Ep 234: Ajaz Ahmed of AKQA - "The Decent Leader"

How does your leadership make people feel?

Ajaz Ahmed is the Founder and CEO of AKQA. They describe themselves as an ideas and innovation company. AKQA employs 6,500 people around the world and receives about 80,000 job applications a year.

The most creative and innovative companies in the world thrive when they build environments that their people trust and cultures that absorb new blood of every type, willingly and happily.

Developing a truly diverse talent base has been the focus of a great many failed attempts by a great many companies. This is true even of companies otherwise acclaimed as the best of the best.

For the amount of time, energy and talent devoted to the effort, diversity and inclusion is still too often a well-intentioned initiative rather than a lived reality.

Ajaz’s definition is the first time that I’ve heard a description that made me understand what a truly inclusive company culture would feel like. And I think that matters.

Leadership has always been measured by results - usually, the kind you can see on a spreadsheet.

That will always be the case. Economics matter. And in the short term, you can move the economic needle of your business through sheer force of leadership will.

Which is why we tend to judge our own leadership impact by analyzing what we can get people to do.

But, for any company dependent on creativity and innovation for its success, sustained economic performance is the result of how people feel.

This is a frightening idea to contemplate, I think.

‘How do I make you feel?’ is perhaps the most vulnerable of human enquiries.

But it’s the one that moves the needle, both on your impact as a leader and as a soul on the planet. A win-win.