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

by Frances Frei

leadership is about empowering other people as a result of your presence—and making sure that impact continues into your absence.

How do you build up stores of this essential leadership capital? Here’s the basic formula: 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). When trust is lost, it can almost always be traced back to a breakdown in one of these three drivers.

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. In other words, take radical responsibility for everyone else in the room. Share the burden of moving the dialogue forward, even if it’s not your meeting. Search for the resonant examples that will bring the concepts to life, and don’t disengage until everyone in the room understands. Note that this is almost impossible to do as long as texting or checking email is an option, so put away your devices (everyone knows you’re not taking notes on their good ideas).

One of the most haunting stories he tells involves a legislator who has to decide the fate of his adulterous son. Out of respect for the father, the community wants to spare the son a gruesome punishment—blinding in both eyes—but dad refuses to accept the charity. Instead, he gouges out one of his own eyes and one of his son’s, achieving an “admirable balance … between compassionate father and just lawgiver.”3 Justice seems to get much of its power from this kind of equipoise. To lead in justice means achieving a rare mix of strength and empathy, of white-hot, battle-ready ferocity blended with the cool, moderating forces of wisdom and grace. Justice is neither blindly devoted to someone else, nor so relentless in its quest for power that leaders lose their humanity. Justice neither imposes its authority at the cost of duty, nor is it dutiful at the cost of authority. If we were to coax ValMax’s observations into a modern 2×2 framework, it might look something like that in figure 3-1, with authority on one axis and duty on the other. Leaders should aim for high marks on both ideals, embodied by justice in the upper right. They should convey both commanding authority and a profound sense of duty to their fellow human beings.

Leaders are most effective in empowering other people when they create a context we describe as high standards and deep devotion. When a leader’s expectations are high and clear, we tend to stretch to reach them. And we are far more likely to get there when we know that leader truly has our back. It’s a version of tough love that places equal emphasis on the toughness and the love. We hope to convince you, by the end of this chapter, that it’s the highest form of love.

Dweck summarized her challenge with the following questions: Are you preparing the child for the path? Or the path for the child? 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? Are you empowering others or are you making them comfortable?

The good news is that the most effective mechanism we know for accelerating human progress taps into our natural devotional impulses. The idea is simple: catch someone in the act of behaving exactly as you want them to behave, using sincere and specific praise. Describe the behavior in enough detail so that they can replicate it. Take it from Dweck and focus on things that a person can truly control. Rinse and repeat on a very regular basis. The specific part matters a lot. Sincere but nonspecific praise is easier to dispense, but it rarely helps someone improve, since they’re not entirely sure how to recreate the magic. For example, telling someone they did a “nice job” after a meeting generally doesn’t help, since the recipient has to guess what they did to earn it. In 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.

There’s still a time and place to correct negative behaviors, but we advise doing so sparingly, as it’s much less effective at spurring improvement.12 When you do have to do it, bring evidence to the discussion. 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 the feedback Scrooges among us, this next part is important: for constructive advice to be credible, it must be layered on top of a foundation of trust. Of course, that foundation requires empathy—the recipient’s conviction that you’re truly seeing them, both the good stuff and the bad. (If someone only sees what’s wrong with us, then we tend to process what they say as judgment rather than as fuel for improvement.) In the absence of empathy, constructive advice can easily become destructive, making the recipient worse rather than better. For example, it could make them more self-conscious in their execution or less confident in their decision making. Note that this happens all the time.

Here’s the main problem with not doing as much as you can, as quickly as you can, to promote inclusion: failing to act in the presence of bias is demoralizing and inhumane. Once you’ve identified systemic barriers to the contributions of your fellow human beings, delays can be interpreted as comfort with their inequity and unrealized potential. Imagine saying something like this to your colleagues: “Look, it’s come to our attention that we’re only empowering the straight, white men on the team, but we have a lot on our plate right now, so we’re going to wait until later to deal with it.” That’s essentially what you’re communicating when you move slowly in response to unveiled bias. There will always be people telling you to slow down and do less. Always, always, always. They often have long institutional memories, care deeply about the organization, and worry most about the good things that may be lost in a transformative change process. When we took on gender inequalities at Harvard Business School (more on this in chapter 6), well-meaning colleagues who believed they were acting in the school’s best interest advised us to wait a year. One year didn’t seem like much to ask for a hundred-year-old institution.

A task force has been assigned to the problem. A small, intrepid team of reformers is one thing; indeed, it’s among the most important tools for accelerating action. Most task forces, it turns out, do not fit this profile. If your organization is pushing you to rely on a structure like this that’s outside the typical chain of command, make sure it’s a mechanism with the legitimacy and decision rights to make a difference.

Here’s what different tends to look like when it comes to attraction: identify the profiles you’re missing and recruit in places where they tend to gather. For example, if you’re an organization that skews white and male in its leadership ranks and you’re now looking for legal talent, start with organizations like 1844, an association of successful black lawyers.b If you’re looking for technical talent, attend the Grace Hopper Celebration, which bills itself as “the world’s largest gathering of women technologists.”2 Begin actively recruiting at historically black colleges and universities. And women’s colleges. And colleges in geographies that are unfamiliar to you. Said differently, if you want to attract different types of people, then start meeting them where they are, in different types of places (ideally, where they’re the majority).

In our experience, the opportunity to thrive has two practical drivers: a culture that values inclusion and widespread access to development opportunities. Later in the book, we’ll spend more time on the mechanics of culture, but we also want to highlight the role of culture here, given how central it is to the experience of belonging inside organizations. A culture of inclusion has four levels: safe, welcome, celebrated, and cherished. These levels can be visualized in our “inclusion dial” in figure 4-1. We often draw people into this discussion by asking them to measure the inclusiveness of their teams using this tool. FIGURE 4-1 The inclusion dial The definitions we use for each of these progressive stages are: Safe. Employees feel physically and emotionally safe in the workplace, regardless of who they are. Welcome. Employees feel welcome in the workplace, regardless of who they are; they can bring their “whole selves” to work without penalty. Celebrated. Employees feel celebrated in the workplace because of who they are; they are rewarded for contributing their unique ideas and perspectives. Cherished. A culture of inclusion permeates the organization; leaders embrace differences among employees as a source of competitive advantage, and there is minimal variability in the experience of belonging across individuals, teams, and functions.

It’s essential to approach these questions with the humility that your own theory of the case may be wrong. When we started working on issues of gender equity at Harvard Business School, male faculty members were being promoted at twice the rate of female faculty members. As we talked to our senior colleagues about how to explain this phenomenon, two prevailing hypotheses emerged: either the school was making biased decisions systematically or men are better prepared than women to be promoted. We put aside our own point of view and did an investigation into which hypothesis was right. We looked at fifteen years of résumés (that’s how long we had been at the school, so we knew the candidates) and found true variance related to gender: men who were up for promotion had, on average, a higher number of top-tier publications than their female peers. And then we pushed further, channeling the famous “five whys” of root cause analysis. Why did the magnificent female scholars in our community tend to have fewer publications? Why were these talented women less productive academically? We found a trend that surprised us: overall, women were holding on to draft manuscripts for extended periods of time—often for a year or more—before submitting them for publication. And while they were polishing their work toward an relentless goal of perfection, their male counterparts were submitting works in progress early and often, getting critical feedback on their ideas and shortening the timel...

We’re going to skip the explanatory part of this discussion—the part about the gender baggage we’re all dragging around—and simply advise using anonymous evaluation tools sparingly, or at least with the recognition that they don’t reliably bring out the best in us. If you must invite everyone to opine on each other’s strengths and weaknesses, then we suggest first training people in how to perform productive, unbiased evaluations. Figuring out how to separate signal from noise from ego in assessing our colleagues is varsity stuff, and we shouldn’t just be throwing people into the deep end with it, which most 360 processes effectively do. (Another way to mediate this risk is to involve a skilled facilitator in data collection and analysis, someone who can provide the context and filtering themselves.)

Once you’ve hired, developed, and promoted great people of all varieties, you now have to retain them. In today’s talent marketplace, this is often a significant challenge. The solution? Earn the right to keep your people, every single day. We recommend you start (stay with us here) by making lots of paranoid assumptions. Assume your competitors are looking at your inclusive, well-oiled talent machine as their own development pipeline. Assume your best people are getting calls from enthusiastic headhunters on a weekly, even daily, basis. (In our experience, African-American software engineers get called by recruiters at an average rate of every day.) Assume a few of them are feeling restless and/or some subset of the following: underchallenged, undervalued, underpaid, and underappreciated. Assume that someone put a great offer in front of them today, and they’re talking to their loved ones right now about the pros and cons of making the jump. Wake up every morning with a commitment to create the conditions where your employees aren’t even tempted to take that first call. That process is going to look different for every organization, but it always starts with open-hearted, open-minded inquiry into what’s getting in the way of everyone thriving, particularly the ones who are contributing the most. One of the things we like to do when we start working with companies is to sit down one-on-one with senior women and people of color and ask, “What does this organization need to ...

The first frontier of absence leadership is strategy. Strategy, done well, empowers organizations by showing employees how to deploy the resources they control (time, focus, capital, etc.) in the absence of direct, hands-on leadership. This scale of leadership depends on people understanding the strategy well enough to inform their own decisions with it. In our experience, too many companies are held back by strategic confusion below the most senior ranks. Said differently, strategy guides discretionary behavior to the limit of how well you communicate it.

Your first job as a strategist is to be better than your competitors at the things that matter most to your customers. This sounds simple enough, but here’s the thing: in most cases, this means you’ll also have to be worse than your competitors at other things, ideally the less important ones. A major lesson of our decade of research on service companies—we wrote a book about this idea—is that organizations that resist and try to be great at everything usually end up in a state of “exhausted mediocrity.”2 Sound familiar?

In particular, we suggest underinvesting where it matters least in order to free up the resources to overinvest where it matters most. We propose being bad in the service of great.

Under Kelleher’s leadership, Southwest became best-in-class on the attributes that mattered most to its customers precisely because it chose to be worst-in-class on the ones that mattered least. The airports Southwest operated out of were in inconvenient locations (for example, its Washington, DC, hub was in Baltimore), but that meant lower costs for the airline, savings it could pass on to price-sensitive customers who were more than willing to give up convenience in return for cheaper tickets. Southwest denied passengers any meaningful onboard comforts (including an assigned seat!), which meant it could turn planes around faster at the gate, which meant that the airline got more flying time out of its expensive, airborne assets than its competitors, freeing up even more room to lower prices—the thing its customers wanted most.

“the most successful people don’t even try to do everything.” They apply “ruthless prioritization,” in Azzarello’s words, while the rest of us become “famous for working hard instead of for doing important things and adding value.”

These debates are often passionate because there’s no universally correct answer. The argument for maximizing profits is perhaps obvious, but it can also be good business to leave enough room on the value range to delight loyal, buzz-generating customers. Apple’s pricing strategy is a good example of this approach. Apple deliberately prices its products below its customers’ sky-high WTP (but still well above cost), generating a form of customer devotion that approaches frenzy.9 Despite paying a handsome price premium by industry standards, almost everyone leaves an Apple store feeling like a winner. Meanwhile, Apple’s profits continue skyward.

This is where value-based strategy gets even more interesting. The goal of strategy is to grow the “wedges” on your product’s value stick (customer delight, firm margin, and supplier surplus) without making any of the other wedges smaller. We call them wedges because it helps people visualize the opportunity for expansion and contraction. It’s relatively easy to grow one wedge by shrinking another one. That’s what cable companies do when they raise consumer prices—and fury—without doing anything to increase our WTP.21 Great strategy asks you to work harder than that and find ways to grow everyone’s wedge.

Pick any mode(s) of communication you want and certainly play to your strengths. Every year Jeff Bezos writes a long letter to his shareholders in which he reinforces the pillars of Amazon’s strategy. It’s addressed to investors who own a piece of the company but clearly written for every stakeholder in his orbit. Bezos is a clear, persuasive writer, and these annual letters are a great example of “deeply/simply” communication. In his 2017 shareholder letter, Bezos reminded everyone of his internal ban on slide presentations in favor of long-form, six-page, double-sided memos that Amazon executives draft to pitch new ideas to each other. Memos are drafted collaboratively and circulated without the authors’ names, to minimize politics. Strategy meetings at Amazon start with everyone reading every word of a “six-pager” and then engaging with the ideas in what one Amazon alumnus recalled as “the most efficient and exciting meetings I had ever attended for any company.”24 When was the last time you described a meeting that way? Efficient? Exciting? Bezos has called this practice as the smartest thing he ever did, since the discipline of crafting sentences and paragraphs forces deeper thinking.25 We tend to think of writing as a tool for influencing others, but writing is also the greatest tool for sorting out our own thoughts that human beings have invented.26 If you want to create a better strategy, we advise writing about it early and often. Start with a blank page and give ...

As a starting place for discovering how possible it is to change culture, we like former MIT professor Edgar H. Schein’s iconic framework, which loosely divides organizational culture into artifacts, behaviors, and shared basic assumptions.2 As Schein argues persuasively, to get people to reliably behave the way you want—even in your absence—you have to get them to reliably think the way you want. David Neeleman famously flew as a crew member once a month when he started JetBlue.3 He would put on an apron, serve coffee, and introduce himself up and down the aisle with a friendly, “Hi, I’m Dave.” Neeleman electrified the organization every time he did this and reinforced the company’s shared basic assumptions, including the belief that everyone, at every level, was in service to JetBlue passengers. The most important assumption he surfaced—a somewhat radical idea at the time—was that customers are people. JetBlue’s mission was to “bring humanity back to air travel.” Seeing the CEO treat a passenger like a human being was a warning shot to everyone that no one flies steerage on this airline. That’s how things are really done around JetBlue.

Here’s our definition of a weaponized value: it’s the manipulation of an espoused value to disempower, or in extreme cases, harm someone. It’s the opposite of leadership in that it’s all about the weaponizer and their own interests. A weaponized value dresses up a new belief in the guise of an old one. It changes the meaning of what is true without the rest of the organization’s consent. For example, we worked with one company that listed “default to trust” among its core values. This phrase was meant to remind everyone to give each other the benefit of the doubt, a noble idea, but it began to be used to shut down healthy dissent. “Default to trust,” a manager might say to a direct report who questioned the plan or offered an alternative viewpoint.