21st Century, especially

because we, you know, millennial generation right now, they are

becoming in management roles, yeah, senior management roles,

VP roles, because the age of millennials are anywhere from 29

to 44 so these Five leaderships become really, really important

that leaders transition to. So the the first one is from

control to connect and receive. There's a connection, yeah.

Second one is from conformity to see and accept. Third one is

from expectations to intentions. The fourth one is from authority

to authenticity, and the fifth one is from bottom line, myopia

to belonging. And so, yeah, if we look at the first one from

control to connect and receive, we have been trying to slowly

move away from command and control, which does not work on

the younger generation, and it really didn't work on my

generation, but we just sucked it up and we did it anyway, right?

Yeah, yeah. We felt like we had to deal with it.

Yep, right, exactly.

So we have to transition from control to

connect and receive. And connection is not communication

or connectivity. It's how I feel when I'm with you. So there was

a recent survey done by Korn Ferry. They do it every year.

It's called their workforce survey. And this year they had

15,000 professionals from 10 countries, and they surveyed

everything. From entry level employees to CEOs. So you have

every generation, yes, not millennials, every generation,

all five, yep. And in there, they show that there was a huge

disconnect between generations. No surprise. But what was

interesting is they would say that the boomer generation felt

that they were very much connected to Gen Z because they

clearly communicated. However Gen Z said, we don't feel

connected to boomers, and that's because connection is not

communication. It's how I feel when I'm with you. The Boomers

also thought that Gen Zs did not want to be in management roles.

Oh, and Gen Z said, No, it's not that we don't want to be in

management roles. It's that we don't want to be our manager

because they didn't like the way their managers live, right? And

then, if you go from control to connect and receive, receptivity

is a very overlooked quality of leadership, because we're taught

that it's better to give than to receive, right? But building a

body of a leader means building a body that can receive

thoughts, that can receive ideas, that can receive praise

criticism, help with openness and curiosity. And in the same

survey, which was really great, they said the companies who were

the most successful at getting their people behind change in AI

and automation, were the ones that received the voices of

their people. They created infrastructures where their

people could share their thoughts, their ideas, their

perspectives. They let them participate in the adoption, the

usage and the implementation process of AI and automation.

And this actually was so important because it allowed it

to be more closely aligned with the organizational strategy. And

so you're finding that the companies that are most

successful, they receive the voices of generations. And they

also found, in one case, that Gen they allowed Gen Z to mentor

the people at the top in AI and automation.

Nice, yeah, yeah. So, yeah, I love this, Susan. Let me

pause our conversation here, and I'm going to tell listeners more

about you. Okay, sure, yes. Susan Inouye is a

transformational executive coach with nearly two decades of

experience empowering leaders across 600 companies and 40

industries, her one on one coaching method integrates deep,

holistic practices of mind, heart and body, honed through

extensive training with a seventh degree black belt a Kido

Sensei and Insights from the Heart Math Institute. This

approach not only enhances emotional intelligence, but also

reshapes organizational cultures into thriving, sustainable

entities. Central to Susan's work we've already heard about

it is the soy Bona leadership, rooted in the Zulu greeting, I

see you fostering inclusive cultures, where individuals are

valued for their authenticity. Her expertise extends to

millennials, highlighted in her best selling book, leadership's

Perfect Storm, which illuminates their impact on modern

leadership. Past. Passionate about women's leadership, Susan

champions their role in shaping compassionate, purpose driven

organization, her influence transcends coaching to include

retreats, cult culture, excuse me, culture building initiatives

and mentoring programs, reinforcing her belief that true

organizational formation starts with empowered leaders, which is

why we're focusing on these leadership traits. Thank you for

being here.

Susan, thank you so much. Amy,

yeah, so I already love what you are saying about

the shift from control to connect and receive. I think

Susan, that it's really easy for us as human beings with our

natural biases and filters to to hear and be like, oh, yeah, I

like that. I like that. I like that. I don't like that, right?

And then we're not fully accepting everything that's

being shared with us, right? We're pulling and we're

incorporating what works in our schematic that our brain has

created from our experiences, but truly taking it all, putting

it all on the page and like, how are we going to integrate all of

this? And I love that folks being mentor. Like when we

consider generationally folks being mentored in all

directions? Yeah, absolutely. And you know, the

thing about it is, is that we have to understand that

receiving is more than just hearing what people say. It's

dip when I receive something. Am I being triggered by what you

said, or am I just feeling very neutral and like a sponge,

taking it in, and then if I'm being triggered? Susan, then I

have some work to do. Yeah, absolutely, yeah, absolutely,

absolutely. And that's when I do the deep, holistic work that I

do in getting leaders so that they're not triggered by the

same things they were triggered before.

Yeah, so that's also acknowledging, like, oh, this

triggers me, right? I've got some processing to do here about

about why and how I can work through that. Yeah, absolutely

love it. Yeah, okay, do we keep going?

Yeah? So the second one is from conformity to

see and accept, yeah. And Millennials have a saying, the

same is one size does not fit all. They want to be seen as

unique individuals, not part of a mass herd, yeah. And for them,

it's so important to see them as a whole human being and accept

all of it, whether you think it's good or bad. And in

salbona, we start through the portal of being able to see the

gifts, and then it opens up to many other things. Can I share a

story? Yeah, demonstrate of one of my clients. Nice. Well, I'll

call this person Kathy.

Okay, yeah.

Kathy was a director of tech support, and

she had a lot of it reps. One of them was Jack. They were all

Millennials underneath her. And I was the company. I engaged my

services. I wasn't coaching Kathy at the time, but one day,

she came up to me and she said, I need your help. I don't know

what to do. I'm going to have to hire one of my people that I

feel has so much potential, Jack, but he's not making his

monthly quotas of new customers served, and I've tried

everything now, Kathy was brought up on command and

control, okay? And then command and control, we use the carrot

and the stick? Yep. So she used incentives on Jack. It didn't

work. She used reprimands. It didn't work. And she said, I'm

out of options. I don't know what else to do. Yeah. So we had

conversation. I started to talk about gifts, and at one point I

asked Kathy, so what are Jack's gifts? Yeah. And she looked at

me puzzled, and that's not unusual, because our gifts are

what we were born to bring naturally into the world. Yes,

it's what we do without thinking about it's just who we are,

innate, yep, yep. And so I said to her, I reframed. I said,

Kathy, why did you hire Jack? And all of a sudden her eyes lit

up, and she said, Oh my gosh, Susan, he is not like any other

tech rep. He easily gains rapport with our customers. He

doesn't talk down to them in techie language. They love him

so much. They call for him by name. Yeah, he is so smart he

can solve the most challenging issues. I said, Wow. And she

said, But my boss is pushing me to fire him by Friday. And I

went, Well, okay. I said, let's step back and see a bigger

picture here. And she said, What do you mean? I said, let's step

back. I said, What is Jack's retention rate on his existing

base compared to the other reps. And she said to me, Well, why? I

said because he may be servicing less new customers, but

retaining more of his base, and he could be more profitable. And

she said, Oh my gosh, yeah. I said, Can you find out? She

said, absolutely. So she went, and a couple of days later, she

calls me, she says, Susan, you'll never believe it. Jack

has the highest retention rate compared to any of the other

reps. He is more profitable. I said, Wow, great. I said, Use

this to buy his time with your boss. So she did, yeah, we

brainstorm. And the first thing out of my mouth, because you

have to be able to see the gifts, not only in people's good

behaviors, but in their bad so I said to her, what is the gifts

that are trying to come out in his bad behavior? And so she

thought about she said, and we came up with a whole list. And

after that, I said to her, how can you take these gifts and put

them in another direction. How can you use these gifts? Put

them in another direction so they better help you jack and

the organization. How do you redirect these gifts? So she

thought about it, and she said, Wow, what if he created a

training manual? Yeah, and gave away all the secrets. I said,

Wow, that'd be great, yup. And she sai d,

greets everybody else's retention of clients,

yeah?

She said, then they wouldn't be coming to him

and taking his time away, right? I said, Absolutely. And I said,

because one of his gifts is coaching and training, what if

he trained the whole department with this training manual? Yeah?

She said, Oh my gosh. So I said, you have to go to Jack. You have

to acknowledge his gifts, and you have to ask him maybe be

open, yeah? Well, Jack was flattered, and he said, Yes,

he was already doing it in many Yeah, let's just make

this

formal, absolutely. So we did many

things, but bottom line, what happened was Amy was the company

got a new training manual, yeah Jack train. The entire

department, productivity and retention went up 10 fold. Jack

was making his monthly quotas of new customers served. They had

three consecutive years of record breaking, customer

retention, and Kathy was promoted from a director to a

general manager.

Nice, yes, I love what that story illustrates.

Susan, there's lots of talk about strengths based

leadership. What I think is unique about the story that you

just told, we're looking at strengths that are innate, those

gifts that have been natural to us forever, like when we were

four, we were doing the four year old version of it right.

And then what also struck me about you said, What you said

is, we're looking for the gifts in the quote, unquote good and

bad behaviors, right? And how can we leverage those? How can

we line up the work with those?

Yeah, absolutely. And in sabuna, we make a

distinction between gifts and strengths. So gifts are what we

were born to bring naturally into the world. Strengths are

what we work hard at to be competent in, yeah, and so one

of them gifts fills us with energy, because it's a part of

who we are. Yeah, strength takes energy and effort, but when we

get so good at a strength, it sometimes looks like a gift, but

it's not the thing that gives us energy, that fuels

us

right? Or we do naturally, yeah, yes, yeah,

okay. I want to make sure we get

to the other three. Susan, expectations to

intentions.

Yeah. So expectations are our rules of

how things should be done. Amy, I expect that if I give you

training, you'll be able to do your job, and when you make

mistakes. I have a lot of pain,

so I told you on this Amy, come on.

So I tell my execs, you've gotta turn your

expectations into intentions, expectations you can't control,

but intentions you can, because they're within you. My

intention, Amy, is to help you be the best you can be by give

you training. Now if you make mistakes, I don't have any pain,

because my intention is to help you be the best you can be. And

what it does is it opens us up to now conversation where we

talk about, what are the things that you can do next time, so

you don't make the same mistakes, where expectations

just cut you off and says you're wrong, I'm right. You have to do

it my way. Right?

Yeah, I like it. Susan, it's, it's, it's a bigger

picture commitment, yeah, and it helps us show up, courageously,

vulnerably, looking for the learning, being curious, rather

than, Oh, I learned it this way, and it's not happening. And the

young

people, especially like this, look, this is the

result I need you to get. Use your gifts and use your talents

and do it in the way that you see it. As long as I get the

same result, yeah, it allows them to decide the how exactly,

and it puts them on a path of creativity, innovation, figuring

out themselves, rather than us saying, this is exactly what you

need to do. So when we set expectations, we're saying, this

is the way we want you to do it. Yeah, and we prevent them from

being able to use their gifts, their talents, to become

innovative and creative and figure things out on their own.

So in the long run, they're not constantly coming to us for the

answers. They're the ones that are being empowered to find the

answers on their own, and they do.

Yes, i t's empowering and it's engaging.

Yes, absolutely, yeah, absolutely,

okay, authority to authenticity.

Yeah, from authority to authenticity.

Millennials are the first generation that did not have to

go through authority to get information, and this. Huge

people in power used to use information as a leverage point

over their people. They can no longer do that because young

people can get information before their leaders.

That creates a great understanding that's worth

repeating. Millennials are the first generation that didn't

have to go through authority, authority figures to get

information. It's all out there. Oh, right, yeah,

every single one of them. And that's why they

don't respect you, just because you have a title. Yeah, what

they do respect is authentic wisdom, information, experience

that they can learn from, as long as you don't lecture down

to them, and they feel like they can talk with someone a CEO, the

same way they talk with their friends, because that's being

authentic, and they can do it in a respectful way. Yeah,

beautiful. Yeah, beautiful.

And the fifth, the fifth

one is from bottom line myopia to belonging nice.

And I want to say that millennials and we're finding

more and more generations, they want to feel a part of something

greater than themselves. They want to feel this sense of

belonging to something that's meaningful and purposeful. In

fact, in that survey that they did of Korn Ferry, what they

said was that, and this was from every generation, that what

keeps them loyal and what keeps them staying with the same

company is meaningful work that aligns with their values, their

identity and their purpose, and When they are given work that

aligns with their gifts. When they are given challenging work,

yeah, where they are tested, they actually like this, yeah,

because they leave the day feeling fulfilled, yeah, and so

important, yeah. And there's one story that I want to share with

you. It actually demonstrates all of the leaderships one of my

clients, I have several that I could do this with, but this one

was really kind of special in many ways. Yeah, I'll call him

Lewis. Okay. So Lewis was a general manager of a retail

outlet of a national chain of they're kind of semi

restaurants, fast food places, anyway, and when I was called in

to work with him, he had so many HR issues, too many to count, he

was only making 30% of his monthly budgeted goals, he had a

team of people that were calling HR every day to get him out.

There was a whole campaign against him, okay? And I didn't

know this, but he didn't tell me, but he was on the verge of

divorce, okay? So he was in a lot of pain, yeah, and so when I

connected with Lewis, he was very open to doing almost

anything I asked him to do. So we had long talk, and I said,

Look, we have to first rebuild trust with your people, so let's

have conversation with them and ask them to give you a break and

stop calling HR. So we met with them, and Lewis admitted to them

that he was a terrible leader, that he really wanted to become

better, and that the company had brought me in to work with him,

and would you just give me a break? And they said they would,

Wow, talk about vulnerable and authentic, I know. And they said

to him, though, you got a month, okay,

we want to see something concrete in the next

month.

Okay, okay, so we started through the aspect of

salbona, right? And I'll just go through the leaderships. I don't

always follow it per se, but it's a combination, but from

control to connect and receive. Lewis had learned command and

control leadership from the grocery industry. It's a very

directive, authoritative kind of leadership that they taught

them, right? And so what I did was practices to get him to

quiet his mind so we could drop into his body and connect with

it, so he could connect with his people. His people said to me,

Susan Lewis, doesn't listen. His mind is always elsewhere. We can

talk to him, but we know he is not there. Yeah. And now what

happened? He was starting slowly to become present. He was

receiving their thoughts and ideas, and they felt it, and

they said, Oh, this is different. And he was saying to

me, my gosh, I didn't even know my people had some of these good

ideas, right? I mean, it was went over his head before. So he

was learning to connect. Received by quiet in his mind

and body. Okay? Then we went from conformity to see and

accept Lewis, truly believe, like command and control, that

one size fits all. I want everybody to do things in every

the same way. But they were telling him, we're all unique in

who we are. We have different gifts, right? So all of a

sudden, now that he was connected into his body, I

started to help him develop the intelligence of his heart. So

now, as he was more open and present to receive with openness

and curiosity, he started to put people in areas where they would

excel. He started to praise their gifts, which is different

than just regular praise. He prays the action so far. We went

from conformity and accept, from expectations to intentions. He

let go of his expectation. His intention was to help them be

the best they could be. We went from authority to authenticity.

Instead of being the guy at the top, he started doing things

like letting them go off on vacations and he would be there

on Thanksgiving and Christmas. Wow, they saw him being a part

of the team and from bottom line myopia to belonging. Guess what?

The results were this. They have lowest turnover rate of all the

stores. He went from too many HR issues to count to one. He went

from meeting 30% of his monthly budgeted goals to 100 in two

years, they became the number one store in California, and his

marriage got back on track.

Louis, yeah. Susan, I love this. Thank you for

bringing the five leader shifts to life through Lewis's story.

Seems like a great place to end our episode. Thank you for

sharing your wisdom and your experience with us.

Susan, you're so welcoming. Thank you for having

me.

Yes, our pleasure. Thanks for being on the Courage

of a Leader podcast.

Thank you for listening to the Courage of a Leader podcast. If

you'd like to further explore this episode's topic, please

reach out to me through the courage of a leader website at

www.courageofaleader.com I'd love to hear from you, please

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because you've got the courage of a leader.