Leadership lessons from Unleashed

The book Unleashed by Frances Frei and Anne Morris is about how to lead by empowering people. Leadership is not about you, it’s about empowering other people around you both in your presence (thro trust, love and belonging) and in your absence (thro strategy and culture). My key takeaways from this book is the practical wisdom related to what I could do myself as an individual to empowerment others around me.

Warning signs you make it all about you

Before we can empower others, we have to understand leadership is not about us, it is about managing other people’s fear and expectations. Here are 10 ways we often make things all about us.

1. What other people experience rarely occurs to us - we’re not being curious enough
2. We don’t ask very many questions - don’t feel the impulse to feel how other people think or feel
3. The most interesting thing about other people is what they feel about us - you don’t have a genuine interest in other people
4. We’re constantly keeping a tab on your own weaknesses - your inner critical voice is too loud
5. Other people’s abilities bum us out - our primary response on seeing others excel is feeling worse about yourself
6. We’re constantly in crisis
7. We’re pessimistic about the future - despair is the opposite of leadership
8. Don’t feel a sense of wonder and reality has become too tedious
9. Apathy and powerlessness are our dominant emotions
10. We’re the star of your own show - a leaders mission is to ensure wild success for everyone in their team and not toot their horn

This is not to say that as a leader we shouldn’t have aspirations or personal goals but that they all take a backseat to the mission of the team.

What is empowerment leadership?

Empowerment leadership is ensuring that people feel empowered to the do the right thing both in your presence and in your absence. The book visualises this as two concentric circles. The inner circle of empowerment involves trust, love and belonging and the outer circle involves strategy and culture.A lot has been written on making strategic changes to promote diversity, psychological safety and establishing a culture of accountability. Colin Doyle’s book The Culture Code addresses some of these issues. I am going to stick to the inner circle in this post.

1. Trust - There are three parts to establishing trust with people around you. First is authenticity, i.e. I talk to the real you, second are you logical and third do you empathise with me and have my best interests at heart (think Caring Personally from Radical Candor). Empowerment “wobbles” when any people you’re trying to lead, suspect any one of these as breaking down (your logic of a decision, your lack of empathy, etc). It is important to know your “wobble” and then address it.

1. Love - The 4 quadrants of how others experience us is shown below. On the x axis we have the devotion people feel from us towards their well being and on the y axis is the standards they feel we have set for them. Justice is the most empowering quadrant as it is the only quadrant where people feel both loved and held to high standards. People in this quadrant excel in our presence. Neglect is the worst as these are people whom we have written off and are not being challenged sufficiently. Severity is the second worst as people feel we are holding them to high standards but don’t care about them. Fidelity is when over protect people but don’t lead them to excellence by setting higher standards. The key point is we have the ability to be a leader who can both hold people to high standards and care for them deeply. Our goal as leaders should be to try and move as many people as possible from neglect, severity and fidelity to the justice quadrant.

2. Belonging - Building a place where bring their complete multidimensional selves to work is super hard. The scale of belonging starts from feeling safe to feeling welcome to feeling celebrated to finally the promised land of feeling cherished. There are some simple things that can be done to make a more inclusive organisation. Bring in clarity around promotions and make the criteria objective. This is especially helpful as marginalised groups often feel that there are artificial critieria that are used for majority folks. Anonymity can also often break trust. Instead of anonymous 360 degree feedback, bring it out of the shadows so there’s clear context around feedback.

10 ways to raise the bar

The part I loved about this list is all this can be done in the next 24 hours by us in any organisation we work in.

1. Kick off a group project - Raise the collective standards and explain why the standards are what they are
2. Celebrate a win publicly with specific praise to people who made it happen
3. Treat someone like their better future self - Engage with the new and improved version even if they’re not there yet (may be even assign that stretch assignment you’re holding back)
4. Put your high performers to work - Goad them to coach others
5. Convene an after action review (AAR) - What could have been done better
6. Set better goals - SMART or OKR
7. Broadcast your ambitions - Find a peer or two or three to keep you honest
8. Eliminate an inefficiency - Reduce people’s pains (easy wins). Stay humble and curious about what’s draining your team’s time
9. Take bold action - Take immediate and meaningful action. Ideally do something you’ve never done before which surprises people who know you
10. Be the standard - Model the standards that you want others to adopt

10 ways to show your committment

Another list of 10 things we can do to show our commitment to empowering others. Again, as I’ve said before, the list is actionable and achievable in the next 24 hours.

1. Get rid of your phones (distractions) while in a conversation - Offer your undliuted attention to everyone you talk to
2. Get curious about the lives - A simple “tell me about yourself” can go a long way
3. Experience their reality - active enquiry into how they experience the world and day to day work
4. Ask how you can help - focus on how to make it more meaningful
5. Help proactively without expectations for return
6. Offer snacks - I know this sounds silly but acknowledging someone’s humanity like this can be a big deal
7. Give them a break - Sprints need time for recovery
8. Acknowledge their presence outside work - Minimise evening and weekend work
9. Sincere gratitude - Clear thank you notes
10. Less me and more you - Language matters

I run a startup called Harmonize. We are hiring and if you’re looking for an exciting startup journey, please write to jobs@harmonizehq.com. Apart from this blog, I tweetabout startup life and practical wisdom in books.