Intentional Connections: Embracing Vulnerability feat. Frank Congiu

In this episode of Taking Back Monday, we explore the power of intentional connections and how embracing vulnerability can transform your professional life. Discover how genuine relationships can boost your career, personal growth, and business success. If you're tired of superficial networking and ready to build meaningful connections that truly matter, this episode is for you. Tune in to get practical tips on creating an authentic network that supports your goals and enriches your journey.

Our guest, Frank Conjiu, is a seasoned leader at Randstad, the world's largest talent organization. With a unique background that combines psychology and accounting, Frank's journey from being the first in his family to attend college to becoming a pivotal figure in the HR community is nothing short of inspiring. He shares his insights on how intentionality and vulnerability have shaped his career and personal life, offering listeners valuable lessons on building a supportive and impactful network.

Key Takeaways:

• Intentional Networking: Learn how to build meaningful, value-driven relationships that go beyond traditional networking.
• Power of Vulnerability: Understand the role of vulnerability in creating authentic connections and fostering trust.
• Community Building: Discover Frank's approach to creating successful communities and hosting impactful events.
• Personal Growth: Gain insights into leveraging your background and experiences to drive personal and professional success.
• Leading with Generosity: Explore the concept of leading with generosity and how it can transform your career and relationships.

It's time to say "goodbye" to the Sunday Scaries.

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Transcript

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Hey everyone. Thank you so much for tuning back into taking back Monday. I am so excited. You've decided to say goodbye to the Sunday scaries and hello to the future of work. I am so excited to introduce you to an incredible guest today. Welcome to the show, Frank. Yeah. Thank you for having me. Well, we met by way of a mutual friend and she was talking about my podcast and we were getting ready to kind of put together a list of who we thought would be really inspirational thought leaders. And your name was number one at the top of our list. So thanks, Amber. Thanks for connecting me to Frank. I'm really excited to, to learn from you and hear a little bit more about your story. I feel like I owe Amber money for, uh, for that plug. So, um, yeah, happy to share some, some background on me. So, uh, by way of introduction, Frank Conju and I work for an organization, uh, called Ronstadt world's largest talent organization. And, uh, joined about 10 months ago. And part of the reason I was brought into the organization was the stuff that I'd been doing for years now in the HR community, which is building community and service of HR leaders. Not only executives that we do business with, but also just people out there, um, that we find really, uh, innovating or people that we think can bring value to the HR community. So it's, uh, it started off as a passion project for me and has evolved into a full time job. So a lot of our listeners work in more of a corporate environment and maybe get a little nervous like HR comes into the room and you're thinking, Oh, no, HR is here. Like, what am I going to do? They're kind of the, the boogeyman of the corporate world. Sometimes. Why? What's your reaction to that? How would you respond to that idea? Um, Well, first, I'd acknowledge that that's not 100 percent wrong, right? I mean, I think that is still going to be the reality and that, uh, when someone maybe needs some course correction, HR will be there to help steer that. So that's that's not completely going away. I think what HR really needs to be doing and the best leaders in HR are doing a lot more. Are thinking about how to help advance the careers of individuals, how to steer the careers of individuals, how to make sure that they have all the resources needed, whether it's specific to education, coaching, any sort of enablement that individuals can need and would benefit from and you see some world class organizations that are that are doing this across the board. Um, I personally come from a background of an uneducated family. So I love organizations that are doing things like providing education resources to frontline employers and, uh, funding that education. So, um, I think HR is doing a lot more than perhaps they get credit for. And there are certain HR leaders that are, that really stand out and are doing a lot more. And so I always think about how do we celebrate those sorts of leaders so that other people kind of join the party. You mentioned that you come from a background of an uneducated family. Were you the first in your family to go to college? Yeah. So the first in my family to ever go to college and I come from a fairly large family. So my mother was one of six and my father. One of four. And, um, out of all of my cousins and my, uh, aunts and uncles and grandparents, I'm the first person to ever go to college. So that in itself, um, came with some interesting challenges, both from this perspective of being the first to do it, but then also how to figure out how to fund it. And so worked full time while going to school full time. And, um, one of the blessings in that was, was like, Bit of a career pivot from what I thought I might do. I started as a psychology major at NYU, transferred schools, went to an accounting major and, uh, never did anything in either field. But I think both of those studies helped underpin what I do today. Yeah. I also started as a psychology major. And then I discovered that I didn't want to be a therapist. I didn't want to go to grad school. I didn't want to do any of that. And there's not a lot you can do in psychology when you don't want to go to expanded school. So I actually pivoted into marketing because I discovered it's the more employable version of psychology. How do we understand how people think? Yeah. Well, I eventually ended up there, but it wasn't, wasn't on the roadmap initially. So tell us a little bit about, how did you get to where you are today? What were some key milestones in your journey that brought you to your daily life today? Yeah. I love the question, right? Because I think the worst term I've ever heard is self made man or self made woman, because no one is. And I think the most successful people in the world Achieve success through and with the help of other people. And so if I think back to the earliest stages in terms of growing up in a very uneducated and, and, um, poor might be a strong word, but, uh, not a wealthy family, but living in a town with lots of wealthy individuals, largely an educated population. Um, I learned at an early age, it was really critical for me to surround myself with my friend's parents and build intentional relationships to understand how they achieve the things that they did, how they. owned the possessions they had or the country club memberships and things like that. So I think from a very young age, I, I realized that I wasn't going to achieve what I wanted to by surrounding myself by my family. Now all very lovely people, but just had different things than what I had aspirations to achieve. And that carried through as I, um, graduated high school. And I thought about the friends that I had and the friends that I needed to make, um, And then certainly as I got into the corporate world, being really intentional about building the right relationships. And now I do this for a living, right? I spend a ton of time thinking about who are the people that I need to have in the room as I'm doing large summits, events, dinners, and so on. So I think it started at a really early age and I carry it forward. Even, uh, even today. So I'm a father of two young girls and, uh, grew up in a family of boys. And so not knowing, uh, how to raise. young daughters, I intentionally thought about seeking out parents who had, uh, so my friend's parents who had successful daughters and ask questions, right? So I think no matter what the goal is that you have, I always try to think about who are the relationships that can help make that goal more successful. I think that's so key. And I agree with you. I hate the phrase like self made and that the idea that I did it by myself, all of my success, I can trace back to a friend or a colleague or someone who saw me for what I wanted to be known for and saw an opportunity and just opened that door for me. Or in the case of some of my friends shoved me through it because they said, this is good for you. And this is an opportunity you need to take. Even when I sat there saying, well, I don't know. I mean, Maybe who am I to do that? Who am I to have that opportunity? Have you ever felt like considering your background and the people that you were surrounded with that little hesitation or edge of fear? Like, who are you to take these opportunities? Um, so absolutely. Imposter syndrome is a very real thing. I still have it as of today. Right. And I don't know that it'll ever go away. Um, I think as you seek to constantly, if you believe and you subscribe to Better Never Stops. then you'll always have a bit of that and something about that level of uncomfort or um, sort of maybe like healthy anxiety, I think is a good thing, right? This, this, this ability to get complacent is probably the worst thing. And so I straddled this idea of, There's something nice in being comfortable for a little bit. And then, I want to always feel uncomfortable. And so I always put myself in the room where if I'm the smartest person, then it's a massive failure. And transparently, I'm never the smartest person in the room because I intentionally set myself out. To be in rooms of people that I can learn things from and I, on a daily basis, I'm on a call, uh, and I'm learning something from someone, or I'm in, I'm hosting a dinner and there's multiple people around the table. So, I, I seek that out intentionally, uh, because I'm a big believer in that, that's the only way to get ahead, um, and to continuously, and I'm a very naturally curious person. Um, I think what's important though is to step back and say, Oftentimes, these people have a ton of expertise and they're a lot smarter than you, but it's in maybe one way. So, if you do this too often, you can walk away feeling less than. I think the reason that I don't is that I realize that, okay, of course a CHRO who's been practicing for 30 years is going to know HR far better than I do. And there's things I know far better than them. And if you can walk away with that, knowing that, and you don't let it detract from your own, Self esteem then great. Um, you should, you should push yourself to do that as much as possible. And you mentioned a couple of things that I want to key in on. You mentioned the importance of relationships and surrounding yourself with people who are going to elevate you and elevate your experiences. If anyone were to go to your LinkedIn page, I feel like when I was doing my, my pre research on this conversation, we see a lot of pictures of these dinners that you mentioned that you host. Tell us a little bit more of those, how you got started and what value they bring to you and to your community. So it kind of fell into it. Um, as I mentioned, right, psychology, accounting started working for a guy who wrote a bestselling book and, uh, within his business, I started running some of the consultant projects. And one of the consulting projects was building executive community on behalf of one of the world's largest consultancies. And through that, they asked me to lead the chief operating officer community. And now I have. No knowledge of what a chief operating officer even does at this point, but I'm, I'm tasked with convening this, this group and creating a community of a hundred. And, uh, I then would go on and build this for British telecom focused on marketing, did it for Siemens and focused on heads of sales, university of Phoenix focused on chief learning officers. Um, and as my run was up in that organization, I got approached by another company that was squarely in the HR space. And then All those sort of fears and doubts, like why would I get approached by an HR company? What could I possibly do here? I don't know anyone in HR. Quickly was able to pivot that and say like, well, I know this playbook. I built this for companies that had no relationship to the COOs, no relationship with the heads of sales. Like, why don't I just come in here and do this? So I, um, effectively said, I'll take the role. And I said, as long as you give me some budget and a little bit of, uh, side project time to start carving out a CHRO community that I'll run. So back in December of 2015, I hosted the first CHRO dinner. Which was phenomenal and had, um, CHRs from all the biggest companies from IBM, Accenture and Pfizer and MetLife and, all Fortune 500 organizations around the table. And that was the first moment of, holy shit, I can do this. Um, and, and I think that the excitement just got turned on and so I've been doing these dinners now for HR leaders for close to 10 years. And, uh, they just, since January, I've done 23 of them. So, very, very busy first half of the year. And what that does, I think if you think about like what I was saying before, in terms of being really intentional about building relationships, doing it in a one on one fashion is fantastic. If you're doing it in a pretty, uh, laser like focused manner, but if you want to be able to build relationships at scale, I don't think there's any better way than doing it through the lens of building community and doing it in service of others. So I feel like, you'll, you'll, if you read a lot of books around networking, they talk about how to do this and or selling how to do this and how to build intentional relationships. And there's so many good tools and that's great. I think I've cracked the code on how to do this at massive scale, um, to the benefit of my own personal brand, to the benefit of my business, but also for the benefit of everyone that has a seat at that table. And so while I'm certainly deriving some value, I'm quite confident I'm adding more value than I'm taking. I think that that's a very important point, right? Because I think sometimes people go into networking with a strategic plan of how am I going to get benefit of this? Am I going to get a lead? Am I going to get a sale? Am I going to get access to this person that I'm trying to get into? You go into it with a, how can I add more value to these experiences for these other people? And, put in 1x, get 10x back, right? I think that's the difference between networking and building relationships. So like the way you described it, I think of the person that is out and they would say, I'm going to be networking. And to me, like, I hate the word. Um, yeah, it's so sleazy sometimes, right? It feels just icky. It does. Right. Because I think it's about what am I going to get out of this versus I, I'm a firm believer in, uh, leading with or killing people with generosity. And Uh, also sort of this concept of knowing that you don't need to keep score of what you've done and count everything and look for what the return is because, the simple equation for me is if you do the right things. Enough times with the right people. You'll get to the right outcomes. And I see this all the time where I'll get pulled aside at a dinner and say, Hey, I need to talk to you about X, Y, Z. And that required me doing zero selling. And they've come to me proactively and effectively asked me. So not only have I not given them the wrong feeling of, Oh, this guy's here to sell me something. I don't even talk about what I do, uh, for in my role, or I don't talk about what our company does as a business, but I'm quite confident that when they need something, they'll probably give me the first call and maybe if they don't, it's okay. It's okay if they don't. You've cracked the code on building a great community. Is there any, like, let's say I wanted to build a community of people who work in a specific area. What would I do to start? Yeah, the first thing is start small, right? So let me, let me back up even, I think it's be really clear on what your focus is like, what is it that you want to do? Why do you want to pull these people together? And then why do you have the permission to do it? I'll get like, I was just asked to pull together a chief procurement officer community for my organization. I don't think I'm going to do it because I've got no right doing it. I don't have any knowledge in the space. I don't know anyone in the space. Our company has no business. So I'm probably not going to do it. So I think it's doing something that's really authentic to you where you're, you can get excited about it, where you can add value. That's sort of like table stakes. Um, the other pieces, if you've looked at my LinkedIn posts, you'll notice never once do I do a dinner without someone else. And I'm a big believer in that. No one shows up for me. No one shows up for the company that I work for. People show up for who else I'm doing them with and who else is coming. So a sample invitation might say something like, Hey, I'm doing a dinner with insert, uh, CEO, HR leader, thought leader, and we've got X, Y, Z from these people from these companies coming. Can you make it? And. Uh, what I've done now is I've disarmed someone from thinking, Oh, this guy wants to sell me something. Oh, this is a corporate advertisement, but this is, so I think that's the other. So what I would say is kind of put ego aside, think about who's someone that you can reach out to. And you'd be blown away by how accessible these people are. Um, I reached out when I was first starting to do this, I just started reaching out to a bunch of thought leaders and said, Hey, um, I can't pay you. But what I can do is put you at a table in front of your buyers. If that sounds good, let's do a 20 minute call. I can tell you what this looks like. I did that until I built up a list of people that were doing these dinners with me. I could then name drop them to the next thought leader and say, Hey, I've done five dinners with people like this. You should consider this. Um, and so I think it's, it becomes intimidating when people look at the outcome. So when I used to look at people that were doing this and I always thought, I'm, I can't do this. Um, and when you really break down the big goal into like a very tiny sub goal and say, I want to pull together a dinner or a virtual call of four people becomes more real. Um, the dinners that I'm doing now are 25, 30 people. I would have never envisioned that when I started and thinking that I could do these on a weekly basis, but it's been a built, right? I've been doing this for 10 years now. So how does this differ from your approach? How does it differ from traditional like workshops or meetups or, what do you do differently that makes people actually want to come to these things? Yeah. Okay. So, so a couple things. I think one is, um, again, it is a traditional workshop or a meetup probably is specifically around the agenda of the organization hosting it. So I quickly make sure that people understand that is not the agenda. It's in service of them. Uh, the second piece is around creating what I, what I would say is like a rapidly accelerated intimacy. So taking complete strangers and making them friends in a, in a short period of time. And there's a lot of exercises that you can do this with, um, in the LinkedIn posts. If you've seen them, I mentioned sweet and sour. And the idea is I will lead with something incredibly vulnerable, um, intentionally. And lead with that so that people feel the permission to now share something like that themselves. Uh, and so all this doesn't happen all the time. Uh, at a recent dinner I did in New York, two women from one of the top premier investment banks in the world were crying hysterically and couldn't even get their words out. Wow. Um, if you think about the culture that they work in and, and sort of, it's, it's, it's something where they don't feel safe to share that. So. Uh, there's other examples where a woman rolled up her sleeve and showed where she had slit her wrist and a tattooed above it to never allow work to burn herself out. So I think there's this looking at how do you do introductions in a different way? No one cares about your title or the company you work for, but if you can give somebody a reason to care, um, that goes a long way. And so. We created a very high relational environment and then move into content that isn't about, um, again, anything that I can sell them, it's about things that they're thinking about, uh, which are, again, I'm able to reach out to people and understand what are the topics you want to hear more about. So they're, they're different in that way, in that it's a sharing of very specific high return best practices. Um, so when I, when I set the context up front, I say, If we don't walk away with four to five specific things that you can do with your organization, your team, or personally, then it's a failure. Um, if you don't walk away with one new relationship where you feel like you can pick up the phone and call that person on the weekend or text them, and that could be a complete stranger, but now a new friend. And then the dinner was a failure. So I hold myself to a really high bar. I'm thinking about how will someone walk away from this and tell their friends or their spouse? Like this was awesome. Um, if it doesn't check that box of failure, I love that because it truly is the greatest example of you're bringing value to these people's lives. And like you mentioned earlier, if they need your services, odds are good. You're going to get at least the first phone call. But you're not coming in with an agenda besides creating a great experience for everyone who participates. And I think that's a really unique, unfortunately, unique mindset that a lot of people don't have in the corporate world. It's business first, people second, rather than people first, business later. I think that's right. So, This is your chance to kind of throw someone on the hot seat. If, if we want to learn more about, taking back Monday and really making work a meaningful experience and connecting to other human beings and people to people, who do you think is out there as a true thought leader? Who is really leading the charge on that? Yeah, there's, um, so there's something that I'm part of and proud to be kind of a founding member of and what we're calling radical innovators movement. So myself, Keith Farazi and another gentleman named Moses Berkowitz. So I think we see ourselves more as the conveners. And then there's organizations. That are part of this, um, some of the Walmart and, and other large, uh, CHROs and our real goal is, is exactly kind of what you've talked about and that it's, how do you make, how do you elevate, uh, individuals? And in their corporate role, but in their personal lives, and as a result, sort of transcend into society, given that these organizations like a Walmart touches 2. 1 million people individually. And then of course, if you think about the number of, uh, families impacted. And so what are the specific high return best practices? That these organizations can implement to radically innovate. And so, uh, some examples would be breaking down jobs. So this construct of what work is, it's like we we've created work. And so we can re envision what work is, uh, And, and we're doing some great work. So one, one example would be with a hospital who has said, we're in a massive, uh, nursing shortage and 50% of what a nurse does they hate, which is administrative work. So why can't we break down what a nurse does and and replace that 50% with allowing them to be nurses? Yeah, you'd probably have you, you can infer a few things. You're likely to have higher retention. You probably have more people go into the, to the profession. Um, and as a result, you might have a bit more, uh, supply for, for nurses altogether, right? And alleviate some of that massive shortage. So there's a lot of different ways we can think about this in a corporate setting. And so, um, Keith Farazzi is a well known author and Moses Berkowitz works with one of the world's largest, uh, ed tech platforms. And so I think what our three organizations bring together is, is highly complimentary and we're excited to be kicking that off. I think it's so important to recognize that we are the only species on the planet that has created this kind of economy where we all have to do something in order to get, basic needs and and and enjoyment. Your example of looking at, the things that nurses don't enjoy or The reason that they're leaving their job and saying, is this the highest and best use of their skillset? No, let's let them connect with their highest and best use, and then let someone else fill the gap for the pieces that doesn't best meet the needs of the organization or of the individual. Yeah. Yeah. So there's a number of different examples of threads that we're looking at. Um, the human future of leadership. So thinking about if AI starts to displace a lot of the managerial tasks that people don't like to do and people who are being managed, employees don't like being managed by and they say they prefer AI. Well, what does that do to free up managers to be better at coaching better? And there's so many different things that a manager might do right in terms of how they show up differently. Yeah. And so there's, there's a lot of, um, good thought leaders like Atendra Wadhwa, who is from Columbia, who is helping us on that work stream. Uh, Rita McGrath, who is a top strategy thinker, who's helping us think about how do we push decision making out to the, uh, outer levels of the organization so that things aren't so centralized and you're really in power. Uh, more and more individuals in the organization. So there's a lot of great, great things that we're doing and it's just starting to kick off in the last month. And so I'm super excited about that. And I feel like this is the next evolution of the community work I've been doing. I'm so excited to follow along on that journey with you. Uh, if someone really connected with you today, wants to, to follow what you're doing or get in touch with you, how can they find you online? Yeah, I'm, uh, I'm, I'm poor at branding, so I'm on LinkedIn. That's about it. Um, and, and eventually there'll be more, but right now LinkedIn is probably my primary place to go. Thank you so much for being on Taking Back Monday. I've really enjoyed this conversation. Yeah. Thanks for having me.