Nisha (00:22.528)
This is the Delivery Space podcast. Whether you're interested in software delivery, business change or transformation, we have some great content lined up for you. We take you into different areas of delivery and bring you insights and experience that you won't get from a book. Welcome. I'm Nisha and this is our episode on the fundamentals for leaders to build resilient organizations.
And today discussing this topic with me is Sohrab Salimi. Hello, Sohrab. Not at all. It's such a pleasure to speak to you after following your content online. Your nothing comes from nothing newsletters that used to land in my inbox on Sunday mornings. And I used to read them and expect them to be about agility, but they were about life. And so they caught my eye and they caught my attention. Welcome.
Hi, Nisha.
Sohrab (01:20.076)
Yeah, thank you. Happy to be here.
So, Sohrab tell me a little bit about yourself so that our listeners can get to know you a little.
Okay, so I'll go a bit further back, but promise to keep it short. So Iranian heritage came to Germany at the age of four after a more or less two year journey with my parents. to school, ultimately went to university, always wanted to become a medical doctor, made it to medical school. Loved the experience. At the end of med school decided that I also want to explore other areas.
I was always curious in all sorts of topics, joined Bain & Company, a huge management consulting firm, stayed there for almost three years. Initially worked a lot with pharmaceutical and med tech clients after learning the key tools of any consultants, which is Excel and PowerPoint. For me, the red and the green program as a medical student. also was allowed to work with a lot of other organizations, Automotive, Telco.
was super interesting, learned a ton working at that organization. Then left Bain mostly because my wife said, you're never at home. We won't have any kids. So I became an entrepreneur, which didn't mean I worked less, but I traveled less. Today we have three kids, 12, 10 or 12, 11 and nine years old. So my son recently had his birthday. Became an entrepreneur building products.
Sohrab (02:54.21)
Hardware, software products, super successful at the very beginning where we had a lot of customer interviews, where we delivered fast. Then we were a bit too euphoric, forgot a lot of those things that made us strong in the first place, built too much based on assumptions. Took a year and a half to deliver an app because I wanted to make it perfect. And then that app didn't land with the target customer group that we were addressing.
And there was a very humbling experience. Took that and helped my parents, IT consulting company to transform from a waterfall model to become a more agile delivery organization. had a bunch of consultants working with various organizations. They became curious on how this agility thing works, reached out, asked for trainings. I volunteered because I always loved teaching and the rest became basically history ever since then.
This is now for the past 12, 13, 14 years. I've been spending about 50 % of my time teaching, starting out by teaching Scrum Masters, teaching product owners, then more and more working with leaders. And the rest of my time, I spent working with teams initially, actually building great products, supported the German automotive company MAN that built trucks and buses to build their very first electric truck, driving down development time from five years to 18 months.
Yeah, helped Rush with the very first PCR test that they were building for COVID-19, driving down development time from nine months to 42 days in the midst of the pandemic. Quite remarkable. Obviously the vast majority of the work was done by the teams, but they relied a lot on the principles that we had worked with them earlier. And today I work with organizations that want to transform their whole organization.
towards more agile ways of working and ultimately delivering better products in a better way. So that's me in a nutshell. In my spare time, again, I mentioned three kids, there's not much spare time. But if they allow, we were talking about this earlier, Nisha, I love doing sports, try to keep myself fit. Want to grow as old as I can to see my grandkids and my grandkids kids. So let's see how far I can take this.
Nisha (05:17.066)
I love that intro. I'm just thinking how much history you have behind you, how varied your career has been through all of that. When you reflect on your own leadership journey, regardless of whether you were an entrepreneur, led a business, trained, you were still performing as a leader, knowing you, knowing how
You would be working with those people in order to help them. If you reflect on your own leadership journey from medicine to agile leadership to entrepreneurship, what's a key lesson about resilience that stayed with you throughout this journey so far?
Yeah, I've been reflecting on this a lot, actually, like in terms of why did I even do the things that I did? Yeah. And in hindsight, it's always been driven by curiosity. It's always been curiosity. Like, what is the next thing that I can do? What is, like, how can I transfer the skills that I've learned here to something else? I'm so curious about that topic. Right? What would it take to become really good at that? So curiosity was, was,
Probably my driver probably still is my driver. Like I was curious to join you on this podcast. So I followed my curiosity, right? We didn't know each other prior to that. that's, think, something that also serves a lot of other people well, no matter in what type of leadership role they are. If you're a product owner, you should be curious about your customer. If you're a developer, you should be curious about the technology, right?
If you're a scrum master, you should be curious about human dynamics and how you make those groups become a really cohesive and high-performing unit. If you're a senior leader in an organization, you should be curious about how do we create culture. So curiosity, that's one. The second thing is connected to curiosity, but actually helps me put the curiosity in a certain direction, and that's care.
Sohrab (07:35.798)
If you're only curious, or if I'm only curious, I tend to jump from one topic to the next. But caring about then craftsmanship. So becoming really good at something. At some point when I, when I became a trainer, I never had like a formal trainer, assessment or, I mean, I had an assessment, but I never received a train the trainer program, but I really wanted to be the best trainer out there.
you
Sohrab (08:05.558)
I wanted participants that go through my course, leave the course and say, this was the best training we ever had, both in terms of content, but also style of delivery. So I really focused on that for several years, not just a few weeks or days, but really several years, constantly like caring about my craftsmanship and like channeling my curiosity to go very, very deep into one particular topic.
before I get out and then try to build that craftsmanship in other areas as well. those two things, the curiosity and the care for craftsmanship, I think they've served me well. And when I work with leaders today, those are two topics that I usually try to also help them understand and dive deeper on.
And how do they react when you talk to them, Sohrab, about that depth that they need to get to, that level of mastery that they need to get to, because working in agility, I know that that's no superficial stuff. working in leadership, especially to bring agility to organizations that requires mental strength, emotional strength, psychological strength, and those resources.
internally to support people that you are leading. That requires a lot of depth and a lot of inner work. How do you, what do you bring to leaders that you work with to say, Hey, don't leave anything on the table, but just thinking about this in a superficial way.
Yeah. So my experience with most leaders has been that many of them are very competitive. You don't move into a leadership position usually if you're not competitive. Being competitive means you want to win. That in itself sets some kind of ambition. And then I asked the question, so the first question I ask is, do you want to win?
Nisha (09:44.565)
Aha!
Sohrab (10:05.614)
Right. And then I asked the question, what does winning mean? Because it could mean different things to different people. And then I asked the question, so how do great teams become winning teams? And very quickly people get to like, okay, they need to work really hard. I'm not okay, but it's not only working really hard. It's also what they work on. Right. And then coming back to the topic of our conversation today, the fundamentals. Yeah.
Hmm.
Sohrab (10:35.554)
You very quickly realized that you don't need, let's take the example of a scrum master, right? Or a coach. You don't need hundreds of tools in your toolbox that you barely know. It's enough if you have five, six, seven, maybe 10, but you know how to handle them really well. I was trained as a surgeon. As a surgeon, you don't have a hundreds of tools, but the ones that you have, like the scalpel.
or how do you stitch the patient or the endoscope, right? You need to be really well-versed in using those few tools, right? So understanding the fundamentals. And as a leader, we then go and talk about how do you run meetings? Every leader is constantly in meetings by definition, right? And if you look at how meetings are run in most organizations, you're like, my God, right?
meeting doesn't have an agenda, it's not clear if you're participating, they don't timebox decisions, right? Even if they create the agenda, they have like 10 items on the agenda, you just look at it, you're like, you want to cover all of that in a one hour meeting? No chance you will be able to do so. No, no, no, no, we do that. And then they get only through three of them. And then next time they again have 10 items on the agenda, you're like, didn't you learn anything from the last meeting?
Right. So they're kind of repeating it, but also sometimes they don't even speak to each other. So they will check in everything going, all right, you're in, you're in, you're in everything. Okay. Great. We don't need to talk anymore. I've also been in leadership meetings that go like that. And to me, that's really scary because then that means that there are agendas that are not out in the open. You're not really sure where each other's stake is, where they, where their real interests lie.
And surely that cannot make for a resilient organisation.
Sohrab (12:32.896)
It can't. And this is then the part where I really think, hey, we came into a leadership position. if you, I mean, I got an MBA at some point. An MBA was initially created for people that have a non-business background, but a chemist, a medical doctor, a physicist, an engineer that now have people leadership responsibilities. an MBA first and foremost teaches you how to read a P &L, right? It's not rocket science.
It gives you some understanding on how to manage people, right? It's called master and business administration. So it's primarily about the administrative parts of a business, how to do like financial planning, budgeting, all these kinds of things. It rarely, even if you take the best MBAs in the world, it barely teaches you how to do great strategy. And it does not teach you at all how to create a high performing organization.
a shame. What a massive miss.
Yeah but-
Yep, I used to think about that as well, but then I thought the title tells you what it is, right? So for example, if you go into a product owner course, the expectation should not be that you become a great leader. You should become a great product owner, right? You should learn about prioritization, about product vision, and so on and so forth. If you go into a course about agile engineering practices, you should learn about engineering practices. Now, if you pursue a degree in
Sohrab (14:05.976)
business administration, you should become a good business administrator. Right? It's not called master in leadership. And so I think it's also about like, what is it? What is it that this product is? But let's go back now. A lot of those fundamentals. We talked about running effective meetings, creating a strategy and on a regular basis, refining it because it's not a one-time thing you do. Right. It's then.
daily choices that you have to make based on the learnings that you've had. next, how do you align people? Alignment, it's a human dynamic. That's not some kind of engineering thing that you do. How to create a culture? What is culture at all? All of those are things that most people that come into a leadership position have never learned.
but we still expect them to do those things. And I think one of the things that we can do as coaches, as trainers, as whatever we call ourselves that gets to work with senior leaders is to create the awareness of how important these fundamentals are and then actually help them with a few things. Again, not hundreds of tools, a few tools that help them do those things systematically.
And once they try working with those things, develop their level of mastery so that they can do it really, really well. And my experience has been from the work that I do as a leader, have an organization with like eight, nine employees in it. So it's not huge, but still like it's more or less the average number of direct reports that any other leader also has. But my experience has been that with a few things that you do really well, you can get to incredible results.
That's also what I've been observing with a lot of the leaders that I get to.
Nisha (16:05.742)
are those few things that you do, that you practice in your company? I've seen you write about these, but I don't want to comment. I want to hear it from you because you write about it with such passion sometimes when you point out things that happen and your reaction to them. So it'd be really lovely to share with our listeners, what do you do that drives that resilience, that builds that cohesion within the people within your company?
And what can others learn from in the way that you do it? Also, why you're at it, tell us the things that you haven't done so well.
Yeah. Maybe I start with the things that I haven't done so well or things that I've learned as part of the journey. Yeah. One of the things I just recently had a conversation with one of my colleagues and I asked, was like, what's my biggest weakness? I asked her like straight to her.
Brave of you! Good, I'm glad you did that.
And she asked me, do you want an honest answer? I was like, if I'm asking you, yes, I do want an honest answer. And she said, you know what? You trust people too much.
Sohrab (17:14.798)
I was like, what do you mean? Can there be something like too much trust? She's like, yeah, just think about this and this and this situation. Like, so we had hired somebody and we were already like fully remote due to the pandemic, et cetera. I thought she was coming in as a professional in her space. I gave her like full trust and now full trust can be or trust could be in multiple directions. One is she knows her stuff, right?
And I think she knows her stuff. The other is she will integrate well with the rest of the team. It's a completely different thing. It can be really, really good at your particular topic. And at the same time, don't integrate well with the rest of the team because you're not, not a great team player, right? You're a disruptor. Maybe even you take pride in that, right? I want to like be stubborn and force everybody to move into my direction. These kinds of things.
Now me trusting that person too much meant also that I didn't keep an eye on that. I was busy doing other stuff and I was having this excuse to myself. I'm like, I can trust her. I could trust my whole team. They also the rest of the team was probably overwhelmed with this. They didn't know whether they could come back to me and say, Sohrab this new person we hired, it's not working out. Right. So as a leader.
Thank you.
Sohrab (18:43.402)
If I actually did not trust as much, I would have been closer to the topic. Now, eventually, I saw that we're not getting the results that I want to get, right? But this took me way too long. It took me a year and a half instead of maybe two months. Now think about how much money we spent in that time. And even if you forget about the money, how much energy drained from the rest of the team, right?
maybe even missed opportunity for the person that we hired. Maybe she would have worked out much better in another organization. And it was my job as a leader to be closer to that topic, be a bit more skeptical. So you can have a certain amount of trust and at same time be skeptical to really observe whether things are going in the right direction, whether we actually have the type of fit that we need.
while at the same time having the amount of diversity that we need, right? We don't want people to be yes sayers, but we still want them to integrate in the team because otherwise a team can never be high performing. And then make either adjustments, basically coaching that person, or if the person demonstrates to not be coachable,
Make the tough call.
much, much earlier, much, much earlier. So that's one of the areas where I could have probably done much or I should have done much better. And this is something that I've learned from. But you were also asking about what was the question again, Nisha?
Nisha (20:20.014)
Things that you've done really well. Yeah. Based on feedback from those that you need within your company.
Concrete things. Yeah. So one of the tools that I learned at Bain was it's called manager on the page where you basically lay out on one page. It can also be two, right? Mine is right now one and a half pages, but you basically lay out how you work, what your expectations are. And you try to be as crystal clear as possible. based on that manager on the page, you A, give people
clarity, what you expect from them and what they can expect from you. So I still remember one of the managers I got to work with at Bain, he became later the founder of West Wing, the e-commerce company. Stefan Smalla is his name. Amazing guy, incredibly structured, great leader. So he gives me this manager on a page and I read through it. And every manager at Bain had a different manager on a page because it's very individualized. It has to be different, right?
And I read in his manager on a page where he states, he's like, I love basketball. I was like, huh? I watched the NBA. So a lot of the games are at like two, three, four AM, Germany time. And I happen to also send emails while I'm watching those games. But I do not expect from you to respond to those emails at that point in time. And I remember for me, this was like,
fun, right? Because I was still
Nisha (21:59.854)
They can keep coming through because you're probably churning through these things and thinking about them at that time. But I don't need to. When I'm ready, I'll read them.
Absolutely. And he was like, so you wake up the next morning. Don't be like completely like scared because you received so many emails from me. That's just the regular process. And then like you start working on them. And if you have questions about what is now the number one priority, always come and ask me. That it was, it was not only like, I expect from you to do zero defects. And I expect from it was also giving me a lot of clarity and a lot of
Right.
Sohrab (22:39.15)
quote unquote comfort without making me become lazy, right? And it provided me with the level of calm that I needed to do an excellent job. So this is something that I've taken from Stefan and in general from the time at Bain. I have a manager on a page. I share it with every person that I hire in the organization. I even give it to them during the recruiting process. I'm like, hey, that's how I operate, right? If you are right now, like,
challenged by this, probably not the right fit. But if you think this is great and you could perform within these constraints and how I operate, ultimately it's my business, then I think we have a good foundation to build up. That's one. Number two, were earlier talking about this meetings. I'm very strict on meetings. And the number one rule is I don't want to have meetings. That's my number one rule. So everything that can be avoided becoming a meeting,
You've probably seen those coffee cups. I survived another meeting that could have been an email. Yeah. For us, it's mostly a Slack message. So I try to fix everything without having a meeting. A meeting is our last resort. The only meeting that we have that is not our last resort is once a week for two hours. Everybody gets together. We talk about everything that we did in the previous week, just to make sure that everybody's on the same page.
We talk about all the challenges that we currently have, right? And about what we are going to do in the next week. And the teams that are actually working on product, this is, we refer to it as our RPS review and planning session. So they basically do their product demo. Everybody gets to see it. mean, we're a small company, so we get to do this with eight or nine people. Everybody provides feedback. The people that have a perspective on this, it's sometimes we're done within an hour.
Great, right? The two hours is our maximum time box. And everybody else in my organization, they have zero other meetings, zero. That's it. That's the one meeting we have. No more meetings.
Nisha (24:51.438)
It's so easy. Like right now I'm working in a small company as well. And if I need to chat to our development partner, or if I need to chat to somebody in marketing, for example, I'm just huddling them on Slack quickly. Are you okay for a five, 10 minute chat? It's spoken about, it's sorted, no assumptions, either of us are walking away with, and it's clear. And we don't need to round up five of us, six of us in a meeting because those meetings, if you think about everyone as a
Day rater can get so expensive.
Yeah, absolutely, absolutely.
Sohrab, can I circle back on something? Yeah. You mentioned before around revisiting your strategy. What advice, because that itself makes leaders resilient. That itself makes, that's a fundamental in making organizations resilient. You and I not saying, get the best consultants in, fill your boots with a wonderful strategy. It looks great on paper.
Maybe missing some of those alignment and cultural elements you and I touched on earlier. And then you don't touch it. What we're saying is you need to be able to review it. And how do you do that in your business? crack open that advice for leaders.
Sohrab (26:10.998)
I think the first aspect is really acknowledging that when we create that initial strategy, I refer to it as a strategic draft, we are creating it at our dumbest point in time. And I intentionally say that because that's the moment in time where we have the least amount of knowledge. We still should do something like that. It's not like, we don't know anything.
So we are paralyzed, we can't do it. No, we need to decide certain things. Every strategy is a decision that we make. It's a set of choices that we make. Roger Martin refers to this as where do we play and how do we win? Those are the two big strategic questions that we need to ask ourselves. And yes, we make assumptions and that's fine. As long as we acknowledge that we're making assumptions.
Now, what do we do with assumptions? This is the medical doctor in me, right? If a patient comes in, I look at them, I immediately have some kind of diagnosis in my mind. But now I need to do, based on the symptoms that they share with me, I need to do differential diagnosis. Now, then I have to run various tests, A blood sample test to the lab, then I look into their mouth, I look into their ears, all of that. need ultrasound, right? Maybe I send them to the radiologist and then...
I get more and more and more information based on the tests that I ran. And based on the tests, I now get to a final diagnosis. And even then, it's not 100 % clear what's the therapy. Because every patient, right, being a complex adaptive system, the human body, responds to the medicine in a different way. Some people need a bit higher dosage, some a bit lower. If you just think about hypertension, such a simple thing.
We have so much experience with it, but there's like hundreds ways of how you can combine different types of drugs based on other diseases that the patient might have, et cetera, right? So all of those things, have to inspect and adapt. And the same is true for product and the same is true for strategy. So if we acknowledge we're making those choices at our dumbest point in time, now think about what are the experiments that we're going to run in order to evaluate the choices that we've made.
Sohrab (28:32.782)
And now based on the result of those experiments, what are the adaptations that we're going to make? And then based on the changes that we see in the market, I the market is not gonna wait five years just because we made a five-year plan to make changes, right? Changes whenever it changes. And then we have to evaluate and say, does this mean we have to rethink our strategy or are we still on course because the changes are actually in our favor? This could also be the case.
sorry.
Sohrab (29:02.028)
So that's the type of thinking that leaders need to acknowledge and become better at. And don't think about, strategy, we did it, check, let's move on to the next topic. It's a constant thing.
Yeah. And you need to know those constant actions, those constant steps that are needed to be able to reach your goal. And that refresh allows you to do that. So if we were going to walk into a resilient organization and something that you would think of as truly resilient when you walked in and you started speaking to leaders and people.
What would you see? What would you feel? What types of things would you hear? How would people be showing up in an organization like this?
Yeah. So first, first, maybe one of the paradoxes. It would be a calm organization, not a chaotic one.
I was hoping you would say that.
Sohrab (30:00.62)
Yeah, it would really be a calm organization. And one of the best quotes that I've heard comes from the Navy SEALs, slow is smooth and smooth is fast. It's a paradox, right? In German, we have a saying, if you want to go fast, you should slow down. Right. It's one of those paradoxes. And I think a truly resilient organization and resiliency means based on the changes in the market,
Mm-hmm.
Nisha (30:13.282)
Hmm.
Sohrab (30:29.602)
you're able to adapt. One of my mentors, Craig Larmann, would say turning on a dime for a dime. So it doesn't cost you a lot and you don't take a lot of space to make a pivot in your.
Making those safe bets, right? But you're doing it really consciously and taking people with you on the journey.
Exactly. It's a very calm organization because it's also a very focused organization. So if you trim down your portfolio, if you have actually work in progress limits, you have a certain number of items that you're working on and you want to finish them before you start something else that gives you coming from the flow perspective, right? It shortens your lead times. And then if something else becomes of higher priority,
You just move it up in the backlog and because your batch sizes are so small, you just take on now that's very high priority item, but you don't lose that calm. So a resilient organization is not chaotic, right? It is calm and calm can also result in a lot of creativity because what do people need to become truly creative? They need to feel safe. You can't be creative under a lot of pressure.
Be pressure with regards to deadlines, be it pressure with regards to quality problems that you have, you can't. One of the things that I hear from almost every organization where they've lost their innovative edges, we don't have time for innovation. First, we need to do all of this firefighting and then maybe, and they're not wrong. The people in the daily operations, they tell you as it is. They don't have...
Sohrab (32:17.006)
They literally don't know where should we take the time to innovate because right now we're like completely drowning in work. So the calm organization creates the opportunity for people to become creative. That then again builds that positive cycle towards, right, we now have several bets. Some are working out, some are not because we are also calm and not emotional in our decision-making.
We don't tie ourselves too much to one of these bets. So if we actually see it's not working out, we don't have a problem saying, right, it was a bet, didn't work out, all right, let's shelve this one, let's start with the next bet. So a lot of those elements that I've seen in high functioning organizations and what I've tried to bring into my own organization is that level of calmness. And calmness should not be mistaken for laziness.
or inactivity.
inactivity. People are working incredibly focused on a small number of things, but they're doing them really well and they're actually finishing them. That also gives people a sense of accomplishment. Because what I really hated when I was a consultant at Bain or an individual contributor, I had never an issue with going the extra mile. But what I hated was if I put in an all-nighter,
and the result of our work would end in a trash bin, not because it was not good work, but because a lot of the other elements around it were missing. Right. So that's one of the things to respond to your question. Calm.
Nisha (34:03.362)
Yeah, I like the fact that you said that. I remember, and I was nowhere near calm in this avatar and of my former self. I used to be a program manager working with really high profile transformation programs. I was never calm. I made myself the hub of every decision that was being taken in that program. That was well before I came across Agile and found a new way.
to kind of prioritize and saw other teams working that well. And if I think back at that time, and if I think back as a leader, whether I paid attention to people that were on the operational side of the business where we were trying to impact change, I would say as a leader, I didn't listen to them enough. And I didn't create those conditions for calm. So what happened?
was that we were lamping this transformation project onto everything else that they had. We didn't create that really nice balance between strategic and operational. that calm really comes in when you've got that intention behind creating that balance. It's often a tricky balance. You still want to be a profitable organization, but you still want to make sure that the market is not going to leave you behind.
You still want to keep up with your digital innovation, but you want to make sure you look after your operational people because they're the ones that are bringing really the value and the revenue into the business. if I think about that and I think about that, I have plenty of lessons from that kind of part of my life that I bring into my daily practice now. But it does make me think like how many leaders do you speak to that
Bring that calm into the organization. What are those really good characteristics that you spot in them straight away that you think, this is something that's going to really take you far. This is something that you've really built the inner resilience to and good job, man, because you're passing that on to the teams that you interact with.
Sohrab (36:16.354)
Yeah, unfortunately not that many. I actually don't think it's that strange. Because if you think about it, what happens when we are under stress? Naturally.
strange.
Nisha (36:34.198)
Yeah, we climb up, don't we? Yeah, we climb up.
are simpaticos, Fight, flight, freeze. Those are the natural reactions. And they're there for a reason, because it was about life or death, life or life or death, Matter of life or death. Now, when we take this into the business space,
It's not about life or death, but we still show the same reactions. If we rely on our animal instincts, we still show the same reaction. That doesn't make us calm. Now, where did I get this from? I still remember the first time I was in surgery, patient was almost bleeding out. And what we see in like those movies about medicine or TV series like Grey's Anatomy,
Suddenly everybody's like active, it's not like that. The surgeon that was at the table, right, he took a deep breath. And then he's like, all right, that's what we're gonna do. With his deep breath, he calmed down everybody else. But he was trained in this. That's the thing, right? Over and over and over again. And then later when I was at Bain and to this date,
When I work with my team and sometimes things go wrong, right? Team member calls me, so our server is down. I'm like, calm down. Nobody's going to die. And just, and they're like, yeah, you're right. But I'm like, no, but nobody's going to die. Calm down, take a breath. Now let's think about solutions. So it's not like laissez faire, it's going to take care of itself. No, no, no, no. But you acknowledge that you panicking is not going to help you.
Nisha (38:05.516)
Right.
Nisha (38:16.557)
Right.
Sohrab (38:27.15)
So and then you practice that right Meditation could be good for that mindfulness could be good for that like breathing exercises And I and I have to train this to the state And I become better at it. mean, I'm Middle Eastern. I'm a very emotional person, right? When when I get into a fight with my wife or like I get disappointed about my kids I can lose my calm and then I remind myself. I'm like, hey, dude, there's no
what you want to be, who you want to be, take a breath, right? And it's just that one breath you take and suddenly you show up differently. So those are a lot of the things that leaders have to think about. And for me, it always starts with nobody's gonna die. But that's because of my background. So everybody might have a different storyline that they tell themselves. For me, that has been working.
you
Nisha (39:19.938)
Yeah, absolutely. It makes complete sense why I feel instinctively that it's a right thing to start off some of my coaching sessions with my clients with breath work, because it helps them clear the decks. And then it starts them thinking about things that they can take action on right away, but not in a rushed way, but in a calm way. it physiologically in their minds, it does something for them. There's such a marked difference. I love that powerful example.
that you've given of the surgeon, really should pull out. And if I've missed it, I apologise, but you pull out as much of those experiences that you have in medicine because there's such powerful metaphors.
Yeah. And I wanted to add one more thing. I lost the thought. Maybe it comes back.
It'll come back. It'll come back. It'll come back. But you know, there's a funny thing that you say about culture, right? Like the the Middle Eastern culture that you're from. My mom and dad, like they obviously were from an Indian culture. And the it's the interesting thing about that is they look for results like we were brought up to, you know, we want results. So my sister and I are programmed to want to achieve to, you know,
hold ourselves accountable to results and stuff like that. But sometimes that can also bring like that heavy rush of action first. Yeah. When, when often as a leader, you don't want to be able to do that. Yes, you want to seize opportunities, but there are times when you need to just stand back rather than act first. And that's that, that is really stood me in good stead. had to do so much unlearning sort of, and I love my mom and dad for putting that, that like that.
Nisha (41:09.548)
that thirst for wanting to progress in us, but I really do, I really have had to unlearn that part.
Yeah, and I mean sometimes you have to unlearn something to make progress on something.
else.
when you you do ski.
No, I'm really bad at it and I don't see the point of having three foot long feet in the snow. I don't see the point man.
Sohrab (41:34.921)
I love speed
But the point that I want to make is you learn to ski. You first do the pizza and then pommes, we call them. So the snowplow, think it's called it. But that's not how good skiers ski. It just gives you some kind of feeling for the snow. And then you have to unlearn this. In order to become a really good skier, after you start with this initially, which gives you some kind of safety, et cetera,
you have to unlearn it so that you can then go in parallel and do actually different types of turns instead of every time going into the snowplow before you then again parallelize, right? And there's a lot of examples, right? I learned playing tennis all by myself. The first time I had a coach, she was like, you're talented, but your technique is like catastrophe. have to unlearn everything, right? So I had to unlearn a lot of the things in order to make progress. And the last thing,
You mentioned like taking a step back. How often do we tell our clients, let's take a step back all the time, right? Exactly. They say something like, all right, I got it. Let's take a step back. Right. And then ask like, why are we doing this in the first place? And that same chain of thought we need to use on ourselves. I'm doing, Oh, let's take a step back. Why am I doing this? Let's take a step back.
You have to! In order to get a free landscape, you've got to!
Nisha (43:02.702)
Mm-hmm.
Sohrab (43:07.758)
And what is the driver? And just asking ourselves the same questions that we so easily ask our clients, that makes a big of a difference.
Yeah. Sohrab I am so grateful you took the time out to spend this time. There's so much more we could talk about. We could take up a whole other episode on the inner and self-talk around resilience. I'm going to put you on the spot, my friend. Will you come back?
Yes.
Thank you so much. It was a lot of fun. We could have gone for another hour probably, but you got stuff to do. I got stuff to do. We are going to wrap up. Thank you so much for making the time, Sohrab. If people want to work with you, if they want to find you, if they want to talk more with you about some of the topics that you touched on today, how do they get a hold of you?
So one way is easy, connect with me on LinkedIn and I'm sure you can share my profile with them. Of Sohrab Salimi is the name, there's not that many of us out there. The other way is to go to Agile-Academy.com That's my company's website. You will easily find us and just reach out. We are always happy to help.
Nisha (44:23.692)
Wonderful. Thank you, Sohrab Thank you, everyone, for listening. Please make sure that you follow us on our socials so you do not miss out on great speakers and great episodes like this. Bye for now.
