Mohan Sivaloganathan Part 2

S7E7: Unlocking Co-Creation in Leadership with Mohan Sivaloganathan PART 2

This interview is icing on the cake of a season all about identity and connection in the workplace. Part two of the conversation with Mohan Sivaloganathan is just as enlightening as the first interview. Mohan and Anika discuss the ways in which true respect between generations occur, why younger people’s leadership is exactly what the world needs right now, and the practical ways co-creation can be invited into communities and workplaces. Spoiler: it starts with intention but doesn’t end there. As an acclaimed TED speaker, and founder of Harmonious Leadership is positioned well to be at the forefront of this conversation. And if you haven’t listened to Mohan’s talk yet, what are you waiting for?  The holidays? (said in jest because the holidays are around the corner when this launches!).

A huge thank you to all our guests this season.

You’ll want to listen to Mohan’s TEDtalk: here

About our guest:

Mohan is a keynote speaker, coach, and a "recovering CEO.” Above all, he is a proud father, husband, son, brother, friend, and a committed challenger to the status quo. Mohan earned the nickname of the “Batman of Social Impact,” as an executive leader by day and keynote speaker + hip-hop artist by night. Throughout his career, Mohan has supported local and national organizations in orchestrating sustainable transformation and systems change for education, civic engagement, racial equity, and social justice.

Mohan is the founder of Harmonious Leadership, a movement to rewrite the rules for leadership and social change. Harmonious Leadership asks “what if” by breaking down the false choice between wellbeing and performance - an antiquated leadership ideology that inhibits people and organizations from advancing their boldest social impact ideas. Prior to launching Harmonious Leadership, Mohan served as the CEO of Our Turn, a national, youth-led movement working to close the opportunity gaps for young people. Mohan was awarded the “40 Under 40 Rising Star” by New York Nonprofit Media and a “Next Generation Leader” by the Human Services Council. Mohan’s keynote talks and thought leadership have been featured by TED, ESPN, Fast Company, Stanford Social Innovation Review, New York University, Good is the New Cool, Fordham University, Net Impact, Penn State University, Synergos Institute, the University of San Diego, and more.

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Anika

Welcome back to Root & Seed, a podcast about tradition seekers who are sparked to explore, define, and celebrate their family and cultural identity. I'm your host Anika Chabra. 

We know you’re eager to hear the last half of our conversation with Mohan but let’s just listen to one more snippet from his acclaimed TEDtalk on “The Breakthrough Power of Young Leaders”:

Mohan:

I want you to picture yourself at a campfire.  It's been a long journey to get to this point. You're tired. Your clothes or maybe cake with dirt, with sweat.  Surrounded by loved ones.  Now can you picture someone? Leaning forward across the campfire.  Glows in their face.  I say, Hey.  Can you tell me about your Google sheets metrics dashboard.  Anyone?  I got shade for days. Y'all.  Equal opportunity to shade distributor. That's me.  No, that doesn't happen.  People want stories.  Strategies come and go. But stories are forever.  And young people are storytellers. They are truth tellers.  Even a few months ago, I never could have imagined publicly sharing that I was on a performance improvement plan.  But you needed to know my story. You needed to know my truth. To go on this journey with me.

Anika

If that doesn’t convince you that Mohan is the perfect guest to close out Root & Seed’s season on Workplace, then let me double down on that in my next question:

So, Mohan, you really spoke about the wisdom of our elders and you spoke about the wisdom of the younger generation, but there's real wisdom in you knowing yourself and you understanding your identity and you owning your stories. 

What's the magic behind that? What is the power of really understanding who you are?  In order to show up well, and in order to show up as, I don't want to use the, the term, but as your real true self that you're meant to be here for. 

Mohan

Oh, yeah. 

Anika

All the words.  

Mohan

Oh, all of it. All of it. I mean, this is something I think about. I mentioned earlier,being an artist, being a creator, from like my early days envisioning myself on the stage. And so before, before I was a CEO, before I was a TED speaker, any of these things, I was a hip hop artist. I was a student and I was a hip hop artist.

I've been creating hip hop for a long time. That said, because of the way I was conditioned, it wasn't until just a few years ago that I started openly telling anybody, not just friends, but people in the professional space, particularly that I also create music. I firewalled those two sides because I felt like, I don't know, I didn't feel secure enough to share that with people. I felt too vulnerable. I felt like that was a side of me that didn't belong in the professional world, and that wasn't just what was going on in my head, I received that type of message in so many spaces. There are certain aspects of me that needed to be pushed to the sidelines to be able to show up with a certain professional pedigree. 

And then there was this other side of me and as a result, neither side was ever fulfilled. I wasn't maximizing what I can do on either side by not bringing people into my musical world. And then also on the professional side, not allowing this dimension of me to be able to come through.

And, there were a number of reasons why I started to break that down. One of my mentors once told me your team should never have to read what's on your mind.  And I've just found it to be really powerful. Advice like if you're not fully in tune with who you are as a person and expressing that and then therefore your team is not going to know that then there's always going to be mystery.

There’s always going to be something left on the sidelines and those things can cripple an organization.  They can, really inhibit an organization. When you have that ambiguity, when you have the mystery, when you have the question marks around people, when other people are starting to shape their definition of who you are.

And I've experienced that myself. I've been called everything from too brown to too white, to too black, to too hip hop, to too robotic, to too out there, to too loud. I've literally received all those labels in my life and in my career., I finally just had to say, you know what, this is not serving me well. I can't control other people, but this is not serving me well.

And it was the last role that I was in, now about five years ago where I decided, I'm coming in full force.  This is who I am. That doesn't mean that, I'm gonna be rapping to you in every meeting. I'm not gonna do that. This is not a self promotional space every time we're in a meeting.

But I'm not gonna hide it. I'm not gonna hide it anymore. And it was transformative. For me, I find that a lot of times people are more interested in talking with me about my hip hop side than about my work and like, and I love that. I'm all for it., It's like, “Oh wait, I thought we were going to be talking about a funding initiative. You want to hear about hip hop? That's cool. Let's do it. 

Let's chop it up. I want to be talking about not just my artistry. I want to talk about Kendrick and, um, Taylor Swift and her political endorsements. Yeah, let's do it. I enjoy that.” 

And it just shifts the energy in space when we're able to do that. Um, I think it creates courage and permission for other people. And what's been really cool now is like, I'm starting to like offer a training to folks that called the Leadership Manifesto, where I just believe that too often we're put into positions of responsibility where someone else tells us who we are as a person or as a leader, some other assessment, some test, some instrument, somebody else is telling you that.

No, you need to define that on your own terms. And so the Leadership Manifesto, the idea is like we go back through your life and your career trajectory and understand what are all the different inputs that made you who you are. Right now, and give you this opportunity to plant a flag for who you are.And, this is what I represent, this is my manifesto, here are my values, my approaches, my expectations. So you take away that mystery from yourself, and create that definition for yourself, with that opportunity to be able to flow and to grow. And it's something that you can then take to other people. So that they understand, who is this person that I'm interacting with in a much fuller way than they ever could have. 

Anika

Mohan, one of the things that resonated with me strongly in your TED Talk, was you gave practical knowledge. I mean, you came up with those four ideas, those ideas of what we should respect in the younger generation. And the one that really resonated with me, because actually somebody just gave me this compliment, they said I'm an and person. Right? Because they're binary thinking and you think this way or the other and this idea of false choices landed so deep in my soul. If you can, please provide some advice that you might have for listeners who may want to connect with generations that are not theirs. 

Mohan

I was speaking at a conference recently and talking about the leadership of young people and someone asked a question and they said, almost kind of like half jokingly,  so should I just hire young people to my team? Um, and the crowd started laughing and I said, yes, you should. Actually, there's no joke in it. Yes, you should. And now what happens when you do that, right? Well, for one, young people have the leadership skills that we need right now. So not the leadership skills for the future, the leadership skills we need right now. Like we're in a moment with so much change, so much volatility. Imagine what we would have been saying. So it is now September. We'll see when the episode airs. What we would have been talking about with respect to technology. Or politics or culture. If this conversation happened six months ago, and let's say if it had even if it was six months from now, it would be entirely different.

So given that there's so much change, what is at a premium at this point? Well, what's at a premium is the ability to work across stakeholder groups to be inclusive of those different stakeholder groups to find ways to raise innovative ideas to the surface to be able to work with agility and speed.  To have a humbleness in that type of approach. I could keep going about these skills that we know are so necessary right now in the workforce. It's not the antiquated stuff from decades ago, or even a few months ago, we need real agility right now. Um, we need that sense of possibility. And the reality is that so many CEOs out there, they don't have that.

Because if they did, they wouldn't have to be swinging the pendulum back and forth so often between rapid growth to layoffs, to rapid growth, to we're pinching our wallets. That pendulum that goes back and forth, that's not a sign of agility. Agility and readiness for the future. That is a sign of reactivity. And that's not, that's not leadership. That's not the leadership we need right now. But that's not how young people show up. And so this is a force and an energy that we need in our organizations, in our institutions right now in order to be successful in order to be impactful and what the benefit at the same time is it gives you an opportunity for proximity. 

That said, just hiring someone to your team is not a guarantee that you're going to have proximity. I've talked to principals, principals of schools, who do not have proximity to their own students. In their own school and that happens when your priorities are shifted away from that connection with your community when you don't ask questions, when you don't create spaces to be responsive to what you might hear and then to co-create not to just say, okay, I've received your orders. I'm going to go into a back room and I'm gonna figure it out myself. If you really want to forge those bonds with the emerging workforce with young people who have these game changing talents that we need for innovation. You have to be willing to co-create. That is something that I have found time and time again in working with high schoolers, with college students and with young professionals.

They're not saying, Hey, Mohan, we need you and your generation and other generations to get out of the way. I'm not hearing that from anybody. What I'm hearing is how can we co-conspire and co-create? What will it take? For us to be able to do that. And I'm excited to be able to see that.

That's something I talk about with organizations often through, through partnerships is like, you can't just speak that into existence. Like, what are some specific things that you could be able to do to be able to foster that co-creation? How do you ensure that the resourcing is appropriate? How do you set the right guidelines? How do you establish unity of purpose? These are things that you can do, to be able to maximize that power of the young people who are coming into, um, positions of leadership in society right now.  

It's you're speaking to intention, right? It's like having those intentional processes, uh, connection points, like integrating in a way that is not, uh,  you know, box checking, right?

Anika

Like it's, it's one thing to hire, as you said, but then that, that proximity does not naturally occur if there is no intention. So I think that's a beautiful way of saying and answering the question. 

I would love to ask you a question from our conversation cards. 

Mohan

Sounds good. 

Anika

I am channeling Mohan right now.  This is a good one because we have not gotten personal enough, I would say, in this conversation :) 

What do you consider comfort food?  

Mohan

Oh, what do I consider comfort food?  So many things. Uh, pizza.  Pizza is definitely comfort food. I was already planning on probably having like a slice or two with my son after school today.  Pizza is one. My mom's curry with bread will always take me back to my childhood.

Also speaking of always going back to my childhood, cinnamon toast crunch cereal is comfort food for me too. So that's three. I gave you three. 

Anika

Tell me about the curry and the bread. Like, what's the bread part of it? 

Mohan

Even as a Sri Lankan, I've never been too big into rice.

I like it. It's cool. But like, but bread instead. With your hands -  it's getting that texture and that feel and so it could be like a potato curry or, even my mother in law makes this incredible, like, chana masala and so I just have that with some bread, like some wheat bread. And just kind of mix the two together. It's all so good.  It is so good. And it's a funny thing. The reason why I actually like comfort food for me oftentimes is a treat like pizza. If I could, I would eat it every day. And my metabolism cannot handle that. Even something like bread and curry, like a lot of times I'm the crazy one who's like having. Like subjis, I'm having curries without any roti or rice or bread and people look at me like I'm crazy. I'm like, no, I'm doing it for my health. But a few times I'll treat myself and it's worth it.  

Anika

I selfishly asked you the question about bread, because when I got married to my husband, he would take like a wonder bread and start eating it with our chicken curry.

And I was like, what, what's happening here?  

Mohan

I don't do white enriched bread. But, hey I could see how that would work. I could see, oh, I mean, that's the, like for like a pau-paji, like you, that's the type of bread oftentimes, right? It's like a regular, right?  Like a dinner roll. I could see it. 

Anika

It's the Indian hamburger!

Mohan, thank you so much for this conversation. You have honestly put some really. really practical, advice into the world on how people can, with intention and with purpose, really connect with other generations.It's something that's so core to what we do at Root & Seed is having respect for multiple generations, but also inviting in that intention and that purpose behind the connection, as opposed to just, being in the same space, being at the family dinner, being in a workplace that checks all the boxes on all the generations.

It's like, how do you actually create that intention?  And you have so wonderfully  articulated that in your, your Ted talk, not Ted X talk, Ted talk, and in the services that you provide to the world. So thank you so much.

Mohan

Thank you. Thank you. It was a pleasure. Thanks. Thanks for doing what you're doing. I think it just brings this level of warmth and purpose into the world that we really desire right now. 

Anika

What an interview! If you remember back to part one of our conversation, Mohan mentioned that he’s come to a point in his life where he  didn’t want to be a “king” but instead, he wanted to be “the king maker”. I think he’s truly succeeded. 

He’s helping so many of us, from every age and generation, realize that it’s not just about the tangible metrics, it’s about the intangible, the stories. When you know - and embrace - your history, you can be your full self in your place of employment. As we get older and are more choiceful in how we spend our time - it also allows us to be our full self in our place of purpose! Let’s not “firewall the two sides ourself”, as Mohan so eloquently put it, because that’s how we flourish and how the places that we work in do too. 

So where does that leave us?  Our hope for you is that you too can contribute to being “king makers” no matter what stage of your career you find yourself.  Build connections meaningfully. Don’t leave your personal strengths on the sidelines of your professional life. We heard this from Peter, and saw it full heart and soul embodied in Carol Ann. AND we now hope you can help elevate intergenerational connections in your workplace. Use the empathy and conversation tips Bobbie so generously gave us. And if you are in the business of creating solutions for the generations, Samantha shed a light on just how to make it more inclusive along the way.  All in all we end this season knowing that you have the tools to let everyone show up at work exactly who they are, connect with intention and innovate for a better tomorrow.

A big thank you to Mohan, for joining us and being the perfect bow on top of this gift of a season. 

We do have one last episode planned for Season 7… a bit of a surprise. So subscribe to our newsletter at rootandseed.com to stay on top of the latest news and happenings!

This episode was hosted by me, Anika Chabra, executive produced by Jenn Siripong Mandel and edited by Camille Blais.  Bye for now.

Episode Credits

Hosted by: Anika Chabra

Brought to you by: Root & Seed

Executive Producer: Jennifer Siripong Mandel

Sound Editing by: Camille Blais

Music credit: Something 'bout July (Instrumental) by RYYZN https://soundcloud.com/ryyzn

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