Rich Fernandez

Rahul Abhyankar [00:03] Rich, thank you so much for taking the time out of your busy day to join us on Product Leaders Journey. I've been looking forward to it since our conversations in the past.

Rich Fernandez [00:14] Thank you so much. It's a pleasure to be here, happy to talk about this topic with this audience.

Rahul Abhyankar [00:19] Rich, I know that you like to start your meetings in a very specific manner. Any guidance, any instructions for our listeners as they look to participate in how we kick off here.

Rich Fernandez [00:33] Absolutely. And what you're referring to, Rahul, is that I like to offer what I call a minute to arrive, basically to get our attention and our brains, which can be a little bit scattered, into the current moment. In order to do that, you have to exercise those skills. So this practice, which I'd love to offer you all, is what we call a micro-practice. This particular one, about 30 seconds long, is called a three-breath practice, and it's a way to just return to this moment. If you're coming from a previous meeting, if you have some other thoughts or other things going on, it's a nice way to allow yourself to arrive with your full attention. And there's neuroscience behind it, because it helps re-regulate the nervous system and it helps train the attention.

So let's try it. You can do this if you're sitting, standing, eyes open, eyes closed, whatever you like. First just find yourself in a posture that's awake and alert at the same time, and we'll begin this three-breath practice. Taking one slightly deeper inhalation, bringing that breath in and drawing your attention to the breath as it's making its way in and then out of your body, anchoring your attention on the experience of breathing. The next breath, again a slightly deeper breath, breathing in and, as you exhale, relaxing your body one small measure, connecting with your body. And then the final breath, taking a slightly deeper breath again and considering what's important in this moment, what's important now. Notice what comes to the forefront. Keep breathing, and then, when you're ready, we can rejoin the conversation. Thank you for that. It's a very brief attention training practice—attention, body, and priority or what's important—and it's a nice way to start meetings. It's one of the practices that we introduce when we start meetings.

Rahul Abhyankar [02:53] This is so wonderful, and even in these 30 seconds, I can feel my energy shifting. I feel more settled, I feel my voice changed as compared to before versus now, and it's just a much more calmer presence that I bring to this meeting and to our conversation. This is just wonderful.

Rich Fernandez [03:14] Absolutely. And I think there's a reason for that, which I'll just share. We started to tap into what's called the parasympathetic nervous system, the responsive aspect of our nervous systems, the neural mechanisms that bring a little bit more calm and clarity and executive function, as opposed to the stress and reactive part of our brain that we can often be in when we first arrive from many other experiences and events. So it's a way to quickly recalibrate.

Rahul Abhyankar [03:45] And the beauty of this is that you said this is a micro practice and it's only 30 seconds. In today's day and age, when we are just rushing from one meeting to another, taking 30 seconds to ground ourselves, center ourselves, and then be fully present in the next conversation that we are going to be in—this is a huge ROI on these 30 seconds.

Rich Fernandez [04:12] Yes, really helpful in teams as well, when we can all just gather together, settle, take 30 seconds, and then get to business.

Rahul Abhyankar [04:20] Wonderful. So you started at JP Morgan Chase and then at Bank of America, doing talent development, leadership and learning. Was this your calling?

Rich Fernandez [04:33] It was. Just for everyone, I'm by training a psychologist. So what would a psychologist be doing in financial services? Why is a psychologist on a podcast for product leaders? But I can tell you that when I was taking my training years ago, first of all, I was interested in it because I focused on organizational psychology and basically the core factors that contributed to effective leadership, effective teams, and organizational cultures that thrive. And then I went into industry with the explicit idea that I can bring some of that research, some of that knowledge base, into organizations to support their leadership, organizational development, and general learning.

First place was JP Morgan Chase, then Bank of America, both often working with the investment bank, which is a very particular environment, as you all know, and probably like product leaders here—very analytical, very fast paced, very hard charging, achievement oriented, outcome oriented. All good, and at the same time, it's people who are delivering on those outcomes. So leaders would often need tools to be able to really help bring their teams together and work effectively together.

That was my job. It was called leadership learning and leadership development, and I worked with a lot of the managing directors, often on the trading floors and other places, to help optimize team performance, individual performance, taking a brain-based approach, oftentimes also using behavioral research. That was a calling, because I've been a student of human nature. That's why I went into psychology, where I got a PhD in this stuff, and then I was able to apply it in that setting. That naturally led to me getting recruited over into tech, where I went over to eBay and I ran learning and development there for a number of years. All again on this notion of how do you advance leadership effectiveness, team effectiveness, and build a culture of high performance, and then, importantly, sustain it, because, as we know, in high performance environments, burnout's a real thing, attrition's a real thing. So my job was to help provide some of the tooling from a people and culture perspective to enable that.

Eventually I went to Google, where I ran executive education, which is leadership development for the senior-most leaders at Google—so that would be basically directors through SVPs—and offering them experiences, programs, supports, coaching. The main thing I would like to highlight is that by the time I arrived at Google, having had a grounding in neuroscience and behavioral research, what I found was that there was a beautiful marriage between the things we were trying to achieve in terms of high performance and neuroscience and attentional and perceptual training practices like mindfulness and meditation.

They all came together at Google because I happened to share an office with an early Google engineer by the name of Meng Tan, who had begun developing a curriculum called Search—like Google Search—Inside Yourself. It was neuroscience-based mindfulness and emotional intelligence training. Then I helped him grow that and develop that and spread it within Google, and then finally, separately, we spun it off. It became wildly popular, by the way, with product leaders, engineers, all employees, because it was about trainable skills around these qualities of mindfulness and emotional intelligence rooted in neuroscience. So it wasn't fluff, it was really about training your neural networks for executive function. And then we eventually spun that off as a separate individual educational institute, which I run today, called SIY—for Search Inside Yourself—Global, and we operate now in over 60 countries, mostly working at Fortune 1000 companies. We've trained over 250,000 people in these skills. So I followed my calling and I'm living my dream.

Rahul Abhyankar [08:51] Excellent. Nothing better than that, right? Then work is not work. That's wonderful. Going back to your journey in leadership development, talent development, given the velocity of work today, do you find it challenging for companies to be able to carve out time, bring employees out of their routine and velocity, to pause for a few minutes or days to go through these programs and training and really invest in that?

Rich Fernandez [09:27] It is a challenge, and at the same time, you could portion it out over time so it doesn't have to be overly taxing on the schedule, on the product cycle, on whatever it is you're trying to achieve. It's just like carving out time for a walk in the daytime or maybe some physical exercise. That's why at Google we were able to put it in a way that allowed people to come. Because it's an hour or less a week to acquire the core skills, and then once you acquire that threshold level of tooling, then you could self-sustain, and we have tools to support the self-sustaining part of it. So there's ways you can format the skill development that work with very busy, demanding schedules.

Rahul Abhyankar [10:16] Especially in the area of learning and development, unless you have an opportunity to apply that learning on some consistent, regular basis, that learning doesn't really take root. Otherwise it just remains as sort of intellectual exercise or an intellectual pursuit. So how do you make this much more repeatable and consistent for people to take it forward?

Rich Fernandez [10:45] We access everything from our devices, so you have to show up there as well. So asynchronous learning and practice opportunities, guided practices, research—all the knowledge and content that you need is available asynchronously, together with a synchronous or live experience, whether that's virtual, like this, or an in-person experience to help install and get that basic threshold momentum going. And then I think the other factor is really a cohort or a community of people who are similarly exercising these skills. Back at Google, we had started a community called G-Pause—P-A-U-S-E—Google Pause, G-Pause, and that is still going today. They have informal mindfulness practices pretty much every day of the week across the globe.

There's dedicated rooms for meditation and things like this. There's events that happen, there's refresher courses, and that's all shepherded and championed by the employees themselves. There's no approvals needed. It's just something that some enthusiastic super users do on their own, but it's supported by some of the content that they've had from, for example, Search Inside Yourself and their access. Sometimes it's as easy as people showing up in a room for 10 minutes, and they'll listen to a quick talk and a guided practice, whether it's a meditation or just a calming practice or a focusing attention training. Having all of the tools at your disposal and then some level of cohort or community that is using the tooling is what helps sustain them.

Rahul Abhyankar [12:37] I assume that like any initiative that goes forward in an organization, there is the grassroots, bottoms-up commitment and involvement from the employees, but then there is also championing from the top so that it creates that good alignment between bottoms up and top down to keep that moving forward. In that context, do you see a C-level role coming up? We've seen chief innovation officers when that was a boardroom conversation, chief digital officers, chief data. Is there a chief mindfulness officer in the future?

Rich Fernandez [13:16] There is, actually. SAP has one. He's a VP of their global mindfulness practice. They're our biggest client, and a guy named Peter Boselman. They've been doing it for 10 years, and they've trained over 17,000 employees at SAP in our curriculum Search Inside Yourself. His title literally is Chief Mindfulness Officer, and at times he's reported out to the SAP board about their efforts.

Because if you're going to train 17,000 employees on something, it better be worth—there better be an ROI, which there is. It's about 200% is what they've calculated. The cost of the employee time and everything that goes in compared to what comes out in terms of performance, productivity, efficiency, collaboration, creativity. They've actually measured it over time and they've seen that that's the ROI, and they've also seen statistically significant levels of improvement on those parameters as well. So he shepherds those efforts at that company, and I think increasingly you'll have people. It may either be a part of a role like Chief Wellness Officer or a role in itself, because it is a big body of work.

Rahul Abhyankar [14:31] It would be fascinating to see how they've calculated the ROI from time invested in training employees on mindfulness practices, and maybe this is something that other companies can look at and see, well, there is a framework, there is a way to do this inside any company.

Rich Fernandez [14:50] Absolutely. I can tell you a little bit because I have some of that at hand and it's public knowledge. For example, they measure something called leadership trust. They have an index, and they saw that people who went through these trainings on emotional intelligence—the participants had improvements of 80% in their leadership trust index, and every 1% change in the leadership trust index is about 100 million euros in operating profit. So they actually can formulate what then the return on investment is.

These are public. There's articles been written in Forbes about this. Through our SIY programming that's reached 17,000 employees, what they've seen is 9.2% increase on employee well-being, 12% increase in meaning that employees describe and having about the company and their work, 6.5% increase in employee engagement. That alone is a huge driver of ROI. You also have 7.6% decrease in stress, 12.2% increase in creativity, 6.9% increase in communication, 5.2% increase in collaboration. So those are very concrete data points that help formulate the ROI.

Rahul Abhyankar [16:23] That's fascinating, that they've been able to take these attributes of employee engagement, performance, leadership trust, and then tie that back into economic value to the company. That's brilliant.

Rich Fernandez [16:38] It's essential. I think you have to link to the economic value—as you said, the business case—but then also the strategic value of it. Because in today's world of agile transformations and massive organizational shifts, the advent of AI and automation, how can you effectively manage that change?

The biggest risk factor is the people who are going to adopt it and the ability to collaborate, to trust, to work cross-functionally. That's where we come in. So linking to strategic initiatives like agile is also business case, plus strategic priority, is how you can effectively introduce this type of work into organizations. It's not just soft skills and fluff. It's actually changing mindsets, changing capacity to work collaboratively and efficiently with others.

Rahul Abhyankar [17:38] You mentioned creativity as an attribute that got a boost from employees engaging in this practice. Were there any studies done about how the Search Inside Yourself program or mindfulness in general was a catalyst for creativity for engineers and product people at Google?

Rich Fernandez [18:02] Not rigorous studies in the sense that the data we got was what I would call self-report data, so it's pre-post people having these trainings. Some of the engineers did report greater insights and creativity, but that's not like a randomized control field study of the type you'd want to see if you wanted to really create attribution. But we know that what we heard was that a lot of people were able to, quote-unquote, separate the signal from the noise by being able to harness and train their focus.

I remember we led a specific mindfulness practice at some point training perceptual awareness. This is what's been sometimes called an open awareness practice for those familiar, but really what it trains is your neural networks that are dedicated to perception—so perception of the environment as well as your own thoughts and mental and emotional processes. You train both a little bit. For just a few minutes, like I'm talking no more than maybe seven minutes.

Rahul, I remember there was this engineer who was in this, and afterwards we always asked for people's comments and reflections. He raised his hand and he said, "I wasn't trying, but I solved it." I said, "What did you solve?" He goes, "There has been a bug that I could not figure out. I really understand now what it is, and I'm going to go right after here and go deal with that." I think it took him stopping for a moment, pausing, and almost intentionally paying attention to what is the broader perception here.

You might say that it's more like a reflection almost on pattern recognition. What are my mental patterns? What are the thought patterns? What am I experiencing in noticing? I think he realized he was just on this one track, thinking about this bug instead of considering other data points, and apparently he came to that conclusion, understood it, and went off and did the thing. There is value, I think, for technical leaders in training these skills that aren't completely focused on cognitive processing. They're perceptual processing, they're attentional processing. There is some overlap between all those things, but there are also different neural networks in your brain that you're activating when you do these other types of exercises.

Rahul Abhyankar [20:38] Especially in current times where we are continuously in back-to-back meetings, going from one context, topic, to another context, topic, without having the opportunity to really pause. Continuous Slack messages all the time. It's like a meeting that never ends.

Rich Fernandez [20:56] That's right.

Rahul Abhyankar [20:57] What other practices do you teach, do you recommend?

Rich Fernandez [21:02] A few things. One is attention training. We also train, like I just mentioned, perceptual awareness, open awareness. We also train emotional awareness, so awareness of your own emotions, as well as mental awareness. So what are some of the thoughts and mindsets that you're inhabiting? And then mental clarity and decision quality are things that we also work on. How can you train mental clarity in the face of complexity? There are ways to do that. When you're able to not make decisions purely from the sympathetic nervous system, the fight and flight and react, but rather the calm, focused, executive function part of your brain. You could even do that through simple breathing exercises, amongst many other things.

Rahul Abhyankar [22:03] Especially when we talk about emotions in the workplace and the stress, there are so many different times when those emotions get heightened, whether that's a stakeholder conversation, an important presentation to leadership. One of my friends used to say there are butterflies in the stomach many times, but then you have to train those butterflies to fly in formation instead of just randomly.

Rich Fernandez All are calm. Well said.

Rahul Abhyankar Bringing all those elements together to understand, become aware of our emotions, the stress response that gets activated because of those emotions—and these are very micro events that happen inside our body—to be able to become aware of them and then be able to regulate them.

Rich Fernandez [22:55] Absolutely. You named so many things right there—from the stress and the activation of the stress response mechanisms in the brain. That's a terrible place from which to make decisions and from which to collaborate and innovate. So there are skill sets that allow you to, what you called, regulate—that's the right word. The technical word is down-regulate those parts of your body and brain that are kind of going haywire in response to the stress, and then bring top-down regulation, meaning bringing a better calibration coming from parts of your brain, like the prefrontal cortex, that are responsible for executive function, for allowing those butterflies to fly in formation, as you say, to allow thoughtful, considered, planful, deliberative action. So you can strengthen parts of your brain that perform specific functions that allow you to be calm in difficult circumstances, focused when you need to be focused, aware when you need to be aware. Because there are many instances as product leaders, as team members, where you do have to be aware of other people.

It's funny. I like to joke that we invented Search Inside Yourself at Google because some of the engineers there didn't realize working with other humans was in the job description. We needed to help them have tooling and skill-based things that they could use to effectively work with others, and you can train those parts of your brain.

Rahul Abhyankar [24:30] You talked about empathy, and it's a big part of just building products for other people. Is empathy coachable? Is this learnable? Or does it require a transformation from the inside out, kind of a metamorphosis, for you to be able to tune into the other person?

Rich Fernandez [24:54] Empathy is a skill, and it's trainable. What do we mean by empathy? I would very simply define it as perspective taking. You have your perspective. What is the perspective of another? Simple as that. Good UX design starts with an empathy map, right? You create a persona and your perspective switches. That's not something that just happens on a design sprint or a design thinking activity, but it's actually something that you can do moment by moment. What is this person—what's important to them, what are they considering, what might they be thinking, what might they be feeling? You don't have to have a perfect answer for all of those, but even just asking the question—literally asking the question, "I have an idea, but what's important to you as we discuss this? What have I not thought about, and what could be some other perspectives here?" It doesn't take much, but it's important to know how to do that, and that's where I get to: it's actually a skill that's trainable, and you can exercise it, and the more you exercise it, the better you become at it.

I want to read you a quote from somebody who went through one of our programs, who's currently a senior product manager at Amazon, and she gave us permission to share this. Her name's Joyce Bao, and at the time she was a senior product manager at Fitbit when she went through our program and gave this quote. She said, "My biggest takeaway from the Search Inside Yourself program is really about learning how to better work with my peers. As a product manager, especially at a fast-paced company like Fitbit, I have to interface with over 50 people on a daily basis. Having to adapt to different people's needs, perspectives, priorities, and interpersonal dynamics requires me to know where my own center is."

I love that quote, Rahul, because it indicates that you can maintain your perspective. Empathy is not, as is commonly mistakenly thought about, kind of giving away and giving ground and ceding your perspective and just being kind of a pushover. It's about knowing clearly what you think and believe, but also creating enough space to, as Joyce was saying, understand the concerns of others and understand how those all come to play together in a team.

Now, if I might add one other component to this: empathy is the building block for the next, more advanced skill, which we call compassion. And compassion also is misunderstood. People think that compassion, when you're a leader and you're compassionate, might mean you're weak or you're giving ground again. Compassion I would define as simply being of service and benefit to others. Here's the thing: you put the two together. When you can perspective-take and understand your own and the other's perspective, then you can effectively be of service and benefit to others, should you choose to be. You don't have to be compassionate, it's a choice. You could be ruthless, so it just depends on how you want to lead. But if you choose to lead with empathy and compassion, it's about taking perspective and then being of service and benefit to others.

When I say others, I don't just mean loyalty or team at all costs, or loyalty and individual. You can be very compassionate to customers, to users. There's broad application here. But again, these are not well understood skill sets, and they are skill sets that, if you can train—imagine, if you know how to take perspective effectively and you know how to be of service and benefit to others—usually you call that good leadership. That's what we train.

Rahul Abhyankar [29:09] The point that you brought up just now, which is being a compassionate leader, should not mean that you are a weak leader. There is an element of charging hard at your goals and objectives. But then how does that sit with being compassionate and empathetic?

Rich Fernandez If you are compassionate and empathic, you will achieve those results that you're driving hard towards, and your team will much more effectively. Let me give you some real-life examples. Jeff Weiner, former CEO of LinkedIn, says that the primary way that he's been able to achieve what he has—the most important leadership skill for any leader—is compassion. Because when you know how to be of service and benefit to your team and give them what they need, you achieve those results. Marc Benioff, founder and CEO of Salesforce, another example of someone who is a compassionate leader, literally brings that in. They hired us to do massive trainings for not only their employees, but their customers. And then someone like Ray Dalio, Bridgewater, one of the largest hedge funds out there in the world, has said that his entire success came from his meditation practice of stopping 20 minutes in the morning and then pausing 20 minutes at night to reflect in silence. So these again have real-world implications, not just fluff. These folks you could point to as probably being mindful, empathic, and compassionate leaders, and their success speaks for itself.

Rahul Abhyankar [30:39] Going back to your time at Google with executive development—when leaders get to a certain stage in their career journey, at some point, senior directors, VPs, SVPs, people are smart, they're hardworking, they have built a strong track record, they've built strong teams, they have the relationships and support within the organization. So what separates people at that level, where only some people get an opportunity to progress further?

Rich Fernandez [31:25] That's a huge question. What separates people at that stage? One of the key things that I've seen is you need to understand how to be a leader of leaders, which means that you have, I think, the core ingredient there is trust. So you have a very cultivated trust among those leaders who are now following you as the leader of leaders. How does trust get cultivated? I think you have to bring a certain level of awareness. In fact, we have a formula. We call it AVP. There is a denominator which is self-orientation. This is derived from a body of work that was earlier called Trusted Advisor. It's a book. They ran big studies on this. We've adapted and modified their trust equation, but the trust equation is awareness, vulnerability, and purpose over self-orientation.

What I mean by that is, first of all, you're aware. We were talking earlier about being responsive versus reactive. So you have that skill. You're aware of when you need to be responsive versus reactive. You're also aware of the position you occupy. Leaders have a huge microphone, as we say. If you sneeze, if you have a bad day and you have a stomach ache and you're bent over like this with a frown, people are going to interpret that a million different ways. So you have to be aware, positionally, of where you are and its implications for those around you, how you're showing up.

You have to be vulnerable. You have to be willing to speak to the opportunities and also the dire challenges in an authentic way, without sugarcoating it, because people are going to smell it and they're going to know. In order for them to trust you, you need to be somewhat vulnerable and paint the picture and also the reality of things as they are.

And then you have to have a very clear sense of purpose. Why are you doing this and why does this matter for this organization? You need to be able to articulate that clearly. So there's the communication and influence skills that come in there. All that matters—awareness, vulnerability, purpose.

And then the denominator. The bigger the denominator is, we know, the more it degrades the numerator or divides the numerator. So the denominator is self-orientation. If you're only about you, if you're being aware and vulnerable and purpose-driven only because you're trying to better yourself, again, people are going to smell it. So when you could work on all three of those things in the numerator—if you look at Sundar Pichai right now, he is quite a great communicator. He's a trusted leader. He's talked about the pivots that have needed to be made. So he's been vulnerable. He's spoken quite openly about AI and its opportunities and threats, and believe me, he's aware of all that stuff. He is very aware that he's doing all that stuff, and he's not doing it to self-aggrandize. I would not call Sundar a self-aggrandizing leader, so his self-orientation is fairly low. You can see how that trust equation—or someone like Bill Gates, there's a credibility factor, a trust factor there. These are examples of leaders who I think demonstrate that next-level skill, and that next-level skill, I would say, centers on trust.

Rahul Abhyankar [34:58] I love that equation—awareness, vulnerability, purpose divided by self-orientation. I was speaking with someone, senior product manager, very smart individual, and they have an opportunity to now become a team lead, director, and have some anxiety around what does it mean to be a first-time leader of a team. So those are some interesting aspects of growth. How do you then change your way of thinking and context around your performance versus your team's performance?

Rich Fernandez [35:38] Absolutely, and they're interrelated. You'll perform well if your team performs well and you have a good relationship with them and have empathy, but also, like I was saying, build trust by being vulnerable, by clearly articulating purpose, by managing self-orientation, and then by exercising empathy and compassion.

Rahul Abhyankar [36:03] This is great.

Rich Fernandez I'm glad you set that up, because it brings all the elements together that we talked about, Rahul.

Rahul Abhyankar [36:09] Wonderful. We've come to the rapid fire section of our conversation here. Which book have you recommended the most to people? Obviously, not Search Inside Yourself—and I love that book—but any other books that come to your mind?

Rich Fernandez [36:27] I love Yuval Noah Harari's work. The book on 20th century leadership—of course start with Sapiens, but you can read all of them, and they can be really effective. I really like Marc Benioff's book, Trailblazer. It's a little bit of a memoir, but you see how he's built a purpose-driven company with a lot of these qualities. And I like Howard Schultz's book also, documenting Starbucks' journey as a value-based company. It's called Onward. Those are all books that I find really important and really helpful.

Rahul Abhyankar [37:01] In terms of your personal practice for mindfulness, tell us a little bit about how you find the time in your busy schedule as a CEO to make sure that you have a consistent practice.

Rich Fernandez [37:15] I'm an early riser, early to bed, early awake, and one of the first things I do when I get up is I sit and I meditate, usually around 10 to 20 minutes, preferably 20 minutes, unless I have to really be somewhere—pretty much every day. And then we have micro-practices. I usually start every meeting that I'm in with a minute to arrive, so I get a few more minutes throughout the course of a day. So I integrate it throughout the course of my day as well.

Rahul Abhyankar [37:45] Excellent. Wonderful, Rich. Thank you so much for taking your time to be on this show and all the wisdom that you've shared. I know this is going to be a lot of great takeaways for all of us.

Rich Fernandez [37:56] Thank you so much, Rahul, and thanks everyone for listening. Great to be with you.