Leaders today face the significant challenge of connecting with their employees and effectively recognizing and leveraging their unique talents. This often results in disengagement and underperformance. As the millennial generation, which highly values authenticity and compassion, becomes the dominant force in the global workforce, this issue becomes even more pressing. Traditional leadership styles frequently fall short, leaving employees feeling unrecognized and disengaged. The solution lies in adopting a more compassionate, gift-centered approach to leadership. By embracing and acknowledging the unique strengths of each individual, leaders can foster a more connected, motivated, and effective team.

Susan Inouye’s proven track record as an executive coach in transformational change has positively impacted over 600 businesses in 40 industries. A recognized expert with millennials, she was instrumental in taking a revolutionary method called Sawubona Leadership (Zulu for “I see you”) and is being used globally because of its capacity to unite all generations through their gifts, passions and purpose. She is the bestselling author of Leadership’s Perfect Storm: What Millennials Are Teaching Us about Possibilities, Passion and Purpose. 

In this episode, Susan shares the importance of recognizing and leveraging individual gifts within an organization to foster a more engaged and productive workforce. She emphasizes the need for leaders to practice self-awareness and vulnerability, particularly in the context of working with millennials and Gen Z, who value authentic and compassionate leadership. She talks about the concept of “gift-centered praise,” which focuses on acknowledging the underlying strengths behind employees’ actions to encourage broader application of their talents.

What you will learn from this episode:

  • Discover the necessary core shifts in leadership that will be a game changer in the workplace
  • Find out how these three simple yet profound principles of Sawubona Leadership drive significant positive outcomes
  • Listen to Susan’s spot coaching and discover practices that develop heart intelligence and intuitive knowing to help you make decisions more effectively and avoid staying too long in unsuitable roles

“The shifts that we have to make as leaders are, and we say this in Sawubona leadership, is number one, we have to go from control to connect and receive.”

– Susan Inouye

Valuable Free Resource: 

Topics Covered:

03:19 – Susan shares her journey in focusing on millennials in the workplace and how she adapted this approach called Sawubona Leadership

06:52 – Sawubona leadership and how it drives necessary shifts in workplace culture from transactional to human-centric

13:34 – Millennial mantras and how they are driving significant changes in leadership 

14:58 – How these three profound approaches not only enhance leadership but also leads to significant business growth

17:46 – Listen to Susan demonstrate with Sarah the power of Sawubona through her laser coaching

43:32 – How effective change start

46:10 – Fostering leadership through vulnerability and recognition of individual gifts 

47:50 – Q: Why do women have the edge in being the kind of leaders we need to take companies to the next level and to thrive in the 21st century? A: Millennials want compassionate leaders who see and accept them for who they are. And while men can employ it, women are more attuned to compassion.

Key Takeaways:

“It’s not about the practices in their life, it’s the practices integrated in their life that actually gets them to do it and transform in the way they do.” – Susan Inouye

“My execs have found, when you see and accept someone for who they are, they see and accept you for who you are. And a different conversation unfolds. It’s not one of us lecturing to each other, but one of us listening and learning from each other.” – Susan Inouye

“In its simplicity, the three things of Sawubona, if you connect and receive, if you see people’s gifts, if you create a culture where people feel a part of something greater than themselves, so many things can happen.” – Susan Inouye

Ways to Connect with Susan Inouye:

Ways to Connect with Sarah E. Brown:

 

Full Episode Transcript:

Susan Inouye 00:00

And so, what Sawubona does is it brings back that humanity because Sawubona literally, it breaks through all the stereotypes that we have, all the generalities that we have of generations, genders, of ethnic groups, and it focuses us on the human being. It focuses on the person, and it gets rid of our filter of this wrong-right judgments that we have that creates this kind of a you against me rather than a you and me.

Sarah E. Brown 00:43

Hello, everyone! Welcome to the KTS Success Factor Podcast for Women, where we talk about challenges senior female leaders face in being happy and successful at work. I’m your host, Dr. Sarah E. Brown.

My guest today is Susan Inouye. She has a proven track record as an executive coach in transformational change, which has positively impacted over 600 businesses in 40 industries, from small businesses to Fortune 500 companies. In nearly two decades of working with leaders and their organizations integrating mind and body practices, she has helped clients create dramatic turnarounds, cultural transformations, increased profitability with executives living a more balanced and fulfilled life. She is a recognized expert with millennials. She was instrumental in taking a revolutionary method that emerged from this generation into the corporate world. Today, Sawubona Leadership, Sawubona, being Zulu for ‘I See You’, is being used globally because of its capacity to unite all generations through their gifts, passions, and purpose. She is the bestselling author of Leadership’s Perfect Storm: What Millennials Are Teaching Us about Possibilities, Passion and Purpose. An active member of the community, Susan is the recipient of the Congressional Award for Contributions to the Community. She was named one of the ‘Top 10 Inspiring Women Rocking the Global Business World’ by Business Women Today/Global Women. Susan, welcome!

Susan Inouye 02:49

Thank you, Sarah. Thank you for inviting me. I am so excited to be here. Thank you.

Sarah E. Brown 02:54

And for those of you listening, this podcast episode is going to be a little different because we’re actually going to do a demo of Sawubona. So it’s going to also be a little longer, but it’s going to be well worth holding on and hearing about this really fascinating tool. Susan, how’d you get so focused on millennials in the workplace in the first place?

Susan Inouye 03:19

Gosh, it was more than a decade ago that I remember getting calls from executives who were frustrated and very puzzled by this generation. In fact, I remember one executive calling me and say that one of his young women who had been there a year came in with a resignation letter. And when he asked her why she was resigning, she told him that the culture sucked. And he later found out that she had no other job to go to. And he said to me, who would quit their job without another job to go to? And story after story, an HR director said, a parent called her telling her the best way to work with her son. And another CEO had called me and said, Susan, I had a young man who was only six months with our company, and he asked me, how can I get your job in five years?

He said, the nerve, the nerve, right? So I was determined to try to help them find a way to better engage. And it was my clients that challenged me to find something that was not just based in theory or academics, but really grounded in proven results. And that’s when, it’s funny, an executive client of mine, he took me, if you can imagine, to the ghettos of South Central Los Angeles to find my answer. And there he introduced me to this man by the name of Tony LoRe and his nonprofit organization, Youth Mentoring Connection. Now, Tony was a former CEO and he had a very successful business that he sold, but for the past, over a decade, he had been transforming and saving the lives of thousands of inner city millennial youth through his mentoring programs with unprecedented results. Now, what drew me in was that he actually went into the community of these young people and he asked them what it was that would allow him to engage with them.

And they told him, and through the years, he developed what he called the gift-centered approach. Now, that day, I remember watching him in this program, his people, and the connection he had with his staff, the deep connection with his staff who were millennials, the connection that the staff had with the mentees. And there were multi-generational there. I mean, there were mentors who were boomers, gen X, and then the mentees were millennials. The connection they had and the way they engaged each other to bring out the best in who they were, it really just fascinated me. And I said to myself, I need to learn this. And so I asked Tony to mentor me, and he did. And I took it into the corporate world. And the difference was I’ve always turned around companies and cultures, but now I did in a way that was long-term and sustainable. The gift-center approach was at the heart of the way he led, which he called Sawubona Leadership. And as you mentioned, Sawubona is a Zulu greeting, meaning ‘I See You’, and yes it is in over 30 countries today.

Sarah E. Brown 06:43

So how do you see Sawubona answering this call of millennials to get more engaged in the workforce? Tell me more about that.

Susan Inouye 06:52

Yeah, so I think you have to understand that millennials were creating a disruption, and this disruption was really needed because our workplaces have become too transactional. We are disconnected from each other. And what millennials demanded is they wanted us to bring the human element back into the work because they value different things. They value things like wellbeing. They valued work-life balance. They didn’t want to work 24/7. They valued different things. They didn’t want to work 24/7. They valued wellbeing, work-life balance. They valued fun. They wanted to have fun. They didn’t want to be like their parents. One millennial said to me, I don’t want to wait until I retire and do something I don’t like to have fun. I want to have fun. Now, I want to find out what I’m passionate about. But more importantly, they wanted to be seen and accepted for who they are. They wanted to be valued for their gifts, and they wanted to use them to get the results we needed in their own way.

And so what Sawubona does is it brings back that humanity, because Sawubona literally, it breaks through all the stereotypes that we have, all the generalities that we have of generations, genders, of ethnic groups, and it focuses us on the human being. It focuses on the person, and it gets rid of our filter of this wrong-right judgments that we have that creates this kind of a you against me rather than a you and me. And so when I work with my leaders, there’s actually what we call the leadership of Sawubona leadership. And maybe I can share that with you. Would that be okay?

Sarah E. Brown 08:46

Oh, yeah. Is this how leadership has actually changed as a result?

Susan Inouye 08:50

Yes, absolutely. You know, the style of leadership prior to millennials has always been very command and control. And there’s a lot of companies that still have command and control today, but you are talking about a generation who by 2025 will be 75% of the global workforce, and they want different things. And so the leadership, the shifts that we have to make as leaders are, and we say this in Sawubona leadership, is number one, we have to go from control to connect and receive. And connection is not connectivity or communication. It’s how I feel when I’m with you. And receiving is being able to receive thoughts, ideas with openness. How can we receive help? How can we receive criticism and be curious to what a person means, rather than cutting the mouth with our judgment. So that’s the first leadership. The second one is from conformity to see and accept.

The one thing I’m going to tell you about millennials is one of their favorite sayings is one size does not fit all. They believe they are unique human beings, as I think we all do. And they want to be seen for their gifts. They want to be accepted for all of them. Gifts, blind spots, strengths, weaknesses, genius. And they have found, my execs have found, when you see and accept someone for who they are, they see and accept you for who you are and a different conversation unfolds. It’s not one of us lecturing to each other, but one of us listening and learning from each other, really powerful. And I think the third is from expectations to intentions. You know, expectations can get us into trouble. I’ll share with you an example. I remember going into an HR director to talk about one of the people that I was coaching on a path to a partner.

And his first words out of his mouth were, is so-and-so meeting your expectations? And I said, what expectations? He goes, what do you mean? Don’t you have any expectations? I said, no, because expectations are my right way of looking at the world. And if I have them, I’m going to have a lot of pain when, I’ll just call her Judy, doesn’t meet my expectations. So I said to him, I teach my leaders to replace them with intentions. My intention is to help Judy be the best she can be through coaching. And I’ll never forget, he started to take notes and he said, well, tell me more about this. But yes, we have to replace those expectations because they put us under the filter of those wrong-right judgements. And then the fourth thing is that we have to shift from authority to authenticity. Now, you have to understand that the millennials are the first generation that didn’t have to go through authority to get information.

And information was something that generations prior to millennials hold very closely to their vest to have the edge to say, this is why you need me. Well, as we know, the internet changed that. And millennials can find out things before even their leaders can find out. So they don’t like to look up to you just because you have a title. What they want is authentic wisdom, information. They want authentic guidance that can help them as long as you don’t lecture them. And what’s interesting is, that they will say things in their authentic way to a CEO, the same they would say to their friends, and they can do it in a respectful way. And that’s why this one gal told the CEO of his company sucked, his culture sucked. And the last thing is from bottom line myopia to belonging. Millennials want to belong to something greater than themselves. And I think this is true with every generation. So we have found that leaderships just don’t work on millennials, they work on everyone, every generation.

Sarah E. Brown 13:17

Okay. So that’s how millennials are actually pushing leadership to change. In your book, you have a concept that you call the millennial mantras. Are they similar to how they’re pushing leadership to change? Or are they different?

Susan Inouye 13:34

No, I mean, the millennial mantras, there are many, I want to be me one-size-does-not-fit-all. Yes, they are definitely guiding us in a different way because they believe things in a different way. Yeah. So I think they are very reflective of just the era they were brought up into. And also, you have to understand, they have seen their parents complain about their jobs, but keep them because of the money and the security, which is not a bad thing. But I’ve had many millennials say to me, they don’t want to be like their parents. They don’t want to be suffering for all those years before they decide to retire and do the things that they love to do. They won’t do that. And by the way, the parents encourage them not to do this. So this disruption that millennials created, have been encouraged by their parents saying things like, which is important, follow your dream, do what you’re passionate about. Don’t settle for less. And so that’s what they’re doing.

Sarah E. Brown 14:43

They want the kids to live out what they didn’t live out.

Susan Inouye 14:46

Exactly. Yeah. Don’t be like me.

Sarah E. Brown 14:49

Yeah, exactly. So tell me how Sawubona answers this call and helps with this transition.

Susan Inouye 14:58

Yeah. So it is very powerful. Like I said, I think the best thing about it is that it does really bring humanity back into the workplace. And it is simple, but it is quite deep. I’ll share with you that when I happened upon it, I was also looking for a way to be able to share with my executives, that was simple, yet deep. Now, you have to understand that I have read many, many books. I’ve gone to many seminars, and I have every way you can imagine to negotiate, to listen, to do time management, to do all those things. And I would share those with my execs. But who could remember all those ways? I mean, I couldn’t, so I was looking for a through line and thread. I was looking for, if you did like a few simple things, everything else would happen.

You know, like dropping a pebble in a pond, it just ripples out. And that’s when I happened on Sawubona and I thought, oh my gosh, this is a thing that I’ve been looking for. Because in its simplicity, the three things of Sawubona, if you connect and receive, if you see people’s gifts, if you create a culture where people feel a part of something greater than themselves, so many things can happen. I have had business owners, I had one business owner double her profits in a year. I had a regional vice president of an international bank, very big. Her team increased their book of business by 50% in six months. And we’re talking during the time of when there was a downturn in the economy, like this was 2008 when I worked with her. And by the end of the year, she was at 150% of her goals. And she said to me, oh my gosh, Susan, I never realized that me being a better leader and a better person and looking people through the filter of their gifts could create all of this. Yeah. So it’s very powerful. And even though it seems simple when you learn it, it goes very deep.

Sarah E. Brown 17:17

Okay, so we’re going to do a little demo now. So Susan is going to coach me, and she has intentionally not researched me. So she really doesn’t know very much about me at all. She doesn’t know about my business, she doesn’t know about who else I’ve interviewed on this podcast, she’s going to talk with me or coach me with the purpose of demonstrating the power of Sawubona. So I’m going to turn it over to you and let you lead from here.

Susan Inouye 17:46

Okay. So let me, can I preface this by saying that what I’m going to do with Sarah is a very simple version of coaching, the deep kind of coaching I do when I do enter through the portal of Sawubona, when I work with executives and CEOs and partners and things like that, is much deeper and consist of this one month assessment and information and looking at three behavioral areas. And we go very deep. And I’ll say two things about my coaching and my assessment is that I don’t put people through a program. I find out who they are, and then I build a program around them. And then the practices and the exercises and self-observations I give, I don’t give a lot of extra stuff because my XX won’t do extra stuff. I actually find out what they’re doing in their life. Like if they walk in the morning we brush our teeth, whatever, and I bring new distinctions to that. So it’s not about the practices and their life, it’s the practices integrated in their life. And this is my secret that I found out years ago that actually gets them to do it and transform in the way they do. So we’re going to do what I call on the spot coaching or laser coaching. So Sarah, so yeah, thank you. Tell me, let’s start by you telling me a little bit about yourself, because I don’t know much.

Sarah E. Brown 19:17

Okay. I had a long corporate career, and the way I got into my corporate career is kind of roundabout. I had intended, when I was in college, to get my PhD in theoretical math. I’m kind of this nerdy, brainy type, and I loved theoretical math, but at the time that I was getting ready to go, I got my master’s, but at the time I was getting ready to go off to get a PhD. I did a market scan and found out that the market was flooded with PhD mathematicians. If you can imagine that there was a time when the market was flooded, and most of the schools that were in my field had a real bias against women. And my faculty advisors were saying, don’t go there. Don’t go there. They’re going to chew you up. And so I was running out of options of places where I could go to get my PhD, and I didn’t think I really needed to wait on tables to wait to get academic appointments.

So I said, this is baloney. And so I started looking for corporate jobs, and it boiled down to two jobs. One was, and this would have been the better choice, but I didn’t do it. One was to go into the Naval Reserve and to teach upper level math at the nuclear propulsion school in Florida, which was a brand new offering. And that actually would have been better for me, but I didn’t do it because I was scared of Admiral Rickover who ran the program. He had a reputation for chewing everybody up, not just women, but he would shoot everybody up. And so when they were prepping me to go for these interviews and telling me stories about him, I said, I’m not going through that. Because he would do things like lock people in a closet, sit them on a three-legged stool with one of them cut off to see how they balanced in, I mean, all of these crazy things.

And I said, I’m not doing that. So I did my second choice, which was I went to work for the bell system. And I became a systems engineer working with a lot of the up and coming emerging telecommunications technology at the time, the reason that was not a good fit for me was because it was very hands-on work. And I’m not really good at hands-on work. I’m much better with conceptual work. And the other reason is because I was the only woman and I just got harassed one side and down the other, by the nature of the work that I was doing, I had to do a lot of work at night. And so I would walk into a central office and the technicians would have on a great big whiteboard for a good time, call Sarah and they’d have my number and all of that stuff.

I mean, it was just, and that was the tamer stuff that happened. So that was my early, early days. So I made a bad choice into another bad choice. And so when the bell system broke up in 1984, I was looking around for another job and I got hired by DuPont to come and put the telephone company back together again. So what happened is when the regulated stuff was separated from the unregulated stuff, companies had to put it all back together again inside, because the co telephone company had done it up until then. So that’s how I got to DuPont. And then I weaved my way through a whole series of information technology jobs at DuPont, and was often the only, what I call the only, or the lonely. I was the only female in that role, or I was the first female in that role.

But there were often very few, very few peers. So that was my DuPont career. And then in the late 1990s in the outsourcing craze, when all of that was going on, DuPont did what at the time, was the largest outsourcing that had ever been done and outsourced its information technology to a combination of CSC corporation and Accenture. And I went with Accenture at the time, and that’s how I got to Accenture where I retired from. Accenture had a culture that was not well suited to my personality. And so I struggled quite a bit. I mean, I did fine. I retired 17 years later as managing director. So I was a partner. You know, I did fine, by all intents and purposes, but it was a struggle. It was a real struggle. Accenture’s culture was shoot first, ask questions later, make a decision, then figure things out.

And I am very much a thinker, like I said, a very conceptual person. So this didn’t play to my strengths at all. Because I wanted to think things out ahead of time. DuPont culturally was actually a better fit for me by virtue of the fact that they ran chemical companies. You have to think first, otherwise you’re going to blow people up. So it was much more a think first than act, but Accenture was an act. And then think. So that was a bit of a struggle for me, but I did okay. But I was always the only woman wherever I went, I was the only woman. And that got me to really thinking about the unique challenges of being what I call an only or a lonely. And there are some huge challenges for people in that role because they’re always running to catch up.

You don’t start off on an even playing field. You’re always running to catch up. But the more important thing is, everybody coming behind you is expecting you to pull them through the pipeline, and you’re always running to catch up. So you can’t possibly do it. You know, you can’t keep going on your own and pull everybody else through at the same time. And that’s what I think got me most interested in the work that I’m doing now, which is working with mid-career professional women, so I’ve got a different clientele than you do. I’m working with the mid-career professional women who are really stuck in their careers and they can’t get the mentoring from their senior leaders, like from women that are above them because they’re so stretched. So we got to figure out a way to scale mentoring and coaching. And that’s what I’m doing. And that actually plays, I believe to my strengths because my strengths are conceptualizing, my strengths are teaching, and my strengths are scaling, taking a complicated idea and scaling it. And so that’s why I left Accenture in 2014 and started my business, the business that I’m doing now, which is focused primarily on mid-career professional women, but as a way to scale their senior leaders in the workplace.

Advertisement 27:33

Hi, this is Sarah Brown again, the host of the KTS SuccessFactor Podcast for Women. I hope you are enjoying this episode and gaining some tips and inspiration on how you can be happier, more successful, and experience less stress at work. If you would like to learn more about how you can empower the women in your organization to do the same, simply click on the show notes to see how you can connect with me. As an added bonus for my podcast guests, you’ll see how you can book 30 minutes with me to explore how you can implement a scalable self-coaching program for the women in your organization. Simply visit bookachatwithsarahebrown.com. Now back to this informative episode.

Susan Inouye 28:30

Wow. You know, thank you for sharing as I’m listening to you, I’m pretty amazed when you started your career. I’m furiously writing down all the gifts that you have. I mean, I hear that you’re a thinker. I also see one of your gifts is that you’re very analytical because like you had a hard time at Accenture because it was shoot and think later, right? And your gift is naturally to analyze the situation, find out if it’s the best thing for the situation, and then make a decision. Is that true?

Sarah E. Brown 29:09

True.

Susan Inouye 29:10

Yeah. And I also heard this gift of drive and determination that you had. I mean, when I see how far you have risen, where you started and when you ended up, and how you just kept going and going and going, you don’t let anything stand in your way.

Sarah E. Brown 29:29

I’m like going, whoa, this is amazing.

Susan Inouye 29:32

And then I heard a lot of that’s

Sarah E. Brown 29:35

Admiral Rickover. I did let him

Susan Inouye 29:37

Yeah. That I know. But I think the aspect of knowing what you were getting into, because I do believe one of your gifts is courage. I mean, you had to have courage to be the only woman in every situation that you were in to be able to stand your ground with, I mean, let’s face it, the cultures have been built in companies mainly for men. And this is why it’s harder to bring women in because we haven’t established cultures that support women. They support men. You have a tremendous amount. Another gift of yours is resilience for you to be able to go through all you have gone through and still come out and be excited about and curious. I saw a curiosity in you as a gift and to be curious about, wow, what about this, what about that? It’s so beautiful to hear. And you mentioned that you’re conceptional, that’s another gift of yours, and you love teaching, another gift. Yeah. And I heard that when you said scaling. I heard that that gift of being able to really look at the complex, being able to problem solve, but in a very high level, complex way, taking a lot of complex situations and then making them simple. And so, I mean, from your story, these are the things that I saw in you. Was there anything that I missed? I don’t think so. Okay.

Sarah E. Brown 31:12

I think I might characterize resilience more as bullheadedness.

Susan Inouye 31:17

But well, we can also say, I think you have the gift of persistence as well.

Sarah E. Brown 31:24

Do you think so?

Susan Inouye 31:25

I think so. Yeah. So as I’m looking at all of this, let me ask you something. What are the things that, because a lot of times when we have gifts, we overuse the gift because that’s the only filter we know to see the world through. And when we overuse a gift, it becomes our weakness. But it also leads to what we call our blind spot. And let me just share with you, blind spots are not negative things. They are just gifts that we don’t have. And these lends for much opportunity, because in this area we can then take the blind spot and turn them into strength. So what do I mean by that? I’ll give you an example of one of your gifts.

Okay. So you have this beautiful gift of drive and determination. And I got to say, I also feel another gift of yours, which is energy. You have a lot of energy, it’s like just seeping through the conversation that we’re having. But, okay. So one of your gifts is drive and determination. And usually the way we find the blind spot is that we literally define what drive and determination is for you. And that actually leads us to see what it is blind to you and what you need to learn. So if you were to define your drive and determination in terms of all your experience, how would you define that?

Sarah E. Brown 32:54

I would say that I stuck with and drove through situations I should have left a lot earlier. If you go back to my bell system days, I shouldn’t have stuck it out as long as I did. It wasn’t a good match. And I was just working my little, petered off to compensate for things that weren’t my strengths. And I should have backed off on that one a lot sooner. So that was one, probably the same thing with Accenture is I probably should have pulled the trigger earlier. And I’m not saying I had a horrible career. I didn’t, there were some amazing things, but I think I stuck with something longer than I really needed to.

Susan Inouye 33:45

Right. So let me ask you something, Sarah, what do you think is the other side to your gift of drive and determination? You drive to get somewhere and then you get there and you stay there longer, you kind of maybe get into the groove and you stay there longer. When you find out that it’s not really suited to your situation or your gifts. What would’ve helped you if you had not overused that gift of drive and determination? What do you think that other side to it that you could have used that would’ve helped you to say, wait a minute, sooner? Like, Hmm. Need to leave, need to get out, need to find something else. There’s some things here that I’m sensing too for you, which is that I think you’re also a person that may like certainty. Is that true?

Sarah E. Brown 34:43

Yeah. I would prefer it. Yes.

Susan Inouye 34:45

Yeah. And so sometimes when we tend to like certainty, and today, leaders have to learn to be in uncertainty. They don’t have to be comfortable with it. When we like certainty, we sometimes get stuck in things because it’s too scary to go out and do something else, and it’s too much trouble. And we think about all the work we’d have to do if we went outside. But if we focus on drive and determination, what would’ve helped you to be better with that aspect of just being in uncertainty? What do you think? And being able to make that decision to leave.

Sarah E. Brown 35:29

I’ll flip that a little bit and say, it wasn’t so much the leaving, but I mentioned to you that the culture in Accenture was make a decision then figure it out. Seize an opportunity, then figure it out. And the strength of that is that because of that, they were able to capitalize on a lot of opportunities that if you waited for me to figure everything out and to develop that uncertainty would be missed. So, there’s strength in that.

Susan Inouye 36:05

Yes.

Sarah E. Brown 36:06

When I think about your question, I think about it in the context of what would’ve helped me to embrace that more. And what would’ve helped me to embrace that more is to know that somebody was going to be standing side by side with me, shoulder to shoulder with me, to help me figure it out after we committed to it.

Susan Inouye 36:29

So can I throw something at you? Because in Sawubona, we, and this is not just the only thing we do, this is one of the things that I do, but this also helps my execs when they coach their people, what I’m hearing is that, part of the other side to the gift of drive and determination is being able to slow down and to be present with what’s around us. And to be patient and being present allows us to see not what we want to see, but what is just right there in front of us. And part of what I’m hearing for you is in being able to slow down, it’s going to allow you also to tune in to your gut instinct, to your intuitive knowing that is the other side to your gift of most people, of analyzing. People who make decisions through information and getting statistics and things like that are really good at analyzing. But the other side to that gift, which they’re hard to, is being able to make decisions through their intuitive knowing, through their gut instinct, which takes slowing down and being in tune with who we are. So how does that land for you? Does that make sense?

Sarah E. Brown 37:46

That makes a lot of sense. That is a struggle for me.

Susan Inouye 37:50

Right. There are practices that you can do to be able to start to develop that intuitive knowing, because we cannot change unless we change the way we feel in our body. And what do I mean by that? Audience probably remembers learning to drive a car. You go to some kind of school, you learn how to drive a car in a classroom, you learn the rules of the road, you get a lot of insights. It’s not until you get into the car and you are in traffic and you feel the pedal and you feel the break and you’re in it and you embody what it feels like to drive a car. That’s when you’ll develop the habits that lead to your competency where you can drive a car without thinking about it. So unless we change the way we feel in our bodies, and unless we feel what it is to slow down first, then we can tap into developing what we call the intelligence of our heart.

Because that’s where our intuition is. And by the way, there are many books on this, but the best way I can say is, can I offer you just a couple of practices that would help you do that? So the first one is, and by the way, these are practices that are in the back of my book and book. They’re very simple. One is a sitting practice. This sitting practice I learned from my coach, but Phil Jackson, the coach of the Lakers, when I read his book Eleven Rings, I found the same practice and I went, oh my gosh, he stole my practice. He didn’t, he learned it from his, I think Buddhist mentor. But sitting is going to help you to just, it’s like you have a thought, you say thinking, you let it go. You go back to just listening to your breathing and listening for sounds in the room.

Ah, thought thinking. It allows you to clear your mind. And when we clear our mind, we can then drop into our heart. And then the second one I would say to you is that the way we develop the intelligence of our heart is through practices of appreciation. And so one of the beautiful practices of appreciation that you can do, and sometimes it’s hard for people to immediately do this with people. So I ask them to take a walk in nature and as they walk in nature they slow down, and I have to say, you have to slow down. You can’t walk fast, you have to slow down, is you connect with the trees, you connect with the ocean, you allow that energy to enter your body and you receive it.

Sarah E. Brown 40:35

Let the dog sniff. Oh, okay. I love, that’s how I’ll slow down. Yeah. I love it. Exactly.

Susan Inouye 40:44

But what happens is, in allowing that energy to come into and then appreciating it into your heart, literally appreciate it in your heart, you’re starting to build that heart intelligence, which then opens up to your intuitive knowing that allows you to now make decisions by opening your heart and say, what would I do? And your heart always knows. Now, some people say, listen to my heart and it was wrong. Well that’s probably because your head was overriding your heart. Our head is very big, it’s very overdeveloped and a lot of times it pounces on our heart. But when we develop our heart to its strength, it’s just amazing. And so those are a couple of practices that I just would suggest for you.

Sarah E. Brown 41:34

Okay. Sitting and appreciation in there in the back of your book.

Susan Inouye 41:37

Right. And look for a walk in beauty.

Sarah E. Brown 41:40

Okay.

Susan Inouye 41:41

Because walk in beauty is the one you want to do and walk in beauty is probably my most famous practice because my clients have conversations about walk in beauty with my other clients because it has helped them so much to be in tune with themselves and with their people.

Sarah E. Brown 42:00

And you referenced that in the opening story that you got your CEO client to go do that.

Susan Inouye 42:06

Yeah. He knows it. Around his office there were a lot of trees and nature. And so he went and it helped to calm him down. That’s why he said, I exactly knew that you’re going to ask me what is the gift that is trying to come out of bad behavior. Now, you have to understand that in the Sawubona leadership, we just don’t look for gifts in good behavior, which is easier to see. We’ll look for gifts and bad behavior as well. But first we have to know the gifts of a person by observing them through their actions, through their emails, through what they say to all these things. Tell us who they are. Having Sarah tell me about her is allowing me to see her through her gifts and to see her as a human being. And I just want to say the other side. So the gifts are not negative. They’re not like, well she’s impatient, she’s this. No, it’s just that she has to learn to slow down and to be more present and then patient. And what happens is other things start to emerge. So I don’t know, how does all this land for you, what I’m saying?

Sarah E. Brown 43:13

First of all, I think you’re spot on and I like the practices of sitting and walking in beauty. And I will say that you couldn’t be more right, that I do need to learn to slow down. So how do you teach your clients to do this effectively?

Susan Inouye 43:32

Well, the first thing I’ll say is that we have to work on ourselves. We have to do this on ourselves. We have to start to slow down and see the gifts in ourselves. And we, I call them self-observations. We have to observe because when, the first step to change is awareness. If we are aware of certain patterns and habits, if we are aware of when we overuse our gifts till they become our weakness, then all of a sudden that’s the first step to us stopping it and doing something else. The way that we start to change is we start to interrupt patterns and then replace them with new ones. And every time you interrupt a pattern and replace it with a new one, your body starts to go into a new way of being. You know, it starts to feel differently. And so, and then the second thing I would say is once you start to see the gifts in yourself and you start to understand what are the blind spots that you need to work on, it’s going to be much easier to be able to slow down and observe your people. And through everything they do from how they write to, like I said, their emails or actions, you’ll be able, just like I did with Sarah today, to be able to see their gifts and then to have conversation about it.

Sarah E. Brown 44:59 

Do you encourage your clients, your leader clients, to share their gifts and their blind spots with their organization?

Susan Inouye 46:10 

Yeah, absolutely. Because the more vulnerable you are, the more that you’re, especially millennials and Gen Zs, the more they’ll love you. Because we’re not in a world, remember we’re in a world, a new generation where they put everything on social media from brushing their teeth to combing their hair, to, you know, what they’re doing. They love vulnerable leaders. They love leaders who say, you know what? I don’t know. You know, maybe you could help me by finding out. They love that. They love collaboration, they love partnering. They love to, if you say to them, so this is where it also leads. Once you see the gifts, once you know them, when you have a conversation, the next step is gift-centered praise. And gift centered praise is different from regular praise. It’s about praising the gift behind the action.

So for example, if someone came to my office and one of my gifts is organization, right? And they took the stapler from my drawer, and then they put it back in the same spot, you know, and I would go, wow, they do, they’re organized, they have the gift of organization. And I might say, I’ll just call Jack, Jack, thank you so much for putting, you know, my stapler back in the drawer. I, I’m noticing that you have the gift of organization and Jack will probably do, yeah. And so I was just curious to know how we could use that in other parts of the organization? How could we use that to solve some other problems that we have? How could you use it? And so if you just praise the action of putting the stapler back, he’ll put it back every single time. But if you praise the gift behind the action, then you’ll find other ways to use that gift. Because a lot of times people have not been acknowledged, or I’ll ask them, what do you think their, your gifts are? And they don’t know. But when you see it in them and they go, oh yeah, I do have that gift. You’re right. Okay, so how could we use this? Then they start to search for other ways. So it’s a beautiful way of being able to have them spread their gifts in a way that can take the organization to the next level.

Sarah E. Brown 47:27

Well, I’m glad you brought up the fact that many people don’t know what their gifts are, because I see that a lot as well. And this is a great way to start helping everybody to see it, not just the individual. So Susan, what should I have asked you that I didn’t, that would help us understand Sawubona better?

Susan Inouye 47:50

Well, I think the question is, because your audience tends to be women, right? And the question that I think comes up for me is, why do women have the edge in being the kind of leaders we need to take companies to the next level and to thrive in the 21st century? And that is a really important question. Do you want me to answer it?

Sarah E. Brown 48:18

You raised it, you better answer it.

Susan Inouye 48:24 

Okay. Well, I mentioned that for more than a decade, the title leadership has been changing. Okay? The touchy feely stuff that was mocked as unimportant, today is more important than ever because of the millennial generation taking their place as the largest generation in our global workforce. And as I mentioned before, 75% will be the number come 2025. And millennials, and let me just say this. I say millennials, but every human being, millennials want compassionate leaders who see and accept them for who they are. They want leaders who encourage them to contribute their gifts and to live in their purpose. And, you know, science has discovered that compassion is essential to our evolutionary history. And while men can employ it, women are more attuned to compassion. And this actually marks an evolution, you know, a new normal in the way that we must lead. We’re looking for, um, I mean, generations are looking for a more connected, a more emotionally intelligent way of leading. And this is why women have the edge.

Sarah E. Brown 48:48 

One more question. Where can people learn more?

Susan Inouye 48:52 

Well, first of all, if there’s anything that I’ve said that you want more explanation or I have a thing where if you go to ask.susaninouye.com, I give a free 15 minute consultation where you can ask me anything, no strings attached. And I’m happy to do that. It’s like a free 15-minute executive coaching session. Um, if they want to learn more about my book, Leadership’s Perfect Storm, which by the way, I just wanna mention, it hit the number one Amazon bestseller at the end of 2018 when we launched it. It was very exciting and it sold all over the world. Uh, they can go to Amazon, it’s on Amazon, and they can get that. And the third thing is if they wanna find out more about my services or testimonials or anything like that, results. They can go to susaninouye.com, my website. And yeah, contact me through that, as well, too. So thank you, Sarah.

Sarah E. Brown 50:50 

Susan, thank you so much for being with me today.

Thanks for listening To the KTF Success Factor Podcast for Women. If you like what you are hearing, please go to iTunes to subscribe, rate us and leave a review. And if you would like more information on how we can help women in your organization to thrive, then go to www.sarahebrown.com. You can sign up for our newsletter, read show notes, and learn more about our podcast guests, read my blog, browse through the books, or contact us for a chat. Goodbye for now.

Sarah E. Brown
Sarah E. Brown

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