E9 | How Great Leaders See What’s Coming Next | Ariel Regatky

Welcome to Lead With a Coaching Mindset, a podcast where every conversation sparks new ideas on how the best leaders unlock their followers potential. I am Dr. Damian Goldvarg, and I am here to inspire you to become the best leader you can be be sure you subscribe and rate us. Let's jump right in. Today we have with us, HR, head of City International, Ariel Regatky, who I know for many years, and it's great that you're available to share with us. We were discussing what part of the book we should be discussing today, and we agree we're going to be focused on our last chapter that is about foresight, is about how leaders relate to the future. I asked Ariel to think in advance some stories and examples for his experience. Thank you very much for accepting the invitation.

Oh, thank you, Damian. It's a pleasure to be here with you as we know each other for many, years, but we've never had the opportunity to have a dialog like this. I'm sure we're going to enjoy

it great, and we hope that people who are listening to us too. I am curious to your experience reading the book and looking at the last chapter, if anything resonated for you in particular based on your experience.

Yes, I found, generally, the book very interesting and very relevant for the moment in which we are living now. I think that, you know, leading with a coaching mindset is a great approach for leadership given the new realities that we are living in, and we can touch on, you know, some of those elements. But in particular, the last chapter, chapter 10, on coaching for the future, I found it honestly, very much aligned with many of the things that I been seeing in the market, my own company, with other colleagues, former colleagues as well, in terms of the challenges that we all face as leaders. First of all, you know, trying to understand, you know, what the future would look like, and try to prepare for it. And you said something the book that I found fascinating, which is this idea of the need for preparing for many futures, trying to predict specifically what is it that is going to happen accommodate business strategies on a prediction like that is like crazy these days in my area of work, you know, I help lots and lots of executives in thinking about their careers, and honestly, there are many, many challenges around predicting what the future would look like, and therefore what they want to do and how they want to prepare for that moving forward.

So for people who do not know you, Ariel, tell us a little bit about your position. What is what you do at the

city, I would say that I'm a global HR executive that combines coaching experience, consulting experience and corporate experience. Mostly for the last 20 years, I've been working in global corporations, but I have the opportunity to work with many different global firms, either in consulting or working for as part of the staff the companies currently I am responsible for, HR, for the International Division at City. We operate in 94 countries around the world. That's my area of focus. Basically we call international everything that is outside of the United States. This element around the future is one that particularly interested in, in my day to day is part of the conversations that we engage in all the time, but something that very curious about the future of war and helping really leaders to reinvent themselves and prepare for multiple possible futures, as you describe in the book.

And when leaders come to you and ask you, what do you see in the future? Do you have any idea based on what we call that are sickness of the future. Things from the future that we're already starting to see happening. Are there anything that caught your attention that you tell leaders to pay attention to?

I'm curious. But as you say, we don't know what will happen in the future, but what may happen, what do you think possible?

You know, as a matter of fact, if you asked me the same question five years ago, and I would have told you, well, the future of work will look significantly different. But there are certain type of roles, like creative roles, no, like writing, like producing video, like design, like everything that requires creativity, everything that requires high cognitive skills, all of those skills will not be replaced. We were thinking, what's going to be replaced are things that could be easily automatable, because there were repetitive processes and tasks and all of that. And five years later, what we see is that today, many jobs that we consider require creativity today are very easily performed at a very decent level by some of these new tools. It has changed significantly. So I cannot tell you, in a long, long term,

really, really good example of things that you cannot predict. What they found interesting is that, as we are going to be seeing, that there are some job may be disappearing. New jobs will appear, and we still don't know what they are. The question is, how you can prepare for something that you don't know what is possible. So one of the ways, and I see that with leaders, is you see a percentage of leaders that embrace technology, with that curiosity, with that interest, but then you have a percentage. And I see also that in my industry, as coaches and colleagues who resist technology, who do want to go there, who avoid it, and I know I'm telling them, you're going to get behind. So you need to learn. You need to figure out, pay attention, get involved, because even though you do not like it, too bad if you don't do it, you it will be a consequence.

Indeed, I think that one way to have to solve the situation in which we are that we cannot predict the future and we don't know, we don't know what we don't know, and we don't know what things are going to look like, is really to rethink the way we think about, for instance, our careers generally. We used to think, you know, many executives that I talked to, they still think about careers like the challenge of reaching to the top, or to define, okay, I want to be blank CEO, CFO, CIO, whatever. No. And I want to do this in this company. This is the title. This is, let me give you a metaphor that I've used a lot with in several conversations with executives for many years. I don't know if you've used this, but for many years, I have used the metaphor of the GPS as a metaphor to do career planning. So basically, you define where you want to go. No, that's point bulation. You understand where you are. You understand where you are today. That's point A. And you ask the GPS, you know, what's the shorter or the quickest way you know to get from point A and point B? It will give you a step by step way of getting the. There, and that's perfectly fine, and it's beautiful. You create a plan, you know, you know exactly what you need to do in order to get there. Only that it doesn't work like that, right? You know, maybe 20 years ago you could argue that some of that was useful. So then I started another concept, which is, well, we don't use regular GPS, like the Grammy and, you know those you know anymore. We use now ways we have been using for many years, ways, and ways is a much more interesting device and metaphor, because what it does is it continually look at your surroundings. It's gathering information in real life, and it's informing your plan and recalculating and offering you different alternatives on how to get from point A to point B. So you still have the destination. You still know where you are, but now you are getting feedback from others. You are reading the environment, you know, and all of that, and you know, in order to get there. So it's much better. But you know what the problem is for the new world that we are right now, the world of AI, the world of self driving cars, if you wish. That is no longer a good metaphor either, because there's no way you can know what the destination is

totally the definition may even change. So before you know where you're going, now you don't know where you're going

because you don't know where you're going. So pick the challenge now. And I'd like to think that the new metaphor maybe it's more like a Lego in which you use Legos and you build the car with a Lego, but then you can take the pieces apart and you can build something else with those same pieces. So you need to learn certain things, learn new things, and reaccommodate how you get there, but even where you're going, in my view, and following this metaphor, it's less about reaching to the top. So the challenge is not really how to get to the top, it's really how you reinvent yourself all the time. In reinventing yourself, you need to think about the journey more than the destination. And it sounds like too cliche, but I mean it in the sense of given that you don't know what your destination is, and there's no way of knowing. Well, you'd better make it worth the journey. So it's about who you go through this journey with. It's about the meaning that you give to this journey, and How significant are those experiences, those things that you see in the journey, and it's about feeling that that although you don't know exactly where you're going, that it's worth the ride. And honestly, I think that this could be very rewarding. Probably you see this in your coaching practice all the time, but I have seen through many, many, many, many years, many successful executives that still ask that uncomfortable question, saying, is this all? They are the CEO, the CIO, the CFO, whatever they got to the point they wanted to get, and they still feel that they get the question on, was it worth it? Is this is because what they did was they accomplished what they wanted to do. They live a very accomplished life, but not necessarily a fulfilling one. And this is very typical in corporations, I would say, especially, which is you find people who actually have mastered the science of achievement. They are really, really good at setting goals and achieving results, for their careers, for their business, whatever it is that they put there, but they don't know exactly how to master the art of fulfillment and feeling that what they are doing is meaningful and feeling good about it.

There are a couple of things, because I think this is a this question about fulfillment, satisfaction and paying attention to your life. And sometimes I like to use the metaphor. We're talking about metaphor, it's in automatic. If you live your life in automatic without paying attention to what you're doing, how you are doing, how you're relating many times. There is also some issues about relationships where people are so focused on work that they don't pay enough attention to other relationships in their lives. And there's a consequence about that. You said a few things. I really enjoyed listening to you, and I was thinking about these metaphors about the future and where you want to go, and some of the skills that leaders need to enjoy the journey and to be effective is managing uncertainty. So how do you navigate conversations with leaders around uncertainty, or even in your own experience as a leader yourself, with your own team? How do you do that with your own colleagues?

I am honest about knowing what I know and not and not knowing what I don't know. So embracing that uncertainty is what I mean. It's not trying to hide it and think that I can eliminate the uncertainty, but embracing it. You said something in the book that also resonated to me around this, that you said something along the lines of, sometimes you make decisions without having all of the information in some of those decisions might be risky, but even those, the risk of those decisions with limited information are less risky than not making a decision now that staying still, and I think that leading in uncertainty is also understanding that you're going to Need to take some risk and talking about moving, I mentioned several times the word reinvention, that we need to reinvent ourselves all the time, and I think that it has to do with motion. We need to be in constant motion. The other thing that I share with people in my team and others is, most often than not, you're better off changing, changing roles, you know, changing strategies, changing and learning, than staying where you are, you know. So I think that being in constant movement, reinventing yourself, asking new questions, that's a skill that is very relevant. I'm going to use a term that this is not scientific, and, you know, don't look it in any book, because it doesn't exist. Just came up with it. I call that kinetic intelligence in the sense of this ability. And we know we talk about emotional intelligence and cognitive intelligence, but I think that now the most important one is this kinetic intelligence. It's the ability of staying in motion, of continually exploring new scenarios, to using your words many futures, learning through reinvention and trying new thing. And I think that that is the greatest competency that we need these days. The other one obvious that it's related to this is staying curious and in constant hungry for learning new things and paying attention to all of the emerging trends and emerging futures that we see coming.

We're thinking about this kinetic intelligence that you develop this idea. And I believe that sometimes people don't move, don't take action for fear, and the fear sometimes is a conscious and sometimes unconscious. So they don't know what they're not taking action. They're thinking that not doing not moving forward, they are safer when, as you are saying, and I agree with you, not making the decision, not moving it may be safe to some extent, but there is a cost, and sometimes the cost is higher than moving forward, and maybe not.

I'm glad that you agree with me, because I think that I read it in your book.

Okay, great, great. We need to start wrapping up. I think that I really appreciate sharing your experiences before we go. Anything you would like to say about any strategies so people leader who are listening to us. Can think of, okay, how we can prepare for the future, being curious, taking some risks, embracing uncertainty.

I drive a Tesla. It has self driving capabilities, but basically, in the Tesla, what you do is, you take the wheel, you are in the driving seat, and the Tesla will actually select the roads that are that is going to take, you know, and actually drive turns, turns right, turns left, passes one car or another, you know, and gets you from point A to point B. But every time that I drive, I'm still with my hands on the wheel, okay, and many times I made my own decisions, you know, and I override the automatic functionality, and you talked earlier about being in automatic I went with my family to San Francisco last year. One of the things that we got fascinated with was that there were way more cars there. So basically, for those who don't know what that is, it's like, the equivalent to Uber, but with a beautiful car that drives by itself. But in this case, I'm not in the driving seat, I'm in the passenger seat. So despite being an incredible experience, and it's fascinating, particularly when you go with your kids so and they open the eyes, I got really concerned, because what I felt was I am no longer in the driving seat, and I cannot accept this. So that's the other piece that I would say, in terms of thinking, you know about how we're going to use technology, particularly these new technologies, AI in the workplace, I think that we. Need to be very, very intelligent in terms of determining when and where are to do what we're going to put these technologies to make sure that we are on the driving seat, or at least in our own personal decisions, do things and use technology in a way in which our capacities get augmented, that we deliver higher quality products, that we can be more efficient, that we can create additional time for dedicating to other things, etc, but never leave the driving seat.

Adriel, thank you very much. Was great having you in our podcast. I hope in the future, you come

back. Oh, my pleasure. It was great, and congratulations on the new book.

Thanks again, Ariel, for spending time with us today. Take care, and that's a wrap up for today's lead with the coaching mindset. I am Damian Goldwater, thrilled to have shared this time with you. Don't forget to subscribe and give us a rating. Stay excited for more episodes, take care and keep living with a coaching mindset. You.