← Impact Podcast, Mentorship with Eddie Wilson
Impact Podcast, Mentorship with Eddie Wilson
64 - The Burden of Leadership | How Great Leaders Make Decisions Under Pressure
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Welcome to the Impact Podcast. I'm Eddie Wilson, here to help you visualize what others cannot see, create opportunities where others have failed, and push you to build empires where once there was empty space. Let's embark on this journey together and make a difference in this world. Welcome to the Impact Podcast, Eddie Wilson. My favorite time of the week. I hope it's one of your favorite times as well. As always, love to hear your feedback and. And this episode comes from feedback that I've received from a few listeners on a podcast that I did a few weeks back. And I talked about this idea of heavy is the head that wears the crown, this heaviness of leadership. And I talked a lot about the emotional toll and the emotional weight. And I'll go just a little bit deeper with you today because I know it was a podcast that really set well and helped, but also maybe added some additional questions. And so I'm going to give you just a little bit deeper level. So this would be a 202 level for, for that podcast. Now, if you didn't listen to that podcast, don't feel like you have to go back and listen in order to get this one. I'll reframe it, teach it, and just go a little bit deeper. Today I'm gonna talk to you about the burden of leadership. And that burden of leadership, I think, is best exemplified in the life of Dwight D. Eisenhower. Dwight D. Eisenhower led us after Franklin Roosevelt, did such a fantastic job. Now, whether you believe in the ideals of Franklin Roosevelt, obviously he founded Social Security. There are a lot of people that, that he was a socialist. I have my own opinions on, on. On fdr, but I think that in the end, he did an amazing job leading us through World War II. You think about the. The table that was set before him with Adolf Hitler and Mussolini and these people that the world had never seen before. Stalin, I mean, he had some of the most immense, immensely evil, I believe, truly evil characters in the world. And I've. I've read so often that there's really 5% that are really trying to tip the scale and do good and 5% that are really trying to tip the scale and do evil. And then you got 90% in the middle that are truly just sheep. And based on how the top 5% or how the bottom 5% do it, follows suit. And so much of the world was following suit. Think about it. Millions of people were okay with eradicating a race of people, right? The bottom 5% was doing a job on the 90% of the sheep that were literally just following that pathway. And I think that right now we're sitting in the middle of, of Dwight D. Eisenhower now taking over the reins of fdr. He did not make a lot of these decisions. He was a wartime general. He was somebody who understood what war meant. And now he's leading the nation in the wake of FDR's passing and on the night of June 5, 1944. So if you go back, you've got Pearl harbor, that's in 41 now, 1944, you've got one man carrying the weight of the free world on his shoulders. That's Dwight Eisenhower. You've already got Winston Churchill, who has been in the fight for years. Now you, you've got other leaders who are doing their best to stay in the fight. But Dwight Eisenhower is now staring at one of the greatest battles that this world will ever see or the Americans will ever see. And it's on his shoulders. June 5, 1944. He's got horrible weather. The weather's unstable. The intelligence was incomplete and the timing of what was happening was literally collapsing around him. He has all of this effort, all of this, you know, grouping of ships and tanks that are on the ships and the people that are on the ships ready to deploy into Normandy. And the largest amphibious invasion in human history was sitting in limbo. It's literally sitting in limbo. Do we go or do we not? If the invasion fails, tens of thousands of men would die if they delay too long. Hitler would strengthen the defenses because Hitler was what did not realize that they were coming in in Normandy. This was a, a, a, a, a great point of inflection in the war where we finally have the advantage. And Hitler, if he finds out with strengthen the defenses and the opportunity would have, would immediately disappear. And standing in the middle of all of it is Dwight D. Eisenhower. What fascinates me about great leaders isn't how they act when certainty exists, it's how they move when certainty does not. We see him after the fact. We see him in retrospect. We see him in the rearview mirror. And if you could go back to that day, if you could relive the circumstances of what's happening on June 5th. Eisenhower is standing there with complete uncertainty. The weather isn't cooperating. We have incomplete intelligence. He, he doesn't know all of what Germany has prepared for us on the beaches of Normandy. And by the way, every leader faces a level of this. They face a place where they enter a room where no one can truly help carry the decision. They can give Opinions, which oftentimes are detrimental. They can give their own ideals, which oftentimes don't matter. But every leader walks into a room at some time or another where they have to make a decision, and no one else can carry the weight with them. These moments are truly where you will find the separation of the levels of leadership that I consistently teach. There are moments where advisors can inform you, teams can support you, friends can encourage you, but the final weight belongs to you. And that night, Eisenhower faced three realities that every leader eventually encounters, and these three realities we're going to talk about. This is the framework for the podcast today. Number one, you must own the loss before you know the outcome. You must own the loss before you own the outcome. Number two, you must decide in uncertainty, not in certainty. And number three, often the decision itself isn't the hardest part. Carrying the decision is the hardest part. These three things we're going to talk about today, because every one of you as a leader will face it, whether you're leading a business, a home, a friendship, a relationship, you have to own these three things. Number one, own the loss before you know the outcome. One of the most extraordinary leadership moments in history happened before D Day even began. Before the invasion launched. Eisenhower wrote a short, handwritten note and essentially said this. It said, if the operation fails, the blame belong entirely to him. Not the weather, not the person who's trying to determine what the weather was. Not the generals, not the troops, not the guns misfiring, not the issues, him. The note was never intended for motivation or public relations. It was a private accountability of his own writing. And I think it reveals something powerful about real leadership. True leaders emotionally absorb responsibility before the outcome is known. We as leaders have to own whatever we believe the outcome could eventually be. Very few people pre own the failure. Very few people say, you know what? If this goes wrong, it's on me. And that's rare because leadership is expensive emotionally, especially when lives, livelihoods, or futures are attached to our decisions. In business, I've watched people consistently outsource accountability. They always want to shift the blame to someone else. It was always the circumstance, it was always the lack of people, but rarely it's them. It's the market, it's the team, it's the timing, it's the investors, it's the economy. But a mature leader says, if this fails, I will carry the responsibility. Not because you control every outcome, but because ownership creates clarity. And when we create clarity, we can find true success. Once you've already accepted emotionally the emotional possibility of loss, Fear loses its control over you. And this is important because you as a leader can never be an effective leader if you're leading out of fear. Fear is always the avoidance of something. Passion, desire, love. That's the pursuit of something. A good leader is leading out of love. They're leading while pursuing something, not leading while avoiding something. If we are constantly avoiding something, that is a fear based leadership tactic which always erodes of the very opportunity for success. And once you've already accepted the emotional possibility of loss, fear loses its control over you. That doesn't mean that you become reckless or that you just like naturally go after things that don't matter. And it means you stop pretending that certainty or absoluteness exists. And great leaders in history were not fearless people. They just accepted the possibility of failure. They were willing to carry the consequence. That's different. A lot of people want the authority of leadership, but few want the emotional liability attached to it. And they're past podcast. I talked a lot about that. I talked about the emotional weight of leadership and this is the emotional weight that I wanted to go deeper in is the emotional weight is your ability to relieve yourself of the fear that you feel. Oftentimes the greatest weight that we carry is fear. Fear is what paralyzes you, right? So in order to get rid of that fear, and this is the question that was asked to me after that podcast, is how do I get rid of the emotional stress? Is there a way to do it? And the answer is yes, accept the outcome, even if it's bad, and accept it ahead of time because it removes the fear or the pressure or the weight of fear from you during the time period that you have to carry it. If it goes poorly, tell yourself, I'm not going to hide, I'm going to stand up, I'm going to own it. You become much more dangerous in the best possible way when you are someone who is willing to own failure. Number two, decide in uncertainty, not certainty. One of the big biggest myths of leadership is that great decisions come from complete information and they never do. They come from incomplete information processed with courage and judgment. The greatest decisions always come from a incomplete information that are processed with courage and judgment. The weather surrounding D Day that day was chaotic. It was not good. A bunch of the advisors said, hey, let's delay this, let's give it another 24 hours. Others believed that there was a narrow opening. Hey, we've got this three or four hour time period that we've got to insert ourselves in. But in the end no one knew with Certainty what would happen. And eventually Eisenhower simply said this, okay, let's go. That, that was his words. It wasn't some charged speech, it wasn't some belief that everything was going to go right. It was, you could hear it in his words. It was, okay, let's go. It was an acceptance of whatever happens, happens. We've done our best, we've prepared, and I will live with the outcome solely being directed at me. And history remembers the confidence of that decision. When you see this moment played out though, that phrase is what is consistently acted by actors, it's written by writers, it is described by poets. This moment is the moment. And it's not a moment of hero and, and, and this, this leader that's stepping out and charging the battlefield screaming freedom like Braveheart. It's literally Eisenhower saying, I've done my best, I've prepared, and with courage I'm going to accept that this is the moment and if it fails, it's completely on me. But I've done my best and I will live at the consequence. What's often forgotten is the uncertainty around this moment. Major decisions in life often happen without full clarity. When you start a company, you don't have clarity. You have an idea, you have a passion. When you make the acquisition of a company, I can't tell you how many times I've bought a company that literally the previous owner straight up lied about the information and I accept it. In the acquisition, it's the unknown changing direction, ending the partnership, moving from city to city. It's launching your vision. We rarely get certainty before we have the ability to make a decision. We get signals, we use our instinct, we get partial data. There's pressure, time constraints, and by the way, that's leadership. It's taking all of that and acting with courage. It's acting with love, not fear. Three questions and this kind of three question framework, I think that's easy to remember. Something that you might want to write down is that you can ask yourself when you're struggling with moving forward. And I get. This is the, this is. The second question I get asked is like, hey, under this weight I get stuck, I get paralyzed. How do I move forward even through the weight? Number one, remove the weight by getting rid of the fear. Number two, use this framework to ultimately help you make decisions and move forward. Number one, ask these three questions. Number one, what happens if we move forward? Make a list. What happens if we move forward? What are the risks? What are the costs? What could we break? We need honesty here, not optimism. Right. Like what happens if we move forward? Number two, what happens if we do nothing? Right? This is the question that most people ignore because oftentimes waiting feels emotionally safe. We think like, well, we'll just pause for a second. That might be the best thing to do. But we never ask the question, you know, what is this delay going to cost me? Markets move, people disengage, opportunities disappear. What happens if we do nothing? Number one, what happens if we move forward? Number two, what happens if we do nothing? And number three, can we survive if we are wrong? This is critical because not every decision needs perfection. Oftentimes it is just this understanding of if we take a step forward and we fail, can we recover? Because if recovery is possible, movement often matters more than certainty. I would say that a majority of the time, movement matters more than certainty. So if you can recover from a slight mistake, if there is recoverability available to you, then oftentimes the right move is to move. I think many people stay stuck because they're subconsciously demanding guarantees in life and we never are going to get them. Your subconscious wants you so badly to be safe to, to avoid that failure that you've had in the past, to avoid the consequence of the problems that it could create if you're wrong. And our subconscious fights us so hard, and in the end we get stuck because the subconscious is demanding guarantee. But life rarely, if ever, offers it. Leadership requires movement before emotional comfort arrives. And honestly, some decisions don't become clear until after the commitment. Lee Iacocca was famous for this methodology of acting and adjusting. Take an action and then adjust based on the negatives that essentially came out of that action. What he said was, if I act quicker and I act consistently, that I can adjust more frequently. It's this idea of iterations. The entire Empire operating system is built on this concept. It's iterations. It's, let's not make decisions every 30 days. It's, let's get good data every week and make small tweaks and decisions every single week that get us to success. And then decision. The decision isn't the hardest part. Carrying it is. This is part number three. So the, the three part in, in, you know, kind of point number two, the three questions that you're asking yourself is, what happens if we move forward? What happens if we do nothing? And, and can we survive if we are wrong? And then lastly, the decision isn't the hardest part. Carrying is the hardest part. Before the invasion launched, Eisenhower visited the 101st Airborne, and he walked among the soldiers preparing to jump into occupied France. Occupied France is where the German army already had a foothold. They were already building bulwarks and they were already them fortifying areas they already possessed and occupied France. Many of these men in the 101st Airborne would not survive. There's lots of stories about the 101st and as they parrot shoot it into occupied France, they, many of them did not survive. But Eisenhower, in preparation for the decision he had to make, he wanted to understand the humanity of the decision. Many of these men that he walked by and he talked to, he knew that these young men would be returned in a box to their family or even worse, never seen again. And there's something really deeply human about the moment that we see with Eisenhower going among these young men. Because after all the strategy and all the planning and all the logistics, it always becomes personal because we rarely can do life without others. Every one of our decisions ultimately affect someone else. But Eisenhower understood that the mission was critical. He understood that if you go back and you ask the three questions in that framework, right. What happens if Eisenhower moves forward? Well, we have a chance to create one of the very first big wins against the Nazi machine, the Nazi war machine. What happens if we do nothing? Well, France is lost, probably lost forever. And now England is most likely next, right. They're already bombing London, they're already bombing England and France. And Hitler is on a full out mission to take over all of Europe. He would love to go into, he's already moving into Africa. Hitler is on a mission to take over the world and if we do nothing, he continues that mission and it may be too little, too late. And can we survive being wrong? That was the question that Eisenhower struggled with the most, was he didn't know we were putting the largest amphibious assault together the world had ever seen. And we were going to expend so many resources. He didn't know if we could ultimately survive. But in the end he knew that the consequences were too great to not act. So he went back in a last final ditch effort to look at the humanity and understand it, to make sure that his decisions were not emotional, his decisions were not irrational, but they were made with a framework that had the best possible outcome and in the end gave us the best chance for survival and ultimately success. That's what leadership is. As you lead today, whether it's leading your business, your family, whatever it is, you have to have a framework to make sure that you're removing fear out of your life. Get rid of the emotional baggage of fear. When I talk about Heavy is the head that wears a crown. Oftentimes it's unbearably heavy. If we're wearing the crown with the weight of fear on our shoulders, in our head, get rid of the fear. And number two, use the framework for decision making that allows you the greatest chance for success. This is the burden of leadership. But leadership done right is one of the most rewarding things in the world. Now we look back at Eisenhower as such a hero of his day. He found success. He helped us win the war. He pushed back the Nazi war machine and the fascism and the. And the totalitarianism that was plaguing the world and destroying nations. Eisenhower did that, but he did it with a massive weight on his shoulders. But he gave us a framework, a blueprint for us to be able to make that decision. Now, today, you're not going to have that level of weight. You don't have to think about the fate of a nation. You don't have to think about sending hundreds of thousands of young men to their deaths. You don't have that weight. You have the same framework, the same tactics, and by the way, they work today. Whether you're in business, making a choice of buying a company, selling a company, going through difficult times, adding new products, it still works today. The same framework allows leaders to elevate and ultimately lead with love. Thanks so much for being a part of the podcast and for listening today. Love to connect with you further. And you can connect with me on social media at Eddie Wilson official on any of the social media channels.