The Learning To Lead Show with Mark J. Cundiff

#20 From Accidental Leader to All-In Manager: Ali Merchant’s Leadership Journey

• Mark Cundiff

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In this episode, Ali discusses the pivotal role of trust in leadership, emphasizing that without trust, nothing else matters. He shares his personal journey from growing up in a bookstore in Karachi, Pakistan, to becoming a leader and now an author of 'The All In Manager.' 

Ali explains the concept of an accidental manager and the importance of transitioning to an all-in manager, characterized by insatiable learning, delivering meaningful results, and caring personally for team members. He highlights the significance of psychological safety in fostering innovation and effective communication within organizations. 

Ali offers practical advice on becoming a better leader, including the importance of learning and listening, asking the right questions, and conducting difficult conversations. He also discusses burnout and managing up as common issues leaders face today. 

The episode wraps up with Ali sharing his methodologies for training and coaching leaders and recommending essential books that have shaped his leadership philosophy.


00:00 Building Trust: The Foundation of Leadership

00:58 Ali's Leadership Journey: From Bookstore to Boardroom

02:45 Navigating the Workforce: Applying Self-Development

05:35 The Accidental Leader: Rising to the Challenge

11:04 Psychological Safety: Creating a Safe Culture

20:58 The Power of Candor: Speaking Truth with Kindness

24:02 Establishing Rules for Candor

24:43 Rewarding Candor in Leadership

25:40 Learning from Mistakes

26:24 Challenges Leaders Face with Candor

27:31 The Importance of Feedback

31:25 Practical Steps for Leaders

33:05 Coaching and Training Leaders

36:04 Common Issues Leaders Face

41:38 Advice for New Leaders

43:53 Recommended Books for Leaders

45:30 Where to Find More Resources


Connect with Ali Merchant:

Free Learning To Lead Resources

🔎 About LeaderNotes

LeaderNotes is a quick-hit companion to each episode of The Learning to Lead Show. In just 5–10 minutes, Mark Cundiff recaps the top leadership insights, frameworks, and action steps from each interview, designed for busy, growth-minded leaders who want to review and apply the episode’s biggest takeaways on the go. It’s like the highlight reel + playbook—all in one.


Contact Mark at: mark@markjcundiff.com

Audio Only - All Participants:

If people don't trust you, nothing matters. The book doesn't matter. The frameworks don't matter. The tools don't matter. The templates don't matter. You gotta work on the trust part first. And for anyone who's listening, I wanna say this, if you. Become someone who is worthy of trust. Even if you drop the ball and even if you make a mistake, your people will forgive you. And I talk about this in the book, trust is like a bank account. You gotta keep adding those deposits. And the three core deposits are carrying reliability and competence. Hello. Welcome to the Learning to Lead Show. I'm your host, mark Cundiff. That clip you just heard is from Ali Merchant. He has spent the last two decades scaling learning and development departments for public companies, tech brands, and the world's largest ad agencies. Today he is the founder of All In Manager, a leadership development firm that trains and coaches, managers to become leaders. Since 2018, Ali has trained thousands of managers and coached hundreds of senior leaders worldwide. He is also the author of the All In Manager, become a Better Leader Today. Not someday. Ali lives in Chicago with his wife, Sarah, and their dog, Lenny, we're going to dive into his book, the All In Manager that just recently came out, and I think you're going to get some leadership goal today. Make sure that at the end of the podcast that you download the leader notes. That'll give you a summary of all we discussed today. We unpack a lot of different things from his book,

I highly recommend that you go to Amazon and purchase his book, the All In Manager. Now let's dive into our conversation with Ali.

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how you doing? Ali? It's good to have you with us. I'm delighted to be here, mark. We're gonna discuss your new book, the All In Manager today. But first of all, introduce yourself to our audience, and tell us a little bit how you started your leadership journey and how it came to the fact that now you're going to try to write a book about what you've learned during that journey. Yeah, so I'm gonna date myself, but we're gonna go back probably in the eighties here and I don't think I've ever shared this story you sent me some questions and I was prepping through this, and I was journaling and this just came to my mind. So not a lot of people know that I grew up in a bookstore. My father used to run a tiny little bookstore in Karachi, Pakistan. In Asia and back in seventh grade, there was a speaker that came to Karachi by the name of Anthony Robbins. People know him by Tony Robbins right now, but back then his name was Anthony Robbins. My dad couldn't afford a ticket, but he bought me a book by Anthony Robbins. I was just a teenager. I didn't read it, but then I came to the US in 1997. I was opening my bag. And what do I find? I find that book snuck in and I think the name of the book was Giant Steps. It was like a notepad. I still remember, and honestly, I started reading that book. I was this 18-year-old kid in a new country and I would read it and I'm like, the self-development stuff, there's something here. There's some magic in this stuff. And it's a little bit cheesy. Sure, it can be a little corny, but the idea of becoming a better version of yourself really spoke to me back then when I was a kid starting undergrad at Arizona State. Weirdly enough since that, that self-development bug just established in my brain and I've been on that self-development journey since then. That's awesome. So how did that translate to when you got into workforce? A lot of times we can read these books, right? And you, like you said, you're 18 and my oldest just left the college world and entered into the work world and he's realizing that the books are good. But then when you try to. Make those apply in the workplace. It's a bit of a challenge to, to navigate that and figure that out. So how did you do that? Yeah, so I, I think we all read a book, we get inspired and then life happens, right? And we forget. But I think I, mark the honest answer is I got really lucky. I had a couple of jobs and then I got this other job and I was, I wanna say. The 70th or 80th employee in this company, and it was a startup. And with the startup, you had to do a lot of different things, right? You had to wear a lot of different hats. You had to work really hard, but with the startup, you could do a lot of different things and prove yourself really quickly. And I started as as we were called a search marketing specialist. Back then you would optimize marketing campaigns for clients. This is when SEO was starting out. But then I quickly started to realize, going back to the Tony Robbins thing, that people need a little bit of training. They need a little bit of development. And what happened was I was a technical guy. So my boss comes to me and he's Hey, why don't you train people at some of the technical stuff, because you can do that. I start doing this and I start to get better. Now, I've never trained before, by the way. Again, it's a startup. You just figure it out. So I do this and it's. It's going really well. Then I go to my manager and I tell him, you know what? I think we're doing really good with the product stuff, but I'm realizing that manager training is something we need to also start to figure out. And going back to this idea of being fortunate, being at the right place at the right time. I had a great boss who said, you know what? You figure it out. You tell me how this goes. And long story short, I had to learn on the job. The phrase I use a popular phrase is building the plane. Building a plane in the sky. Yeah. That's how this started. I had to learn on the job, I had to apply it. I had to start teaching. And one thing led to the other, and honestly it's been why I've been doing the learning and development stuff for the last 16, 17 years. And when I was in the corporate world and people bash on the corporate world a lot, they're like, oh, it's bad. And not every day is great. But honestly, I've really enjoyed that, that world. But the corporate world led me or gave me the opportunity to become a better leader. That led me to the book eventually. What's interesting, you used the term accidental leader in your book and I found that resonated with me because early in my career, my first 12 years I spent in sales and then they promoted me to plant manager. A lot of times those promotions are promotions to failure because like you said, many organizations don't have a systematic, intentional way to train you. So I had to take that up on myself. And I started with John Maxwell, 21 irrefutable Laws of Leadership. What do you mean by accidental leader and tell us a little bit of a story about how you became an accidental leader and that led into, your ambition to learn leadership. So again we're gonna go back. So before the trainings and before the leadership development stuff started, I was. Just a guy who was good at his job, right? This is 2008, layoffs are going on. The economy is tanking. My manager, the COO, by the way, calls me in the office and I'm like, this is it. I'm getting laid off. There's no way around it. I still remember, I, I remember the conference room, I remember it's afternoon, San Francisco. He calls me, sets a meeting with all of us and he says, no one's getting laid off today, but we're gonna reorganize. I'm like, okay, great, Ali. He looks at me, he's you're gonna ma start managing five people now. I've never managed anyone in my life at this point. Okay. I am good at the technical stuff, that's all I know. It's that's what you're gonna do. And by the way, mark, it wasn't like you're gonna start managing tomorrow. It was like today after you leave the thing, it's happening today. This was sink or swim. Again I've always had this development bugging me and I'm like, okay, I gotta figure this out. I gotta get myself out of this jam. What I started doing was, I'm like, okay. I'm gonna start to buy a book. I'm gonna read the book, but going back to your son okay, read the book, apply the lesson, read the book, apply the lesson. I know your viewers might be thinking, man, this is simple and I wanna tell them. It is simple. Yeah, it's common sense, but it's not common practice. So when I talk about an accidental manager, this is what I mean. If you are the type of individual who's really good at your job, and one day your manager said, mark. You gotta start leading a group of people. You are an accidental manager. If you're a vice president who's never been trained, coach to mentor, taught, you are also an accidental manager. Mark, while I was doing research for this book, what I found out is fascinating. Two out of three managers, two out of three managers are accidental, meaning they've had no training, no coaching, no mentoring. They were just told, you gotta go do this thing. Now, being an accidental manager is not a bad thing. Okay? I wanna be very clear. It's not a bad thing, but here's the problem. A lot of accidental managers, or a lot of managers start accidental, but they remain stuck. They don't have the bookshelf that you do behind you, right? Because we get busy. And life happens and you're like, I'm just gonna start winging this whole leadership manager thing. And that's why they start failing. So the reason why I wrote the book, the All In Manager, was I wanted to reject the status quo. I figured out after a lot of work that if you understand leadership and if you apply the principles of leadership, you go from an accidental manager to an all in manager. Now, I wanna be very clear what is an all in manager? An all in manager does three things really well. Three. One an all in manager is what I call an insatiable learner. I didn't say a learner, I said insatiable. Someone who is learning. All the time. The second thing an all In manager does is he or she delivers meaningful results. Now, mark, I didn't say results, I said a meaningful results. Anyone can produce results. Anyone can deliver results, but there's a big difference between results and meaningful results. Results that move the needle. And the third thing, all in managers do really well. And I have a feeling you can relate to. This is all in managers personally, care personally, care for the success of their people. So let me recap. Insatiable learners, they deliver meaningful results and they personally care. Now, here is the kicker for you to go all in. You can't have one. You can't have two, you need all three. That's why the Club of All In Managers is a very small club. The Club of Accidental Managers is huge. One of the perils of accidental managers is that they create. For lack of better word, a toxic environment because they're really using positional leadership a lot of times instead of influence relationships, and that creates a psychological, unsafe type of environment. You talk a great deal about psychological safety and how that. Is a key for the all in manager to get these results, to have the relationships. Can you dive into a little bit about what you mean by psychological safety and having a safe culture? Psychological safety is such a buzz word, right? We talk about this but what does that really mean? So psychological and not to be academic here, but I wanna make sure that. Our, the viewers and the listeners and viewers understand what we mean by safety. Safety is a climate or an environment where we feel safe enough to take interpersonal risks with each other. So let's do a quick example. So let's assume, mark, you are my manager. Okay, and I'm your direct report In a psychologically safe environment, I get to tell you, my manager, Hey Mark, I disagree with this idea and here is why I disagree with this idea. Now here's another part to it. Which is not only do can I disagree with my manager or with my peers, but I can do so without being punished, attacked, or retaliated against. So in a psychologically safe environment, I can disagree. I can raise my hand and be like, you know what? Maybe it's just me, but I'm the only one that doesn't understand what we're talking about here. In a psychologically safe environment, I can speak truth to power. Right? That, and by the way, what people don't realize is that. In a psychologically unsafe environment, innovation dies because what we're doing is we're keeping our voices to ourself. We're keeping our best ideas to ourself because we're like, okay, what if this idea is too too too risky for people to try? Or what if my boss thinks that's not a great idea and that my boss is gonna shoot it down? What we've seen, and by the way, there's research that, that shows this in a psychologically safe environment, not only people are happier, but they produce better results as well. What I really like about your book is you start out with a chapter on trust and in order to have psychological safety that there has to be that foundation, right? And many organizations. I've went in and done some work with different organizations over my career, one of the things that was really lacking in the ones that were underperforming is a culture of trust. And they could not be psychologically safe. They could not talk back to their peers or to their leaders in a candid way. Like Jim Collins talks about in his book, good To Great, you gotta be able to confront the brutal facts. Companies that go from good to Great have those robust conversations. They speak with candor. So talk about how you see trust as foundational to build on this psychological safety, to build a culture like that. There was a reason why the book starts with trust. Because trust is, again, one of those terms that we, you, that we just throw around really loosely, right? And the real thing is after teaching almost 1500 people all over the world, when I talk about trust, I ask them, what do you think trust really means? Because everyone knows the idea of trust, but when you ask them what are the ingredients of trust? People are like, oh man, I've never really thought about this. And typically what I hear is trust is only about say doing and saying the same thing. It's like saying what you do what you say, that part. The book talks about this, that is one part of trust, which is, are you reliable when you say, I'm going to get this done, will you do it or not that? But that's only one part of this. Mark Trust is way bigger than that. I wanna build my case with you a little bit and Mark, I want you to push back please. Okay. Okay. So there are other elements of trust and I wanna start with the first one, which is competence. So let me just say one thing. Imagine you are a very reliable person. When you say, I'm gonna do something, you do it. But whenever you do it, you make a whole lot of mistakes. That's correct. Do I trust you? That erodes the trust. Exactly. So now what we're learning is trust isn't just about being reliable, but it's also about being competent. But let's not stop there. Trust has a third component to it, which is care. And when I talk about caring as a leader, I talk about, is it we the collective or is it only me? Now we know a lot of leaders who are very competent. These are really brilliant leaders. But they don't care about their direct reports. It's only about them. It's only about their goals. It's only about their agenda. Now, these are brilliant people, but no one wants to be around them. Do you trust that person? No. So just like I spoke about all in managers having three ingredients, trust is very similar. You need to care. You need to be competent and you need to be reliable. Now, I spent a lot of time researching this and there's so many different frameworks. The trust triangle, the trust equation, and blah, blah, blah. But at the core of it, mark, they're all talking about these three things and by the. When direct reports are sizing up their managers, they're always asking the same questions. Is he competent? Does she care about me? And can I trust her to be reliable? Here's another thing. Having spent almost two decades in the corporate world. I am convinced that your title doesn't matter. Your brilliance doesn't matter. The amount of money in your bank doesn't matter. The experience doesn't matter. If people don't trust you, nothing matters. The book doesn't matter. The frameworks don't matter. The tools don't matter. The templates don't matter. You gotta work on the trust part first. And for anyone who's listening, I wanna say this, if you. Become someone who is worthy of trust. Even if you drop the ball and even if you make a mistake, your people will forgive you. And I talk about this in the book, trust is like a bank account. You gotta keep adding those deposits. And the three core deposits are carrying reliability and competence. Yeah, it's consistency over time. And one thing I like John Maxwell says about this, and he uses the same analogy like a bank account that you're talking about. He calls it change in your pocket, so to speak, but the one thing he says, if you don't love people, you need to get outta leadership. He's pretty strong on that because a lot of people take leadership roles, but they don't really love people. They're people. Yeah. You want to deal with them in a good, empathetic way and care about'em. I think that's a great. Summary of what the foundation of trust. So when you have that and you start building this trust and you start building a culture where psychological safety's there, what happens? When you have a psychological, what kind of behaviors do you start seeing? I think a couple of things are gonna happen, which is you're gonna bring out the best in your people. Because people will not hold back their great ideas. In fact, you know what? Let me share a quick story about what happens when you have safety and trust, or rather what happens in the absence of safety. Here. So we all know Netflix, right? And I'm gonna date myself here. Does Mark, maybe you remember those those envelopes when Netflix would send you DVDs, right? Yes. So in 2011. What happens is Reed Hastings, the former CEO of Netflix, decides that, you know what, we're gonna split the company. We're gonna split the company, and he comes up with the name Quickstar, maybe people in your audience remember the term Quickstar, and he says, we're gonna split the company and we're gonna raise prices right within a matter of weeks. The stock plummets down. Stock plummets. They lose millions of sub subscribers. And the backlash is so intense that Reed Hastings doesn't about turn. He's Nope, we're not gonna do any of this. But that's not the crazy part. The crazy part is. After a couple of months, Reed Hastings starts to realize that there were a lot of employees at Netflix, which is a great company by all standards. A lot of employees were against this idea of splitting the company and raising prices. But Mark, they didn't speak up. Even in a great company like Netflix, people were like Reed Hastings is one of the smartest executives on the planet. He knows. Or what if my idea is stupid? And what if people laugh at me? What happens? This happens. That's why I'm so passionate about this idea of psychological safety, which is if you find that you are in an organization where people are walking on eggshells, fear is half the battle. You're literally losing money because people are hiding their best ideas from you. You talk there about candor and Jack Welch was huge during his success of, bringing GE to, a world dominating company with all the different billion dollar companies he had. He said, one of the things he said is that if you do not speak. The most empathetic thing, the most caring thing you can do for your people is to speak to them with candor, because they don't, they'll never improve. They'll never grow. They'll never become the success they could have been if you don't have a spirit of candor. This is a key aspect of it. Net Netflix didn't have that confront a brutal facts, type of culture. They didn't have people speaking with candor. So how do you get there? How do you get this to come alive in the organization. I, I love that question. And I just wanna say this candor. I love that word candor. In fact, I talk about championing candor, but I also fear that the word candor has been hijacked. I think it's been hijacked by some bosses who believe that in the spirit of being candid, I can say anything and that scares me. That scares. The heck out of me. So I think we wanna first define candor, and I talk about this in the book, candor is this idea of you. And I love confronting brutal facts, right? But we can be candid by being clear and direct and being kind at the same time. I don't think candor is you being direct without being kind. Now let me give you a quick example. I talk about this in the book. At that startup, we had a small team. My peers got promoted. I didn't, and it just, it sucked. I hated it. All my peers got promoted. I was the kid that didn't get promoted. But the same day, my boss calls me in his office and he says, I just wanna keep it straight with you. I have higher expectations from you, Ali, and right now you haven't met those expectations and that's why we're not promoting you. But I'm gonna sit with you. We're gonna get you where you're trying to go, but I just wanna tell you honestly that you're not there yet. And it sucked hearing that. But I am so grateful that this individual took the time to be honest. Direct and kind. So let's talk about how do you create that type of culture. The first thing you wanna do as a leader is you wanna set an expectation, set a standard in your company that this is the kind of team that we get to talk to each other honestly and openly and kindly. As your manager, I am giving you permission to speak up, say the difficult things, say it with kindness, say it to my face. But Mark, I'll tell you this. That's only half the battle. The other half of the battle is you coming up with standards about what is an acceptable way of being candid with each other and what's an, what is an unacceptable way of being candid with each other. And this is an exercise I exercise I do with leaders all over the world. All I and you can do this by the way. I just draw a circle and I tell people what are acceptable behaviors of candor and people tell me, okay, I'm not gonna. I'm gonna tell you to your face, I'm not gonna do this over email. I'm gonna schedule a meeting, I'm gonna be specific, et cetera, et cetera. And then I ask, what are unacceptable ways of being candid? Unacceptable way of being candid is. I'm gonna send a nasty email to you, or I'm going to be passive aggressive, or I'm going to name call. So you have to come up with the rules of the game to create an environment of candor. Again, that's not the entire equation. The last thing that I want every leader to do, and we're terrible at this, is you wanna reward candor if your direct report says Mark. I think this idea is missing something. Instead of saying, you are wrong, you wanna tell your direct report, tell me more. What do you think is missing? Or if someone says, I disagree or if someone says, I made a mistake, instead of punishing them for making a mistake. Maybe you tell them, Hey, this was really hard for you to admit and I appreciate you admitting that you made this mistake. Let's figure out a way to fix this. So the way you champion candor is you set a standard. You come up with acceptable behaviors of candor. And when you see people using those acceptable behaviors, you reward them. So they continue being candid with each other. I love what you're talking about, the mistakes. If I read one of Jack Welsh's books and in there he talks about early in his career, and you was talking about somebody being candid with you. He actually had one of his plants that he was over blow up and ruin the plant. And he came in kinda like you, and at one point there where you talked about where you thought that they're going to terminate and then they give you, promotion to, to lead people. The guy says, man, why would I do that? I've got millions of dollars invested in you. You'll never make that mistake again. And you think about that. If that CEO or the leader, whoever was over him at that particular time did not take that approach of helping him learn from the mistakes and take it and move on, he would've never became the great run. Sure. The champion that he was for ge. What do you see are some of the things that leaders really get wrong with this? Specific candor, especially when you're talking about being candid, so it's easy for the leader to come in and do like they did with you and give you the feedback, the one, the biggest because of, as leaders, we all have egos. Probably the hardest thing for us to do is to take that candid feedback with humility and curiosity. But it's something that if we really want to grow as a leader and become a great leader, that we have to be able to receive that as well. So how do you coach leaders through that process? I'll just say one thing. Not only do you have to, you need to take that, right? So I love that question and I'm so glad I'm happy you asked me this question. I wanna do a quick circle around to the definition of an all in manager here. The first thing I said was, all in managers are insatiable learners. That wasn't just about learning about AI or the next cool thing that was about learning about yourself, accepting, constructive feedback from your people. Now, how do you do it? Now, I want to tell your audience, I've been in the trenches for two decades. I'm not just a trainer. I've led teams all over the world, and when you say, man, it is hard. It just, it's like a gut punch to take constructive feedback from someone junior to you. I think your survival as a leader depends on you busting your blind spots. Right, and the way I teach people is a, there is a way in which you need to ask for feedback, and that's a separate topic because a lot of times when you ask for feedback, what do you hear? Oh, you're fine. Oh, you're great. Nothing's wrong with you. Something's always wrong with you as a manager, that's what I've learned. But I think what you wanna do is you want to go in being genuine and being honest. Being vulnerable, which is very hard, and you need to tell your people, I want to become the best leader I can become to serve you, and here is where I need your help. When it comes to X, Y, Z, what is one thing I can start doing differently? Just one thing. And you'll hear something and when you hear something, your brain is gonna be screaming at you and you're gonna be like, oh, but I thought I was really good at it. And my advice to you is, do the whole two ears, one mouth strategy and not talk and just listen. Listen to what the person is saying. And then if you really wanna, if you're still unclear. Or you wanna disagree with the feedback that you're getting? My guidance to you is don't disagree. Right now my guidance to you is listen and then ask a follow up question. A follow up question could if so, let's assume that Mark, you are giving me feedback and in this context, I'm your manager and you tell me, you know what Ali? I don't like the way you're running team meetings. I'm not getting enough from these team meetings or one-on-ones or whatever. What I might do is instead of saying, oh no, I disagree, I think these team meetings are great, I might say, you know what, mark, thank you. So I'm rewarding it. Help me out. Can you tell me more? What you mean when you say these meetings aren't a good use of your time? Can you give me an example? Because an example would really help me figure this out. The point mark that I'm trying to make is so much of feedback gets complicated because it stays. In the world of generalities, what I need people to do is tell me specifics, tell me behaviors. If I can really understand the specifics, I can get, I can get better. The second thing I would say, and again I talk about this in the book, is, and this really scares me and I read this research and there's a really fascinating research by a professor, I forget which university, but what he has found is the higher up we go. The less feedback we are asking, meaning a new employee is asking for more feedback. The CEO is asking for no feedback at all. And even when we're asking, we're not getting enough feedback. And the problem is when we're, if we're not asking, if we're not getting feedback, what's happening? We're dying. We're not growing at this moment in time. So to go back to your original question, if you want to be an elite leader. Not an average leader, elite leader, you have to start to work out your feedback muscle. You have to ask these questions, and then you need to have the humility to sit with the answer, no matter how uncomfortable that answer is. You're all about being practical. So we've covered a lot today talking about trust and psychological safety and all. And I really love your focus on behaviors. And especially like in candor, identifying those behaviors that are the right behaviors and the wrong behaviors. What is one practice, one practical exercise that someone listening today could go and do this week to start down that road? Yeah. One practical step that they could take to move in that direction? Yeah. I'll give you a good one. And it's gonna be really challenging. Okay. It's gonna be really hard, but hey, it's a good one. The next time as a leader, the next time you have a really big strategy or a big idea that you wanna share with your teams, share it. But then ask one question, which is, can anyone poke holes? In this. What you are doing is you are turning into a debate maker. What you are doing is you're telling your team folks find what is. I want you to find what is wrong here. I want your best thinking and tell me what's wrong here. So we don't make that mistake. Now here's, and I will bet any amount of money, whatever you share. Someone will find something that's wrong, but they might sit on it. Remember the Netflix story? Yeah. Don't do that. Become what we, become a debate maker. Liz Wiseman, who wrote a phenomenal book called Multipliers, talks about becoming a debate maker, right? Yeah. That's what I want you to do. Next time you share a really big idea with your people, have them poke holes in it. See where that takes you. I promise you're gonna get really good ideas. That's awesome. That's awesome. Tell us a little bit about what you do other than write this book. How do you help leaders grow and become successful? Tell us a little bit about your life as a coach and a trainer and and help how you help leaders become better, how you take good leaders and help'em become great leaders. Tell us how you do that. Ellie it is a very rewarding job. And I just do three things. The first thing I do is I spend a lot of my time teaching managers, training managers, and I do a six week. Course six week cohort, and it's called the All In Manager. When you read the book, that book is basically the entire thing. And these managers from all over the world come in and it's great. It's a 90 minute session every week for six weeks. You get really raw, honest conversations. It's not a theoretical session, it's not an academic session. It's in the trenches session. So that's the first thing, which is I teach managers. How do you do those? In person and online? Or both? Yeah. So before COVID I was doing them in person after COVID. I do it online, but honestly, I'm so tired of. Sitting behind a zoom window. So yeah, it's starting to, I'm starting to move back into the online, into the offline world, which is doing it in person, which is a lot of fun. So that's the first thing. The second thing I do, which I absolutely love doing, is I work with very senior leaders in a coaching capacity. Think of these senior leaders as directors, senior directors, vice presidents, CEOs, founders, et cetera. And this is, these are one-on-one conversations. This is where the raw stuff happens. And again, my coaching is very different, mark and it's different in the sense that a lot of coaches only ask questions. I do that too. I do that too, but I am not afraid of sharing my opinion at this point. And you know what? The funny thing is, I've gotten a lot of clients over the years saying, Hey. I don't want you to only ask me questions. I want you to, gimme some advice from your experience. So coaching is the second thing. The third thing I do, which I don't know if it's a great thing, I live on LinkedIn because I write a lot of content. I create a lot of content. So you can find me on LinkedIn. I've been there since the last five years, been posting. Almost daily been able to create a community of 50,000 leaders which has led me to this book right behind me, this physical book, which still sounds shocking for me to say. So three things I write a lot, create a lot of content. I teach managers and I coach senior leaders and so it's a full plate. I will say one thing that. We don't need, we, we don't need to live with this idea that everyone is an accidental manager. I think we, as leaders, we can play a big role in educating managers as well, and that's my goal at this point. I. You're having these coaching conversations, these training conversations. What are maybe two to three key issues that are common with leaders today that you see that they're struggling with? What are two, two or three things that are really stick out, that jump out to you on a regular basis? I'll give you three without even thinking about it, about them. One is always difficult conversations. Always difficult conversations. I don't care if you're a CEO or a new guy. I hear that a lot, the two. The second one is managing up. I see this a lot, which is I have a very difficult manager. I haven't developed that relationship. How do I do that? And the third is burnout. See it all the time. See it all the time. In fact, I will say this, that over the last five years, this burnout or this idea of I'm just not satisfied with my career at this point seems to be coming up a lot. Here. That's the theme. Difficult conversations is a huge part because we haven't trained people. We haven't trained people in how to do this. And Mark, I'll tell you, when someone comes to me and says, I wanna have a difficult conversation, or I wanna give really difficult feedback to an employee, and I tell them, tell me what's going on. And they tell me all the things that are going on. And my question is have you shared this with your employer? How much of what you've shared with me have you shared with them? And the typical answer is nothing. I haven't. And I'm like, okay, I can't fix this. You have to tell the person who's the problem here. And, and obviously we role play this we get very specific. We work on language, we work on tone. We work on how do you ask questions, and then two or three weeks after they've had the conversation, like clockwork, 80 to 90% of the time I get a message or a text message saying, oh my God, this wasn't that bad at all. I did it and I feel like a load has been lifted. And that's why, I tell people difficult conversations don't ruin relationships. Avoiding difficult conversations typically tends to ruin relationships, and that's why I wrote this book, which is life is short. If you're struggling to give feedback, read the chapter, take one nugget out of it and try it. Don't sit on this stuff. It's gonna eat you alive. One thing I liked about what you talked about this candid conversations and having those difficult, challenging conversations is it creates a culture of accountability. If you're not doing that, the byproduct is that you don't have a culture of accountability and all your good players around you see that you're not having those difficult conversations. And when you do that, it creates frustration with your good players and eventually those good players will leave. Sure. I'm so glad you said you said this, that's the problem. If a high performing employee is struggling with another employee, he or she might look to the boss and if the boss isn't doing anything, that anger starts to direct towards the manager. And you're absolutely right when you say, what's the byproduct, A high performer is going to leave because the manager isn't doing anything about it. And. For anyone who's listening, don't think of feedback or giving feedback as this doom and gloom situation. Feedback unfortunately comes with a lot of baggage. Think of feedback as this helpful information that you're sharing with someone. You can be direct and you can be kind, and you can say the hardest things, but the goal is for you to be tough on the problem. And tender on the person. And you can do both here. In fact, that is the job one. One of the problems I've seen is this passive aggressive behavior that a lot of managers do instead of having those difficult conversations. Right? And one format of that is sending out broadcast emails to the whole team about a problem that he has with one individual, one person. Yes. And then what that does is creates chaos within that team. Everybody's looking over their shoulders. What am I doing? Who did that about the Bram? And so then the person starts getting all these phone calls or emails, Hey, and he has to go and explain to each one of them that, no, it's not you. I just wanted to make sure everybody knew that this is the standard instead of just going and having that one-on-one in private. And so you can create a lot of cop unintended consequences by not having those difficult conversations. And then your life as a leader becomes far more difficult. That, that example just makes me laugh because it happens so often. One guy does something and the manager sends an email saying, we need to get better at this. And everyone is hang on, who is my manager really talking about? Have the conversation. And by the way I had in the book, I talk about. People who refuse to have the direct conversation. I've been one of those in the past. I call them avoiders, right? We avoid everything. We avoid the conversation, but here's what we do. We end up telling the whole world besides the person. We tell our dog, we go to our, we hang out with our best friend, have a beer, and we complain to our best friend about the person we tell the coach. We don't tell the person. On the other end is what I call an impulsive, and impulsive just shoots from the hip, which is, you need to get better. You suck at this, blah, blah, blah. In the middle is a responder. A responder gives feedback, which is about behavior. They don't judge. They do it timely, they do it kindly. They do it specifically, and that's a different podcast of how they do it. We see these problems all the time, and the solution isn't that complicated. It's not it's simple. It might not be easy, but it's simple. That's good information and I appreciate you sharing that. What if you were to look at yourself back when you were talking about when you're 18 and you came here and reading Tony's book, when you got here and started realizing that you needed to grow for that new and emerging leader, maybe even an accidental leader, or maybe they just got handled the title, this week or recently, what would you say to them to do right now? Besides pick up your book, pick up the book and I appreciate you saying that. I would tell them to, and you're gonna laugh. Two things you ask for, one, I'll give you two. One, go on a learn and listen to her, which is talk to your people. Don't think that you have to be the smartest person in the room. You don't, that's not the job. Listen to people. Get to know your people. Connect with the person behind the title. Ask them about their problems. Don't be in a rush to show off. That's what leaders do. We try to be like, oh, I'm the smartest. I've done that. I've made all the mistakes. I've made all these mistakes. Go and learn and listen, tour. The second thing is become lazy. That's what I tell my clients at times as well when my managers become lazy. Now, what does that mean? What that means is you don't have to be the fixer in every situation. You don't need to do that. You don't have to be, you don't need to have advice for everyone in your life. You can ask a question. Ask, learn to ask a question and learn to listen to the response. Now, people who are listening are like, oh my God, give me something concrete. I am giving you something concrete. The problem is somehow all of us, when we grew up, we were. Taught that our value is by giving an answer that is not true. That is unequivocally not true. Our value is having the right answer, but our value is also having the ability to ask the right question. That's awesome, right? That's what I tell leaders, regardless of whether you're a first time manager or you're leading a hundred thousand person company, learn to listen. Learn to ask a great question and learn to shut up and listen to the answer that will serve you for the rest of your life. I will bet any amount of money on that. That's great. If, new and emerging leader, accidental leader, as you call'em, is listening that will serve them well if they'll do that throughout their career. So you talked about growing up in a bookstore. So as I'm going to talk about books and other than the All in Manager what books have shaped you in that's in your career? I got a couple, I mentioned one, which is multipliers. I'm a big fan of Liz Wiseman. The second book that really made a big impact on me is actually by Reed Hastings called Netflix. No Rules, rules. And that's a phenomenal book because he looks inward. He talks about his mistakes. He's a phenomenal leader. He talks about Netflix. He talks about a lot of the things that Netflix is doing right and a lot of mistakes that they made as well. And I'll give you a third one. The third one is not a leadership book. It's written by a firefighter and I think it's called Zen and the Art of Firefighting. That book has made a tremendous impact. How I lead, but it's also made an impact on how I'm trying to become a better person at work and outside of work. So I think it's called Zen and the Art of Firefighting, if I'm not mistaken. I'll send it to you. You can add it if you wanted. In the show notes i's a, I'll put those links in the show notes. Yeah. It's a it's a great, it's not a book about one-on-ones are giving feedback. It's a book about life and it's a book about dealing with really difficult moments, and it's a firefighter who writes about this, about running into buildings. As a firefighter putting out the fire. And there are lots of parallels to leadership in that. So I, I would, you just asked that question. The three that come to my mind are those three. That's awesome. We wanna let people know how to get in touch with you and where they can find your book so they can become an all-in manager. Can you just share a few things and I'll put those links in the show notes? Sure. Sure it's really easy. Just go to all in manager.com. One word, all a LL in manager.com. As soon as you land, there's a blue ribbon up top click it takes you to the Amazon landing page. If you don't wanna buy the book, that's fine. It's, by the way, it's only 99 cents right now for limited time. There's a blog there, there's lots of resources on that on that website. You can follow me on LinkedIn as well. I will make a shameless. Plug for the book because I want you to get the most out of it. Chapter two of the book, if you buy it, chapter two of the book has a little link where you go to the link and it's gonna give you access to all my tools, all my templates. And all my bonuses. Now, the truth is it took me 18 months to write this book. It took me 18 years of working in the trenches to come up with the idea of writing this book. So I hope you grab it. It's my life's work and the reviews are great but again, obviously I'm biased. You will choose it for yourself. Yeah, and I upload a plugin. I went in and downloaded those tools. And if you're out there in the trenches, these tools that you can adapt'em to yourself and right. Some of'em are Google docs and you can go in there and create your own type of system that'll fit into your culture, into your workplace. But I highly recommend that you get the book just if nothing else, just for the tools, it'll really help you. And we thank you for your time today and Got it. We, we look forward to you continue to produce content on LinkedIn and your blog and so forth. And I'll just say he's a great person to follow on LinkedIn. He puts a lot of great content out there that challenges you to thank, help you to ask questions about how you can grow as a leader. Ali, we thank you and wish you well with your book. I appreciate you so much. This was a lot of fun.

Ali Merchant did a great job today. Taking us from his journey growing up in a bookstore in Pakistan where he first encountered Tony Robbins and he lit a fire in him to have a growth mindset a mindset of growing and developing as a leader. Today he took us on that journey where he became an accidental leader. Then how from going to an accidental leader to being someone who was intentionally learning how to grow as a leader, lots of great content. Make sure you download our leader notes. It'll give you a great summary and outline of the key points and the key quotes from today's episode. It will also give you the links to his bio in the book. Make sure you go to Amazon and get the All In Leader. We'll also give you some key takeaways to put application to what you've learned here today. If you've got value out of today's content, make sure you tell a friend, share what's going on the ING to Lead Show. Make sure you subscribe so that every time we upload an episode, it comes into your feed. Also, please go to your favorite directory and give us a rating of five to let others know that we're providing good, valuable content here on the Learning to Lead Show. And until next time, go out and learn, grow and Lead. Take your organization to the next level. I.