Unleashed: The Unapologetic Leader's Guide to Empowering Everyone Around You

by Frances Frei

people tend to trust you when they think they are interacting with the real you (authenticity), when they have faith in your judgment and competence (logic), and when they believe that you care about them (empathy).

For the advanced trust builders out there, consider going back and testing your analysis directly with your skeptic. This conversation alone can be an enormously powerful way to build and rebuild trust. Taking responsibility for a wobble reveals your humanity (authenticity) and analytic chops (logic), while communicating your commitment to the relationship (empathy).

We also tend to have less time for recovery, which leads us to seek moments of micro-recovery throughout our day, sometimes smack in the middle of conversations with the very people we’re working to empower and lead.

We advise empathy wobblers to pay close attention to their behavior in group settings, particularly when other people have the floor.

The prescription is easy to describe, but harder to execute: change your objective from getting what you need in the meeting to making sure everyone else gets what they need.

Share the burden of moving the dialogue forward, even if it’s not your meeting.

“never forget that investing in people has the possibility of infinite returns.”

Along the way, don’t hesitate to learn from what other people know. Other people’s insights are among the most valuable—and overlooked—resources in the workplace, but accessing them requires a willingness to reveal you don’t have all the answers, something leaders often resist.

(asking for help can also reveal what energizes you professionally).

we’re talking about inauthenticity as a strategy for navigating the workplace.

fact, the uncomfortable truth is that diverse teams can underperform homogenous teams if they’re not managed actively for differences among team members, due in part to a phenomenon called the common information effect.

But here’s the thing: the common information effect only holds when we’re willing to wobble on authenticity. When we choose to bring our unique selves to the table, the parts of ourselves that are actually different from other people, then diversity can create an unbeatable advantage by expanding the amount of information the team can access. Indeed,

This expansion relies on the courage of authenticity wobblers. Believe us when we say we know this is hard—and sometimes too much to ask. At every step of our careers, we’ve been tempted to dilute who we are in the world.

The smaller we choose to make ourselves, the less likely we are to take up the space required to lead.

If we all take full responsibility for leading companies where diversity can thrive, and we all take full responsibility for showing up in them authentically, then our chances of building trust—and achieving true inclusion—start to look pretty good.

Your primate brain is also not playing the long game.

Buddhism has been wrestling with how to master this part of the mind for thousands of years, and the modern mindfulness movement has created a bridge to accessible tools and practices that can be enormously helpful. Our advice is to at least give them a fair look.

Surround yourself with reminders of these things or—better yet—find ways to somehow bring them with you into spaces where an inauthentic version of you has a habit of showing up.

Drop the script. Make sure you’re not emphasizing logic at the cost of authenticity.

Give us the “why.” What drives you to do what you do every day? What has called you to the practice of leadership? Many leaders keep these fundamental truths to themselves, sometimes simply out of habit, missing an opportunity to build trust by revealing what matters most to them.

Learn in public. At some point, it became a false badge of honor to think something and never waiver from that thought. Give yourself the freedom to update your point of view based on new information or experiences. Do it out in the open and model what it looks like to have the courage to evolve.

great thing about authenticity is that it’s crazy infectious.

Build a Team. Authenticity is not a solo sport. It should not be attempted alone in the private distortion chamber of our own minds. Build a Team (capital T) of friends and colleagues around you who can help you stay connected to the real you. Make it a requirement of Team membership that everyone is as comfortable with your insecurity as your audacity. Now spend time with the Team on a very regular basis, no less than monthly.

The less your agenda is about you and your shortcomings, the more the authentic version of you can show up and get the real work of leadership done.

How much do you trust yourself? Trust is the starting point for leading others, but the path to leadership begins even earlier, with your willingness to empower yourself. What are the wobbles in that most intimate of relationships?

Our point is that it’s not uncommon for the wobbles and anchors we experience with other people to map back to the way we feel about ourselves.

How do stress and pressure impact your ability to build trust with others? Does your wobble change or get even wobblier?

Do you lead an organization or team that needs to rebuild trust with its key stakeholders? If so, what is the institutional wobble that needs to be addressed?

How will you turn your trust diagnostics into meaningful action? What can you start doing immediately to build more ...

example in Su of high standards–deep devotion leadership. One practical expression of this is her “5 percent rule,” which is her commitment that AMD will get a little bit better every time the company performs a task. Demanding 50 percent improvement, she believes, is too daunting (in ValMax’s language, too severe), and accepting the status quo is an unthinkably low bar. Pursuing a relentless 5 percent is exactly the right, justice-steeped balance.5

It’s the rare leader who defies this trade-off, casually setting the bar high while revealing deep commitment to others. The rest of us have to work our way there with healthy doses of intention.

Neglect. Whose name do you have trouble remembering? Who have you written off as not worthy of your time and attention? You may think they don’t notice your decision to relegate them to neglect (they do). In general, a crowded neglect quadrant is a red flag for both leaders and companies, so we counsel people to find ways to empty this bucket as quickly as practical. We discuss how to do this with integrity later in the chapter.

CRP’s ultimate dream is to empower Peru. He believes that if the people around him, like the path-breaking Innova graduate, become strong leaders in their own right, they will invest their talent back into the country, spurring a virtuous cycle that will unleash the potential of an entire nation. He’s already seeing parts of this dream become a reality, as dynamism and activity in Peru’s most important service sectors continue to grow. Many of the leaders he has developed and launched are now building vital businesses of their own, continuing CRP’s transformative tradition of high standards and deep devotion.

We’re sometimes creating empowering contexts where other people can succeed wildly; at other times, we’re either not helpful or making choices that undermine their ability to thrive. Our thoughts and emotions distract us from leadership. It becomes about us rather than them.

Said differently, most of us hit the justice target when it’s emotionally convenient. We embrace justice when the conditions are optimal—when we’ve slept well, or we’re not under pressure, or when it doesn’t require too much discomfort or deviation from our preferred patterns of behavior—but this convergence of circumstances rarely coincides with our biggest opportunities to lead.

The thing that will matter most, hands down, to your ability to empower others is the capacity to move into justice w...

How do you travel, on your terms and timeline, from severity or fidelity or even neglect...

start by letting go of strict assumptions about who you are and, more importantly, who you are not.

Your leadership past does not define your future, and therein lies the possibility.

But they persevered and turned challenges into gifts, pulling glory from the crucible of adversity.

We all possess this type of character strength, the strength to break free from whatever leadership identities we’ve chosen to occupy in the past. It’s simply a decision about whether to use that power—and where to go with your newfound freedom.

On her quest to teach the world about the merits of a “growth mindset,” Professor Carol Dweck has grown comfortable with tough conversations.

Our translation to leadership is this: Are you asking your people to evolve? Or are you instead—because of loyalty or complacency or conflict avoidance—asking relatively little of them?

If people feel supported but unmotivated around you, cozy but passive, then your path to justice involves raising the bar. Let Dweck’s prep-for-the-path challenge be your battle cry—a reminder of the Sulla within all of us, waiting to break free.

The idea is simple: catch someone in the act of behaving exactly as you want them to behave, using sincere and specific praise.

Take it from Dweck and focus on things that a person can truly control. Rinse and repeat on a very regular basis.

contrast, telling someone, “The way you took two competing ideas and articulated what was in common between them was really effective in breaking the stalemate,” has enough detail so that the listener knows what to do more of the next time. Another word for this, of course, is positive reinforcement.

It forces you to pay closer attention to the people around you and generates a positive charge between you.

Be clear about the future state you envision and the higher-order reasons for it. Whenever possible, frame the behavior change as a small pivot with a big payoff to your shared mission. Let’s call this type of intervention “constructive advice.”

for constructive advice to be credible, it must be layered on top of a foundation of trust.