Fear Doesn’t Show Up How You Think | It’s What Gets Left Unsaid

Tariq Hassan (00:00)
I grew up dyslexic

I lived in my own fear of failure as a result of the sort of concerns of what I had to compensate for and, or felt like I had to compensate for.

And then as I got into leadership roles, I started to see what would happen inside of organizations

when that same sort of paralysis of fear existed inside of an organization or more directly with my teams.

But more importantly, I started to see what would happen when you identified it, called it out, liberated it, and allowed, gave your team the ability to have some room and some psychological safety to function in absence of it.

the greatness of things that you saw came about as a result of feeling safe to take risks.

Kevin Rice (00:47)
Welcome back to CEOs and ABCs. Today I’m joined by Tariq Hassan, former chief marketing officer at McDonald’s. Prior to that, he held leadership roles at Petco, Bank of America, and Hewlett Packard. Tariq has built an extraordinary career at some of the world’s most recognizable brands. Today, we dive deep into a belief that has shaped his leadership. It’s the belief that you cannot achieve incredible outcomes if fear of failure is embedded in your company’s culture. Tariq shares how growing up to Slexic shaped his understanding of fear.

how psychological safety drives high performing teams, and why celebrating the amazing almost changed the culture inside of his organization. We also explore what this looks like at home, raising a daughter, navigating seasons of long distance parenting, and balancing two high performing careers in one household. This is a conversation about fear and risk and trust and what it really takes to build environments both at home and at work where people feel safe enough to grow.

Kevin Rice (01:43)
So Tariq thank you so much for joining today.

Tariq Hassan (01:46)
Kevin, thanks for having me. It’s great to have a conversation that moves beyond the things we do in our careers every day. So I love what you’re doing. I appreciate being here.

Kevin Rice (01:53)
You know, I’ve had at least a dozen executives on the show who have after the fact expressed to me that they’ve been interviewed by the media, by news, countless times, but nobody’s ever taken a moment to like ask them about their personal life.

You said something on our first call that I’ve been thinking about and you said, you can’t get to incredible outcomes if fear of failure is in the system. So could you share a little bit about this perspective and like, why is this a hill you’re willing to die on?

Tariq Hassan (02:22)
Yeah, you know, it’s really interesting because to your point about life outside your resume, the discovery for this notion of the implications of when you have fear of failure dominant, I think became more relevant for me in my career in reflection of my own personal life. You know, I mentioned you in our conversation,

I grew up dyslexic and that went unidentified for a really long time.

And then when it was identified, went, you know, I was part of that era where you didn’t really talk about your weaknesses or deficits. First of all, it took me years to recognize that actually wasn’t a deficit. It was actually a positive. But I think I lived in my own fear of failure as a result of the sort of concerns of what I had to compensate for and, or felt like I had to compensate for. And then as I got into leadership roles, I started to see what would happen inside of organizations

when that same sort of paralysis of fear existed inside of an organization or more directly with my teams. But more importantly, I started to see what would happen when you identified it, called it out, liberated it, and allowed, gave your team the ability to have some room and some psychological safety to function in absence of it. And the things that you then saw, the greatness of things that you saw came about as a result of feeling safe to take risks.

Kevin Rice (03:33)
So what does that kind of fear of failure look like culturally within an organization or even in a meeting? How does that show up?

Tariq Hassan (03:40)
Yeah.

Yeah, look, I think it shows up in different ways in different cultures, right? I’ve talked in the past a little bit about the ghosts of the past of cultures. It’s amazing how they can still live in the hallways, even when the leadership isn’t the same and the culture appears to evolve, right? And so part of it is decoding and understanding the culture that you’re in. And in particular, in organizations that have had success.

Why shake the status quo of success and take those chances? And I think it shows up to your question in a couple of different ways. In the subtle extremes, I think it just shows up in the opportunities that people don’t take, the risks that they don’t take and the opportunities you don’t even know that the organization missed. At its worst, I think it shows up when the charge is actually asking people to step out of the usual comfort and try things differently.

not for not willingness, but just not belief that it’s a safe environment to or not certain what would happen if the attempt fails. And that can show up in really subtle ways inside of meetings, the things that don’t get said, as well as, you know, overtly the things that.

people back away from when maybe if they pushed a little bit harder and you had the debate a little bit more, you might unlock something because that near miss actually unlocks its way self to an amazing great opportunity. And what I was meaning to you when you and I talked was if you think about creativity, whether it’s in an organization or just great creators themselves, great creativity, great storytelling has tension in it.

And attention has to have dimensions to it. And that dimension, quite often, comes from that little nervousness, that tummy rumble that you have that just says, I’m not sure. And being allowed to, and we see this in our kids, they’re fearless. That’s why we talk about kids being fearless. We haven’t flogged it out of them yet, right? The same thing holds true in an organization.

Kevin Rice (05:24)
Yeah

Tariq Hassan (05:27)
When you allow that and you create that safe space and you encourage it and you actually create a culture where not taking the risk is a bigger detriment than taking it. I’ve been fortunate enough to be around amazing teams where I’ve seen them achieve incredible outcomes or identify incredibly unique ideas.

Kevin Rice (05:43)
Yeah, you have, you have held CMO titles most recently at McDonald’s before that Petco SVP of marketing at bank of America, Hewlett Packard. You’ve had this amazing career. So throughout that career, have you noticed this in different organizations, maybe less subtly?

Tariq Hassan (06:00)
Yeah, I I’ve seen it both, I think subtly and less subtly. And quite often inertia unlocks the willingness to or the need to. You know, as a Petco, we were in a turnaround situation. And when you’re in that environment and you agree as a leadership that you’re going to take big swings, right? It’s amazing how you see those things come about. everyone says, well, it’s because, you know, if we didn’t, the alternative was certainly not a great one.

It’s actually in successful organizations where that can be incredibly difficult. McDonald’s and incredibly talented team. I knew we had another gear. And, and even though the leadership myself and others would proclaim to our team, Hey, let’s take more risks. Let’s try things. You’re safe. We got your back. You wouldn’t necessarily see the behaviors start to change. And I used to have a boss who would say, you know, look, you can say it a couple of times, but if you’re not getting it, you know, then you got to have an action to go with it.

So we did something really simple. I pulled my leaders together and I said, you know what, every quarter, I want your nominations for the absolute greatest failures of the quarter. And I use those words on purpose because I do believe there is a way to fail greatly, right? And so it’s not just about running with scissors and just rolling the dice. It’s about having a construct for what you’re going after strategically.

And then a construct that allows you to either be really successful or fail really successfully. And there’s a couple of really simple pillars I attached to that. You be declarative around what the objective is. Are you cross-functional in who you have engaged in the process? Have you laid out with the measurement and the KPIs will be, you’ll look forward to define what that success looks like. Are you checking in along the way so it’s not wait till the great failure at the end? And then more importantly, the biggest byproduct we would talk about.

was is there exhaust from the experience that either changes the trajectory to be successful, helps the organization not make the same mistake again in a positive way, or there’s a byproduct that actually allows you to pivot and go the other direction. And that used to be a little bit of a joke I would say to the team, what do startups call failure? In many cases, they call it pivot.

Kevin Rice (07:53)
Pivots.

Tariq Hassan (07:54)
Right?

You’re pivoting because it’s easy to fundraise money and say, we learned this and now we’re going to do that. You don’t go in and talk about, well, we do have an incredible failure, but we still want you to write a check to our future. Right? And so how do you bring that sort of entrepreneurial mindset into large organizations is not easy other than to sort of start to celebrate it, frankly, which is what we did.

Kevin Rice (08:13)
Right. And when you say dare greatly, I imagine you’re referring to trying new things, testing out new approaches, but are you also celebrating misses unforced errors?

Tariq Hassan (08:23)
are, we are.

No, look, I think again, there’s the responsible approach to how you do things. It’s just the things you can’t see coming, right? ⁓ But we would, we would literally, we’d grab these nominations and then we had these, an award we would give quarterly called the Amazing Almosts. And it was for two reasons. It wasn’t big. was, know, $50 gift certificate or a pizza party for the team. The point was to share in what the experience created,

what we learned from it, how we benefited from it. And more importantly, and frankly, most importantly, that your folks start to see that psychological safety. And the reason that’s so important, there’s actual data on this. So it’s not just, you know, something that I dreamt up one day and thought was interesting. But as I got into this, I started to go down the rabbit hole and look at it. Google did a really interesting study in this space and they found the most significant driver of success of high performing teams was not time, was not resources, was not talent.

It was psychological safety. So there’s actual data around this as well.

Kevin Rice (09:18)
Yeah, I think what I saw a lot being on the agency side, working with brand side leaders was We want to take risks. We want to try new things, but the second something didn’t work, then there was consequences. and to your point about psychological safety, you can say one thing, but if you have consequences and punishments, then

it’s not congruent, right? And it sounds like your perspective or just even the research shows that with that fear of failure, organizations underperform.

Tariq Hassan (09:49)
They do. I mean, here’s some additional data on this. Today, more than 80 % of our organizations are afraid to have a conversation with HR. More than 70 % of our orgs wake up every day worried and concerned that whether or not they’re contributing to the organization. And on the flip side, companies that don’t have that environment where they allow that risk tolerance, or they have leaders who lead out of

restraint and strength over allowing that room. Those leaders, they waste somewhere in the neighborhood of equivalent of about $6 billion a year in the time that they lose managing with a firm glove and holding that sort of fear factor.

Kevin Rice (10:16)
Mm.

Tariq Hassan (10:28)
of organizations that actually where that safety exists. So it’s not only about the teams and the individuals and the experiences they have, the enterprise actually suffers, the growth of the enterprise suffers, and frankly, the leader themselves suffer. They’re less effective and less efficient in their own week.

If you don’t have that environment where your people feel safe, where they can go explore and try and fail and know that there is a leadership team that has their backs. It’s a lot less fun too. Right.

Kevin Rice (10:50)
Right.

Yeah, we spend a lot of our lives at work. It might as well be enjoyable.

Tariq Hassan (10:57)
Well, and if you

think again, you know, you and I talk about the relationships to parenting. Right. We don’t use that fear approach with our kids when they’re learning to walk, when they’re trying new things, right? We know it’s the exact opposite. When a kid falls, the whole thing you do is not overreact to it. You downplay it and let them know they’re safe.

Kevin Rice (11:01)
Yeah.

Tariq Hassan (11:15)
and then they get up and try again, right? So these are things that we inherently know as individuals, but when we get in our collective organizations for a variety of reasons, a variety of cultures, that either can flourish or that can change.

Kevin Rice (11:27)
Yeah, for me, the, the work context, it was easier. there were frameworks like skill versus will matrixes that would help me understand like what’s happening. where I struggled was now at home in the exact same scenario where

Tariq Hassan (11:34)
Yeah.

Kevin Rice (11:41)
my kids would be throwing a temper tantrum and I would feel like it’s disrespectful. And the reality was it was just a developmental issue. When a child is four, they don’t know how to regulate their nervous system.

Tariq Hassan (11:51)
So you bring that up, let’s go back to fear for a second. So aside from all of the organizational behaviors and all the organizational influences, the aspect of fear is also a physiological reaction in us as individuals. So on top of what you’ve got with an organization, the development of how fear forms in people is very, different. here’s the example.

your body’s and your brain’s ability to define fear to keep you safe, right? That’s just an inherent, you know, ⁓ ability to keep you in a safe environment. It actually happens faster than the brain actually finishes completing the analysis to know whether it’s real or not. The simple example, it’s why you jump back before you realize that stick was not actually a snake. It was just a stick.

Kevin Rice (12:34)
Thanks

Tariq Hassan (12:34)
because the brain has been taught and it’s been conditioned both by terms of the way the physiology of the brain works, but then also your own experiences have you respond. So those things come into the workplace with our folks too. So it’s not only what we bring in as a corporate culture, the development of how fear structures formed for our employees all form in a really, really different way as well.

How much of those do we start to understand as leadership and start to understand so that if you’re going to unlock it, you have to understand how it got locked in the first place.

Kevin Rice (13:03)
Have you had any big career wins that were only made possible because you felt safe to take a risk?

Tariq Hassan (13:09)
Yeah, look, I think it’s interesting. ⁓ My last role, and actually the last couple of roles I was in, I worked for leaders. I’ll give you a simple example. My previous president at McDonald’s, US president, Joe’s mantra, he was known around our team for saying, aren’t scaring me yet. It’s a funny little thing that you can throw out, but it goes a really long way in terms of what that says to the team. mean, that’s like,

My meter’s up, go try things. It’s going to take a lot before you all. mean, just that language from the top creates a really, really different environment. And again, when I was a Petco, I worked for Ron Coughlin who recognized we were in a situation where we could not win as a traditional brick and mortar retailer. We were going to have to do something inherently unique and inherently different.

And so that set the tone both for the leadership and then for us as leaders to go back to our teams and really try and establish different approaches to things without concern of, look, again, there’s always a level of responsibility and the things that don’t leave our accountability. So just like the child that’s during that temper tantrum, when it’s over, we still start to teach them. Okay. That was outside the bounds of what’s acceptable, right?

Kevin Rice (14:13)
Mm-hmm.

That’s the only time we can teach them, because when you’re in the moment, their brain is turned off. They can’t learn.

Tariq Hassan (14:19)
Correct?

And so it’s the same situation. Again, you also let your child know pretty early before the temper tantrum. There are expectations of how they should behave in different environments, right? We have to do the same thing in terms of the way we engage our teams, because you can’t just flip it on and expect that they’re all going to go take risks tomorrow. That was the hard lesson that we learned. My leadership team is we said it, but people weren’t doing it. And in fact, the first time we celebrated an amazing almost my leadership team came back and said, my God, that was awful. We can’t do that again.

We just made people feel like we just called them out for their failures. And I said, we’re going to do it until it feels normal, right? We didn’t do it in a way that was harmful. We didn’t do it in a way that was embarrassing anyone, but it felt inherently very unnatural. And so we kept doing it until people started to understand like, all right, you know what? I just had a moment on one of the programs I was working on.

We had an amazing outcome, but the outcome didn’t mean that the program succeeded. The amazing outcome was what we learned from it for us to do something different. And I can actually go celebrate that, right? Now, again, as an organization, that’s not saying that you should celebrate constant failure. I’ll be very, very clear on that. It’s about understanding those moments and creating those opportunities for your teams to know when they have the opportunity to take risks.

and in the context of running the business and being successful with the business and in the context of maintaining accountability.

Kevin Rice (15:36)
I think those standards are really important to express alongside promotion of trying and taking risks because otherwise then it becomes kind of a cop out like a scapegoat of like, well, you know, we messed up this email blast. We were trying something new and it’s like, well, I want you to try new things, but at the same time, there are activities that are table stakes and you know, we can’t really just afford to be missing on things that are routine.

Tariq Hassan (15:41)
Yeah.

I’ll give you a great example. have a really good friend of mine works for a direct to consumer online business, ran a promotion and crashed the site. And he said to me, I’m thinking, Oh, I got to go call my boss and go call the CEO. And he called the CEO. went through what took place, the reasons why, what they had done to mitigate it in the future, et cetera. And the CEO’s response to him was good. Go figure out how to do it again. I mean, just think about that, right? The individual is smart enough to know that they don’t mean that literally.

But they sure walk away knowing that the way they approached it, why it happened, what they’re doing to mitigate it. And by the way, that comes from their over, right? As an underestimation of the success that you were actually gonna have to crash it, that sets that leader up for a very different continued path forward on the things they will and won’t take chances on. That is a pretty enlightening. I remember him telling me that story and I’m thinking, those are leaders you wanna work for.

Kevin Rice (16:49)
Definitely. Yeah. I mean, it was so successful. It crashed the site. That’s a win.

Tariq Hassan (16:53)
Yeah. Now, were there things you

could have done? You know, in his case, he would have said, we underestimated our success. I had a few of those at McDonald’s where we had promotion windows where we sold out two weeks earlier than we’re supposed to. Now, a little bit of missed opportunity and FOMO is great, but you know, maybe sell out four or five days earlier, not 14. But again, how do you teach the culture of the organization?

that you had a failure inside of a giant success. Even those are important features to be able to start to explain inside of an organization and recast how we think about it. And by the way, I think Kevin, this is going to become really, really important in an agentic world with AI because our old mindset around pre and post-test mindset or like running pilots, it’s an old test model. It doesn’t actually apply as directly.

Kevin Rice (17:38)
Mm-hmm.

Tariq Hassan (17:40)
to an AI world because the whole nature of AI is, like us as humans, continued learning, right?

And so that old pass fail mindset, we’re going to be careful. That’s not really the most effective way to go forward with AI. It’s to actually look and understand, it might not have exact the benchmark I wanted it to, but what happens when I let it continue to learn on itself? It may way over exceed that benchmark. So there’s going to be some fundamental things that we as people need to think about learning as we start to get data defined differently for us.

Kevin Rice (18:09)
Yeah, I think AI and psychological safety is an entire episode in of itself. That’s a very deep conversation.

Tariq Hassan (18:14)
In of itself, sure.

Kevin Rice (18:35)
I wanted to go back to the amazing almost, because I think that’s super interesting how you implemented it within the organization. Was there something that you saw that clued you in to there’s something wrong in the culture that we need to implement this new process?

Tariq Hassan (18:38)
Yeah.

Yeah, look, I think it was first of all, us trying to say it and hoping that we would see a different behavior and not seeing it. And then I think when we did it the first time, that sort of immediate reaction of like, my leaders came back and like, you cannot do this again. You know, our teams are going to kill us. And to me, that was like, we’re going to until we make it comfortable. Right. It’s kind of like when you’re making new friends. Well, you know, they’re your really good friends when that when that line you cross with the ability to laugh at each other.

and cover each other, right? The reason I was so big on continuing it was not only in terms of the creativity, the output that the teams would ultimately do, but I think it changes the mindset of how you look out for each other and how you function as a team, right? Rather than celebrating your failure because I can step on your shoulders on the way past you because of it.

I start to own it together as a community and look about how failures can become wins together. And so I think part of it’s also just a cultural opportunity for how you think about these things. And I would just say that for me, ⁓ I’ve never been a hierarchical leader. I believe in really flattening your leadership model. I very much believe in having great people with better strengths than you in certain areas around you.

Kevin Rice (19:39)
Hmm

Tariq Hassan (19:59)
And that means when you have that collective, that’s the safety net to try those things, to then go and put those things to use and try. I think it’s more rewarding. I think it’s more fun. It’s just a little bit, can’t just assume it’s a little bit of scar tissue to take off first to get organizations comfortable with it. And by the way, we got our group comfortable as a department, but it was viewed very sort of counterculture in other parts of the company.

And that was another contention we had to deal with because, you know, it’s one thing to approach those things. It’s not, that’s why I said you have to along the way include other people in your madness, so to speak. Right. But again, like if you think back, it’s Edison, right? Who said, you know, I didn’t fail a thousand times. I got it right once. Somewhere along the line, we lost that mindset.

Kevin Rice (20:25)
Hmm.

Tariq Hassan (20:44)
And I think it’s because of the accountability of our performance to the whether it’s to the street or the board or the inside of the organization. But yet, if you look at the biggest innovations that have changed culture, for the most part, they either happened from those who were in positions, take Apple, take some massive view of looking things differently and innovate differently to turn the corner or startups. Right. You think about it, it made less sense for Apple to put

Kevin Rice (21:08)
and

Tariq Hassan (21:11)
a camera on a phone than it did for Kodak to create a camera with a phone.

Kevin Rice (21:15)
and

Tariq Hassan (21:16)
Why

did one happen and not the other?

Kevin Rice (21:17)
When did you know that this was working?

Tariq Hassan (21:19)
I think I knew when I was sitting in a meeting and we were going through some results on something and, you it hadn’t gone the way that they wanted it to, but they went through the process. They explained what took place, where we missed, where the outputs were, where we could go in the future. And literally someone at the end of it said, so if nothing else, we got another great example of as an amazing almost. And so when it starts showing up in the vernacular, right, or quite often you don’t see it in the day to day business.

It’s the comments that get made to your leaders or the comments that get made to you. Off to the side when one of your folks said, you know what? I don’t think I would have taken that shot. Thank you for making me feel like I could roll with it. I don’t think it’s one of those things you throw a key KPI up on. Although I will tell you, and it goes back to some of the data on companies that the percentage of opportunities companies don’t take. I did have one of the leaders on my team say to our broader leadership once, look, I don’t even know if we fail enough.

Do we track enough of our failures to even know whether we did as an indicator? It’s are we trying to do things enough? It’s just a, it’s kind of a provocative way of thinking about it. Now, again, I think the key here is, is a very fine line of what I’m talking about and propagating inside the organization that it doesn’t matter whether we succeed ever, right? There’s a flip side of this that you have to be very, very careful of. So I’m not suggesting that people get an absentee on all things successful.

Kevin Rice (22:18)
Mm-hmm.

Tariq Hassan (22:34)
It’s more about those, what are those opportunities and what are those risks that you create inside of an organization you allow them to take that might create some magic that if you hadn’t created the environment for it, it wouldn’t have taken place. It’s not negating our day-to-day run of business and the things that we have to show up and do every day.

Kevin Rice (22:45)
It’s not it.

Yeah, it feels like there’s kind of this subtle nuance here of giving people room to try new things But at the same time having guardrails, right? You can’t just constantly be having misses. And that actually is very similar to, if we were to take this conversation from the conference room to like the living room, it’s very similar to how we work with our kids, right?

Tariq Hassan (23:01)
Yes.

Kevin Rice (23:13)
We want to keep them safe, but they’re going to fall and they need to learn to get back up. And we can put some guardrails around that and like lead a mentor. But at the end of the day, they have to learn through their own mistakes and their own failures. So how do you and your wife, Carla, think about failure at home? Especially when your daughter was younger, before she had moved out of the house and gone off to college.

Tariq Hassan (23:32)
Yeah.

I think we have a healthy tension between the two of us even. I’m a smart man, I’m married up. I have a very high performing, effective leader who in some ways was the opposite of me. I scratched and crawled my way through school, had to work hard for every grade I got. think Carla has some inherently natural capabilities where…

Those things came relatively easy to her. So in some ways, we play a unique balance for our daughter in terms of when those challenges ⁓ show up. Having said that, I think we are a little bit of a different generation of parents that we probably at times try to be a little more too proactive in preventing the failure before it happens than spending the time on how do we prepare when they do fall, right? I’ll give you a simple example. ⁓

My daughter was a senior in high school last year going through the university process, which any parent that’s gone through that knows it’s just very different than when we were. And it’s just an insane amount of pressure of unknown decision making. So her first choice school for early decision, she got deferred, not rejected, but deferred. And you would have, you you thought the sky was falling and thankfully happy ending. She, she got in, she got in the Northwestern. That was her first choice.

And I said to her much later, I said, I would have never said this to you when you first got deferred. But part of me was really glad you got deferred. Because we don’t have a lot of early decisions throughout our lives. More often than not, we have to go through deferment, through many of the things we go through and the things that we pursue. And so, of course, if you hadn’t gotten in, I’d have been really disappointed for you. But the fact you didn’t get in on the early decision worked, pursued,

didn’t give up and got in off deferred into regular decision, that’s a pretty amazing life experience, right? And so I think we work hard to look for those deferral moments, if you will, look for opportunities where you might know your kid is gonna fall, but rather than jumping in front and throwing the net down in the safe ones.

Kevin Rice (25:16)
Absolutely. Yeah.

Tariq Hassan (25:31)
How do you counterbalance? Like, you know what? I’m going to let you fall on this one. You’re going to have to learn. Not easy, right? It’s never easy to let your kid do that. I think we’ve agreed that the perseverance that creates and the ability to sort of learn how to persevere is critical. Now, in fairness to her, she’s got a bit of built into her. She’s a cancer survivor. And so there’s a little bit of this already inherently in her. But I think as parents, we

Kevin Rice (25:35)
Yeah.

Tariq Hassan (25:54)
We maybe don’t give our kids enough credit for their ability to survive it, so we try to prevent it from happening in the first place too often sometimes.

Kevin Rice (26:01)
Yeah, I think that’s a natural tendency to, as a parent, want to give your kids more opportunities, you know, a better childhood than maybe you grew up with and in doing so we want to take away disappointment and pain. But disappointment is a great learning opportunity. It’s a great teacher, right? When kids are disappointed or even as an adult, when I’m disappointed, I can either choose to be a victim of my circumstances or I can choose to grow from it and learn through it. And,

make better decisions or become a better person as a result of that disappointment.

Tariq Hassan (26:30)
Yeah.

Now can tell you on the flip side of it, there’s probably plenty of times when Carla rightly so would say to me, this is not one of those moments we let her fall. I probably come a little more out of a little of hard knocks at times and she’ll counterbalance me and say, no, no, no, this is one where we can prevent it and we should. The safety net’s not there. And so I think you have to as a parent understand where is the safety net.

Kevin Rice (26:40)
Yeah, sure.

Tariq Hassan (26:55)
If it’s not there and the implications could be really detrimental, then of course we do the things that we’re supposed to do as parents. Yeah. But even there’s some stakes, yeah, right? But even when there’s some stuff that’s, know, the stakes are still high, but the safety net’s there, then you have to look and say, where is my kid today? Because tomorrow they could fall without any problem and bounce back up. Could be the same exact fall as today.

Kevin Rice (27:00)
Right, when the stakes are high, right? When safety is, like physical safety.

Tariq Hassan (27:20)
But there’s other stuff going on their lives where this is not the moment, right, to allow that lesson to be learned. So it’s the same with the people we lead. Failure does not look, even the same failure does not look the same day in and day out for our folks, nor does it for our kids. It’s multi-dimensional. So thinking about the environment that it’s in, but also then thinking about the state of mind of the individual when it’s taking place.

Kevin Rice (27:27)
Mm-hmm.

What is your version of psychological safety at home look like kind of just day to day? How did you facilitate a culture?

Tariq Hassan (27:48)
I’m probably better at

work some days than I am at home. Look, I think it’s the things that we’ve talked about. ⁓ We always had one kind of really simple metric that we used, which was if she’s still talking, we’re doing okay, right? When the minute our kids stopped talking, we were like, we probably have encroached on the environment, right?

It may not be that they talk right when you want them to, but as long as you know at some point, conversation is going to be had. There’s times now I have to literally step back and think, wow, I can’t believe I’m having this conversation with my kid. I would never talk to my parents about this. But then I’m overjoyed by the fact that she feels comfortable enough too. So I think for us, there was always a really simple metric of does she feel like she can keep communicating and will she communicate ahead of time?

Kevin Rice (28:35)
Mm-hmm.

Tariq Hassan (28:36)
And that I think is held true. And I think by the time your kids get older, that becomes even more critical, right? You think it’s when they’re younger. It’s actually when they start to get into their teen years and their early adulthood. When that starts to show up, boy, are you grateful.

Kevin Rice (28:49)
They have less reliance on you, right? They’re not opening up to you because they live in your house and they rely on you for food and shelter. And I draw this parallel sometimes of like in early parenting, you kind of have this assigned authority, right?

Tariq Hassan (28:51)
Yeah.

Kevin Rice (29:03)
But once they grow up, you kind of have to shift into more authentic authority where the authority is earned because of how you show up for your team. Otherwise kids, they’re not relying on you anymore. Your daughter’s out of the house. She doesn’t have to call you, but.

Tariq Hassan (29:16)
No, but the biggest

indicator of success you have as a parent is when they do it in spite of having to. And so as I said, so if, you know, we’ve been fortunate enough to, we have a relationship with our daughter and of course, you know, the mother daughter one’s even more unique, like, but the, know at some point, we’re pretty certain at some point she’s going to come and talk to us. Even if we know about it, we haven’t, we haven’t got it or engage in it.

Still pretty good idea that she, it’s like understanding the communication codes of our kids too, right? At some point she’s gonna either reach out to her mom or both of us and the conversation will be had. When it doesn’t and we know, that’s the stuff where you were like, okay, what’s going on, right? And you know, like I think psychological safety is, you know, it’s that basal affirmation, confidence that you’ve got them, that you know, that they’re safe.

Kevin Rice (29:53)
Mm-hmm. Now.

Tariq Hassan (30:02)
⁓ encouragement, support when they fail, celebration in both cases, ⁓ Knowing when to slide in and prevent it, knowing when to catch, right? And then as I said, like, can you maintain the conversation? And at times, know, I’m, know, Carla’s probably better at this than me sometimes, like not everything has to be a lesson.

dad has to work on that one a lot. I think I want to move to the lesson behind it. It’s not always the case and not always necessarily needed, at least not in the moment.

Kevin Rice (30:32)
Yeah, I always moved to the solution too fast. Instead of like listening to the problems, giving comfort support, I’m like, okay, my natural instinct is to let’s just fix this.

Tariq Hassan (30:36)
Yeah.

is to fix.

Yeah. So I have a dear friend and mentor. He has four daughters and a wife. lone man at home. And he gave me great advice a while back. He said, when I approach a conversation with my daughters, I always ask three things. Do you want me to listen? Do you want my advice? Or do want me to fix it?

And it’s a great sort of like really simple thing to remind yourself because I’m like you. All right. I want to go and fix and solve and continue to move on. But I try to remind myself with those three things. Do you want me just to sit and listen? Do you need my advice or do you actually need to engage and help solve this for you?

Kevin Rice (31:21)
Yeah, I’ve heard it as do you want to be heard, hugged or helped? ⁓ and I try to remind myself of that with my kids and also in my relationship, Because it’s not always my MO of just like, okay, let’s solve the problem. That’s not always what’s needed.

Tariq Hassan (31:26)
Yeah, it’s a great way of putting it.

No, because we were rewarded, particularly our generation of leaders, we were rewarded by the facts. Get it done, solve it. So it’s a really important one. I’m better at it some days than others, frankly. It’s a lifelong journey.

Kevin Rice (31:46)
Yeah.

So with you and Carla, because Carla is also a incredibly accomplished career marketer. She’s the chief marketing officer of JP Morgan Chase. How did you guys balance home life while also both having two very ambitious careers?

Tariq Hassan (32:05)
I think it was right from the very beginning. We met when Carla was on the corporate side and I was on the agency side. And actually ⁓ we met through a mutual friend that she had worked with and who was then my client. And eventually when we did eventually get engaged and ultimately married, she came back to work, both my wife and my client, because she had moved from her previous employer to come to work on a… ⁓

company that was my client.

Kevin Rice (32:32)
that’s amazing. So were you like the

like client partner account executive and she was the client?

Tariq Hassan (32:36)
Yeah, I was a little more senior in the agency. So we weren’t in quite as many meetings, but yeah, small and in the same and in the same city. And so we very quickly established we used to call it the the garage rule. So if we rode home when we went into the garage, that was it. It was kind of a rule like just no more shop talk. I think partly from from a personal perspective to maintain that balance.

Kevin Rice (32:39)
Sure.

Tariq Hassan (33:02)
But then professionally, we felt it was really important that we continued to allow ourselves to establish and develop our own identities. And I think that was important for us.

Honestly, it’s not as hard as most people think it is. Most people say, my gosh, I love you on your kitchen table. Mine’s like, no, you wouldn’t. It sounds a lot like yours because we don’t, we don’t talk a lot about work So we, just something that we’ve always felt was kind of really important to maintain.

your own identity and your own space in those things, particularly when you then kind of come home and that’s all it ends up being, right? Yeah. Yeah.

Kevin Rice (33:31)
Otherwise it just…

all encompassing, right? I mean, I love the boundary you had of

when you get home, you know, turning off the work. I actually tried to have a kind of like a re-entry ritual when I come home from work. And that’s just kind of like helps remind me of, okay, I’m taking off my executive hat and now it’s time to come home and be dad. And, my goal tonight is to be firm and fair and kind, and we’re going to work on this.

Tariq Hassan (33:52)
Yeah.

Kevin Rice (34:00)
and most importantly, turn off my phone or put it on, not disturb because otherwise like the Slack messages and emails just keep coming.

Tariq Hassan (34:07)
Yeah, no, mean, honestly, I think we’ve done it for so long that it’s just kind of become second nature for us.

Kevin Rice (34:13)
Yeah. Did you guys have any seasons where your careers were maybe pulling you towards work harder than others? How did you manage that kind of ebb and flow? Did you have seasons where you were both really under a lot of pressure at work?

Tariq Hassan (34:20)
Hmm.

Yeah.

Yeah, I think there was two dimensions to that. We had a season around career decisioning, opportunity presented to one of us where it would have meant pretty significant changes for the family. And neither one of us overtly comfortable putting the other in the position to say, like, I’m going to lead or you’re going to lead. ⁓ And that one we worked our way through is

not about the role ultimately, but like really evaluating what that role meant in terms of our life as a family ⁓ and deciding not to do it. We had another one where as a result of it, we decided to do it. Yes, the role was a great experience for one of us, but making the move was an even bigger opportunity we decided collectively as a family. let’s do that. ⁓ Look, I think… ⁓

It’s more like month to month as opposed to seasons ⁓ where, you know, we’ll go through ebbs and flows of, you know, one of us having some sort of madness going around what it is that we have to do. And I think we do a pretty good job of not allowing that to dominate or just being very clear. Like, here’s the space. I got to detach for a bit. I recognize it. I’m stepping out. Here’s what it looks like. Right.

I think the hardest thing we had to deal with them, I did seven years bi-city living And that’s mostly for me, I think as a parent trying to be present, you know, for my daughter or coming home and be like, Hey, I know I’ve been, I know I haven’t been here for a week, like include me and catch me up on everything I missed. Right. mean, that’s hard. And so, um, yeah, yeah.

Kevin Rice (35:53)
Right. Or listen to me, right? Like I would go away for a

work trip, be gone for four days, come home, be like, hey guys, your room’s a mess. It’s time to clean it. And they’re like, we haven’t seen you in four days. Like, why are we going to listen to you?

Tariq Hassan (36:03)
Yeah, yeah,

yeah, exactly. And you know, in fairness to them, we have to figure out where is the reward in that moment? Is it really the action? Or is it being able to say to the kids, you’re gonna do something, actually listen to me? And in fairness to them, we are out of rhythm with them when we travel and we do those things. And so do we give the beat to think about how to reenter, so to speak, as you put up earlier?

Kevin Rice (36:27)
Yeah. How did you maintain connection with your daughter while you were, you said seven years living bi coastal, either to San Diego or Chicago?

Tariq Hassan (36:33)
Yeah, I mean, you know, it wasn’t

it wasn’t consistent, right? I would do, you know, two weeks at home, a week at home, etc. But we, I think it started out strong. And then eventually, I think it was more one sided of me. We had this thing we would do every day, where she had this joke where she’d send me a photo of the food in the cafeteria that day. And then I would send her

whatever I made for dinner or whatever we would send back and forth instead of a running joke because she didn’t think her school’s cafeteria food was particularly good. but learning how to embrace and understand that like I got it. I had to figure out a communicating in her stream.

You know, even now she just, you she’s in her freshman year of college and I’m like, she’ll call him. I think she’s more interested in having me turn the phone to FaceTime with the dog than she is with me. Right. And so it’s how do you just stay present? Honestly, I think I had it harder than she did, if I’m honest. I certainly ⁓ before she went to college, it took some real time off and spent real time with her over the summer. And I think I was doing it out of some sort of.

Kevin Rice (37:25)
Yeah.

Tariq Hassan (37:34)
concern or guilt I had from absence during some of those windows. But I can confidently say from the exchanges and the engagement I had with her, that was way more self-created for me than it was a reality for her. We do that as parents, right? We talk about their need, but honestly, we have to manage our emotional desire for them to need us.

Kevin Rice (37:45)
Mm-hmm.

Absolutely. mean, there’s so much pressure. There’s just a lot of pressure and there’s a lot of societal conversation around like parental guilt and it’s easy to take that externally and internalize it. But yeah, I mean, if you have a great relationship with your kid, they see you being successful at work that inspires them to pursue their own passions. It’s not all a negative thing. And I’m not trying to like paint this world as like it’s terrible to be ambitious.

Tariq Hassan (37:55)
especially as they get older. Yeah.

Yeah.

Now.

Kevin Rice (38:21)
because it’s not, it really sets a precedent or inspires your kids to do something with their life.

Tariq Hassan (38:23)
Yeah.

And then, and then you look, there were things I just picked and I made a point of, right? Like, all right, kid, you’re playing varsity volleyball. I’m going to make a point of getting back and be back for as many games as I possibly could. ⁓ and what I, what I did discover during that window was it wasn’t about quantity at all. It was about that identification of certain things that I knew mattered to her, even if she wouldn’t have said like that mattered to her far more than like the quantity of it.

Kevin Rice (38:50)
Yeah, the quality of.

Tariq Hassan (38:51)
And then let’s face it, even

if I’d been home all the time, by the time they’re at that level of high school, they’re, off and running anyways. They’re hi bye here’s what’s going on anyways. Right. And so I think in some weird way, the absence had me prioritize certain things, probably even more than I would have if I’d been home.

Kevin Rice (38:57)
They just want to be with their friends anyways. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. And those are the things that kids remember, right? It’s the consistent rituals, whatever it might be, going to sporting events, exchanging a very specific line of text messages every day. Those are the things that they’re going to remember over like some sort of big grand gesture to make up for missed time.

Tariq Hassan (39:19)
Yeah.

It’s true and you don’t you don’t realize it till it shows up, right? So the summer before she went off to college, I had this sort of running joke. I was like, okay, life lesson of the day. And I’d pick like one thing that I would sort of teach her. ⁓ you know, I went to visit her in college and I can’t remember what it was, but one of her friends said, yeah, Nora told me you taught her how to do this this summer, right?

Talk about validation as a parent, right? It didn’t even really matter what it was. It was just like, wow, that little thing stuck, We convince ourselves that sometimes we have to do these big momentous things for it to stick. And usually it’s like everything in life. It’s the things you don’t think people are even gonna notice that end up being the biggest memory recall.

Kevin Rice (39:51)
Yep.

Yeah.

I love the quote you mentioned earlier about do you need me to listen, help, fix? and obviously it sounds like you kind of implemented that in your personal life with your daughter and probably even Carla, how did you implement that or how did you use that with employees in a career environment?

Tariq Hassan (40:23)
Yeah, look, and I think it starts with the self objective and self awareness that I meant what I said I’m better at it some days than I am others, right? And so I think it’s really important we recognize when we’re not at our best in our ability to do that, and be able to circle back and be able to say whether it’s to your partner, your kid or someone you’re working with, I didn’t show up the best way I could there. But I think those things like a full circle this whole conversation we’ve been having.

psychological safety allows vulnerability and authenticity. And when those things are all present, it’s much easier to have those kinds of conversations, whether it’s with a partner, a child or an employee. ⁓ I think, by the way, for better or for worse in certain situations, who I am is who I am generally, I don’t have a very thin, it’s a very, very thin line between how I am at work and who I am professionally, or at home.

And so I approach those things pretty similarly. And then again, I think it’s matter of recognizing when do you do it better some days than others.

Kevin Rice (41:17)
You had me really thinking about whether or not I created an environment of psychological safety in my own organization. And I was always just such a driver, always focused on the next win, the next outcome. It’d be minor celebration. Great job. You signed this new client. What’s that? Like, what’s the update on this next one?

And you kind of inspired me because I really want to kind of go back and even talk to some of old team members and kind of get an idea of like, what was their experience in the rooms with me leading the conversation? Cause I don’t think I always showed up as great either. ⁓

Tariq Hassan (41:52)
Well, and Kevin, be clear, be very clear.

There were lots of days when I went back and went, ⁓ totally wrong posture. I was driving today. I was pursuing it, usually getting pushed, right? In cases where we’re being pushed on our own results or et cetera. I think it’s a marathon, right? And so there’s always going to be little periods within mile to mile where those things are going to not necessarily be their best.

Kevin Rice (42:02)
Did you?

Sure.

Tariq Hassan (42:18)
I think you look for totality. And when I left the organization, the thing I’m probably the most proud of was the number of people who had a common theme that thanked me for creating sort of an authenticity inside the organization. Right. By the way, that means just like in a family, it’s not always bright and sunny. That means that vulnerability also allows for us to not show up at our best sometimes without.

Retribution either, right? And be able to recognize that. Again, within boundaries, there’s certain behavioral elements that can’t come with it. people hear me talk about this and I’d love to say I can do this day in and day out. I have lots of days when I miss. The question is who’s around you to give you a shake, right? I had one or two truth tellers, yeah.

Kevin Rice (42:59)
And when you miss…

How do you, so in, in a work context, I know at home, at least for me, it’s like, I mess up all the time. I say something, I raise my voice and I repair, I apologize immediately. get down on their level, but it almost feels a little contrived in a corporate corporate setting of like coming back to an employee and be like, Hey, I didn’t carry myself very well yesterday. I always want to apologize. like, did you, did you have a process of repairing when you messed up at work?

Tariq Hassan (43:08)
Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah.

Maybe it might feel

look it might feel contrived the first time.

But if you repeat it, then I don’t think over time it is considered contrived. It only feels that way when you’re doing it the first time. And by the way, that’s as much a message to you on the unfamiliarity as it is to the person who’s hearing it, right? And then do you have like, I had a couple leaders on my team, I call them my truth tellers. They had no problem coming and finding me in a corner and go, wow, did you ever miss on that one?

Kevin Rice (43:36)
Mm-hmm.

Tariq Hassan (43:59)
or an HR partner. I had a great HR partner at McDonald’s and she would find me and be like, oh, dude, you so missed the mark on that one. Here’s what we’re going to go do. Like, are you, are you okay to hear that? It’s not fun when you’re first hearing it, but like, if you can get into that rhythm of clarity, just like we patch and repair things in our relationships, not even just at home, our broader relationships, you can do that. I think.

It depends on who you want, what your leadership style is, particularly the more senior you get. I have just not been somebody who likes to function from that sort of executive position of power. It’s funny story. When I first started at a company, I was wandering around, had some free time wandering around, just like introducing myself, meeting folks on my team.

Kevin Rice (44:29)
Yeah, because we’ve.

Tariq Hassan (44:45)
And one of the assistants came over and she said, are you just like wandering around and saying hi to people? And I said, yeah. And she said, you’re kind of freaking people out. Executives don’t do that here. Now that’s an important moment because a, I jokingly said to her, well, I guess we’ll have to get used to it because this executive does, but it was also important for me to understand culturally, right? It’d been easy for me just to completely look at that and say, wow, where are guys from? Are you guys from Mars?

Kevin Rice (45:09)
Yeah, that’s the ghost of cultures past that you mentioned earlier.

Tariq Hassan (45:09)
I mean, was my initial reaction. Yes, right?

And so later I was like, wow, I need to think about that. As much as I wanted to blow that off as like, that’s silly. In fairness, that’s important to understand. I think it probably took me well after that moment to sort of reflect on that and understand that, A, I was gonna be a leader that still was available and present.

But I shouldn’t have dismissed that quite as quickly as I did.

Kevin Rice (45:35)
So if somebody listening wants to build a culture of psychological safety and, the appropriate level of failure celebration at work, at home, what are some of the core principles to, doing that?

Tariq Hassan (45:48)
Again, think you go back and you have to start with understanding the environment that you’re doing it in. If you’ve been there a long time, you probably have a pretty good roadmap for it. If you’re a new to the organization, you both have to learn it. And as I was alluding to, you have to have empathy for it so that you’re understanding how to build a roadmap.

Because I had, you know, my attempts to stop and start to figure out how to do this in previous roles, I didn’t always nail it the first time. More often than I didn’t, it was because I had a very clear plan of what I wanted, but I didn’t have it in the context of the culture that I needed to be successful in introducing it into. So I think understanding that.

And then, I think it’s the African proverb, right? If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go further, go together. You have to involve other people, The ownership of culture is not an individual roadmap, Just like it gets created by multiple experiences over time, you have to change it.

with multiple experiences during that time. so I think allowing people into the process is a really, really critical one. And then I think you have to be declarative. You have to let people know what your intent is. You can’t sneak up on them with the change of a world that they’re familiar with and know. But you can be declarative. You can engage them in the process. You can take them along the way. Again, things that I’ve done better at certain times than I have at other times.

And but when you do it, you do it well, you’ll you’ll know the organization will give you the indications. You’ll feel it.

Kevin Rice (47:11)
Yeah. I had an experience last night. son came up to me and he’s like, dad, I got to be honest with you about something. I was like, okay, great. Like this sounds promising. I want to let you know that I’ve been sneaking extra time on my switch playing a video game. I was like, well, first of all, I really appreciate the honesty. Like I’m proud of you for being honest. And I said like,

It sounds like maybe it’s too tempting to have the switch readily accessible. So what we’re going to do is I’m going to take away the switch, not to punish you, but just to make it easier for you so that it doesn’t tempt you when you’re not supposed to. And then I’ll, I’ll get it out for you on the, I let him play like an hour a week and I’ll get it out for you for that hour and you can play it. But I purposely didn’t have like a big repercussion. The repercussion was, okay, I’m going to help you and take this away from you.

And my aim there was to create safety because I know the stakes are going to be higher when he’s older, when he’s going out with friends and, there’s a lot worse things that could happen. And I want him to feel comfortable enough to call me and say, Hey, like I’m somewhere I shouldn’t be. I need some help right now. And to know that he’s not going to get grounded for a month because he, he asked for help and he did the right thing.

Tariq Hassan (48:19)
Yeah, and I think to you, that requires both you having the reaction you had, but it also requires, and he understood it by telling you. Like my team would have told you what’s the one thing that sort of like is the wrong step with him. And that surprises, right? And one of my leaders used to say, guys,

Something bad doesn’t get better with time. Right. And he would say this to us all the time. And that’s because if you know that it’s safe enough to come and have the conversation, dad, I used the switch when I wasn’t supposed to. You get to a resolution. I may not like the resolution, but it wasn’t disproportionate to my not surprising you and having the conversation and working out the remedy together. Right. And so that’s the other thing I probably governed by a lot, which is like,

Kevin Rice (49:00)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Tariq Hassan (49:08)
I don’t like surprises for my birthday. let’s not, you know, let’s not surprise me with business results or business things on the team and have the confidence to know that we can work it together.

Kevin Rice (49:10)
Yeah

So if I had Carla joining the episode, if

I had Carla joining the episode right now, you wouldn’t like that surprise.

Tariq Hassan (49:20)
Yeah, she would tell you too. She probably would tell you, I’m not going on. He’d kill me. doesn’t, I’m not a surprise person. ⁓ But your son reflected that, right? He could have surprised you. He probably realized telling you was going to manage the situation much more than the surprise of you catching him.

Kevin Rice (49:24)
Yeah.

Tariq Hassan (49:38)
And if anything, you should be proud of him, but then you should be proud of yourself for getting in an environment where he’s willing to talk about it, right? We don’t do that enough as a parent. We don’t step back enough and go, all right, I did that right. Because it’s hard to know when you do.

Kevin Rice (49:43)
Absolutely.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah. Celebrate some of those parenting wins.

Tariq Hassan (49:53)
Yeah,

yeah.

Kevin Rice (49:53)
Tariq, thank you so much for joining today. I really enjoyed this conversation talking about fear of failure and psychological safety and how we kind of bridged it between work and family life. Like this is really the ethos, the spirit of the platform we’re trying to create here on CEOs and ABCs. So thank you for your candor, your honesty, and I just appreciate your time. So thank you for joining today.

Tariq Hassan (49:57)
Thanks, Kevin.

Thanks for letting me take a break from the usual conversations we have around our profession to be able to talk about who we are, because so much of that is actually the guiding light to the things that we do and how we get them done. So thanks, Kevin. I appreciate the opportunity.