Unfolding Leaders

 

A while back one of my friends was unpacking with me an issue he’d held for a long time. It was a pattern he had around other senior leaders he’d been working with hating and undermining him. It was concerning because it had repeated itself at several different companies he’d worked for. He was certain that people hated him because of what he called a habit of ‘talking too much’ in conversations. He’d had a session with a psychologist who had given him a few signposts to look for in conversations so that he could self-censor that tendency.

Actually, that’s not it, I told him.

‘I’ve seen you at work, and I know exactly why some people so vehemently hate you and others totally adore you.’

Having had several colleagues who had experienced similar attacks, as well as myself, I could relate to what was going on in the situations he described.

I’d only observed him working on two occasions. The absentee owner of a café had hired him to turn around the performance of a gorgeous Intstagrammable café nestled in a beautiful rice field in Vietnam. For the preceding year, the café had been making losses and token profits. My friend was hired because he has decades of experience in hotel management and hospitality. He had also successfully turned around the performance of many organisations he’d worked in. In his first month, the profitability was almost as high as their best sales months ever, as my friend literally worked day and night on improving all aspects of their operations.

As I was only in the country for a short period of time, I went to the café for a few hours to do some work and see how he was doing.

Having never seen him at work, it was a pleasure to behold. My friend connected with each and every guest at the café, attended to their needs and checked in occasionally to ensure they were enjoying their experience of the café and its food. Clearly, he was masterful at relationships. At other times, we spoke about the various business improvements he was making, and the dynamics of running a successful café.

My friend embodies a quality few leaders do; with every part of his being, he wants and will support the people he leads (and all of those around him) to exceed his level of personal success.

At the café, I also got to see how he was with the staff. They were treated like family. He paid for the person who was in charge of security to study in order to become a barista. My friend was instrumental in getting the staff pay raises, and trained them in all of the aspects of working in a successful café. He wanted them to have a career path rather than just a job. Nothing was held back. In his conversations with me, he would free share his deepest insights and business secrets without concern about how I might use them or whom I might also share them with.

Having seen it so many times before, the reason the leaders and business owners he worked with attacked him was as simple as it was clear: jealousy.

They see what he brings, and knowing that they could bring that also, but choose not to, they react in jealousy.

Most leaders unconsciously do not want to be outshone by those they lead.

I’ve seen this time and time again in the companies I’ve worked in. The same leader also often thinks that they have to be a master of every aspect of the business, and the source of all of the good ideas. Either directly or indirectly, they then work to attack, hold back, or otherwise sabotage those they lead when they dare to shine. Blame will also be directed at those employees for any outcomes that don’t meet the leader’s expectations.

It is horrible to observe.

Not the least because it communicates to everybody, don’t you dare shine whilst around me.

In the space of a month, my friend had turned the business from losses and marginal profits to the highest profitability they’d ever experienced. Rather than being grateful, the owner still sought out aspects of operations she was unsatisfied with in order to personally attack him, and depreciate what he brought.

The aim of the attacks is simple.

It is to get you to hold back bringing all of whom you are to what you do, and it is remarkably effective in achieving its outcome.

Acquiesce, and that holding back will be the source of your misery.

Its best encapsulated by a saying I once heard that ‘99% is a bitch, 100% is a breeze’.

I never truly understood the meaning of that saying until one day I was in a workshop and had excused myself to the bathroom to mull over a contribution I was going to make… ‘should I say this or that, and if I do, what will people think, and how will they respond? So, maybe I should say nothing, or perhaps phrase it another way?’

In that moment, the meaning of that saying truly landed for me.

It became fully apparent that 100% is just doing something without holding back or questioning. And doing it in the knowledge that if you need to course correct, you’re more than capable of doing so. At 99% participation, it might look like high participation, but it’s a complete ‘bitch’. The 1% gap is the endless festering of self-doubt, mind chatter, ‘strategy’, fears, what if?, should I?, if only…?, regret… and so on, and so on.

That 1% gap is an ongoing agony.

In my friend’s case, he lived with the anguish of the negative behaviours of others towards him that he thought was due to something he was doing wrong. He even sought professional help to deal ‘his’ issue, in other words, thinking that it was about him. My friend had been professionally advised to monitor all of his conversations for signs of his weakness. He was then to self-censor by holding back his expression based on the belief that to do so would make him seem more agreeable to others. I love my friend’s unique expression and engaging storytelling; it is one of his most endearing characteristics and he is masterful at nurturing relationships. He had been convinced by a professional to hold all of that that back.

[As an aside – because it isn’t immediately obvious – this is one of the things to be wary of when working with any type of change professional, be that a coach, therapist or other practitioner: it is entirely possible struggle with or ‘work’ on an ‘issue’ that is neither yours nor even true for weeks, months or even years. Many people do. I know I did. How many issues have you held onto for years or even decades that are not even true?]

In the context of work, that 1% is the holding back, knowing that you could bring more but don’t. It will be the inner dialogue that you have about yourself. Whether that’s not being good enough and whether or not you should do a certain action because of the backlash you may or may not receive. It will and also your constant questioning about the actions of and hatred for the other person or leader who cannot stand to see your amazingness. That hatred for another will exist first in your body and poison you as much as them, even if it is never verbalised. It’s crazy, but I’ve seen many people express that hatred for their boss years after they’ve left the company. The poison continues to harm them, and they did nothing but bring their amazingness to the company.

Also, everyone that interacts with you when you’re playing at 99% now gets the lesser version of you.

In short, everybody loses when you hold back.

But it doesn’t have to be that way.

The most powerful moment is the realisation as to why the leader is behaving the way they are. This allows you to see the situation for what it is (their jealousy) and to not take it personally nor engage with it, lest it will put you in a negative spiral.

In the case of my friend, rather than compromise what he brought, he left the business, leaving the owner to stew in her own insecurity, negativity and judgment. He had offered her everything he had without any holding back; however, the owner’s jealousy was too much to accept it. It wasn’t just increased profits or knowledge he was bringing to enrich her, but new ways of being and relating to the staff that could unlock everything they brought to the business. Everybody would have ended up winning.

When we meet others who are more mastered in an aspect of life than we are, we have the choice to be inspired, celebrate their magnificence, and learn from them. Or, we can see them as a source of competition or threat and become jealous. Unfortunately, a great many choose the latter.

That said, you don’t always need to leave your job if this situation arises. In this context, the real message being communicated by the jealousy is actually a confirmation that you’re doing amazingly well, and it has been noticed. Realise that your boss is insecure, and that’s why they behave as they do. It’s not your issue, its there’s. Give yourself a pat on the back and keep bringing all that you do to your work, and more, and move into an upward spiral, instead.

 

 

A personal development workshop leader once explained to a retreat group I was a participant of, the idea the ‘hard path’ and the ‘easy path’ of personal change.

The concept itself, is fairly easy to grasp, though, there was a more powerful realisation he was trying to lead us to.

The hard path is where you develop the discipline to do things that are self-loving or supportive of your evolution. In other words, things like exercise, nutrition, meditation, good sleep, spending time in nature, doing things to nurture yourself, and so on.

The easy path, is where you don’t necessarily do any of those activities, or where you just do those things when you feel like it. For example, if you’ve had a tough day at work, you might return home, do some Facebook and social media, put your feet up on the couch and watch TV enjoying a bowl of ice cream before going to bed.

The easy path might also mean working until late without a break, living off stimulants like coffee and sugar, exercising whenever you get enough time to do so, and so on. Although, it could also be that you mix it up a bit. If you’ve had a hard day at work, sometimes you do come home and have a bath, and unwind before going to bed early, and sometimes you don’t.

In short though, on the easy path, if you’ve got time for self-care activities, that’s great, but they’re not necessarily something you do with any consistency.

The trainer’s point was, that the first path takes some discipline and effort, and therefore it’s the hard path. And while you don’t always see immediate benefit, over time, you will. With the ‘easy’ path, you also don’t see the immediate cost, but, over time, you will.

I apologise, because I can’t for the life remember how he drew the simple line diagram, so I can’t include it.

However, the bomb he was dropping was following: at some point, the paths actually cross, so that the hard path becomes the easy path, and the easy path becomes the hard path.

And that makes sense.

At some point, how you chose to live on the easy path catches up with you and so you might become sick, lethargic, exhausted, depressed, and so on. The potential consequences of walking the easy path are many and varied.

Of course, the opposite also holds. If you chose the ‘hard path’, after a while you see the outcomes reflected in better health, lower illness and disease, less stress, higher productivity, and so on.

The trainer stopped here with his analogy, leaving it at that its best you take the hard path, rather than the easy path.

What he missed was, that in order to get back onto the so-called ‘hard path’ from the easy path, it is now much more difficult.

This is because you don’t have the momentum of being on the ‘hard’ path (with all of the accumulated momentum of loving actions), and you have to have to battle with a body that is depleted and damaged by taking the easy path. So, if you came home from work exhausted and did Facebook and watched a movie until late with some ice cream, the next day you have to deal with the consequences of those choices, otherwise they will impact your next day as well. They can snowball, or have us in a constant cycle of depletion and relief.

In other words, you have to resurrect yourself before you can even really get back on the other path. And that likely takes more will and effort than actually just being on the hard path from the beginning.

But the trainer completely missed the real bomb.

And that is this.

The easy path actually is the harder path, and always was.

That it is ‘easy’, is a complete illusion.

And the so-called ‘hard-path’ actually always was the easy path.

The reason is simple.

It requires no effort in order to be yourself, and enormous effort not to.

Your body is constantly communicating to you what it needs, whether that is sleep, nutrition, to eat this food and not that food, movement, exercise, rejuvenation, to speak this way and not that, and so on. The more you listen to it, the easier it becomes to read that communication in detail. The less you listen to it, the louder it speaks and the more effort it takes to ignore it. If you get too far out, this is usually where illness and disease can come in to correct the loveless choices that have consistently been made.

Ultimately, if we hold activities which contribute to our wellbeing as a ‘hard’ path, then we have set ourselves up for failure, struggle and self-judgment and bashing before we have even begun. Thus, using the concepts of ‘easy’ and ‘hard’ make things way more difficult than they need to be.

It seems to me that what matters most, is what is ‘true’, something that is uniquely personal to each of us. Being responsive to honouring that which is true in our lives is the path which will inherently lead to well-being.

 

 

 

 

In some ways I was lucky in that I knew what I wanted to do for a living since I was 9 years old.

In Grade 5, my primary school teacher introduced the concept of investing in shares to our class. Looking back, I’m sure he was an investor, if not a gambler, himself. One day he brought a newspaper into the classroom and opened it on the page where all of the current share prices are listed. He explained that you could buy a ‘share’ and be a part owner of some of the largest companies in Australia, for an amount of money as little as a few cents. He went on to say how the price of these shares changed each day, along with the success (or otherwise) of the company. If you made good investment decisions, your shares would rise in value, and your fifty cent shares might suddenly be worth seventy cents, or more!

I was hooked.

That evening I explained my discovery to my parents, and they told me that my great grandfather owned shares in a few companies. From that day on, I followed those companies’ performance in the newspaper, and I read everything I could find about personal finance. In those days, Amazon.com wasn’t a thing, so I had to import books on investing from overseas in order to learn about personal finance and investment strategies. For the next decade I would regularly travel to the city to visit the stock exchange and buy specialist investment books. At secondary school, I was able to organise work experience with one of the largest stockbrokers in the industry and continued reading and learning about investing and personal finance. In the middle of a sharemarket boom, they were very exciting times.

Having to wait a decade before I could be a part of the personal finance industry, I decided to look for work before studying at university.

Thankfully, my first job was with a truly amazing company, being the one that was considered the leading company in the local investment banking industry.

I would be forever grateful to have worked at this organisation as my first full-time job for many reasons. Primarily, it is because the contrast between organisations I would later work for would be so stark. Those differences included areas such as an organisational culture which supported true innovation, a strong work ethic, the value of relationships, risk taking, high performing teams and so on. Most companies these days proclaim that they excel in all of these aspects, though few genuinely do. Had I began working for almost any of their competitors, I would never have realised just what is possible in a high performing organisation.

Realising their people were their greatest asset, they went to great lengths to hire the best and brightest people. For many, this involved a gruelling process constituting multiple interviews, psychological assessments, and behavioural based interview techniques. Once hired they took great care in developing their people.

While I didn’t work in the larger head office, there were a few hundred employees in my office, and even the lowest ranked employee of the firm would feel comfortable in approaching the CEO and having a chat. Surprisingly, there was little to no politics within the company despite the majority of the employees having exceptionally high IQs and being paid very high salaries and bonuses. If you had a good idea, it would be listened to and actioned, regardless of your job title. Everyone’s contribution to the firm was genuinely valued because management knew that the best ideas could come from anywhere.

By contrast, in many organisations I would later work with, the leaders thought that they need to be the source of all ideas and that they understand all aspects of the business better than the people actually working day-to-day in those functions.

Later, this organisation would acquire the second company I would work with, one that had industry leading performance in their asset management business. That company hired similarly bright people; however, their organisational culture was one of high competitiveness and politics. Reading about that acquisition many years later, it was suggested that one of the biggest challenges they experienced in integrating that company into their business was the politics and competition that existed within culture of the asset management business.

In summary, the company found the brightest people they could, put them in groups with others of a similar intellect, and had supported them with a very unique organisational culture. I would describe that as being one where ideas were freely exchanged and controlled risk taking was encouraged. Apart from the corporate side of the business, which legally needed to be sectioned off to ensure client confidentiality, the office was open-plan in order to facilitate the development of relationships and the free exchange of ideas across business units.

Unlike with most companies, if you made a ‘mistake’ because you took a controlled risk, you weren’t penalised should it not pay off. It takes enormous leadership maturity to hold this stance. Most companies penalise those who make mistakes, even if they were good ideas given the available information at the time. As such most companies create a culture of fear, protection, blaming, and one where people don’t or are afraid to take risks. These organisations can never lead an industry. Paradoxically, by trying to do the impossible (avoiding risk) their organisations are higher risk, and therefore are always at risk of failure, because they are followers rather than leaders. As followers, they miss many of the excellent opportunities available.

The company I worked with also had a culture of excellence. You brought your A-game to work every day, and were expected to perform at a very high level. In return, you were paid very well, with profit shares and bonuses being a big part of remuneration. The firm supported employees well in many other ways including professional development and a fully stocked fridge of drinks and snacks.

Their approach to business paid off, spectacularly so.

At the time I was there, the bank had made increasing profits every year, never having made a loss, and its return on equity was several hundred percent greater than those of its competitors.

Their success made them the envy of the entire industry.

With a supportive corporate culture, it was also highly innovative. They were the originators of many investment products and structures that would later become commonplace in the financial services industry, earning them billions of dollars in profits.

It was also my first real experience of working with people that were genuinely able to ‘think outside the box’. I got to see how many opportunities are hidden in a company’s ‘invisible’ assets like knowledge, systems, processes, reputation, and so on. For every company in an industry, for example, a business function might operate as a cost centre. By challenging the assumptions that most hold as true and reorganising that function, it can be possible to run that same function at an enormous profit, simply because no other company has seen that opportunity.

Experiencing that, was an eye-opener for me.

That principle has affected almost everything I’ve done since.

At university, for example, I knew most students would submit essentially the same answers to an assignment. Their answers would be focused on everything in the notes the lecturer gave to us about the topic, or the consensus opinion of two or three of the most noted textbook authors in the field. I knew that if I wanted to do well relative to my classmates, I just needed to find something extra or different from the consensus.

There are very good reasons why most people think the same way about most aspects of life such as organisations. I will discuss that elsewhere on this website, in particular, where I talk about paradigms. That being said, as I was later to learn, different, doesn’t always mean true, better, or even useful.

If you’re reading this website its likely you have an interest in either leadership or individual and organisational change. There are hundreds of theories and models of leadership, and whilst it is true that the same assumptions underlie nearly all of those models, when you look around, there is a clear absence of great leadership despite all of those different theories. Just ‘thinking differently’, doesn’t guarantee any kind of success.

Overall, this was the most valuable lesson I took away from my first working experience.

If all I had ever known was working with average companies, I never would have had any idea as to what was possible. I would simply consider average as being normal, and all there was to business and life. What I began to see, was that we live in a bubble in all aspects of our life. We have been conditioned to believe that is all there is because that’s all we’ve experienced or seen as being real. It’s the bubble that keeps things safe, stable and predictable.

The next few experiences in my career and personal life would change this for me, forever.