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

by Frances Frei

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.

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.”

There’s a role for both positive reinforcement and constructive advice in anyone’s evolution, but here’s the part that surprises most people: the right ratio of positive to constructive is at least 5:1.

Your performance metric is someone else’s improvement. If you’re not seeing improvement, then it’s your job to try another way. Restate your observations with more specificity. Build more trust so that your recipient(s) can actually hear what you have to say. You don’t get credit for trying regardless of whether you were effective. Your job as a leader is to make others better. If the feedback you’re giving has a neutral to negative impact, then you’re not doing your job.

Yes!

In this exchange with Weeks, Jobs made the fundamental choice that all leaders have to make, to choose “me” or “you” or, in our worldview, to choose fear or love. Instead of dismissing Weeks, he made him feel like a hero, someone capable of achieving the impossible.

to make others better comes at a price for the giver.

Our message to you, to all of us, is to tuck your head and keep going. Get comfortable with the discomfort. The payoff is a force with enough power to unleash other people, a force conventionally known as love.

whenever you’re ready, move on to the next ring of empowerment leadership: belonging. This is where you get to empower not only individuals, but also the unit of teams, ensuring that everyone can contribute their unique capacities and perspectives. It’s where diversity and inclusion create the path—the freeway, more accurately—to truly exceptional performance.

One headline is that true inclusion—not just diversity—will help you solve those business problems faster and better.

Anticipation of change introduces anxiety into an ecosystem, and the antidote is to replace it with actual change.

Getting started also allows you to create enough momentum to help you up the inevitable learning curve and around whatever resistance you may meet along the way.

failing to act in the presence of bias is demoralizing and inhumane.

Our goal is to give you permission to pursue this improvement with the same enthusiasm and analytic rigor you bring to other organizational challenges.

she includes her decades-old personal mission: “Be a positive influence on the lives of people around me. Encourage them, challenge them, help them to fulfill their potential.”

Define the selection bar as clearly as you can, and then—like Cammie Dunaway—refuse to lower it.c

The inclusion dial

For example, as some cultures have become more inclusive of women, some men in those same cultures have become more afraid of the costs of inadvertently doing or saying the wrong things. If this is the case on your team, we urge empathy and direct dialogue. Sustainable solutions to inclusion must make everyone better off.

Prophet emphasized that diversity is the starting place, but it’s not enough. The real magic, he argues, happens when “you feel seen, you feel included, you feel valued.” That experience, in Prophet’s view, becomes a competitive asset that’s analogous to a mosaic, with distinct and complex pieces coming together to make a more magnificent whole: “[T]he result is the beauty and the melding of ideas.”17

The final frontier in a culture of inclusion is for the celebration of difference to become so ingrained institutionally that employees feel cherished for their uniqueness and experience minimal variability across individuals, teams, and functions. This is the point of no return in the campaign for belonging. It’s the point at which we no longer feel lucky to have an inclusive manager, the point at which we’re all taking exquisite care of people who are different from us with unshakable confidence that their difference makes us better.

Michel Doukeris, CEO of Anheuser-Busch. He is passionate in his belief that “inclusion drives diversi...

“Our greatest strength is our people,” he told us. “If we get this right, we will be unstoppable.”

Development is the deliberate investment in the growth and evolution of the people around you. Development can be both formal (e.g., training programs and corporate universities) and informal (e.g., mentoring and access to stretch assignments).

Train people on how to do it well—both how to develop others and how to get the support and input you need to succeed—and find ways to keep yourself honest on how well it’s going for everyone on the team.

Which brings us back to formal development. Informal development can go a long way, but often not far enough, particularly for high-growth organizations. Again, one of the lessons of working with Uber is that when organizations are moving at a rapid speed, there’s rarely enough time and space for sufficient informal support and mentorship, particularly for managers.

Formal development programs can help address these dynamics, and increasingly there are ways to do it without breaking the bank or distracting people from their day jobs.

The absence of that clarity comes at a big price.

To avoid this scenario, make the objective drivers of advancement clear, sharing the news far and wide.

Step four: Retain, retain, retain Once you’ve hired, developed, and promoted great people of all varieties, you now have to retain them.

Bozoma Saint John, chief marketing officer at Endeavor, has asked, “Why do I, as a black woman, have to fix it all? There’s way more of you than there are of me. We need some help out here.”

So go ahead: be proactive and execute steps one through three with excellence and joy. Attract great people, give them interesting work to do, and invest in them as if your company’s future depends on it. If they deserve a promotion, give it to them in a timely manner. Don’t make them wait. Don’t make them go to a competitor in order to get the role, title, and compensation package they already earned on your watch.

don’t make women work so hard to simply get what they deserve. Pay people equally for doing the same work, regardless of gender identity or any other distinguishing characteristic. And when they go above and beyond, reward them accordingly.

When people ask us how an organization can heal from a painful past, we often reflect on Nohria’s courageous remarks. In our experience, leaders need to confront their organization’s history with both optimism and honesty. Optimism is about building a better tomorrow, fixing an organization’s problems with the kind of humility and resourcefulness we explore throughout this book. Honesty is about taking radical responsibility for the things that went wrong and the human costs of those mistakes.

Laurent exhibits the kind of principled grace we believe is needed to heal organizations. As part of the company’s redemption journey, he honored the considerable pain that surfaced—actively soliciting and investigating complaints—and took disciplinary action that included the termination of senior leaders.

This future is within reach, in part, because Rioters created an opening for shared humanity, vulnerability, and growth, both their own and Gelb’s. Another word for this choice is grace.

In the first section of the book, we explored how to empower others as a result of your presence.

making sure that impact continues in your absence.

Trust, love, and belonging are all empowering leadership currencies you exchange directly with other people.

Strategy and culture are invisible forces that can shape organizations and empower other people—lots of other people—whether or not you happen to be present.a As a result, the most successful leaders spend a disproportionate amount of time getting strategy and culture right—and broadcasting both to every far-flung corner of the company.

“A” leaders create impact that endures days, years, and even decades after they’ve left the room. Their people go out into the world without them and thrive, even when they’re far away from the mother ship. It’s the ultimate measure of empowerment leadership and the focus of our next two chapters.

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.

strategy guides discretionary behavior to the limit of how well you communicate it.

100%

In the first part of the chapter, we walk through a framework for designing strategies that delight customers, protect suppliers, and deliver healthy returns to both shareholders and employees. We like the term “value-based” strategy because it focuses on where value is created and captured.

one of your central duties as an absent leader is to empower your employees to deploy resources they control without you staring over their shoulders.

Reflecting on her exceptional career and the patterns of effective leaders around her, she observed that “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.”

Consider the following trade-off: What if Super You showed up when it mattered most to them, but it meant that Average You—or even Bummer You—showed up when it mattered least? How would your relationship change as a result? What about your effectiveness or mental health?

One thing that doesn’t get a lot of attention in the leadership discussion is a frank acknowledgment that it takes tremendous energy to do it well. Building trust, maintaining high standards and deep devotion, unleashing the potential of more and varied people: these are nontrivial challenges. If you want to excel at them, do us all a favor and please be bad at something else.

Create (a whole lot) more value than you capture

All this is to say that price is not simply a technical decision you make with your strategy team, informed by what you can get away with. It’s also a proxy for your commitment to be in service to your customers. You’re in this together, and the price of doing business with you should reflect that truth.

Strategic value stick Source: Adam M. Brandenburger and Harborne W. Stuart, “Value-based Business Strategy,” Journal of Economics & Management Strategy 5 (March 1996): 5–24.