May 31: Dr. Flo Falayi, Client Partner at Korn Ferry talks with Bill about leadership development and inclusive leadership. What are the skills he is looking to develop in inclusive leaders? How does his coaching vary between leaders and boards?

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Today on This Week Health.

Inclusive leaders, by definition, leverage differences. They're like great head coaches who know the right roles for the right players on the team. And so building that mindset after you've expanded the aperture is critical.

Welcome to This Week Health Community. This is TownHall a show hosted by leaders on the front lines with interviews of people making things happen in healthcare with technology. My name is Bill Russell, the creator of This Week Health, a set of channels designed to amplify great thinking to propel healthcare forward. We want to thank our show sponsors Olive, Rubrik, Trellix, Medigate and F5 in partnership with Sirius Healthcare for investing in our mission to develop the next generation of health leaders. Now onto our show.

here we are from the Scottsdale Institute. And today we're going to have a conversation with Korn Ferry with Flo, absolutely Flo. First of all, give us your full name and tell us what you do with corn.

Absolutely. Thanks for having me here. My name is Flo Falayi. I go by ADA doctor flow or flow, whatever people are comfortable with it.

I'm fine by that on down. And we come very, and I'm in the healthcare space in the practice as well. I think they should develop in a professional services practice.

So not retain search per se, more leadership development. Absolutely. So what's core doing in the area of leadership develop?

Oh, that's a great question.

So we, one thing that we do very well is that when the service of actually helping organizations deal with the, what we call the human. So we're very focused from the onset in terms of getting people in, in of keeping people within. And then also in terms of helping people find the right place when they're done and a current life cycle and that correct journey in the organization.

Wow. So talk to me about that. So one of the things you just said to me, she had 400 coaches.

Yeah. We've got a good number of coaches because one thing that we're great at a country that we help organizations. When many of the top fortune 100 companies and were able to call me and not just help one individual, but help the entire organization and particularly very interested in focused in the space of inclusive leadership.

And as we see the landscape continue to change across the entire corporate America and also in healthcare based basis, significant need for leaders to be more inclusive because the constituent organization is changing significantly in new generation, gen Z are coming in that actually deemed the most diverse.

In the workforce. And so they asked him, lead us to think about different things that they haven't thought about before. They're very passionate about those things and leaders need to be aware of those things and be ready. And so that's one of the key pieces of the work I do.

So inclusive leadership. Kinds of skills. Are we looking for leaders to develop? I'm one of those older and my team, my team is all, I'm not even cert gen Z. They're all between the ages of 20 and 30 that my entire team. And I'm in, they're constantly teaching me new things of, no, this is what this is about. This is how this should be said. I mean, I assume listening is one of those things being able to, but what are some of the other.

Well, that's a good question. I am the way we show up and dealing with inclusive leadership is we do a very comprehensive viewpoint. We come at it from very diverse ways because want to make sure that we.

Enabled leaders to see what this is about. It's not just the next flavor of the month. And I say that because we look at it from two key, we have a model called inclusive leadership model, and we look at two things. We look at traits. Traits is really how you are, who you are. You're what we call your natural disposition.

And then we look at a competency. The competency actually is how you. And some of the things that we measure at things around trust when we got things around diversity, in terms of perception, we look at stakeholder engagement. We look at courage because those are all the different elements that are needed to drive inclusion,

courage. That's yeah. I'm not sure how you measure that, but but yeah, there, there is courage. I, I saw during some of the events over the last two years, CEO's going out and having town halls, having very real conversations with their organization. How, how does KornFerry come alongside?

So you come in and you do those assessments and then what does it look like from there? What do you actually do?

It's a good, great question. You talked on quarter eight and I think in this day and age leaders have to be. The conversation that we're having and leaders as expected to have, on the cost is actually increasing.

And if you're not at that place where you're courageous to actually share insight and be also willing to be called events and told maybe you're incorrectly assumption, you're incorrect in your, maybe your approach. If you don't have the courage really to show up in that space you'd be very challenging for you to succeed in this new world that we're in today.

And then to your second question around how we use. So typically what we do is we come in and do diagnostics. The good thing is the diagnosis is actually a snapshot of where you are and who you are. And then we now take you into. We've got tools. We've got research, we've got really a methodology and approach that we use to build the aperture.

What we call the aperture for the inclusiveness and is a very, oftentimes it's typically between, I would say between three to six months journey where we take you through, what we call introspection. You see who you are. We take you to some coaching session where we begin to walk through, what are some of the underlining experiences that you have?

That actually informed either you're being inclusive or not inclusive. I've had leaders who in many instances only sought diversity when they got into the workforce compared to other leaders who actually were born with, into a diverse environment. I'm not blaming either one. I'm understand me saying that the journey varies based on your background also based on your interests and on your design.

So he's all of those things we take into consideration.

There's a self-awareness that is required. And then you end up being able to come in and go, okay, here's what we see. And sometimes that probably doesn't match what the perception is of the organization. So you're talking about the individual and the individual leaders, but I assume you're working also with boards.

Leadership teams as well.

That's correct. Absolutely. We do. So the same treatment and the same program exists across different levels of the organization now, depending on where you are and where you stand, who address, and definitely customize the solution to address those needs at the board level, the ability to really, to.

And recognize and also create a sustained culture is important. So in oftentimes for those leaders, we emphasize and focus on how do you keep the culture? How do you maintain that culture? How do you set the tone for the culture? And then when you get time to go down the layers and the levels, we focusing more on the very pragmatic Oracle, many business centric goals might just be leading teams, might be maybe PNL responsibility or whatever those are, is where we focus until.

What kind of conversations are you coaching leaders to have with their, I mean, some of these organizations are 50,000 employees and whatnot, and in what format is best to have those conversations.

So it varies. Prior to, I would say a few months ago, the bulk of the conversation that's being virtual, right. As we all went through the pandemic, we switched from. In-person conversation to a training to virtual. We've done that for the past two years. As things have begun to open up, I'm traveling now almost every two weeks. Our clients are beginning to ask for more of those in-person interactions and what we do in this.

Based on the need is allowed, say two things is one. We expand the aperture. We allow and enable leaders to see beyond what they used to seeing. And we have tools and we have models that we use to actually drive those conversations. And then once we do that, because once you see differences, then the next logical question has to be, what do you do with it?

Inclusive leaders by definition, leverage. differences They're like great head coaches who know the right roles for the right players on the team. And so building that mindset after you've expanded the aperture is critical. And for some leaders where perhaps C-level suite C suite level or board level big goal is to just set it.

And so we help them also with the messaging or we help them with, I haven't been best associated with being an inclusive leader. So it didn't really, I mean, I still that it varies

leverage the differences.

It is leveraging the defensive.

That is so interesting. We've talked a lot about internal to the four walls of the virtual organization, 50,000 employees and whatnot, but they live within a larger community.

And those communities, especially in these urban centers are very diverse. How do you coach leaders as they approached the community or going out into the community?

That's a great question. And I think there's more of that is required today. We have a methodology that we use we call it the inside out, outside in approach, not coaching.

The inside out is actually more of a, we do an assessment. We do a snapshot of who you are. We'll look at drivers, your trait, your competency and experiences. So we have a sense of who you are within. Then we also look at external data points. So it could be 360 degree feedback could be employee break out. It could be employee survey.

It could be community insight, whatever those external data points are. Then we merged the two and I look at that holistic picture. And the goal is meant to coach you to that goal. Like for example, you might be, it might be in the community that is asking for more involvement. In certain spaces and certain areas that perhaps you're good or you're not so good at, then we coach you to showing up attentively, right?

Because this is key, just showing up doesn't mean anything. Right. You've got to show up, we'll have to see that you're vested and you care. And so we coach to those key outcomes. So it was very targeted. I've been coaching for a while. We talked about this before and it's interesting to see the evolution of the industry.

And I would say where we as a coaching industry is phenomenal because now we're not just talking about coaching, we're looking at results and measuring the impact of what we.

So last question, Korn ferry, obviously retained search and bringing people in. Is this becoming part of the criteria? Are we evaluating people for inclusive leadership as part of presenting them?

That's a great question. And I think the bigger question the bigger answer to that question rather is I would say yes, there is more appetite. In organizations for more diverse leaders, more inclusively. And I just want to say that oftentimes we would get caught up with divers and people get caught up with inclusion and I, and the best way to actually explain that, to say, we just want organization one wanting more representation of the country.

And that's the summary of that is we want to make sure that you're representing community and the communities reflected in your. And in the people who are making decisions, people who are involved. And so with our approach, we're looking at how do we ensure with a customer that organization? Also, we ensure that we provide the right ideal candidate as well in those spaces.

We could probably talk for another hour, but I want to let you get to your breakfast flow. Thank you for your time.

It's my pleasure. Thanks so much.

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