Artful Cultures: Dr. Fateme Banishoeib on Creating Work Cultures like a Piece of Art

PITY PARTY OVER

Dr. Fateme Banishoeib is a visionary in organizational development. She blends analytical prowess with poetic sensitivity to craft innovative work cultures through storytelling and creative methodologies.

Dr. Banishoeib underscores the transformative power of cultivating empathy, care, and creativity within workplace environments. She highlights how facilitating open discussions enables teams to tap into diverse perspectives and insights, leading to more innovative solutions and inclusive decision-making processes.

When leaders shift from focusing solely on metrics to considering employees' emotional and psychological needs, workplace satisfaction, resilience, and engagement improve.

Listen to the episode on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Amazon Music, or your favorite podcast platform to learn how to become an authentic and emotionally engaging leader.

Subscribe to Pity Party Over for more insightful episodes. Questions? Email Stephen Matini or send him a message on LinkedIn.

TRANSCRIPT

Stephen Matini: Like me, you have two different cultures essentially that have inspired your life. And then both of us have moved around quite a bit. So when people ask you, where's home, what do you say?

Fateme Banishoeib: I don't actually have an answer to that. And I have to tell you something. I have to confess a secret, which is not that of a secret.

One of the reason why I have traveled so much I lived everywhere in the world is actually because I don't know where home is. I've come to the conclusion that home is a feeling is not a place. And when I find myself into that feeling or when I can recreate that feeling, then I know that I'm at home.

I've been confused most of my life about where home is. I was interviewed. There is a video in which I actually talk about home and where home is, and on top of my bed actually have a, a beautiful painting of the world. And Maya Angelou said what she said something like, freedom is being at home everywhere. It is true. And it comes with a price. So I don't know where home is. Home is wherever my cat is.

Stephen Matini: So in terms of your professional choices, you know, growing up kind of understanding where I should go with my professional career, how much these two backgrounds that you have have influenced the way you think?

Fateme Banishoeib: Work or career wise is a similar journey. I've embraced the same journey as I embrace like traveling and looking for, for home everywhere till I made home for myself. The same happened for my career.

I think in our first conversation I mentioned to you that I was born a highly artistic child, but of course art is not a job or is considered a frivolous hobby. So my parents were, every time I would say, I want to be a poet, I want to be a designer, they were like, no, no, no, no . As soon as I became a little bit, you know, older that I couldn't understand, they were like no, no, no, no, that's not really a job. What do you really want to do to earn a living? And another thing I would say is I want to be a crazy scientist.

And I literally use those words, crazy scientist. So actually they convinced me that art is not a job and in some way they are right in the sense that to be an artist is a way of being. And this is what I do currently now, and I can talk about that a little bit more.

So I became a scientist and I became a scientist really for the deep love have for science and understanding how we work as a human being. And also for the love of curing people that I've always been passionate about curing people since I was a little child. I mean, there are memories and stories in the family of me. Every time I would hear someone saying, oh, I haven't headache or whatever, I cut my finger. I would just run and I would make up something and I would create something to cure them.

And I've said that. And I've also written about, in my first book in the Whisper, I literally wrote this word like I became a scientist to cure people and wrote poetry to save my life. And this has happened to me literally what saved my life as being really rediscovering poetry in my life.

Once I have become aware of that artist within me again that was just there maybe dormant and and sleep as I was, you know, busy with my corporate career, I actually start seeing the world with very different highs.

And I started wanting to be all I am and not just the scientist or just the artist actually I get equally upset or equally triggered when someone refers to me only as the scientist or you know, the executive, the mentor or the artist. I really want to be all of them because I am and all of them.

And I've spent the past years in my life trying to bring harmony and an equilibrium between all of these facets. And that's how I redesigned my career. That's when I founded Renew Business.

And when I decided that there was place for all of I am, I didn't need to, you know, take a break from my corporate job to paint or I didn't need to whatever. To me, there is no switch. We can only be all of who we are. And that has changed not only what I do, but also how I perceive life by that, how I can support or help others.

For example, there are occasions in which someone calls for my help for very specific or technical tasks. However, I do not forget that I'm an artist. I do not forget there is border within me. I do not forget that sensitivity. I do not forget that way of seeing things.

And one of the remark that people always make is like, do you see those things? How do you come? And to me it's surprising because it is like why isn't the same for you? And after all, I actually really think that the quality of what we do, whatever it is, that what we do depends on the quality of who we are. I'm trying to be everything I am.

Stephen Matini: A lot of people can distinctively perceive it. There's more sides to themselves. They have multiple interests, multiple talent. And somehow so many people feel compelled that I have to choose, you know, whichever route. And that creates a lot of stress to people because it always feels, as you said, what about all the other parts of myself? When did you realize that your, who comprised the scientist and the artist?

Fateme Banishoeib: Well, I've always known what I did not know and took me longer. Also because society and the su and education don't help us understand that we can have different interests and we, if we want, we can pursue all of them or some of them. I mean, we live in a society and an education that really pushes us to specialize in something. And there are people who are very happy with doing that. They only have a passion or something.

So it's a, so-called like growing vertically or in a, or specializing, going deep into something. And there are people like me who can go deep in different sectors, in different areas, in different backgrounds. What I actually like to think is that we can act as a bridge between domains that apparently look like so separate and so different very often actually make this example which helps people understand especially when they ask me like, but what the chemist and the poet have in common.

And I always say them, well, the seeking the, this love for seeking truth. When I was a chemist in the lab and now when I write poems, that's what I seek. And there is a peculiar, maybe a little bit pot poetic metaphor that is brilliant alchemy is combining the elements that could be material elements, molecules, atoms or experience feelings and making something that didn't exist before. And in that I only act as a bridge. So I've always known, I just had to unlearn what society, people or conditioning had told me that it was not possible and create it, make it possible for me. But I've always known

Stephen Matini: Was there an event or something that happened in the past that this somehow pushed you to realize that meaning you have always known, but then a moment you made the decision to fully embrace this, who it was, was a result of something to happen.

Fateme Banishoeib: My book, the Whisper knows exactly what I will be saying right now because I actually wrote it in the book. It was few years back out of the blue. I decided while I was still in my corporate job and I wasn't even thinking about writing or anything artistic at that moment, I decided out of the blue I wanted to go to a writing retreat.

And that was a particularly challenging moment in my life. It was very tough. I'd moved to a new country. I didn't have any network. And there were several events in my life that actually had tested me quite a lot, really out of this desire of taking a break and just do not think about how crazy and chaotic my life was. I booked myself into a writing retreat. It was not too far from where I was, just out of the blue was a synchronicity.

One of those synchronicity, even though, you know, Karl says, and even Julia Cameron said, the synchronicity do not exist. Coincidence do not exist. So I booked myself into that. And I remember this was very distinctive at the opening of the retreat, the facilitator asked us, write something nobody knows about you.

And this became after the opening line of my book without thinking, I just came out of me without any talks or consciousness about it. And I wrote, I run a manufacturing plant and I hate it. But I had not realized that at that specific moment I wrote it. But it was like, okay, still foreign to me as a concept.

And then the retreat facilitator asked us, can you please read out loud what you have written? I remember the face of everyone when I read what I had written and my realization at that moment of the shock, not only me or everyone because I had to read it out loud.

And in the meantime we were sitting in circle. I saw the shock in everyone's face. Well, I think they were more shocked by the fact that I wasn't the writer in that moment. They learned what was my job. I mean, we had no time to, you know, to introduce one another. That line became an unstoppable flow of poem. So actually I've written 200 pages of poems in one go. It came out as a stream, as a flow. And it took me a while to process and understand what came out of me. But that was the distinctive moment in which things were somehow put in motion. Of course, it took me a few years first to understand what I had written second to decide what I was going to do after I came into that awareness and then create a word, create a space for me to contain that multitudes.

Stephen Matini: And now you bring the poet, you bring the crazy scientist, you bring the healer, you bring it to organizations. And so when you work with organizations, how do they react to your approach?

Fateme Banishoeib: Okay, first of all, I have to say that when I'm called in, people know exactly what to expect. So there is this openness. I wouldn't be able to do my job in the way I do it if there was resistance. Of course people are like curious, they still want to experiments and then try. But when they call me and say, can you come and I help us or or me they're open to try something that maybe they haven't tried before. What I notice all the time is that there is deep desire of finding a space where someone or a team or is truly listened.

There is this deep desire and I understand why. I mean we don't listen to others because we are too busy checking our phone, answering 20 mail or in the meantime talking, I'm talking especially specifically in corporate environments. We are always in the middle of something.

Even when we are having a one-on-one with someone that is the phone ringing, the, the the sound, the notification of email comes. So we are not really listening. We are missing clues. And there is this deep desire from everyone, every single one to be listened. So first of all, I create the condition, first of all for me to listen.

Without me listening to everything, I wouldn't be able to propose anything. But then for the organization to listen to itself or themself, because that's really missing. There is another element that is always missing, expressing being free and being safe to express what's going on inside.

I mean, and I say this very often, neuroscience tells us specifically that first we feel, then we think and only afterwards we act and we completely up and neglect the feeling aspect. In best case scenario, we notice what we are feeling and we dismiss it and we push it and we repress it.

Most of the time we don't even have a word to express what we are feeling. So there is actually a thinking and an action or a decision making that is happening completely in the blind without knowing what we are feeling. And when we don't know what we are feeling and we don't have a way to express it, forget about it, knowing what everyone else's feelings.

So it's literally impossible. It's literally impossible to think clearly and act effectively. First of all, there is no such a thing as act effectively. But anyway, that, that's my personal opinion. So it's like trying to keep an equilibrium on two legs rather than, so we have a three-legged stool and we are trying to sit and trying to keep, you know, the equilibrium without using one one of the legs. And then of course then we blame the overthinking, the action taken without knowing the background.

Yes, but the, what we don't know is not data. We are over flooded by data. What we don't know is the feeling. And even when we know we don't have a way to express it, most of the time we go into shaming or oppressing or denying judging in a series of things. So that's the the second element I always bring.

So is the listening, then the space to express, then it becomes clearer. And so I asked again as a bridge, as I said before, for people to walk that bridge and go in the direction they really want to go or an organization in direction, they really, they really want to go. But people will say in a more informed way, I would say in a more aligned way because it's about aligning. How do we align if we are blindsided by something? So this is what happens and it can happen in different contexts, in different modalities, but this is more or less what happens in, you know, in a generic way.

Stephen Matini: What is it about feelings and emotions that when we finally let them be or at least listening to them, somehow everything becomes clear. Why does it work that way?

Fateme Banishoeib: I don't know why, but I have a feeling there is this thing, and I mentioned this word, there is truth coming in. Once we realize and we are free to express it or we even find a way to express, and when I say express, I don't say necessarily using words, but most of the time because it's not linear, it's not logic, it doesn't involve the logic side of the brain very often is an image, a sensation, a sound and something.

So we find a way to use art and is not really used in the terms of exploiting. But really to tap into art, to be able to see, okay, what's the that, what's the fabric? What's the extension of whatever I'm feeling or whatever we are feeling, what's our, what are the boundaries? So once we have clarity what we are feeling, we find the courage, we really find the courage to look in the eyes.

So we know for example, why tension is Avis. We cannot deny it anymore. And once we know it's very easy to, or maybe not easy, but simpler to talk about it, I've seen over and over again that's even in the worst conflict I had to deal with that when people had found the safety of expressing whatever they were feeling without any judgment and without anyone saying, no, you shouldn't feel that way or you should feel this way or that way is an expression.

And when it is an artistic expression, no one can say, no , you can't feel well I feel this way. It's this color, it's this fabric is this shape. No one can say no, it's whatever I'm feeling. Then there is also more space to understand how others are feeling. And that puts us into a dialogue.

This is my experience over time. That this possibility to look truth in the eyes and know the truth of why we are in a certain situation or why we are thinking in a certain way or why we are acting in a certain way opens us up to a dialogue. And when we can enter into that space of dialogue, things look very different.

Stephen Matini: So feeling is speaking the truth and art is what allows me to speak the truth.

Fateme Banishoeib: In a way, yes. But it's more than that. It's not just the ability to express whatever is going on, but it's also an opportunity to make sense of why that is also an opportunity to create with that raw material. 'cause When we can create then we are indeed in a creative mode rather than in a complaining mode.

We are already creating without being told or be creative now with that raw material. So it's more than just speaking the truth is creating with it is making meaning, making sense and then transform it.

Stephen Matini: So as of today, when you think of the word creativity, when you think of the word art artistry, what is your definition of that?

Fateme Banishoeib: So to me, creativity and artistry are two different things. Creativity is really the act of creating words, whatever I have. So I create with what I have, I create with the emotions I create with the glass I create and is innate to all of us. We all have, it is actually being said. And biology say that that is distinctive characteristic of us as a species is creativity.

So it's not something that we can associate only to creative professionals or artists. Art to me is the opposite. So creativity is from the inside out with the input or what is I create something I could, art is a little bit different to me is more of if you want also spiritual journey is entering into dialogue with that. And too often we associate art to a specific artwork. So to a specific outcome, I think differently. It's regardless, and this is actually what I'm devoted to, that's why I do the job that I do, is trying to evoke the artist within everyone. It doesn't depend if you write poems, if you paint or at all, it's a way of being and caring of being in that way is a sensitivity, is a capacity to look at the world and enter, participate in the dialogue with the world, with others. So as such is a very inclusive place.

Stephen Matini: As you work with organizations using your approach, what have you observed over the years? Me personally, I think that everyone perceives that we are going through some sort of change of paradigm that we, we used to do business that is totally focused on performance, you know, in terms of numbers, results that doesn't no longer fit the purpose.

And also we have new generations that that really, really sensitive to specific themes as, you know, work-life balance and diversity and such and such, which were introduced by previous generations, but somehow for them is super important. So yeah. The question to you is what have you observed over the years working with organizations?

Fateme Banishoeib: First of all, and I can speak also for myself or what I've seen in myself, and this is similar, so it's not different. I think that what gets laid up, what gets awake is similar because at the end of the day we are all similar and organization is also composed by people. So we shouldn't ever forget that. So what happens is that our empathy gets expanded for different reasons when we pay attention, because to practice art, we need to pay attention.

And as we pay attention, we start caring and care is the first thing that actually gets So through empathy, we expand caring, and when we care, things change. I think it was Peter Senge who said that the last space for innovation is care or the ultimate space of innovation is care. And I wrote, I think he said this in the forties or something like that.

And it was absolutely right. When we care, everything that we do comes from a different place. So when we think about the reason for innovation, do we know, do we want to innovate for what, what reason? Because we care about whatever a, a problem, a solution or someone and a met needs or something.

So care I think is the shift that enables other things to happen. And as a result people measure KPIs. I personally don't, but people who measure KPIs see when we care the metrics, you know, companies are really focused on engagement. Engagement also rises when we care, details don't become a burden. And when we care also we become more courageous.

And courage allows us to practice other, you know, skills and virtues because we do have the courage to practice integrity or any of the other values that accompanies. So I think that the really the key element what shifts is care.

Stephen Matini: What would you say that is the opposite of care

Fateme Banishoeib: Entitlement?

Stephen Matini: I love that. Do you feel optimistic overall considered, you know, in this crazy world that is filled with this so much apparent negativity, everything you share with me, it feels really hopeful. So you optimistic?

Fateme Banishoeib: I don't know what to answer in the sense that of course I have hopes for the world to become a better place for really organizations and workplaces to really care about the wellbeing of the people they work for them also their customer. I really do. And at the same time I also know that the current system is actually serving its purpose, its job. The system as it has been designed is doing its job.

So I, there are a lot of people thinking and talking about a para game shift. I also believe that is about time and I see at least counting the number of interactions that I have and the type of talks and chats I have with other people. So I know that there is really so many of us wanting this shift and this paradigm at the same time. And that's why I can't say I'm optimistic or not optimistic.

I know that whatever old is there, whatever old system or process there won't go that easily because it's designed this way. And we would also do the same if we were set to go. We wouldn't just say, okay, thank you, goodbye. We would resist that.

So I think that before we really see a complete shift, I think tension will arise and which is normal is physiological and it is up to us not to fall backwards when that happens, but creating these spaces for dialogue and participation so that we can together come out of that whatever tension and whatever conflict is in a constructive way and not in a destructive way

Stephen Matini: This evening when I go to sleep and also move forward with my life. Out of all the insights you shared with me, is there any concept that I should pay attention to? In particular?

Fateme Banishoeib: There is something I always repeat to myself. So I don't know if you would consider in in pondering onto that, that, and I share this with you earlier, that the quality of what we do depends on the quality of who we are and the quality of our being. So maybe it's about time we all focus more on the being than on the doing. I probably doing is what got us into this situation. So maybe it's about time to shift our focus on on to the being.

Stephen Matini: One thing that I tell myself, I don't know if it's connected to this, probably it is like anybody else, I have a busy life and it goes way too fast. And I try to remind myself why I do what I do, you know, about everything because everything can become so transactional can become so doing it. Just another thing to reach. And when you do that, you know, have the time to appreciate anything.

So I really try to, even if it's super fast, is to stay in the moment as much as I can and to enjoy it as much as I can. And it's something that often becomes normal because I've done it for a while, but very often, particularly when I'm tired and stressed out, I have to make the conscious effort of remembering this is , you know, that's all is and so enjoy it because that's the the whole point. So I try.

Fateme Banishoeib: I think that, and of course this is easy for us to say in this moment when we are upset or triggered is less so if we remember that everyone is facing a struggle or a challenge and that maybe we have been at that point in time and how it was the only thing maybe we wanted in that moment was someone listening to us. Maybe things change, but I'm the first one to snap when I'm super upset at something or when I get triggered. So don't take me as an angel. I'm actually quite the opposite . But this capacity of remembering that everyone is facing a struggle, I don't know anyone who is not facing this

Stephen Matini: Well. I just wanna say thank you to the crazy scientist, A thank you to the poet for giving me a moment of relief today. Thank you so much for sharing these amazing insights.