ABOUT LAILA
Laila Tarraf is a talent management and leadership development executive with over 25 years of experience building teams and advising companies across many industries and stages of growth. She was a founding member of Walmart.com at the height of the first internet bubble, and the Chief People Officer at Peet's Coffee and Tea as it was redefining its values as a national brand. She then spent seven years working in private equity as the Director of Human Capital at GI Partners and a Human Capital Advisor with Altamont Capital. Most recently, as Chief People Officer for AllBirds, Laila lead the transition from a founder-led, start-up to a public company run by an established executive leadership team.
Over the years, through professional achievements and personal accomplishments alongside professional setbacks and personal tragedies, Laila has evolved her leadership and life philosophy into one that embraces the inherent duality of life -- balancing courage with compassion, integrating head with heart, infusing power with tenderness. Her journey and hard-won insights are what she shares in her debut book, Strong Like Water™. Laila is a graduate of the Berkeley Haas School of Business, and is also a guest lecturer at Berkeley Law School. She is Lebanese and American, an avid traveler and world explorer, and a proud mom to her teenage daughter, Nadia and her 8-pound Yorkie, Max.
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But if you want to know more, this is who I really am….
I am obsessed with reconciling the duality of life. I grew up as the first-born child of Lebanese immigrant parents, simultaneously holding two cultural lenses on the world; Lebanese on the inside, American on the outside. This feeling that I was both and neither made me obsessed with trying to reconcile these two ways of being and the inherent duality of life. This obsession of mine landed me into a field that has always tried to reconcile the needs of two parties: companies and their employees.
For a long time I forgot that I had both in me - the strength and the tenderness. This is me in our front yard in Las Vegas at age 9 shortly after moving from Beirut. I found this photo when I was packing up my mom and dad’s home to sell after their death and it reminded me of who I was before I came up with this story that I could only be strong and capable. I had forgotten for a long time that I had everything I needed inside of me.
I realize now that we all make up a story when we are young - a narrative that saves us in the beginning but then limits us if we don’t examine it more closely to determine what’s really true. Socrates said, “an un-examined life is not worth living.” Usually it takes a tragedy of some sort to wake us up, to have us start questioning who we really are - the self behind the well-honed façade we choose to show the world. This becomes the moment of reckoning for most of us and if we embrace it can be a tremendous opportunity for personal growth.
I’m always drawing two intersecting circles, visually trying to represent the sweet spot possible in trying to cultivate a culture that is able to balance driving hard for results while at the same time, creating the conditions for connection and belonging.
More and more, I have had the pleasure of sharing my experiences and advice in places such as the Harvard Business Review, private workshops, and women’s leadership events. This continues to open up new conversations about the intersection of business and our personal lives.
Trying to strike a balance between these two things requires a constant tacking back and forth responding and reacting to internal and external factors - like a global pandemic for example. It continuously challenges me to see both sides of the story, moving back and forth from being an agent of the company to being an advocate for our employees, trying to be both and neither at the same time.
Finding the balance is elusive and an ongoing practice. Some days I need to be strong and capable and other days I need to be more gentle and tender. Sometimes I get it wrong, but there’s always tomorrow.
I came face to face with my story when I lost my husband, followed by the death of my father and my mother in quick succession. Having to navigate these three major losses as a young, single mother during my first year as a people leader became the catalyst for major life lessons for me.
Listen to my interview with Valeria on the importance of allowing yourself to feel your feelings in order to process your grief in a healthy way.
After my mother’s death, the last of the three, I moved with my 9-year old daughter to the South of France, reading, journaling and trying to heal. While there, I discovered the Tao te Ching, eighty-one verses written by Lao Tzu in 600 BCE on the paradoxical nature of life. One verse in particular called Be Like Water really spoke to me as it captured the essence of the balance I was always trying to achieve.
Be Like Water
Nothing in the world
is as soft and yielding as water.
Yet for dissolving the hard and inflexible,
nothing can surpass it.
The soft overcomes the hard;
the gentle overcomes the rigid.
Everyone knows this is true,
but few can put it into practice.
Therefore, the Master remains
serene in the midst of sorrow.
Evil cannot enter his heart.
Because he has given up helping,
he is people’s greatest help.
True words seem paradoxical.
—Lao Tzu-
Strong Like Water™, my first book, was inspired by this Lao Tzu verse. As a woman in business, a daughter of immigrants and a mother trying to raise an inclusive, kind yet discerning daughter in today's increasingly divisive and angry world, I have experienced first hand the power of being able to harness this duality to be able to lead with courage and compassion - finding strength through love where soft becomes strong.
For a long time, I thought I would write a business book about how to implement these changes in the workplace – and indeed, I might do that next. But this story comes directly from my heart. It’s a story about my lifelong struggle trying to balance courage and compassion, the masculine with the feminine, the yin and the yang, bouncing back and forth between the two until I realize that I am both, and that the art is skillfully integrating these two parts of me.
I have come to see that true power comes from connecting your head to your heart arriving at the intersection of courage and compassion – and from this place, a leadership book looks very much like a story and power looks very much like love.
My journey to finding peace and learning these important lessons was long. To be clear, it sucked for a long time which is why I hope that my story can help others who are on this same path and can be a catalyst for them to make important changes in their life.
Long ago, I was listening to Russ Hudson, one of the Enneagram experts speak and he said, “All of these distorted things that we do in our life are all just an attempt for us to come back home.” That rings true for me. In the end, we are all simply trying to get back to the whole, perfect being we were born as before we started to contort ourselves to be something different than our true essence because that’s what we felt we needed to do to be accepted and loved.
This is the big lie of all of our lives. That we need to be something different than who we are to deserve love. Whatever our story, our experiences, our traumas – we are not any of those things. They do not define us. They cloud who we are at the core. They cover up our true essence. Our journey in this life is to come back home. Paulo Coelho knew this when he wrote The Alchemist and Joseph Campbell knew this when he wrote the “Hero’s Journey,” and most writers know this as the hero’s journey has become the archetype for most stories told today.
Strong Like Water™ is my hero’s journey. There are many great books that encourage people to be strong, to be more confident, and I applaud them all. But my story is a reminder not to lose touch with our softer side too - because it’s the combination of the two that becomes our true source of power. Where can we make space, lean out and re-balance rather than lean in and get more assertive? We have more than one tool in our toolkit. We don’t always have to use the hammer.
So whether you are in a place in your professional or personal life where you are yearning for more balance, meaning, and connection; or you are trying to tap into your innate and authentic source of power as you navigate the complexities in today’s business world; or anyone who has spent their life believing you have to be fierce to be powerful, I hope my story inspires you to find the balance that not only brings you success professionally, but also keeps you whole personally.
When there are enough of us leading from this place, I am certain our world will reflect back what we are trying so hard to attain in our own lives: love, compassion, empathy, and belonging.