Episode 297 – Guest: Michael Chavez
Guest: Michael Chavez

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Kelly Zooms with Michael Chavez, the former CEO of Duke Corporate Education to discuss his book “Rehumanizing Leadership.”

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Something I loved about this book is that it is a business book that doesn’t deny the importance of an entire human experience in our work lives.

“Exactly and, in fact, that is what we mean by re-humanizing leadership. If we’re going to lead humans and unlock their potential, which is really what leadership is about, then we have to kind of reground ourselves and reconnect ourselves in the essence of humanity – and a lot of that has to do with creativity, a lot of that has to do with things that are not linear and not necessarily analytical.”

You also note that today we’re in a new kind of revolution – which is very different from something like the industrial revolution.

“And it’s also about things like being able to create a forum where people can bring their whole selves to work and when we can’t do that, it becomes a limiter to our ability to flourish as people. So I think the key point is the old ways served a purpose but we’re now in this interesting part of history where we’re in another revolution, and  we keep talking about all these industrial revolutions – we’re at I think number four right no –  but I really think there’s a fifth and it’s a revolution of meaning for people.”

Talk about how you replace hierarchy with clarity.

“If we think about distributed clarity, that’s the thing that replaces hierarchy. Because I can trust people to go do what they need to do –  to be creative, to improvise,  to come up with solutions that I, as a leader, could not even imagine because I’m not close enough to the problem.
I have to guard rails which in essence is shared clarity in the organization.”

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