People working in a culture with a balance of boundaries and empathy are more motivated to perform well. That's what Laila Tarraf realized in her decades of experience as a recruitment and business leader. She carried this realization and successfully developed a work culture that effectively combines high-performance growth and caring culture.

Laila is the Chief People Officer at Allbirds, where she is responsible for guiding and strengthening the company's unique, mission-based culture. She wrote Strong Like Water: How I Found the Courage to Lead with Love in Business and in Life at a time when she experienced the grief of losing loved ones yet gained powerful realizations as a mother and business leader. In her view, connecting to our common humanity and bringing hearts to the workplace is the key to creating exceptional organizations.

Listen to this episode as Sean and Laila exchange inspiring thoughts on recruitment and its changes from the industrial to the information age, holistic leadership, and emotional resilience.

Episode quotes

On creating the post-pandemic hybrid workplace

[00:15:05] I think a post-pandemic hybrid workplace and meeting greater flexibility in work is all about a very integrated holistic leadership style that can balance being empathetic and caring— compassionate while at the same time focusing on growing the business and holding people accountable. And while the two might seem like they're on opposite ends of the spectrum, they're really not. They're more like the DNA strands of a helix that are intertwined. I'm always drawing these two intersecting circles where I have business on one side and people on the other, and so there's an overlap, and that's the sweet spot. And for all of us, it's finding that mix, that alchemy that works for us, given our personal style, we all have it. It's just figuring out how to play in the middle. 

On treating employees as a team, rather than as a family

[00:18:24] While you may have made great friends that you think of as family, we're not a family because you can't quit your family. You can't leave your family. We're really a team, and not to denigrate the connections and relationships because being a high-performing team, when you ask people, what are the most inspirational times in their life where they have the greatest connections, it's usually when they're part of a team where they're trying to tackle a really tough challenge, whether it's in sports or business, and they came together and were able to overcome whatever this thing was. And that's beautiful.

On creating a balance between caring for people and communicating their areas for improvement

[00:19:46] The challenge is the counterbalance to being empathetic and being able to hold your boundaries. Because if you don't, then you're merging. I think there is a way that you can care for the person and keep your connection to the person while at the same time delivering a message that they're not meeting expectations or that something needs to improve. It really is as much an art as it is a science to drop into connection and show that you care.

On how she picked the title for her book

[00:24:43] I chose the title Strong Like Water after Lao Tzu's The Tao Te Ching it's verse 78, right? Be like water. Be like water is really about how water is actually very powerful, but in a gentle way. And in it, he says water is fluid, soft, and yielding, but water will wear away rock, which is rigid and cannot yield. As a rule, water is fluid, soft, and yielding, which will overcome whatever is rigid and hard. And he said that this is a paradox that what is soft is strong. And when I read that, I thought that's it. And I realized that really life, in general, is all about reconciling these dualities, where we fall into these false paradoxes where we think I'm either weak or I'm strong. But the reality is like the yin yang symbol; there is no hard, there is no soft. It just depends on your viewpoint. We are all both. 

Show Links:

• Laila Tarraf on LinkedIn
• Laila Tarraf Official Website
• Strong Like Water™ How I Found the Courage to Lead with Love in Business and in Life

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