IAM1258 – CEO Helps Companies Improve Employee Experience and Organisational Performance

OMAR L. HARRIS (Charlotte, NC, born in Pittsburgh, PA) is the founder of Intent Consulting, TYMPO.io, and EquityPulse.io, a Former GM (GSK and Allergan), Gallup Certified Strengths Coach, Speaker, Award-Winning Bestselling Author of 5 books, including “Be a J.E.D.I. Leader, Not a Boss: Leadership in the Era of Corporate Social Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion”, June 25, 2021, “The Servant Leader’s Manifesto”, 2020, and “Leader Board: The DNA of High-Performance Teams”, 2019). With 20+ years of global pharmaceutical executive experience building teams, Omar has worked on 4 continents (U.S., Middle East, Asia, and Latin America) for Pfizer, Merck, Schering-Plough, and more. His books and work have been featured by CNN HLN Weekend Express, Black News Channel, WPXI-TV NBC News Pittsburgh, CBS/ABC/FOX Lake Charles, The Beating Alpha Podcast, The Living Corporate Podcast, Real Leaders, Ladders, SHRM Blog, Thrive Global, CEO World Magazine, Human Capital Innovations (HCI) Podcast, VoiceAmerica, Roland Martin Unfiltered and many more. As fun facts, Omar speaks 5 languages, plays 7 instruments, and started his first company at the age of 7.

• CEO Story: Started entrepreneurship at the tender age of 7 years old, selling golf balls, having the amazing talent of connecting opportunity with commerce and transforming those ideas into business outcomes, mastered it for over 30 years.
• Business Service: Consulting, leadership, coaching, workshops, technology platform.
• Secret Sauce: Positive psychology – looking at the strengths as the starting point, then enhancing them.
• CEO Hack: Book recommendation: Miracle Morning by Hal Elrod – a new approach to starting your day. SAVERS – Silence/meditation, Affirmation, Visualization (rehearsing success), Exercise, Reading, Scribing (gratitude journaling).
• CEO Nugget: “Perfection is the enemy of progress. It’s better to gain progress in learning and to fail and learn and to pick us up again than to achieve perfection.”
• CEO Defined: Be a steward. Own it yourselves towards people who are adding value to your stakeholders. Being a leader not being a boss.

Website: omarlharris.com

LinkedIn: omarlharris

Facebook: omarlharris

Instagram: omarl.harris

Twitter: strengths leader

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Transcription

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00:20 – Intro

Do you want to learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and grow your business from successful entrepreneurs, startups, and CEOs without listening to a long, long, long interview? If so, you've come to the right place. Gresham Harkless values your time and is ready to share with you precisely the information you're in search of. This is the I AM CEO Podcast.

00:43 – Gresham Harkless

Hello, Hello, Hello. This is Gresh from the I AM CEO podcast. I have a very special guest on the show today. I have Omar L. Harris of Intent Consulting. Omar, super excited to have you on the show.

00:53 – Omar L. Harris

Good to be here, great.

00:54 – Gresham Harkless

Yes, super excited about all the work that you do and all the awesomeness that you've been able to create. But before we jump into the interview, I want to read a little bit more about Omar so you can hear about some of those awesome things. Omar is the founder of Intent Consulting, Tempo IO, and EquityPulse IO. A former GM, Gallup certified strengths coach, speaker, and award-winning bestselling author of five books including Be a Jedi Leader, Not a Boss, leadership in the Era of Corporate Social Justice, equity, diversity, and Inclusion.

The servant leader manifesto and leaderboard, the DNA of a high performance teams, and with 20 years of global pharmaceutical experience, and executive experience building teams, Omar has worked on four continents, the United States, the Middle East, Asia, and Latin America for Pfizer, Merck, Sharing Plow and more. His books and work have been featured by CNN, HLN, Weekend Enterprise, Black News Channel, WPXiTV, NBC News Pittsburgh, and CB's.

ABC, Fox, Lake Charles, the Beating Alpha Podcast, the Living Corporate Podcast, Real Leaders, Ladders, SHRM Blog, Thrive Global CEO, World magazine, Human Capital Innovations Podcast Voice America, Roland Martin, Unfiltered, and many, many more. As fun facts, Omar speaks five languages, plays seven instruments, and started his first company at the tender age of seven. Omar, super excited to hear about all the awesome things you're doing. You're a man of many talents, but super excited to have you on the show. Are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO Community?

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02:23 – Omar L. Harris

Yes, I am. Gresh let's get, let's get into it.

02:25 – Gresham Harkless

Let's make it happen then. So to kind of kick everything off, I know I might have touched on it a little bit, but I want to rewind the clock, and hear a little bit more about how you got started, what I call your CEO story.

02:34 – Omar L. Harris

Okay, so I guess my CEO story, we can go back to when I was seven years old and I started my first company. It starts with being able to connect opportunity and commerce. So we moved to a neighborhood in Charleston, West Virginia, where we lived off of a. It was pretty much an all-black neighborhood that was next to a country club, which is a very odd situation to be in the first place. But basically, all of the backyards were littered with golf balls.

And so I told all my friends to gather up all the golf balls they could find. We crossed over the fence, and we started selling golf balls back to golfers. And we sold the colored balls for $0.50, we sold the white balls for $0.25. We financed our entire summer of escapades. And that was my first introduction to being. Being a CEO. So I guess right from the beginning, I've always been someone who could connect dots that other people couldn't connect and then transform those ideas into actual, tangible business outcomes. And I've been doing it for now over 30 years.

03:43 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, absolutely. I love to hear about entrepreneurship at a young age. And I love that phrase that you said, connecting opportunity with commerce. Because I think so many times, with starting and building and making an impact, you can kind of get lost in the sauce, for lack of a better term, and not realize at the essence of, you know, I think entrepreneurship is as old, too.

04:02 – Omar L. Harris

Yeah. Yeah. I think that everybody gets so protective about ideas like this. My idea, that idea, an idea being stolen. I tell people, an idea and $5 to buy you a cup of coffee at Starbucks. It's not anything. What matters is execution. Like, you know, the execution of an idea is where you put your unique fingerprints and DNA on the idea. And that's why when you execute an idea, no two ideas will ever be executed exactly alike. And that's the difference maker. Is the execution not in the idea itself?

04:33 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, absolutely. And I think that's something, you know, like you said, especially if we look at our ideas or those opportunities as gifts, especially, too, and realize that we each individually as individuals, and also as organizations that are made up of individuals, we execute in different ways. And I always say no one, you know, no one can run your race like you can. You can't lose if you run your race. So I think that rang true.

04:55 – Omar L. Harris

Yes, sir. Exactly. I think. I think that you know, it's better to run more. That's why horses have blinders on when they run, when they run in the races because you know, you're supposed to just, you know, have tunnel vision towards your objectives and your own goals and not let anything stop you. It's all, it's wide open in front of you. Don't worry about what's happening outside of you.

05:13 – Gresham Harkless

Exactly. Exactly. That makes the best sense. So I wanted to hear a little bit more about where you're running, how you're making an impact, and what you're executing. Could you drill down and tell us a little bit more about how you're making that impact and how you're serving clients?

05:23 – Omar L. Harris

Yeah, so I think right now I have, you know, over the last year and a half, I've established, my umbrella organization and take consulting. Tech consulting is just the overarching company that allows me to do all the things that I want to do and make the impact that I want to make. But whether that be in consulting, whether that be in thought leadership, coaching, speaking, publishing, facilitating workshops, doing training and design, and also technology.

So basically, over the last year and a half, I've been able to establish tick consulting and launch every single one of those verticals I just mentioned to you. Because each one of those things is a discrete vertical, right? So training is one vertical speaking another vertical, coaching another, consulting another. So basically I've been able to launch all of them and see how the world responds to one over the other and see which ones are more lucrative versus others, and then be able to accordingly assign my capacity and my time to which area, whichever areas are growing the fastest.

So right now, I would say consulting, executive coaching, and speaking or paying the bills. Publishing, of course, my books are paying the bills while I invest in technology and different platforms. So tempo IO and EquityPulse IO are two sides of the same idea but done in two completely different ways, executed from two different sides. One is equity pulse is basically around encouraging employees of large employers to give their feedback on Jedi progress anonymously to a third party. So basically, like lastdoor.com was for employer ratings around, you know, salary and, you know, the process for getting hired. Equity pulse is the same thing.

It's the accountability measure of companies that say they're going to be making progress against justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion. But equity pulse is the measure of that, the accountability measure of that externally. So that's launched. And then the tempo that IO is within, is going to be a tool within organizations that is utilized to enhance employee inclusion. So you have the enhancement inside the company, you have the accountability outside the company. Both of these are launched, have been launched as of September.

07:43 – Gresham Harkless

Nice. I appreciate that. And especially the holistic nature by which you've been able to execute on each of those strategies. And I almost feel like, you know, and correct me if I'm wrong, each of them has, it sounds like an overall kind of support to an overall mission. They just do it in different ways. And I feel like sometimes with, you know, issues that I think you're focusing on, you're tackling that are pressing and needed. It's really hard to do it with one avenue, with one way. I feel like it probably takes that holistic nature to just start to see that progress.

08:12 – Omar L. Harris

I fully agree. And you have to figure out your own why. What are you doing it for? Like, what is the why? And so my why is to empower people to live their best lives by embracing servant leadership principles and stopping toxic leadership principles at the same time. So basically, when I think about that mission, I was like, what are the various ways and avenues that I have at my disposal to make that mission happen?

And what's my own experience, what are my strengths? What am I passionate about? What can I be compensated for and what does the world need? So basically, when I put that together, I saw the umbrella of intent consulting come together. And I've been very, very grateful to grateful, but also very fortunate to have seen it do as well. It has so far.

08:57 – Gresham Harkless

Awesome, Awesome, Awesome. So I want to ask you for what I call your secret sauce. It could be a little bit for the organization, yourself personally, or a combination of both. But what do you feel? Kind of sets you apart and makes sure you.

09:07 – Omar L. Harris

I would say my secret sauce is that I base everything on positive psychology and the strength space whereas a lot of people are looking through the lens of what's wrong and what's negative about a situation. I look at every situation, starting with what's already working well, and then we work backward to how we can mitigate and improve on weaknesses. So the weakness is not the starting point, the strength is a starting point.

And so by looking through the lens of strength, first of all, you get a lot more advocates right from the beginning because I'm talking to you about what's already working well. And I'm saying, how can we take that to the next level? So if you go into an organization that's trying to do a DEI strategy and improve around these areas, the first question I'm going to ask is what's working? Well, what's already working? Do you have an employee resource group? Have you hired a DEI lead?

Do you have, has that person been given resources, resource appropriately? What's the priority nature of this? If you've done all those right things, then we're going to start with that and we're going to build on that first. Then we're going to go into, okay, so then how do we do more of this and enhance the next thing coming down the pipeline? So that's my unique approach going through everything, strengths-based positive psychology and not coming at it from just a purely critiquing standpoint.

10:23 – Gresham Harkless

Nice. I appreciate that. So I wanted to switch gears a little bit, and I wanted to ask you for what I call a CEO hack. So this could be like an app, a book, or a habit that you have, but what's something that makes you more effective and efficient?

10:36 – Omar L. Harris

Okay, so my CEO hack is from The Miracle Morning by Hal Elrod. If you haven't heard of Hal Elrod, please look up this guy. He is an amazingly inspiring story. He was 21 years old. At 21 years old. He was at the top of the world. He was in a horrible car accident, had to be taken out of the car with the jaws of life, was basically in a coma for seven days, the body was crushed. And when he woke up from the coma, rather than being depressed about basically what he had lost, he decided to lead into gratitude.

And that leading into gratitude has led him to become a world-class global thought leader and speaker-in-demand coach around the world. And his book the Miracle Morning, is something I read a couple of years ago that leaned into something that I already believed in, but gave me a motto and a framework that I could apply. So basically, what the miracle morning is, is a new approach to starting your day. So based on how study of how the most successful people in the world approach just starting their day, he initiated a program called Savers and What.

Saver is an acronym for the first s is for silent meditation, a for affirmations, v for visualization, e for exercise, r for reading, and the final s prescribing or gratitude journaling. So the first hour, hour and a half of every day is doing these six things. And, when you line up your day that way, what you're doing is you're investing in yourself right from the beginning of the day.

You are personally developing every single day. You're improving yourself every single day in all aspects, spiritual, mental, physical, and emotional. And this gives you an edge that, if you do this consistently over time, it will be very difficult for people to keep up with you in terms of the fact that you're developing at such a fast rate.

12:37 – Gresham Harkless

Awesome, awesome, awesome. So I wanted to ask you now for what I call a CEO nugget. So this is a little bit more of a word of wisdom or piece of advice. You might have already touched on this, but it's something. If you were to hop into a time machine, you might tell your younger business self or potentially your favorite client.

12:50 – Omar L. Harris

Well, if I were to hop into a time machine, I would go back to talk to 29-year-old me who was a business unit director who was leading his first big organization, and I would have. I would go back and tell myself that perfection is the enemy of progress. So basically, I think at the time of my life, I was too focused on trying to appear perfect. And I think it's something that a lot of us, in terms of black and Indigenous people of color, women in business, we come in and we don't believe we have the leeway to fail.

We believe that we have to be excellent or else we're not going to get any opportunities. And that's not the case. By trying to be perfect, that means you're not taking the necessary risks to gain progress. And so it's better to gain progress in learning and to fail and learn and pick yourself up again than to achieve perfection. And that's a lesson I would pass on to myself if I could go back into DeLorean and speak to my younger version of myself.

13:54 – Gresham Harkless

Awesome, awesome, awesome. So I wanted to ask you now my absolute favorite question, which is the definition of what it means to be a CEO. We're hoping to have different, quote-unquote, CEO's on the show. So, Omar, what does being a CEO mean to you?

14:04 – Omar L. Harris

CEO to me is to be a steward. I used to tell people that when you're at the top of a company, a company is something. Unless you are the founder of the company and the company is basically, you're a Ford and you work for Ford. It's bigger than you, your family, your name, your legacy. It is an entity that has a bigger purpose, hopefully bigger than just making profits and making money. So as a steward, your job, and you don't know how long you're going to be given the keys to run this thing.

So basically, as a steward, you have to choose terms of how you want to operate your entity and your organization. And for me, the key to being an effective leader CEO today is to orient yourself toward the people who are adding value to your external stakeholders. Don't make it about yourself. The less you make it about yourself, the more your organization will achieve because you'll be focused on the right things.

When organizations, and CEO's make everything about their ego, their ideas, and what they want to get done, you're limiting the potential of your organization because everything has to come through the filter.

15:12 – Gresham Harkless

Nice. Absolutely. And of course, I appreciate your time even more. What I wanted to do now was pass you the mic, so to speak, just to see if there's anything additional that you can let our readers and listeners know. And of course how best people can get a hold of you. Your team, get a copy of your books and find out about all the awesome things.

15:27 – Omar L. Harris

So anything about me is www.omarlharris.com anything about my books is Amazon.com  and if you want to connect with me, LinkedIn Omar Alhair I think those are the three best ways to connect. I think that for me, the message I like to pass on at the end of a podcast when I'm talking to leaders is don't forget to lead with love. Really. As I mentioned before, leadership is a vocation. It's a gift of nice.

15:55 – Gresham Harkless

Well, I truly appreciate that, Omar. We will have the links and information in the show notes as well too, so that everybody can get a hold of you and get in touch and find out about all the awesome things that you're working on. I appreciate, you know, of course, all the love and the awesomeness that you've been doing as well too. And I of course hope you have a phenomenal rest of the day.

16:09 – Omar L. Harris

Thank you, Gretch. All the best.

16:12 – Outro

Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO Podcast powered by Blue 16 Media. Tune in next time and visit us at iamceo.co I AM CEO is not just a phrase, it's a community. Be sure to follow us on social media and subscribe to our podcast on iTunes Google Play and everywhere you listen to podcasts, SUBSCRIBE, and leave us a five-star rating grab CEO gear at www.ceogear.co. This has been the I AM CEO Podcast with Gresham Harkless. Thank you for listening.

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