by Kevin Kruse
Now go back and read the story at the beginning of this section, about how I used to be bad at public speaking. It’s okay, I’ll wait…
Ahh, now you see what I did right? I pulled a hero’s journey structure:
ACT I: Kevin is so horrible at speaking he’s embarrassed and in pain
ACT II: Kevin hires a speaking coach, gets books, and is transformed
ACT III: Kevin battles the audience again but this time wins the day with a standing ovation
It might not seem like a very important trick, but consider all the other ways I could have started this section of the book. In earlier drafts I started with:
“The hero’s journey refers to a recurring storytelling structure…”
“In 1949, a man by the name of Joseph Campbell…”
“Great leaders tap into the power of heroic myths…”
Bleh. Actually diving in, using the hero’s journey, is the right way to go.
And if you’re not quite sure what this has to do with leadership, just remember you are communicating all the time. The hero’s journey works perfectly if you ever have to give a speech. It also works if you have to give a big internal presentation. And it even works, if you don’t overuse it, when you are just communicating with your own team members. The key is to openly share your weaknesses and failures—remember the pratfall effect—and explain how you overcame them.
And don’t think your stories have to always be two hours long. You’re not actually Luke or Dorothy. You could tell a story in as little as three sentences. Let’s look at some examples.
You can lead with weakness and use the hero’s journey in times of crisis.
Ten years ago the stress was unbelievable….I had made a mistake and we were in a bad cash flow crisis. But our CFO renegotiated payment terms with our best suppliers, a new banking partner expanded our borrowing line, and our employees rallied by moving invoices out the door faster and finding ways to spend a little less. In less than six months we returned to being cash positive and…
You can lead with weakness and use the hero’s journey to coach and develop your team members.
I remember almost getting fired when I was in the field as a sales rep because the biggest buyer in the country was in my territory, but I couldn’t get them to buy anything. Finally I got advice from a senior rep who said, “People buy from people they like.” I went back in to that prospect and instead of features and benefits, I asked about his kids, his alma mater, and his favorite sports teams. It took a while but eventually I cracked that account open and a couple years later they were our biggest customer.
You can lead with weakness and use the hero’s journey when you have a new job.
It’s true, I’m not going to lie, I have no experience and know nothing about the biotech industry. And when I started at Acme ten years ago, I didn’t know anything about managing software engineers. Back then I got one of the senior guys to mentor me for an hour a day, I sat down one-on-one to learn what everyone did, and I networked with my peers in other companies to learn from their experiences. It took a while, but at my going-away party last week they all said I had become one of them…
We are wired to respond to the hero’s journey. It works in books, movies, and in real life. We cheer for the hero, we want her to win. But, remember, that’s only true if we can relate to them first. We need to know they’re human, that they make mistakes, just like everyone else.
FROM VULNERABILITY TO TMI
Despite all that I had to gain from being a more vulnerable leader, early in my journey I couldn’t help but wonder, Is there such a thing as too much information or oversharing as an authentic leader?
For example, I once panicked many employees by sharing the fact that we were losing money, even though we were beating our budget and had several years’ worth of runway left in the bank. Should I have held that fact back?
I decided to call up my friend Randy Hetrick, a former Navy SEAL officer and founder and CEO of TRX, a company that makes suspension fitness equipment. Given his success in both the military and the private sector, I thought he’d have a unique point of view. He explained that radical transparency is the best approach, if your team members can handle it. He said:
As a SEAL Team officer, I made a point to always be forthright and truthful with my guys. The activities we were involved in might literally kill you if things went wrong. Given that, I believed that all teammates were owed the full score, not some edited version of the details. SEALs want and expect that from their leaders, and they’re equipped to deal with it.
Even in the SEAL community, a leader must learn to moderate and modulate the less-rational, more emotional fears that all humans face. If there is a significant, fact-based misgiving, then the leader needs to stop the training and address it. But if it is just one’s own internal anxieties, the leader’s job is to manage them and to project the confidence that a well-trained team deserves to rally around (Hetrick 2016).
Don’t use Hetrick’s advice as an excuse not to share. The responsibility falls on you to ensure your team members “are equipped to deal with it.” Going back to my personal example, if my profit-loss data frightened some team members, it’s a sure sign that they either didn’t truly understand basic financial principles or they didn’t recall what our objectives for the quarter were. Yes, they should take ownership over these things. But as their leader it should have signaled me to increase my efforts around strategic alignment and understanding financials for everyone.
More instructive to me was the second part of Hetrick’s lesson. A leader still needs to project confidence, so irrational emotions that would be counter to that goal should not be shared. You can still talk about your own shortcomings and limitations, because as Hetrick told me, “Your teams will appreciate the candor and humility and, hell, they’ll sniff them out anyway!” But when it comes to fears, business leaders should focus on the plan and their faith in their colleagues to embrace an optimistic view of the future.
If you’re ever in doubt about whether your attempts at self-disclosure are going to do more harm than good, consider these questions before you possibly overshare.
What is your intent? Carefully consider, are you sharing to be helpful, to teach, or to build trust? Or are you just being needy? Is the real reason behind your disclosures a personal need to vent, to complain, to get attention, or driven by your need to have friends in the workplace?
Are they equipped to handle radical transparency? Do they understand what success looks like? What the organization’s goals are? Are they mature enough to know that there are always risks in any venture? Do they have the confidence in the team to move forward productively into an uncertain future?
How close is the relationship? One way to modulate your transparency is to be more open with those who are closest to you, and share less with those who are more distant. If you’re a business owner facing a dire financial situation, maybe your direct reports—the CFO and your VPs—get total transparency and you admit that you’re worried and don’t have any ideas. After all, you’ll need their help to come up with solutions and they should have the experience to handle it. But maybe their direct reports are told of the situation, but with less detail and less emotional honesty.
Will it violate the trust of anyone else? One easy transparency screen is just asking if your radical transparency will violate the privacy of or embarrass anyone else. Embracing authenticity and transparency doesn’t give you license to gossip or to talk about people behind their back. I’ve always admired the investor, author, and podcaster James Altucher. He is the most transparent public figure I know. He frequently talks about his worst moments, from stalking girlfriends and suicide attempts, to going broke and getting divorced. But
never once has he ever said one thing about his ex-wives or former business partners. When in doubt, leave them out.
THE TAKEAWAY
Sharing your weaknesses, mistakes, and failures—your pratfalls—will help you to build trust, engage your team members, and foster a culture of innovation. But don’t use it in a contrived or manipulative way. That’s an inauthentic way of being authentic. Great leaders know how to drop the masks and just be the best version of their unique selves. They know that showing weakness actually is the strongest sign of courage and confidence.
HOW MIGHT YOU APPLY THIS IF YOU’RE A:
MANAGER: Building trust, increasing engagement, and fostering a culture that fuels innovation is as easy as showing more of the real you. Take advantage of all the times you can answer, “I have no idea, but I’ll find out for you.” Or, “We missed our quarterly goal, and ultimately it’s my fault.” You’ll improve your own performance when you spend time on self-awareness so you can lean into your strengths and hire for your weaknesses.
SALES PROFESSIONAL: My favorite Christmas movie is the 1947 classic Miracle on 34th Street. In one scene the Macy’s Santa Claus tells a shocked customer to go to rival Gimbels department store to get a toy that Macy’s didn’t carry. This unexpected gesture generates a ton of goodwill and publicity for Macy’s. I always tell my salespeople they should look for opportunities to say no, to turn down projects, and especially to say no to demands for lower fees. When your prospects hear you admit that you are not the right partner for them, you dramatically increase trust and credibility (rare commodities in sales unfortunately). This is so powerful that I’ve often opened my own sales calls with a proactive no in the form of, “If you’re looking for , we aren’t for you. But if you want , then we are the best on the planet.”
SPORTS COACH: Red-faced, screaming at the top of their lungs—I’ve seen so many coaches of youth sports instill fear and stress in boys and girls. Your goal should be to get your players to strive to be their best, not to be perfect. You want to teach them to flush away any mistakes they make because the most important play is always the next play. When you share your own mistakes—whether from your own childhood sports experiences or something later—you will earn the trust and respect of your players. They’ll play harder for you and will deal with their own mistakes in the most appropriate ways.
MILITARY OFFICER: More than any other organization, military forces around the world develop and reward toughness and mission results. This is with good reason given what is at stake. But there are times when confidence and strength are exhibited by revealing a mistake or asking for help. Whether it’s sharing a tactical failure to help develop a young officer, or seeking help for hearing loss or PTSD, you can perform better when you show authenticity and vulnerability.
PARENT: You can raise resilient children by sharing all the times you’ve made mistakes and failed, but got back up and found success again. If you talk about your personal weaknesses in addition to what you do well, you are giving a positive lesson about self-awareness and how to lean into your strengths. And if you want your kids to turn to you in their toughest times, they’ll be more likely to feel comfortable doing so if they know you faced similar circumstances.
INDIVIDUAL: We all display different facets of our personality at different times or in different settings. But do you frequently wear a mask? Are you uncomfortable sharing your mistakes, failures, and weaknesses? Think about the way you were raised…did you get love and praise for what you accomplished, rather than for effort or for who you are? Your own desire for perfection may be taking a toll on your health and is likely putting a distance between you and those around you. Look for opportunities to share the real you, including your fears and limitations, with those closest to you. Look for opportunities at work to gain trust by sharing mistakes.
10
LEADERSHIP IS NOT A CHOICE
In the late 1800s, there was an unusual Frenchman named Gustave Le Bon. I say unusual because he was trained as a doctor but traveled the world as an anthropologist (he was the first Frenchman to visit Nepal), conducted research as a physicist (he was nominated for the Nobel Prize), and wrote extensively on psychology. I also say he was unusual because as a “craniologist” he invented a device so he could measure the skulls of women who he believed “represent the most inferior forms of human evolution and…are closer to children and savages than to an adult civilized man” (Le Bon 2002). Yikes!
If we can get past the misogyny, we have to give Le Bon credit for writing a book that would inspire dictators, launch a field of psychology, and some would say even predict the rise of Trump and viral cat memes on the internet. In The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, first published in 1895, Le Bon lays out the first detailed analysis of crowd psychology. He is the first to formulate the theory of social contagion (he used the word contagion thirty times in one hundred pages), describing how emotions, ideas, and behaviors spread from person to person like a virus. The phenomenon of social contagion is why I say leadership is not a choice.
Leadership, with its endless definitions, is most often boiled down to one word: influence. I was having lunch with leadership guru Ken Blanchard when I asked him, “If you had to define leadership in a single word, what would it be?” Without hesitation Blanchard answered, “Influence.” Speaker, author, and leadership expert John Maxwell often says, “Leadership is influence—nothing more, nothing less” (Maxwell 2016). In his book Leadership for the Twenty-First Century, Professor Joseph Rost reviews the changing definitions of leadership over seven centuries and concludes that the through-line is, “Leadership is an influence relationship” (Rost 1993).
In this chapter you’ll discover that because of social contagion you influence people all the time, even without trying. Even if you don’t want to. You even influence strangers. You influence others when you act, and when you stand by. You influence others when you speak up, and when you remain silent. And because influence = leadership, this means leadership is not a choice. You’re leading whether you want to or not.
LEADERSHIP AND SEX, DRUGS, AND ROCK ’N’ ROLL
While most smokers and nonsmokers alike are probably well aware of the dangers of secondhand smoke, most probably don’t realize that secondhand smoke can lead to firsthand addiction. Researchers at the University of Washington, Seattle, asked 808 fifth graders about their smoking habits, and the habits of their parents (Hill et al. 2005). They were surveyed again several times for seven years. After controlling for demographics and other factors, the analysis concluded that children whose parents smoked were twice as likely to begin smoking by the age of twenty-one than kids who had nonsmoking parents. What didn’t matter was the parents’ own attitudes toward smoking. Mom and Dad could tell their kids it’s a dirty, expensive habit and that they wish they could quit, but it didn’t matter.
But there’s good news for all you parents who just decided to quit to save not your own health, but the health of your kids. It turns out social influence works in the other direction, too. Quitting smoking is also contagious. Nicholas Christakis of Harvard Medical School and James Fowler at the University of California San Diego analyzed three decades of health information from twelve thousand individuals and their social networks (Christakis and Fowler 2008). They discovered that when one person quit smoking, their immediate friends and family members were 36 percent less likely to remain smokers. And even friends of friends were 20 percent less likely to smoke. The researchers summarized their findings, “People appeared to act under collective pressures within niches in the network.”
THEY’LL HAVE WHAT YOU’RE HAVING
Not every university has its own fake bar, but the Behavioural Science Institute of Radboud University in the Netherlands has just that. The Bar Lab, as it’s called, looks like a normal bar or pub and even has a working beer tap. But it also has a network of sophisticated cameras and microphones that record individuals’ social
interactions during behavioral experiments.
It was in this lab that researchers studied the effect of social contagion on how much we eat when we’re among others. (Hermans, Larsen, et al. 2012). They invited eighty-five first-year women to participate in an experiment, and as is common in behavioral research, they were lied to (it was only a white lie). Each female participant was told the experiment had to do with nutrition and cognitive function. She would have to play games on a Nintendo Wii to measure brain function, then she would eat a meal with another woman and take some more cognitive tests. Of course, the Wii games were just a cover and had nothing to do with the experiment.
The real experiment took place in the Bar Lab. The participants were paired up and sat at a table for two where they ordered from a menu of lasagna, macaroni, spaghetti, or a Dutch meal called stamppot (Google tells me this is combination of mashed potatoes and vegetables). And one of the two women at the table was secretly a confederate who was working for the scientists. One-third of the time the confederate was told to eat a standard amount of food; in another third of the experiments, the confederate was told to eat a small amount of food (half a standard portion); and in a final third of the experiments, the confederate was told to eat a large amount of food (50 percent more than a standard size). And the portions were actually marked off with secret lines on their plates.
