[00:00:06 ] Gary Bisbee, Ph.D.: Our guest today, Rasmus Hougaard asks the question, how can you balance compassion for your people with effectiveness and getting the job done? Rasmus is the founder and CEO of Potential Project, a leadership development consultancy. He’s the author of “Compassionate Leadership”, for which he surveyed 350 CEOs and CHROs. Rasmus found that the most successful leaders have a compassionate and caring attitude, while also displaying a business acumen and courage to make difficult decisions. The best leaders can do hard things in a human way. Rasmus describes how to lead across age and cultural differences. He encourages leaders to unlearn robotic prescriptions for mentoring and leadership, and to approach conversations with vulnerability. We discussed the great resignation, which Rasmus frames as an opportunity. Employees want good work experiences. Companies that can provide them will attract and retain the best talent. Above all, Rasmus recommends that leaders take care of themselves, get enough sleep, and take time to rest and recharge. Only when you take care of yourself can you take care of others.

Well, good afternoon, Rasmus, and welcome.

[00:01:26 ] Rasmus Hougaard: Thank you very much, Gary. A pleasure to be here.

[00:01:28 ] Gary Bisbee, Ph.D.: We’re pleased to have you at this microphone. As you know, this show is about sustaining leadership excellence and you fit right in with your career that involves really significant work as an author. You’re, of course, the founder and CEO of a global business. So what led, if I can ask, Rasmus, what led to the founding of Potential Project? I know we are covering multiple years there, but what really led you to found your global company?

[00:02:01 ] Rasmus Hougaard: I think, for anything in most people’s lives, that’s not just one thing that led to that, but there’s probably at least three strands that leads to that. The first one was, when I was quite young, I was about 17, I actually completely lost confidence in the Western model of getting a good education, getting a good partner, getting a good car, getting a good career. All of that just didn’t add up to me. I didn’t see the point in it. And I felt I had to look elsewhere for a different way of doing life. And I went to Nepal and India and stayed there for quite some time and studied with some, let’s say, spiritual teachers from Buddhist tradition and other traditions that taught me meditation and taught me a different way of looking at the world and at life, not thinking about yourself first, but thinking about the impact and positivity you can bring to the world. That was definitely what was the foundation. Then I came back. I got my degree. I became a researcher and really learned the value of data, the value of thorough study of a situation before you come in and try to change something. Then I moved from there into corporates. And that was like when the coin dropped. I was working in the Sony Corporation as a leader for a number of years. And I saw how my employees and my peers and my superiors were constantly stressed out. They were not creative. They were not happy. They were overworked. They were burned out. And one day my own boss called me. We had this major, major meeting with our largest clients and he called me five minutes before and said he couldn’t make it. And I said, why not? And he said, I’m sitting in my car. And I said, what are you doing in my car? And he said, I can’t move. And he had just completely, out of stress and burnout, lost his ability to drive the car. I was just shocked by that. And it made me open the eyes and see he was not the only one, but everybody was suffering. Nobody was living up to their potential. And I thought, when I was young, I received all these amazing practices to train my own mind and to train my heart, to be a good person and to be clear minded, focused and resilient, and creative, and here amongst all these people that don’t have that. So I got to do something about that. And that’s when I decided to start Potential Project.

[00:04:23 ] Gary Bisbee, Ph.D.: Well, can you describe it for us?

[00:04:27 ] Rasmus Hougaard: Yeah. So, Potential Product is, as you said, a global company. We are in some 30 countries working with around, I would say, 500 global clients like Microsoft and Cisco and Accenture, and all the big companies. And what we do is research leadership development, and consulting, really helping our clients to ultimately create a more human world at work, creating a more human world of work where people can be truly themselves, where people can feel truly cared for, where leaders are really good human beings that unlearn management and relearn being humans. It’s all about creating a world where, I have three kids and they are going to join the workforce in just a few years. I want them to have a good experience. And that’s the kind of world of work that we’re trying to create.

[00:05:16 ] Gary Bisbee, Ph.D.: Rasmus, we’ve learned through the years, thousands of interviews, that if we can hear from our guests about their early years growing up, how they’ve evolved as a leader, that that gives us a better understanding of their leadership style and performance. And to that end, let me just start with, what was life like growing up for you, Rasmus?

[00:05:40 ] Rasmus Hougaard: It was actually really wonderful. It was beautiful. I loved my childhood. My parents came from a part of Denmark that is quite conservative and they moved to this little island in the Baltic Sea. A lot of artists, creative thinkers, moved there and my parents were some of those. So it was a very, very beautiful community of very free spirited people. And it was a lot of nature. So I just, I see myself as this little boy walking around in the woods, around the lakes, at the big cliffs at the water, with the waves coming up. That was what life was like, and just surrounded by a lot of really beautiful people. It was a beautiful time.

[00:06:21 ] Gary Bisbee, Ph.D.: Well, and I think about your time in New York City in contrast. That’s quite a change. But that sounds like an idyllic existence, really. What did the young Rasmus think about leadership? At what point did you begin to think about leadership?

[00:06:40 ] Rasmus Hougaard: I would say I didn’t spare that a single thought when I was a child, not a single thought. But having said that, I think I learned a lot because the community that I was surrounded by was very non-hierarchical. The school I went to, there was not a school principal. Teachers together were making decisions. So everything was very flat in that way. Not hierarchical, not top down. And I think that has just always been how I thought about how to get stuff done, is through influence and through communication, but not through mandates and commands. That has definitely shaped how I see leadership.

[00:07:20 ] Gary Bisbee, Ph.D.: How about your parents? Have they influenced your leadership style?

[00:07:25 ] Rasmus Hougaard: I think so, a lot. They both were in leadership positions in healthcare and social work. And I think they also embodied this very flat, very, you lead by influence, you lead by having good conversations. And so it’s just always been natural to me. I’ve always questioned the other way of leading, the more traditional top-down. It just never really made sense to me.

[00:07:45 ] Gary Bisbee, Ph.D.: You’re a prolific author, Rasmus. Do you enjoy writing?

[00:07:52 ] Rasmus Hougaard: I think it’s like anything else. If you have the time, anything is beautiful and wonderful, or at least can be. In my situation, leading some 200 people, I don’t have that much time. And when I used to, I really enjoyed writing. But these days, I have to confess I am using a lot of my colleagues and a professional writer to make things more polished and clear. But when I have the time, I really enjoy it, yes.

[00:08:22 ] Gary Bisbee, Ph.D.: Do you have a pattern? Is there a certain time that you write? Some people write early in the morning? Some people write late at night. Any pattern?

[00:08:31 ] Rasmus Hougaard: I tried to do that and it just didn’t work because the intensity of my work is just so that there’s no time of day where I’m standing still. So I realized I need to take out chunks of time. So it’s like everything from three to seven days, I just block completely, go to somewhere with no internet, and then just sit and write with the people I write with.

[00:08:53 ] Gary Bisbee, Ph.D.: Well, let’s dig in to “Compassionate Leadership: How to Do Hard Things the Human Way”. One of the obvious questions, given that you operate in 30 some countries, does each culture interpret the term compassionate leadership the same way?

[00:09:09 ] Rasmus Hougaard: No. No. There’s a lot of different interpretations of that. And even the word compassion is so differently understood even in a country like America, where it’s the native word. Case in point, most people don’t know what is the difference between empathy and compassion. And they think it’s the same thing. And it is absolutely not. Empathy is a really important skill for leaders. We need to be able to connect with the suffering we see in other people so they can see we understand them. And then there is communication. But as a leader, if we stay in empathy, where we are literally taking on the suffering of that other person, we can’t be effective in helping them and driving an agenda. So making that distinction is really important. And so in any culture, we have to help define what compassionate leadership means, including, the biggest misinterpretation people have is, when we’re compassionate, we’re nice. We’re nice people giving people what they want, which is not what compassion is. Compassion is about doing the right thing for people, helping them on their path, which can be giving really tough feedback, which can even be laying people off. So, yeah, there’s a lot of diff