Navid Nazemian- Leadership Without a Blueprint: How to Build, Scale, and Adapt in Uncertainty

Welcome to the Behavioral Profit, the podcast

where behavior drives performance and performance

drives results. I'm Debbie Longo, executive behavioral

coach and founder of Life in Bloom NY. Each episode,

we explore the behaviors, habits and decisions

and mindset shifts that impact leadership, workplace

culture, business growth and personal success.

Whether you're a business owner, executive leader

or someone looking to create meaningful change,

you'll discover practical insights you can apply

immediately because when behavior changes, results

follow. We have a very special Good afternoon.

Welcome to the show. Hey, Debbie. This is very

nice of you to have me on your show. Thank you

very much. And thank you for being here. I appreciate

it. My name is Navi. I'm going to ask you today

to explain a situation or scenario that you've

experienced in any type of business atmosphere

where there was a situation and you went through

a process and you came out the other side and

the end result should always be positive. Now

I do the show for a few different reasons. And

one reason is everybody has negative situations

or problems that they have in their business.

And out of all the listeners on this earth, I'm

sure there is somebody that's going to be able

to identify with what your situation is. These

situations and scenarios repeat a lot in business.

I want to be able to explain what the process

is in as much detail as you are comfortable with

doing. This is going to help the business owner,

and they might say, I'm in this situation and

I don't know how to get out of it. don't even

know if I can. And this is just the way that

it's going to be. We don't want that because

we know that's not the truth. The ultimate goal

of everything we talk about here is to get rid

of the negativity so everything can become positive

and then the company is going to increase sales

and profits. If you could give me an example

of that, I would appreciate it. Thank you. Sure.

Thank you. The one example that comes to my mind

is roughly about 20 years ago when I was hired

in Germany and sent to the Middle East to help

grow a business. What was really unique about

that was that I was the head of HR, by the way.

I was hired in Germany and all my entire life

in terms of professional work experience had

been in Western Europe. And at the time I came

to the Middle East, I was not used to that. Culture

used to that work environment. I've never experienced

scaling up a business. What was also unique about

this was this business had been in existence

for over 100 years and they had operations in

over 180 countries. But for political reasons,

other reasons, they decided to enter the market

roughly two years before I joined and they had

roughly 60 people on the payroll at the time

I arrived. And the plan was really bold and ambitious

to grow this into 500 plus 500. So 500 means

500 kind of own employees and another 500 to

our distributor. I really had no idea where to

begin and to start because as I said, I'd been

working in very mature businesses. I worked for

Adidas or Adidas as you call them in the US.

I worked for GE. These are giant sized businesses

with hundreds of thousands of employees and very

mature and very stable in their business operations.

This was a whole different story. And I really

struggled in the first, I would say six months

because I was trying to get it right and waiting

for direction. So I remember we had three different

layers of governance above us. So we were a country

operation. I had an area team that included 19

countries of which this one was a member. And

they were based in Dubai. And then we had our

regional head office. The region was called Africa

McGillis at the time. It was based in Stellenbosch

in South Africa. The third mayor was the Global,

the mothership as we refer to it, headquartered

in London. And I remember going back and forth

between the area, the region and the Global,

for instance, to get the blueprints for how do

we go about tele -management? How do we go about...

pay and reward. How do you go about all the various

things that you typically do in jar? Now, the

funny thing is I never had to look for those

things in Europe because they had long been established

before I arrived and they were very much readable

and you could essentially utilize them. Here,

it was a whole different game because it was

not just around if this was a game of chess to

think about which figure do I want to move from

which view, you were actually drawing the fields

as you were going along and making up those figures.

And so it was really a struggle for me. And for

about six months, I felt I was going back and

forth and sometimes trying to mediate conflicting

ideas and roadmaps and frameworks from area,

region or global until I decided it's probably

not going to get us anywhere. I would not be

able to even launch this rocket, let alone land

it safely and then have someone getting out and

set foot on this planet. So that's when everything

shifted for me. When I stopped looking for clarity,

looking for guidance, looking for frameworks,

looking for processes, at one point I had all

the policies sent to me. What a nightmare job

it was to try to read through 20 different other

countries' policies and then try to make sense

as to if we were to draft our own policy, which

of these 20 other country policies can be that

adapt and shape shifting to something that actually

works for us. Thank you for that because sometimes

I want to be able to express my opinion and say

what I think is going to work. But I don't know

if it's really going to work or not. But if I

think something's going to work. and I say it's

gonna work, that's different than me forcing

people towards my will, towards saying this is

the way that it has to be, and I know that this

is gonna work. And it doesn't sound like you

said that. It sounds like you were able to say

it in a way where it wasn't ego -driven, and

you were able to get the proper feedback from

your peers or executives or boss or whoever it

was, and you were able to come to some kind of

conclusion. Based on all of this, I might be

getting a little bit ahead of what you were talking

about, but this is really common. I've seen it

thousands of times. And I can't be in a situation

where I tell somebody something in business and

then they say, let's try it. And they think that

they're just doing it because the person is telling

them to. But we want everybody to have a mind

of their own. Think, what should I say to this

person? Should I just say, let's do it? just

this person selling me or should I really think

about it and express my opinion and if I've had

experience in this specific area and I could

stick up for myself and tell people how I feel

and that might help change the outcome. Firstly,

just to conclude what you said, I wish I would

be able to say what is the right course of action

for us in the first month or two or three, but

I just did not have that kind of experience and

I couldn't make it up possibly. And so what I

started to do is try to seek guidance, try to

seek for advice, and really try to get it right.

A harmonized view between the area, the region,

and the global guys. Essentially everyone said,

ignore the other idiots, just do what I told

you to do and you will be fine. That was the

first challenge I had to overcome. And then the

second one was I then connected with a bunch

of the HRDs that had been working in other businesses

in the same country. I connected with a consulting

firm and they invited like... the HR directors

once a month to a networking business breakfast.

And then I connected with all the other businesses.

And to my surprise, they had been in the country

for 30, 40 plus years. I couldn't really earn

from them. They were like a GE or an Adidas or

something of nature, although they were much

smaller because it was obviously a smaller country

organization. But the fact that they had set

up the shop 30, 40 years ago, it didn't really

help me. So I really had to, at some point to

think I have this deliverables, I will be in

12 months down the line, I will be measured against

these outcomes. And these are bold ambitions.

If you want to grow in three years from 50 to

500, you need to look at a pipeline of thousands

of people because you will have attrition in

between. You will have churn in between. You

will have low performance in between. You need

to actually hire a much bigger number so that

eventually you land on that 500 number plus 500.

But again, knowing where to hire. There were

no traditional suppliers in that country. The

way I used them when I was in Germany, I could

just select between the most meaningful manpower

companies and then hit them up and say, I need

100 people for this factory here. And they would

immediately hire me. those people within four

or six weeks. Whereas in that country, it didn't

have those kind of supplies and those connections

and relationships was the other angle. I was

new to that country myself. It really was a puzzle

that seemed unsolvable at the beginning. You

tried to get advice or help, but it didn't work

out. But you went out of your comfort zone and

you said, I'm going to do this. I'm going to

get this accomplished. I'm not going to let anything

stop me. Maybe you had to because of your job

or whatever the underlying reason was, but...

but there were people that maybe would have quit.

There's a lot of other avenues that you could

have went through, but you didn't do that. There's

reasons why that happened to you and things happen

to people because not only did you get out of

your comfort zone and you learned how to do it,

but what happens two years or three years from

now, maybe somebody runs into the same problem

or a similar problem or something related to

that. And they call you or somebody else and

they say, oh, I know this person and he might

be able to help you. I'm not sure, but you should

call. We don't know. And this is all stuff that

I've experienced because now you have that knowledge

and nobody else hasn't. These are some of the

things that are important in business because

these things are very common and things happen

to us for reasons. I want to be able to definitely

get out of my comfort zone and say, I can do

this. And that's when I become totally positive

in my workplace. And then I get a positive result

from that view. I can't do this. I quit. There's

nobody else here that knows how to do it. And

I just can't do it. What would have happened?

You wouldn't have worked there anymore. And then

you would have went on a different path, but

you didn't do that. So you went into the unknown.

I don't know all the exact details of it. I'm

just saying a general example here. And it worked

out good because that's something that just happened.

That's not something that I planned. It's not

really something that I can really control. So

how do I react? I guess what really helped me

were two things. One was that there's a saying,

I'm not sure how to translate it correctly into

English, but there's actually two sayings. One

says it is the equivalent of if you have too

many chefs in the kitchen, the soup is hot. highly

likely to be too salty or too spicy. And that's

just the reality. So if you ask three different

layers of governance as to what is the right

next course of action, it's a bit like when you

speak with lawyers. You ask the three different

lawyers about There's some things very similar,

very different recommendations as to how to go

about it. So that's the first one that I wanted

to cite here. And then the second one is the

fact that don't ask for permission, ask for forgiveness.

That mindset shifts for me to say, okay, you

know what? I actually do not have the time to

sit down and read through 20 different other

country policies. And it's not like you have

two policies in the HR function. You have 40,

50, 60. and that times 20 that becomes a manageable

task. You know what? I'm just going to go with

what we Chilean need we need here. And that is

probably an 80 % perfect solution for now, but

that 80 % is going to give us a heads up because

we need to have the policy in place right now.

We're hiring people in a big way, so we need

to have our recruiting and whatever the adjacent

policies were in the right order. And that's

really helped us as a business also be able to

keep up with the pace. We didn't quite land at

the 500s, but two and a half years later, when

I was assigned with the same company to take

on a different role, we landed at 350 plus the

500 we wanted with the distributors. We almost

got there in two and a half years. But the fact

of the matter is that if I had not done that

role in that part of my career, I would always

be like the developed market guy. Someone who's

been there and done that just in the comfort

zone of Western Europe for most of my career

has been in Western Europe, in Germany, Switzerland,

UK, and all these wonderful countries. But coming

to the Middle East and really almost starting

something from scratch was fundamentally different.

As an experience, it was painful. It was laborious.

It was not always easy, but in hindsight, I'm

obviously much more well -round John Eder. After

I experienced it, it was not my only experience.

I got additional experience in the Middle East.

It really helped me to shape -shift my own career

into something much better. And of course it

was also a good move for the business, ultimately.

And that's exactly my point, because whatever

you did, whatever you went through, how you went

through it, what was the process, we could talk

for hours and hours of this, but we just... really

trying to get to the point. And we did that because

whatever you did that created the end result

and that created a positive result. So we know

that worked out. That was the way you were supposed

to think. That was the way that the process truly

was. But if I don't do that, I fight it. then

it's not going to work out and there's going

to be a lot of problems. And then there's going

to be problems in my workplace. Ultimately, what

you did help the company, whatever the company

got out of it is positive. That's basically the

bottom line. What happened in the end and how

do you feel as a result of everything that happened

and everything that we just talked about and

how you described everything? What was really

good is that, see, the wider organization was

very much mature, established. That meant that

for instance, I'm not kidding me, we got every

single decision right. That will be next to impossible.

So for instance, there were these, we call them

ball composition committee meetings, which essentially

was a way for every market. And there were 19

in our area to set their demands or asked off

the area. As in I want to change the policy right

now that I've set up myself like a year ago.

And now I want to change something because something

shifted in the market or I have now enough data

points to be able to say this part of the policy

really worked for us anymore and I now want to

change it. Now I need to seek permission to get

it changed. I think it was really through those

governance meetings and those kind of collaborative

meetings with the area where I would then have

to come and pitch as in, okay, why do I want

to change it? What is the business reason for

it? What is the rationale? How much is it going

to cost? And what is the outcome for the business

if this was to work out the way I suggested it

would. That was also a learning lesson that I

draw upon from today when I am working with boards

in a way that area entity was like the board

for the country operation to say, no, you can't

just go out and spend all the money on your own.

But if you explain to us why you want to spend

the money and what you're going to spend it on

and what is that. Show business impact as a result

of that. We are happy to give you this permission

for six or 12 months, and then we will come back

and revisit to see if this was the right decision

or not. Same applies with our talent measures.

Again, in a country where you don't have necessarily

the standard suppliers and the recruiters, you

have to get creative and you have to work with

freelancers and sometimes the resources outside

of the country, just to make sure that you're

still able to hit your targets. In terms of business

outcomes, we didn't quite hit the 500 employee

mark. was also pulled six months earlier than

planned. We landed on 350, but we had to take

the 500 employees hired through our distributor

that were distributing our products in the country

already after two and a half months. That was

a very good way to close. I would like to reiterate

that this is an example of a negative situation

that turned into a positive. And if a listener

can get anything out of this, can identify with

any part of this. It doesn't have to be the exact

situation, the exact scenario. It could be something

in this podcast that they are going through.

They can relate it to what the end result was,

what we just talked about. And that will benefit

them and their company. So thank you for joining

us on Behavioral Profit. If today's conversation

gave you a new perspective, challenged your thinking,

or helped you identify a behavior that's holding

you back, be sure to subscribe. leave a review

and share this episode with somebody who could

benefit from it. Until next time, remember your

strategy may not be the problem. The behaviors

behind it often are. I'm Debbie Longo. This has

been Behavioral Profit and thank you, Naveed,

for being on. I appreciate it. Thank you.