Laila Marouf On How To Prevent Politics From Disrupting Your Work Culture

An Interview With Cynthia Corsetti

Create a physical and mental space for your people to share their understanding and view of the world with no judgment — daily, weekly and monthly. Also, create informal opportunities to strengthen their connections [the bandwidth of knowledge sharing.

In an age where political discussions have become more polarized than ever, workplaces are increasingly becoming arenas for political debates. While it’s essential to respect diverse opinions and encourage free speech, unchecked political discussions can create rifts, hinder productivity, and disrupt the harmony of a work environment. How can organizations strike a balance? How can they create a culture that values diversity of thought while preventing divisive political discussions from overshadowing work objectives? As part of this series, we had the pleasure of interviewing Laila Marouf.

Laila Marouf, Ph.D., is the founder and Chief Knowledge Officer of The Knowledge Mindfulness Group, a pioneering organization dedicated to evolving and elevating leaders’ knowledge maturity using the groundbreaking integrative methodology of Knowledge Mindfulness framework. Marouf explores this human take on ways of rethinking knowledge management and knowledge sharing in her new book Knowledge Mindfulness: The Interconnections That Help Leaders Transform Their Business and Life. Laila’s work is driven by her diverse lived, academic, and professional experiences and is founded in broad interdisciplinary research.

Marouf grew up dreaming of a career in medicine, went on to study computer science — then veered in a new direction, gaining a Ph.D. in information science from the University of Pittsburgh with a focus on knowledge management. This led to a long and successful career as a professor, researcher, consultant, and academic leader who served as Assistant Vice President of Research at Kuwait University. She spent two decades studying, teaching, researching, and consulting in knowledge management, knowledge sharing, and knowledge behavior, and publishing over 35 peer-reviewed articles.

Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series. Before we dive into our discussion about succession, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you share with us the backstory about what brought you to your specific career path?

After years of service as a professor, I needed to refocus and recharge. My employer, Kuwait University, awarded me a two-year sabbatical, starting with a few months working at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Open Learning Center alongside some of the most respected minds in learning and innovation. When I boarded my flight to Boston, I was eagerly anticipating an energizing, and perhaps even career-defining, opportunity to reflect on the journey I’d taken and dig deeper into the problems that fascinated me.

Of course, the world had other plans. Almost as soon as my plane landed, the COVID-19 pandemic began. Overnight, the MIT campus closed down. So did the airlines. All those world-leading experts canceled their classes and headed off to their country homes. Along with my husband and our two children, I was stuck, far from home, wandering the chilly and suddenly deserted streets of Boston. I didn’t realize it right away, but the interruption of my planned sabbatical was the best thing that could possibly have happened to me. With nobody to talk to, and no libraries to hide away in, I had the time and mental space to reflect and ask myself some tough questions. “What if things never go back to normal?” I wondered. “Everything’s changed — so what do I want to do next?” Forget the intellectual and professional momentum I’d built up and the academic theories I’d assumed I’d spend the next year thinking about.

Forced to look inward, I realized I’d gotten stuck in a groove. I’d spent my life studying knowledge but never asked what all my own knowledge added up to. Stranded in Boston, I found myself stepping back and asking — for the first time in years — what really mattered to me. Would my knowledge help me to achieve those goals? In what ways? And how could I work to accelerate and guide that process?

When I looked in the mirror, I found myself asking not just how I could do my job better, but whether I should continue on the same path I was on. I loved studying and teaching, but the more I reflected, the more I felt it was time to move beyond the narrow hallways of academia. I wanted to zoom out and let the world be my classroom — to write a new syllabus for myself and others that focused not on narrow specializations, but on the intersections and interstitial spaces that lie between disciplines.

I loved my organization — the department I called home, the university I served, and the broader academic community of which I was part. But as I looked back on my work, I came to see that the siloed nature of academia had constrained not only my teaching and research, but also the way I related to knowledge itself. Knowledge, of course, is an intensely personal thing. As Peter Drucker notes, knowledge is “embodied in a person; carried by a person; created, augmented or improved by a person; applied by a person … [and] used or misused by a person.” During my years studying knowledge management, I’d seen the individual recentered as the basic unit of organizational knowledge, with “personal knowledge management” introduced as a kind of bottom-up addition to conventional knowledge management theories. The better we equipped individual workers to deal with knowledge, the theory went, the more knowledge and innovation they would unlock for their organizations. But as Drucker also writes, knowledge itself is changing fast. “It is the nature of knowledge,” Drucker says, ‘‘that it changes fast and that today’s certainties always become tomorrow’s absurdities.” I couldn’t help but feel that the fragmented and slow-moving bureaucracy of academia was ill-equipped to cope with the new kinds of knowledge we need in today’s fast-changing world.

My work on Knowledge Mindfulness, in other words, was both driven by and itself driving a fundamental shift in my own mindset. I was questioning, reassessing, and exploring in ways I hadn’t done for a long time. In exploring Knowledge Mindfulness, even without knowing it, I was going on a personal journey toward what I now call personal knowledge maturity.

Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you started your career?

I got married after graduating from college and earning a BA in Computer science and for 10 years I was a full-time mother and partner. I decided to pursue my Master’s degree when my two kids went to school. The first day in the computer lab I realized I had not seen a mouse before [only huge mainframe computers at the time of my studies in the late 1980s. No PCs]. I didn’t know how to use a mouse and had to learn what a double click and a right click mean. That did not stop me from pushing through my studies despite the disadvantage of being away for so long. The same thing happened to me in my second transformation. Despite earning a Ph.D. in information science and teaching for around 15 years, I felt like I was in kindergarten when it came to social media and digital marketing. I was never into the virtual world in general. I love human connections and turned down a virtual teaching experience with the University of Pittsburgh because of that. And here I am again learning from scratch about the vast virtual world.

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Do you have a story about how that was relevant in your life?

My religion is very simple.

My religion is kindness

Dalai Lama

I believe this quote is mirrored in my communication, behavior, and actions with everyone I interact with from different cultures, backgrounds or generations.

Many stories come to my mind in different phases of my life, but a recent one in particular stands out. As I was receiving an honorary shield for my service as an Assistant Vice President for Research,, I overheard two ladies saying to each other: “It’s funny that what comes to our mind in this honorary ceremony is not what Laila has done or achieved! But it’s how she made us feel and how she treated her employees!” These are employees who came from different sects and backgrounds.

What do you think makes your company stand out? Can you share a story?

The company is still in its initial stages but I believe what will make it stand out is its value of continuous evolvement and progress, not only in its mission to help leaders evolve their knowledge maturity, but also in evolving the company’s brand itself. The Knowledge Mindfulness framework and solution are not set in stone. So the brand and company itself are practicing the 3Cs Loop — create, connect, and capitalize [the integrative approach to consciously and continuously evolving our knowledge maturity individually and collectively]. That means we are adaptable and open to renewing our old learnings that may have stopped working and being creative in our solutions, working on stronger bonding and a responsible vision. We are committed to the continuous evolvement of our knowledge, leadership, and responsible impact no matter how successful we become.

The story that comes to my mind is when we were discussing our logo. We wanted a logo that also can evolve over time. So, we decided on the arch as a symbol of bridging or integrating, which is a core value/principle in KMD. But what it bridges between keeps changing as the world and needs change.

Ok, thank you for that. Let’s now jump to the primary focus of our interview. In an era where political discourse is more polarized than ever, what proactive steps do you take within your organization to ensure politics don’t disrupt the harmony and productivity of the work culture?

We walk the talk in the organization when it comes to Knowledge Mindfulness. So, each individual is aware of their full spectrum of knowledge and the importance of working on evolving their knowledge maturity, keeping in mind to:

1. Keep questioning their knowledge. Knowledge maturity starts with three simple questions: what do you know, why do you want to know it, and how can you use the Three Cs Loop to close the knowledge gap? Always focus on what’s missing in your knowledge — about a situation or about a person you’re dealing with and not on proving what you know is right.

2. Keep striving for objectivity. In asking these questions, it’s important to be as realistic and objective as possible. We all naturally see the world through a subjective lens and tend to overstate or understate our responses to personal or probing questions. There’s no judgment here, but to stay as objective as possible you need to keep pushing for honest answers, even if it means delving into uncomfortable territory.

3. Keep pushing for a deeper understanding. As you ask and answer these questions, remember the purpose behind them. Are you trying to solve a short-term problem or untangle a big systemic issue? Are you tugging at one thread when you should be dealing with another? The more you ask these questions, the more you’ll see the connections that link yourself with others.

4. Keep thinking holistically. This kind of connected thinking is critical. Focusing on one point and not the other makes you conclude that all issues and things should be either/or. So don’t think of any one part of this process in isolation — keep working to see not only how creativity, connectedness, and capitalizing on our knowledge operate to keep harmony and productivity of the work culture, but also how renewal, disconnection, and continuous action work together as important forces driving you forward on your personal journey to knowledge maturity and thus to a cohesive culture.

5. Keep moving forward. Never lose a sense of excitement and enthusiasm for the feeling of “not knowing” — because that uncertainty and hunger to know more is what keeps us alive and kicking forward. The goal is to constantly work to evolve and elevate your understanding.

Can you share an experience where political discussions began to impact team dynamics and how you addressed this situation to maintain a positive work environment?

When I encountered a heated conversation between two employees, I listened to each one’s perspective and then started explaining to them that politics is never about what actually happened but it’s about one’s point of view of what happened. It covers one side of the story and instead of trying to justify our viewpoints, why not take this as an opportunity to learn from the other about what is missing in our knowledge about the topic? So I started asking questions about the topic, showing curiosity for learning and not giving any answers. Being inquisitive about the topic makes people less defensive and a bit detached emotionally and thus more open to listen, learn and maybe be able to renew some of their older learnings and fill the gaps where knowledge is missing.

How do you balance the importance of allowing free speech and personal expression with the need to keep a cohesive and focused work culture?

Through Knowledge Mindfulness principles and methodology and the aim for a higher knowledge maturity, individuals will realize that with freedom of speech comes a greater personal responsibility that puts the bowl of internal regulation and openness to different perspectives in the individual’s court as opposed to the organization and its imposing of external guidelines and policies.

Leveling up our personal knowledge maturity depends on a kind of creative tension. You need to understand, but also dwell in a place of inquiry and questioning. You need to zoom in and use the granular details of your knowledge, but also to zoom out to see the bigger picture and the larger system of which you’re part. You need to fight against ignorance and constantly onboard and retain new knowledge, but also keep an open mind and be willing to subvert or challenge all the things you think you know.

Unifying these opposing forces, and living in and leveraging the tension that results, is the real meaning and promise of not only developing a holistic understanding of knowledge, but also reaping its benefits which is reflected in a cohesive work culture.

What strategies do you believe are most effective in creating a neutral work environment that respects diverse political views without allowing them to cause division among team members?

I think a Knowledge Mindful strategy that is intertwined [aligned] with an HR strategy and the business strategy is the way to create a neutral work environment that respects diverse political views without allowing them to cause division among team members.

A strategy that focuses on the “Three Cs Loop”: Creating yet renewing knowledge; Connecting yet disconnecting, Capitalizing yet keep acting.

HR & KMD: A strategy of hiring from diverse cultures, backgrounds, and age groups so you have a pool of different perspectives and fewer biases. Weed out those who are not willing to listen, learn, or question their own biases because they can be toxic to the whole culture we are trying to build.

You need to hire for the organization you want to be, because the people you hire today will determine what your organization becomes tomorrow. This boils down to a question of identity, of course. When you know why your organization exists and what you want it to be, and when you understand and can articulate the core values that your company stands for, then it gets far easier to identify the people who share that organization’s aspirations and vision of where it wants to go. When you want others to respect diverse political views, then this is something you can concretize in your hiring processes. Just as Google famously asks people to solve algorithms or puzzles to get a handle on their analytical skills, so your organization can use narrative scenarios and role-playing to explore how people react to different situations and that reveal their values, beliefs, and ability to be open to different perspectives

- A strategy of training and evolving the knowledge maturity of all knowledge workers continuously by exposing them to different knowledge resources that present different views of the same topic. Allowing them to reach their own conclusion rather than dictating to them a certain perspective or viewpoint. Looking at different perspectives as different angles of the same topic. Questioning rather than giving answers, etc.

- A business strategy that is intertwined with Knowledge Mindfulness principles and the need to always maintain doing good and not only doing well. Focusing not only on short-term gains but also on responsible long-term sustainability for the generations to come.

What role do you think leadership should play in setting the tone for political conversations at work, and can you provide an example of how you’ve navigated this delicate balance?

Leadership plays a major role in setting the tone for political conversations and specifically a leader’s level of knowledge maturity. Knowledge maturity reflects the quality/complexity of his/her knowledge — the capacity to integrate multidimensional self-knowledge with the ability to connect the dots of external issues and events.

When leaders take the time to know themselves and use that self-knowledge to help them know and connect with others, the entire team or organization they lead begins to grow into a healthier and more holistic sense of itself. Individual workers will find their own paths to mindfully disconnecting and reconnecting, avoiding conflict and joyfully reaching out to those around them. They’ll take the time that’s needed to assimilate new learnings and new knowledge into their broader knowledge system, and they’ll return to the fray energized and able to think clearly about what new connections they need to work to forge.

Remember, as a knowledge-mindful leader, you define the climate for your organization: you model the culture because the work you do on yourself inspires the same kind of growth toward knowledge maturity in others. This is the power of Knowledge Mindfulness: it helps us to understand ourselves so that we can understand others and to connect with ourselves so that we can thereby connect with others — and bring their insights and knowledge back to augment our self-understanding. The more you come to understand yourself and others, and to connect with both, the more you’ll find yourself living and leading with respect, compassion, and conviction. As you do so, those same traits and characteristics radiate out across your organization and make more profound human connections possible for everyone around you.

Leaders who are high in knowledge maturity are respectful and aware of themselves, others, and the context they are in. They know how to connect the dots outward and inward. They are aware of their own biases and trust their values and intuition. They also know the value of other’s perspectives and have a stronger feel of “we” than “me” through penetrating their human-centered foundation within themselves. That which cultivates care, compassion and respect to the other. They can see both the parts and whole and thus understand that no single element can work without the other. They understand the interconnection between their knowledge maturity and the culture they want to create in their organization for not only adaptable organizations but progressive/evolving ones that can stand disruptions no matter where they come from.

Knowledge Mindfulness tells us that learning is always active rather than passive, because what we ourselves bring to the process determines what we’re able to take away from any given situation — and what we give back to the situation through our decisions and actions determines what others will learn too. Knowledge, in other words, is a living system, in continuous motion, that manifests through our actions, our impacts, and our presence in the world. It’s inherent in our behavior, in our connections to others, and in our ability to collaborate and to lead. To create and renew our knowledge, we need to bring the totality of our knowledge to that process, drawing knowledge inward from outside and upward from within ourselves. Through creative and compassionate leadership, we need to help others to find their own way through the process, too, so they can mindfully and continuously generate and renew their knowledge in order to elevate their own knowledge maturity

A Knowledge Mindful leader shows humbleness in every situation. When knowledge stops evolving and questioning and self-examining, it grows stagnant and becomes opinion or dogma instead of real knowledge. In fact, the more knowledgeable one becomes, the humbler one becomes about one’s knowledge — because the more clearly one sees its limits. Socrates, remember, famously claimed to know only that he knew nothing. As leaders, we need to be open to feedback and fresh perspectives and to raise awareness (in ourselves and others) of the fact that blind spots are structurally ubiquitous in both individuals and organizations. This is what makes connecting so urgent: we’re simultaneously bringing our own perspectives to help others and drawing on their perspectives to elevate our own understanding.

What are your “Five Things You Need To Do To Prevent Politics From Disrupting Your Work Culture”?

1. Create a physical and mental space for your people to share their understanding and view of the world with no judgment — daily, weekly and monthly. Also, create informal opportunities to strengthen their connections [the bandwidth of knowledge sharing.

It’s important to build structures and spaces that encourage frequent interactions and thus stronger bonding. That can mean a variety of things:

Retreats: Breaking out of ruts and moving into new environments can be a great way to get the creative juices flowing and to jolt people into reconsidering entrenched biases and opening themselves to new ideas and diversified perspectives. The open physical design of the work environment itself where people can meet organically over coffee stations or

It’s also worth considering how you can provide your team with access to entirely new perspectives and forms of knowledge. Are there online courses, or different online platforms, that could make new insights and ways of interacting more easily accessible or offer powerful diversified perspectives that could enrich your team’s knowledge spectrum? Such resources are often very affordable, so look around for ways to bring new ideas and growth opportunities to your team

2. Play devil’s advocate.

Ask questions that cut against the assumptions people have or that force them to justify their viewpoints. The devil’s advocate paradigm is useful in part because people recognize it as such. You aren’t attacking them — you’re explicitly engaging in a process of asking questions to test out new ways of thinking, surface biases or emotions, or to try to unlock new insights. Just as people recognize the value in brainstorming, they recognize the value in asking difficult questions to validate and test ideas. When you keep asking questions in this way, without putdowns or judgment, you create a safe environment for people to tell you what they think, feel, and value. The more you achieve this, the more knowledge will flow freely through your organization

3. Stop trying to be right.

Many bosses think the best way to spur innovation and creativity is to argue with their employees — to browbeat them into trying new things and thinking harder about the problems they face. That often gets caught up in questions of ego: bosses want to look like the smartest person in the room, and they ask questions designed to promote themselves rather than to lift up others.

The Knowledge-Mindful leader understands that arguments are dead ends. What’s really needed is engaged and elevating dialogue that goes beyond either/or constructions and actively seeks out new ways of thinking about a given challenge. Think about the art of conversation: a good exchange is precisely that — an exchange — with people taking turns to contribute, to listen compassionately (with our heart and soul, not just our ears), and to build positively upon what the other person has to say. This is both an attitude and an attribute of our conversations: we need to bring an open mind, but also show people that we value them through the words we use, which have the power either to harm or to encourage others.

That holds true for even high-stakes discussions, too. You should constantly be seeking ways to discuss topics that are constructive, not negative or destructive, and that lead to everyone feeling valued and heard. Sometimes, ironically, that means bringing more people into the room. It’s easy for a two-way conversation to become oppositional or confrontational, but invite other people to give a third or fourth or fifth perspective and you’ll often find new and more fruitful paths forward.

4. Break down barriers.

Many biases have to do with in-groups and out-groups — the barriers that “naturally” emerge in any group or organization, whether it’s between competing teams or groups of people of different ages or backgrounds. The Knowledge-Mindful leader understands that such perspectives are cultural learnings — a malleable part of our constructed self, not something set in stone. They understand, too, that while there are real differences between people, those differences can be reframed as an important asset, not a hindrance. Age, for instance, is one of the most insidious barriers that we use to sort ourselves into these groups. When we’re young we often look on those older than us as stodgy or conservative or boring, and as we age there’s a tendency to start seeing those younger than us as naive, immature, or feckless. Knowledge Mindfulness leads to the realization that it’s possible to build conduits that allow insights and perspectives to flow from one generation to another — in both directions — so that the organization as a whole can leverage all the insights and knowledge assets at its disposal.

Again, this starts with building self-knowledge and then connecting the dots outward to the other: looking inward we might realize that we’re dismissing a younger colleague’s ideas, recognize that such behavior doesn’t align with our values of openness and respect, then concretize our insight by putting a plan in place to actively seek their input in the future. At an organizational level, that might mean introducing mentoring without hierarchy: not just horizontal peer-to-peer mentoring, but mentoring that explicitly acknowledges that “too young to retire” employees can often benefit from the insights of younger or more junior employees, and that encourages a two-way exchange of knowledge and insights.

Similar approaches can be applied to break down cultural barriers and capture the value that diversity brings to organizations.

5. Tell more stories.

Good stories don’t just reflect a shared vision; they reflect and embody the values that a leader wants to enhance in their team and across their organization. Every fable ends with a moral, and many children’s stories have moral lessons tied up in them — but because they communicate those lessons indirectly, they are much more powerful and effective, becoming part of the listener’s emotional landscape. In the same way, leaders can use stories to touch people’s hearts and souls — not just to tell them what matters, but to make them feel it, so they’ll cherish those values and work to manifest them. The best companies (and the best leaders) cherish these foundational stories and embed them into rituals and retellings that run through the company culture to give people a sense of real belonging. Stories become a framework that enables people from across the organization to overcome differences, connect, and work together to achieve common goals

Off-topic, but I’m curious. As someone steering the ship, what thoughts or concerns often keep you awake at night? How do those thoughts influence your daily decision-making process?

• Humanity and where we are heading [destruction of our Mother Earth with all its diverse intertwined parts being human or otherwise. Including the climate.] We are more like robots and less like humans, disconnected from our core universal human values.
• It’s very much engraved in everything I do in terms of thinking of the long-term consequences of my decisions and not only the short-term gains. I ask myself whether this decision will harm anything or anyone in any way? Will it have a long-term positive effect on the generations to come?
• I always reflect on what I say and do. I ask myself the tough questions of why I said this and did that? And how can I do it better if It didn’t feel good or right? I work on surfacing my biases [old learnings that are not serving me well now] so they can dissolve once they come out.

You are a person of great influence. If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)

A Knowledge Mindfulness movement with a mission of continuously and consciously evolving leaders’ knowledge maturity for wiser decision-making that can lead to a sustainable and thriving world for the generations to come.

How can our readers further follow you online?

Webpage: www.lailamarouf.com

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/laila-marouf/

Thank you for the time you spent sharing these fantastic insights. We wish you only continued success in your great work!

About the Interviewer: Cynthia Corsetti is an esteemed executive coach with over two decades in corporate leadership and 11 years in executive coaching. Author of the upcoming book, “Dark Drivers,” she guides high-performing professionals and Fortune 500 firms to recognize and manage underlying influences affecting their leadership. Beyond individual coaching, Cynthia offers a 6-month executive transition program and partners with organizations to nurture the next wave of leadership excellence.