Comfort in the uncomfortable: One-on-one meeting strategies that work

In the first part of a two-part podcast discussion, Hamza Khan detailed how he was affected by a severe case of burnout about 10 years ago. In this episode, Khan, an author and keynote speaker, shares more about his battle with burnout today.

Khan explained some of the reasons burnout can affect women in particular and shared some of the knowledge gleaned from attending two AICPA & CIMA Women’s Global Leadership Summits. He also discussed why having relatively few one-on-one meetings with his boss became a bad thing — and how leaders can make those meetings better.

What you’ll learn from this episode:

• Why Khan wanted to emulate Jay-Z.
• The CASTLE acronym and it’s tie-in to burnout.
• Why Khan took one-on-one meetings for granted earlier in his career.
• The tough questions managers should ask employees in one-on-one meetings.
• Why the technological disruption in business today is “a time of danger but also a time of opportunity.”

Play the episode below or read the edited transcript:

— To comment on this episode or to suggest an idea for another episode, contact Neil Amato at Neil.Amato@aicpa-cima.com.

Transcript

Neil Amato: Hello, Journal of Accountancy podcast listeners. This is Neil Amato with the JofA. The episode you’re about to hear is Part 2 of a conversation with keynote speaker and author Hamza Khan. I invite you, if you didn’t hear Part 1, to find that episode and listen to it first. It’s not vital, but it does set up the conversation well. It’s linked in the show notes for this episode or available on your favorite podcast app.

We talked in that first episode about burnout and the inevitability of the four-day workweek. Part 2, which you’re about to hear, continues the conversation on burnout and also touches on those critical one-to-one meetings and how to make them better. Here’s the rest of the interview with Hamza Khan.

Maybe this is our celebrity gossip break, but it’s just off a headline on your Substack that I saw. It was in reference to Jay-Z, and it said “The worst retirement in history.” What does Jay-Z have to do with this topic: burnout, etc.

Hamza Khan: This is full circle. For me, what Jay-Z represented, or at least his burnout story represents to me, is that you can make it to the level of “freedom” that Jay-Z has. We’re talking about a billionaire, an artist, a person who has all of the resources necessary to beat burnout and to do the least amount of mundane, scalable, repeatable, and predictable work. If somebody like that can burn out, then [we] mere mortals don’t stand a chance.

I remember idolizing Jay-Z earlier in my career, especially for his leadership of Roc Nation, and he became a North Star for me. If I were to lead my organization, my team of creatives, I would want to lead them in the way that Jay-Z did, by being a coach, by removing all obstacles from their path, by not serving as this top-down, autocratic, Theory-X style of leader, but really just focusing on empowering and creating legacy and replicating Jay-Z.

I did that, and I experienced, in my own version, a level of success that I would describe as free or as adjacent to the level of freedom that Jay-Z experiences. You’re speaking to me right now in the era in which I’m a keynote speaker. Last year I did about 50 to 60 speaking engagements. The amount of “work” that I did as a keynote speaker, just involved with the travel, the preparation, and standing onstage or recording a keynote that was anywhere from 45 minutes to 60 minutes, let’s just say.

When you look at the total amount of work that I had to do, on paper — even though, you know, Neil, that I obsess about these things, I prepare, there’s a lot of follow-up, a lot of thought research, and everything that goes into it. But optically speaking, the amount of work that I had to do paled in comparison to the work that I was doing in 2014 when I burned out.

In 2014, there were meetings, back-to-back meetings, evenings, weekends, actual design, development, writing, so on and so forth. But I opened this podcast by saying, I’m ashamed to admit, slightly embarrassed to admit that even in this iteration I’m experiencing or flirting with burnout. I’m not fully burned out, I’m not even close, but I’m definitely on the track. I’m definitely somewhere within the first one to five stages of burnout.

If that can happen to someone like me, somebody who has control over their time, somebody who has the resources to deal with burnout, at least at the level of well-being and productivity, somebody who has a team, then we, again, we have to look beyond individual interventions.

Because I know how to solve the problem. I know what I need to do at the individual level, and I have the resources to solve those problems in the way that Jay-Z does. But if that’s still happening to me, then perhaps we’re looking in the wrong place.

I alluded to what a potential solution could be in 2014 or 2016, when I published The Burnout Gamble, I gave the acronym CASTLE, C-A-S-T-L-E, as the metafactors that are contributing to the systems that might lead to burnout, whether in corporations, governments, associations, or nonprofits. We’re talking about global levels of competition, the intensification of competition. We’re talking about profound set feelings of alienation in modern life, certainly accelerated by social media; societal pressures; technology, technological innovation; loneliness as a big predictor of burnout; and an economy in flux. So, C-A-S-T-L-E.

I hope that this conversation can encourage listeners, can encourage the AICPA community and everybody else tuning in to look beyond, to look at the CASTLE that we find ourselves in that is keeping us in circumstances and in patterns that would lead to burnout at the systemwide level.

Amato: Now, last year you spoke at both the CFO Conference in the spring, [in] Salt Lake City, and then the Women’s Global Leadership Summit in Arizona in the fall. You previously had spent, I guess, one other event as a keynote speaker, the Women’s Global Leadership Summit in Miami in fall 2022. What have you learned from maybe your interaction with attendees there about the finance community and what they’re thinking about some of these topics?

Khan: I especially gleaned new insights and walked away with stronger imperatives through my interactions across the two women’s leadership conferences. What I realized through both of them is that there’s a confluence of factors that are resulting in women in the workplace, specifically women who work in the fields of accounting and finance, to burn out to a higher degree and with greater frequency than their male counterparts.

On the one hand, I’ve seen and I’ve heard and I truly empathize with stories of caregivers’ burden. Even today in 2024, responsibilities and many relationships unfairly fall on the strong shoulders of women.

There’s compassion fatigue. The research is showing that women are on average more emotionally intelligent than men. This comes with greater empathy, which allows for more registering of the pain and the suffering of others, which produces greater stress. It’s a vicious cycle. Virtual meeting fatigue, too many virtual meetings, excessive collaboration, too many forced interactions.

Languishing, not enough purpose or capacity; bore out, not enough purpose or capacity, not enough challenge or difficulty. Brownout, being burned out to the point of no return. Quiet quitting, as we heard earlier in the pandemic, covertly doing the bare minimum.

Again, all of these confluence of factors, many of which are disproportionately experienced by women in the workplace, these are things that have changed my understanding of burnout, have given me a greater sense of urgency to solve this problem at the level of system.

Amato: For those of us who manage people, how can they make their one-on-one meetings more meaningful?

Khan: I’m glad you asked that question, Neil, because the one-on-ones are the closest thing that managers have to a workplace cure-all. There was a McKinsey study that was done two years ago that found that the variation in points associated with workers’ perception of well-being dimensions in the workplace — we’re talking about the benefit that an employer provides an employee in terms of health and well-being, whether that’s outright compensation, daycare, catered lunches, so on and so forth, things that would help people to be well, to reduce their stress — there was at least a 20% variance in the perception that leaders had compared to employees.

On average, leaders felt like they were thriving in organizations; meanwhile, employees felt like they were surviving. And that pesky number shows up quite a bit, that 20% variation. It shows up in the employee disengagement score differences. It shows up in productivity, it shows up in many different ways. Regardless of the number, one thing is for certain: Not enough candid conversations are being had between leaders and their subordinates.

In fact, the No. 1 reason why most change initiatives fail is because of avoidance of shifting environments, not just external to the organization, but especially within the organization. It was Gallup’s chief workplace scientist who said, “The single most important habit of a great leader is one meaningful conversation per week” — essentially, that one-on-one, whether it’s 30 minutes, whether it’s one hour, whatever the case may be.

I think back to my own professional journey. I didn’t fully appreciate the importance of one-on-ones until they started disappearing from my calendar. The first time I experienced one-on-ones was actually [their] absence. I worked for a leader who said, “If we’re not meeting, consider that a good thing.” That’s what she told me. She said, “If we’re not meeting, consider that a good thing. It means you’re doing a good job, but if we do have to meet, that means you’re [messing up].”

At the time, I thought that that was a pretty cool system. I would boast about it. I would say, “I don’t have meetings with my boss. My boss trusts me implicitly.” Except when we did have meetings, they were jarring, Neil. Firestorms being rained down upon me. Looking back, I wish that we had more frequent touch points so that it wouldn’t have to be all bunched up and delivered in such a violent way.

Then I remember when I was running one of my earlier companies, a marketing agency, I got so busy, and when I say I got busy, I really meant that I was disorganized. I started neglecting the one-on-ones that I was having with some of my key staff. I would say, let’s push them to next week, let’s push them to next month, and eventually we’d cancel them outright. And I could draw a direct line between my deprioritization of the one-on-ones to that employee, one of our star employees, leaving the organization.

Again, I didn’t truly appreciate the importance of the one-on-ones until they were gone. Now I firmly believe, Neil, that anytime I am hesitant to go into my one-on-ones, anytime I’m afraid to ask questions in my one-on-ones, anytime I start to push them away, that’s an indication that I’m faltering at the level of strategy as a leader.

What I would recommend that people do is, first of all, have these one-on-ones as frequently as possible, no less than every two weeks, once every two weeks. If you wait for longer than that, that’s too long of a feedback loop to receive, especially given the speed at which the future of work is unfolding. It’s imperative that you have these one-on-ones once a week, once every two weeks, at minimum.

In these one-on-ones, ask the questions that you’re most afraid to ask. Ask the questions that you’re least willing to ask. Ask questions like, why did you join this company? Do you respect me? Do you respect our leadership? Are you happy here? Do you feel like you belong? What’s getting in the way of you doing your best work? Ask these open-ended, coaching-style questions. Remember that that which we most need to find as leaders is where we’re least willing to look. And by asking these questions, by providing greater and greater psychological safety, you will quickly unearth the existence of the system-level factors that are preventing not only your employees from doing their best work but could also have a negative consequence on you as a leader, especially in the realm of burnout. If the factors that would produce burnout for an employee exist, they exist not just for the employee, they also exist for you as a leader.

Amato: Some great things to consider for both managers to think about improving their meetings, to keep an eye on burnout, also employees themselves to maybe monitor their own levels of burnout. Is there anything else you’d like to add as a closing thought today, Hamza?

Khan: It’s a sentiment that I expect to share frequently throughout the year and certainly as we hurtle towards a distant point in our future, but not so distant, either. We’re talking about somewhere between 2030 to 2045, when everything that can be automated will be automated, and we’re going to achieve some semblance of the singularity, a point at which artificial intelligence will outpace human intelligence.

If anything I’ve shared today, if anything — I’m speaking to the audience — if there’s anything that Neil and I have discussed today that is making you uncomfortable, that is making you feel like you can’t keep up with the pace of change, that’s OK. I’m right there with you. It is overwhelming.

But know this: I would much rather you become comfortable with change — you anticipate it, you embrace it, you learned how to dance with it, you emulate it so that you change well before you have to change. Change is the only constant in this new era of work. We’re in a brand-new paradigm of work, and things are only going to get faster, things will only get scarier, but I encourage you all to see this as not just a time of danger but also a time of opportunity. An opportunity to continually reinvent yourselves, reinvent your workplace culture, reinvent your organizations, and position yourselves to cross the chasm of time, time and again, as we have done throughout, not just organizational history, but human history.

Amato: Hamza Khan, thank you very much.

Khan: Thank you, Neil.