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

by Frances Frei

Your challenge now is to look at your pattern of wobbles and anchors across multiple examples. Pick the top three or four interactions that stand out to you, for whatever reason, and do a quick trust diagnostic for each one. What do your typical wobbles and anchors seem to be? Does the pattern change under stress or with different kinds of stakeholders? For example, do you wobble in one way with your direct reports, but in a different way with people who have authority over you (this isn’t uncommon)?

Consider the standard meeting example: an empathy wobbler’s engagement tends to be sky high at the kickoff of a meeting (you might learn something!) until the moment they understand the concepts and contribute their ideas. At this point, their engagement plummets and remains low until the gathering mercifully comes to an end. We call this dramatic arc the “agony of the super smart” (or ASS).

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. 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).

Patagonia’s raison d’être, Marcario even changed the company’s mission statement from “Do no unnecessary harm” to “We’re in business to save our home planet.”9

In a world where mistrust is on the rise, her advice to business leaders is, yes, take the long view and make it about something more than your shareholders—channel your inner Rose Marcario—but also “never forget that investing in people has the possibility of infinite returns.”

In this country’s founding documents, we promised to defend each other’s pursuit of happiness—not happiness itself, but the pursuit of it—as a sacred, inalienable right. Until we treat that promise with reverence again, we’re not going to solve our collective trust problem.

Brazilian thinker and teacher Paulo Freire, said, “What the educator does is make it possible for students to become themselves.”11 There is no higher human need than to realize our full potential, and no greater act of empathy than to enable that evolution in others. We believe the future of work—and of the planet Marcario has vowed to save—depends on our willingness to exchange the gift of each other’s transformation.

Your wobble may be logic if people don’t always have confidence in the rigor of your ideas—or full faith in your ability to deliver on them. The good news is the problem is typically rooted in the perception of wobbly logic rather than the reality of it. Either way, the effect is the same: if we’re not sure your judgment can handle the road ahead, then we’re less likely to want you at the wheel.

Root the case you’re making in evidence, speak to the things you know to be true, and then (and this is the hard part) stop there.

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.

For most logic wobblers, however, rigor isn’t the issue. A more likely explanation for the breakdown in trust is that you’re not communicating your ideas effectively.

There are generally two ways to communicate complex thoughts. The first way takes your audience on a journey, with twists and turns and context and dramatic tension, until they eventually get the payoff. Many of the world’s best storytellers use this technique. You can visualize this approach as an inverted triangle with an enchantingly circuitous route to the point. If logic is your wobble, however, this is a risky path. Without enough confidence in your narrative destination, the audience is tempted to abandon you along the way.

Start with your headline and then offer reinforcing evidence to back it up. This shift signals clarity of vision and full command of the facts. Everyone has a much better chance of following your logic, and even if you get interrupted along th...

Authenticity: Who was that masked man? You may have an authenticity wobble if people feel they’re not getting access to the “real” you, to a full and complete accounting of what you know, think, and feel. If the version of reality you present feels overly curated or strategic, an invisible wall can form between you and the people around you.

A quick test: How different is your professional persona from the one that shows up around family and friends? If there’s a real difference, what are you getting in return for masking or minimizing certain parts of yourself? What’s the payoff (for example, approval or a sense of safety)? If you can easily answer these questions, then authenticity may be on your short list of challenges.

In 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.

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

Here’s the reason to care, even if you don’t identify as different: all of us pay the price of inauthentic interactions, and all of us have a better chance of thriving in inclusive environments where authenticity can flourish.

Systemic racism is not just an African-American or Latinx problem. It’s our shared moral and organizational imperative to create workplaces where the burdens of ...

Pay less attention to what you think people want to hear and more attention to what you need to say to them. Reveal your full humanity to the world, regardless of what your critics say. And while you’re at it, take exquisite care of people who are different from you with confidence that their difference is the very thing that could unleash you.

Your primate brain is also not playing the long game. It was designed to get you to the end of the day, not to the end of a leadership journey filled with meaning and impact.

Drop the script. Make sure you’re not emphasizing logic at the cost of authenticity. There is an obvious upside to leaders being informed and articulate, but when it comes to trust, we also crave access to the person behind the talking points.

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.

Focus on unleashing other people. Finally, remember what you came to do as a leader: empower other people, in both your presence and your absence. 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.

Let’s revisit the basic trust-related facts: on the empathy front, the company had improved the lives of an unthinkable number of consumers, but many of the concerns of key stakeholders remained unaddressed, including employees demanding a healthy workplace and drivers looking for more support in their pursuit of a decent living.19 When it came to logic, despite Uber’s trajectory of hypergrowth, there were still open questions about the long-term viability of the company’s business model.20 Although some of these questions were reasonable to ask any company at this stage, it was time to start answering them. It was also time to ensure that Uber’s management ranks had the skills to lead an organization of its expansive scale and scope.21 Finally, at the heart of its authenticity challenges, no one was completely sure they were getting the full story.22

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?

Conversely, you may lack conviction in your own logic and ability to perform. Finally, are you being honest with yourself about your true ambitions? Or are you hiding what really excites and inspires you behind whomever the world wants you to be? If the answer is yes or even “maybe,” then you may have found the source of your authenticity block.

True leadership greatness, it turns out, is reserved for another ideal altogether, which he assigns the lofty label of “justice.”

The leaders ValMax truly celebrates are winners, of course, but never at the cost of their integrity. They refuse to lie, cheat, or use evidence gathered through nefarious means. They preserve the dignity of their adversaries and resist the spoils of war if dishonorably won.

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.

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.

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.

In our experience, most of us gravitate to either fidelity or severity, displaying an opening posture of either devoted or tough.

Fidelity. Who has a prized place in your life, but pays a low price for maintaining that position? Who gets what they want from you (status, freedom, extra dessert), with relatively few conditions placed on the exchange? Maybe it’s your boss or a longtime colleague with whom you’ve worked for a while. Maybe it’s someone who’s hitting their numbers but otherwise wreaking havoc. One clue to this segment is whether you regularly protect someone from hard truths such as how others experience them.

Justice. Who reliably shows up around you as the best version of themselves, the one who’s eager to excel and grow? And how do you feel about yourself when you’re around them? This is a crucial indicator of being in justice. You feel like a superhero because, in many ways, you are one. People go higher, further, faster in your presence because they experience your conviction about what’s possible for them. When do you feel like this? If it’s rare, when have you ever felt like this?

We’re making two simple points in pushing you to find yourself in all of the quadrants. The first is that you have it in you. We all have the ability to foster a range of emotional contexts for the people in our lives. This is important when we move on to the challenge of going from one quadrant to another. There’s no place on this framework you can’t go; indeed, you’re already familiar with the landscape. Our second point is that from the standpoint of empowerment leadership, not all quadrants are created equal. If you want to unleash people, then spending most of your time in justice is much more effective than the other three options.

His deference to his boss’s authority got in the way of telling her what he really thought and becoming a rigorous thought partner.

The journey to justice for leaders like John involves resisting the gravitational pull of our leadership conditioning, the part of us that worries that if we reveal more devotion, then we’ll also have to somehow lower our standards.

CRP sets sky-high standards, while maintaining absolute devotion to everyone in his expansive orbit.

If CRP does have a bias, it’s for entrepreneurial personalities who find ways to achieve more with less. He gravitates toward people who reveal hard-earned grit and a hunger to improve themselves.

CRP believes that human beings are the only truly competitive asset, and he invests in people with unapologetic audacity.

He regularly moves people around business units for the developmental value of operating in new contexts, and he hosts an annual learning trip where managers travel to a foreign country simply to learn. The trip is designed to expose his team to how fast the world is changing, at a speed that means they’re almost always behind someone else. He describes the trip as “our annual vaccine against complacency.”

we’re often spending less time in justice than our leadership mandate asks of us. 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.

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.

There is healthy agreement among leadership practitioners about the first step on any developmental path, which is to start by letting go of strict assumptions about who you are and, more importantly, who you are not. Get yourself into a frame of mind where you’re willing to challenge the rules you’ve written for yourself about the stark lines and limits of your identity.

On her quest to teach the world about the merits of a “growth mindset,” Professor Carol Dweck has grown comfortable with tough conversations. She’s chosen to get in the face of parents and educators worldwide to let us know—in clear but loving terms—that we’re holding kids back with all of our good intentions.

Dweck is the embodiment of justice, on a mission to broadcast the price of fidelity. The punchline, of course, is that fidelity is going to cost you. To remain in a high-commitment, low-standards posture as a leader allows you to feel as if you’re in service of others, since you’re taking care of them, but it’s mostly about you. It’s a decision to trade off other people’s excellence in order to stay within the limits of your own emotional safety zone.

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.