Tim Salau
Tim Salau
Co-Founder & CEO @ Guide
“Empathy. The world needs more, and leaders need more. One of the things I’ve seen in organizational cultures is a lot of leaders don’t know what empathy looks like, because I don’t think they have it for themselves.”
Action Prompts
// SELF REFLECTION
Our capacity to empathize with others is a reflection of the empathy we hold for ourselves. Let’s examine how this shows up at work, and reveal its invisible impact.
Grab a journal and pen to answer the following questions:
1. What do you have little patience for with yourself and others?
2. Think of a time when you were hard on yourself. Why?
Then, do a free word association exercise until your page is full. Have fun with it and see what emerges from your mind. You can’t get this wrong.
3. Start by writing the word “vulnerability” in the center of your page. Draw a line and write an associated word. It can be an insight, memory, or idea. Continue to write words to see what your mind surfaces. You may draw lines between any words that you sense are connected.
4. What was surprising? What did you learn?
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// TEAM EXPLORATION
Virtual Mini Fish Bowl
60 minutes
Take stock of the rituals for connection happening now on your team, and explore how peers are investing in each other’s emotional bank accounts. Discuss the fallacy that building connection at work isn’t work.
Have up to 12 people volunteer. Encourage a diverse cross section of people including introverts. Choose 3-5 people to be on camera, “in the fish bowl”. Everyone else off camera is “observing the fishbowl”. The fishbowl includes an “empty chair” which any observer can occupy to ask a question or provoke further insights. When the chair is occupied by someone new, someone has to rotate out, and turn their camera off, so the core number is constant.
Discuss the rituals for connection on the team, what’s working and what’s emerging.
1. Check-ins - where are you making time to connect with peers or across levels to talk about life beyond work performance & goals?
2. Recognition - how do you share gratitude on your team? How do you say thanks for work well done, for being a great teammate?
To wrap up and collect next steps, use a shared document or virtual white board to collect ideas in these categories: We will... Stop / Start / Continue
Resources
Support Big Black Tea’s vision to ensure every member of our community has a warm cup of tea to help them heal and recover during this pandemic.
Listen to Brené Brown’s interview with Eric Mosley, CEO and co-founder of Workhuman, about his new book, Making Work Human: How Human-Centered Companies are Changing the Future of Work and the World.
Check out the full fishbowl exercise from one of our favorite facilitation resources, Game Storming.
Tim "Mr. Future of Work" Salau (he/him), is the CEO & Co-Founder of Guide, the premier B2B Learning & Talent Development SaaS app helping remote teams and knowledge workers learn anytime, anywhere, on-demand.
He's an author, investor, accomplished international keynote speaker, product leader, tech influencer, and the only Nigerian-African American activist and global authority shaping the discussion on the Future of Work, leadership, and innovation.
Talking to Tim was one of the most inspiring conversations we’ve had on the tour. His conviction that the future of work will deliver abundance, innovation, and flexibility for people to have careers that empower them to live on their terms, was palpable and beautiful.
Tim's life purpose, his why, is to strengthen the bonds people share through compassionate action.
His narrative on organizational cultures that are soothing and healing like tea was a gorgeous vision, and we just love that he offers “Big Black Tea” products under his brand umbrella.
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All the Feels for Empathy
Empathy. The world needs more, and leaders need more. Right now, we’ve seen another example of a leader who has no empathy for humanity. One of the things I've seen in organizational cultures is a lot of leaders don't know what empathy looks like, because I don't think they have it for themselves. If you don't have that type of compassion and care for yourself, you're gonna emulate that to others. It’s powerful. Leadership, and bringing empathy to leadership, is important now more than ever.
Getting to know the Guide Team
We're still in the early stages of our venture, so we’re a team of three and we're fully distributed. I met my co-founder in Seattle and we decided to found a company in April 2019. We both shared the same passion around the future of work as well as fundamental education, and the fact that the skills gap hasn't really been solved. Pre-COVID, we were actually a life skills training app for high school students. We spent a few months in the market, but when COVID-19 happened, we realized that our market expanded and we could take what we were building and still have a B2C side, as well as a B2B play. Going into corporate learning and development, means a much bigger market price, and we can build a more sustainable business model.
We're really passionate about the problem we're solving. One of the things that's really unique about the way we're building our culture at Guide, is that we're really focused on building a team based culture. I’ve been in some of the greatest orgs in the world: Microsoft, Google, I’ve worked with LinkedIn and Facebook in a partnership capacity. I've seen how many of these orgs are constructed. I think things could be better, which is why I've been very intentional in how we're building our culture with empathy.
We're really focused on teams, and we're more focused on the 80% that actually matters, which is, are you spending more time with your family? Are you engaged in doing work that is fulfilling to you at work outside of work, whether it's side projects or ventures that you're building on your own? Also, are you spending more time taking care of your holistic health? Your mind, your body, your psyche, but also your spirituality? Are you feeling holistically well, within our organization? I've never been in an org that actually thought like that. I've never been in an org that said, let's optimize for that 80%. The 20% of your life is actually going into work. Everything else informs how well you can come to work, and bring your best, authentic self to work, and also be a good person with your teammates, and feel a sense of psychological safety. As we grow, we have to scale that culture up.
A Whole New Paradigm for Work Culture
The norm in terms of the broader culture in building a venture and company is ship, ship, ship ship, break things, move fast. Even at the early stages, you have to work till you grind it down, until you make it or raise as much capital as possible. I’d name that force “toxic masculine business culture”. It's almost like you have to build a company that is analogous to a machine gun, imposing its view onto the world. Forcing itself upon customers, it has to conquer market markets, it has to expand. It's completely antithetical to how I think about our business, our movement, and where I'm taking our company long term.
When I think about our culture, it's much more like tea. It's soothing, it's comforting. It helps you with learning, it helps you connect, build community, find peace, reflect. That culture we're creating is actually going to be the cultural norm, eventually. People have seen what the world looks like when it's just men in positions of power, when it’s about being masculine, dominating. We've seen what the world looks like then.
But what about a world where companies are built more like tea? Built around community, around peace, around a circular economy, making sure everyone profits off of the success of the business, not just shareholders. I'm grateful and inspired that we're building culture, because in the long term we’re going to be more successful. There will still be masculine dominated organizations, and that toxic masculine business norm. But the cultures that are going to shine in the next 10 to 20 years are cultures more focused on the welfare of humanity and are building that within the fabric of their companies.
Addressing the True Supply and Demand Issues in Funding
We've raised 130K, from firms as well as angels, friends. Our goal for our seed round has been to raise a million. I go into fundraising sprints and we've been very intentional about our cap table. We only want people who understand what we're building, in terms of the product, vision, everything. We want people who are betting on us as the founders. My co-founder and I, we've seen what happens when you raise too much capital. We understand that we're building something really unique and we're really at a turning point. It matters who's on your cap table, it matters who's on your advisory board, it matters who's on your board, and more importantly, it matters who is backing you, whether it be their firm or an angel. Today, we have people who have a global outlook on the business that we're building. We’re really intentional about building something that matters versus something that shareholders can just profit on.
Many investors are risk averse. Many investors, if they are familiar with an area, but they aren't familiar with that type of founder, they aren't going to invest because they're going to feel as if they don't have natural conviction or perspective in what they're investing in. This is why, in VC right now, we see less than 1% of black and brown founders and women getting funded.
I've invested in women founders. I support a lot of women founders, and the stories that they tell me are crazy in terms of what they go through when it comes to raising capital. Most VCs are men, let's just be candid about that. It frustrates me, because every time I'm looking for investors, I say, “Why in the world do I just see a whole bunch of men? I don't just want a whole bunch of men on my cap table!”
I could just imagine just a whole bunch of men at my board meeting, telling me how to build my own company. They don't really have a point of view on how my female customers feel. They wouldn't actually have the deep nuance I'm looking for, understanding how LGBTQ populations feel, etc. They wouldn't really get it in terms of our holistic, global vision.
This is the problem right here, the fact that we don't have enough women and diversity in VC. So I'm selective just up front in terms of who I'm fundraising from, and they understand opportunity in terms of investing in underrepresented founders and people that don't follow that traditional norm in terms of white male founders.
The thing is that the people with the money have their own preconceived biases, notions and expectations. So if you don't look like a white male, or if you're building a business in my industry or space, I'm not going to invest. What you see is predominantly white, masculine males who are raising a bunch of capital. They may not have great business knowledge, or it may be their first venture, you'll see a lot of them continuing to raise because it's the pattern of who's giving you the money. That pattern matching happens like that naturally. Bias in venture investing is very similar to the biases we see in corporate hiring. Actually, it's two sides of the same coin.
Empathy is needed in the VC world. We need to get more women, more diverse built firms. We're not going to actually change this problem by just having these mandates to invest in more diverse entrepreneurs. The problem is actually more so on the supply side, where there's not enough diverse investors. That's where we need to change the power.
The Future of Work is Right Here, Right Now
We're moving towards a world in the future of work, where work is surely going to be human.
We're going to persevere in challenging the norms as a company. We have to focus and create that culture. Our people are going to have more time to be, and the business itself will succeed. Because they're spending more time with family, they're spending more time exercising on their Peloton. They're spending more time building their portfolio careers, having multiple income streams. I don't want my people to just only rely on our company to be successful and achieve financial freedom.
The fact that the business is successful in the long term, because of the longevity and all the work that you put in. So whether or not you're here for two years, understand that you literally have a stake in our business, even if you want to leave. I don't expect you to be here in our company for 10 years. Not everyone can be a founder, not everyone needs to be a founder. You can be a serial entrepreneur. You deserve to live how many lives you want. As founders, I don't want you to leave early, because I want you to get the full stake of this company given all that you contributed.
I am very, very adamant about creating a culture where everyone succeeds. Our people, our members, the people who were serving, and our shareholders will all succeed. If I'm creating a movement and a company around finding the right shareholders, people believe in us as the founders and our mission. I'm treating our people as humans, and understand that I need to be empathetic to who they want to become. I'm creating a culture and a movement with a company that foundationally, it believes in the human spirit. It's rooted in values of love, compassion, and empathy.
Fundamentally, we’re moving towards where the world is going, working in tandem with technology and tools in a way where it allows us to completely abstract ourselves, and focus on being. Living versus working, working, working, working. That's what excites me about the future of work.
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Join The Tour & Get Your Free Guide Book!
Use this collection of 28 self reflection prompts and team activities. Each one is designed to support you in exploring empathy, and building a work culture in alignment with your values and vision.